Arthur Schopenhauer was a German 19th-century philosopher who deserves to be remembered today for the insights contained in his great work, The World As Will and Representation. Schopenhauer was the first serious Western philosopher to get interested in Buddhism, and his thought can best be read as a Western reinterpretation and response to the enlightened pessimism found in Buddhist thought. "In my 17th year," he wrote in an autobiographical text, "I was gripped by the misery of life as the Buddha had been in his youth when he saw sickness, old age, pain, and death everywhere. The truth was that this world could not have been the work of an all-loving being but rather that of a devil who'd brought creatures into existence in order to delight in their sufferings. Like the Buddha, it was Schopenhauer's goal to dissect and then come up with a solution to this suffering.
It's simply the fault of universities that Schopenhauer has always been taught in such a dry, academic way that it has stopped him from being widely known, read, and followed, and yet, in truth, this is a man who, no less than the Buddha, deserves disciples, schools, artworks, and monasteries to put his ideas into practice. It's not too late. Schopenhauer's philosophy starts by giving a name to a primary force within us, which he says is more powerful than anything else, our reason, logic, or moral sense, and which Schopenhauer terms the will-to-life. In German, the wille zum leben. The will-to-life is a constant force which makes us thrust ourselves forward, cling to existence, and look always to our own advantage. It's blind, dumb, and very insistent. What the will-to-life makes us focus on most of all is sex. From adolescences onwards, this will thrums within us, turns our heads constantly to erotic scenarios, and makes us do very weird things, the most weird of which is fall in love all the time.
Schopenhauer was very respectful of love, as one might be towards a hurricane or a tiger. He deeply resented the disruption caused to intelligent people by infatuations or what we'd call crushes, but he refused to conceive of these as either disproportionate or accidental. In his eyes, love is connected to the most important underlying project of the will-to-life and, hence, of all of our lives, having children. "Why all this noise and fuss about love?" he asked. "Why all the urgency, uproar, anguish, and exertion? Because the ultimate aim of all love affairs is actually more important than all other aims in anyone's life, and therefore, it's quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. The romantic dominates life because," Schopenhauer wrote, "what is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation, the existence and special constitution of the human race in times to come."
Of course, we rarely think of future children when we're asking someone out on a date, but in Schopenhauer's view, this is simply because the intellect remains much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will. Why should such deception be necessary? Because, for Schopenhauer, we would never reliably reproduce unless we had first quite literally lost our minds. This was a man deeply opposed to the boredom, routine, expense, and sheer sacrifice of having children. Furthermore, Schopenhauer argued that, most of the time, if our intellect were properly in charge of choosing who we could fall in love with, we would pick very different people to the ones we actually end up with. But we're ultimately driven to fall in love not with anyone we'll just get on with well but with people whom the will-to-life recognizes as ideal partners for the project of producing what Schopenhauer bluntly called balanced children.
All of us are a little bit unbalanced ourselves, he thought. We're a bit too masculine or too feminine, too tall or too short, too rational or too impulsive. If such imbalances were allowed to persist or were aggravated in the next generation, the human race would, within a short time, sink into oddity. The will-to-life must therefore push us towards people who can, on account of their compensating imbalances, cancel out our own issues. A large nose combined with a button nose promise a perfect nose. He argued that short people often fall in love with tall people, and more feminine men with more assertive and masculine women. Unfortunately, this theory of balancing attraction led Schopenhauer to a very bleak conclusion, namely that a person who is highly suitable for producing a balanced child with is almost never, though we can't realize it at the time because we've been blindfolded by the will-to-life, very suitable for us.
"We should not be surprised," he wrote, "by marriages between people who would never have been friends. Love cast itself on people who, apart from sex, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to us." The will-to-life's ability to further its own ends rather than our happiness may, Schopenhauer implied, be sensed with particular clarity in that rather scary, lonely moment just after orgasm. He wrote, "Directly after copulation, the devil's laughter is heard." Watching the human spectacle, Schopenhauer felt deeply sorry for us. We're all just like animals except, because of our greater self-awareness, far more unhappy than animals. There are some poignant passages where Schopenhauer discusses the lives of different animals, but he dwells especially on the mole, "A stunted monstrosity," his words, "that dwells in damp narrow corridors, rarely sees the light of day and whose offspring look like gelatinous worms, but which still does everything in its power to survive and perpetuate itself."
We're just like moles and just as pitiful. We are driven frantically to push ourselves forward. We want to get good jobs to impress perspective partners. We wander endlessly about finding the one, and are eventually briefly seduced by someone just long enough to produce a child, and then have to spend the next 40 years in misery with them to atone for our errors. Schopenhauer was always beautifully and comically gloomy about human nature. "There is only one inborn error," he wrote, "and that's the notion that we exist in order to be happy. So long as we persist in this inborn error, the world will seem to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of being happy. That's why the faces of almost all elderly people are deeply etched with disappointment."
Schopenhauer offers two solutions to deal with the problems of existence. The first solution is intended for rather rare individuals that he called sages. Sages are able, by heroic efforts, to rise above the demands of the will-to-life. They see the natural drives within themselves towards selfishness, sex, and vanity and override them. They overcome their desires, live alone, often away from big cities, never marry, and can quell their appetites for fame and status. In Buddhism, Schopenhauer points out, this person is known as a monk, but he recognizes that only a tiny number of us in any generation will ever go in for such a life. The second and more easily available and realistic therapy is to spend as long as we can with art and philosophy, whose task is to hold up a mirror to the frenzied efforts and unhappy turmoil created in all of us by the will-to-life.
We may not be able to quell the will-to-life very often, but in the evenings at the theater or in a walk with a book of poetry, we can step back from the day to day and look at life without illusion. The art Schopenhauer loved best is the opposite of sentimental, Greek tragedies, the aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld, and the political theory of Machiavelli. Such works speak frankly about egoism, suffering, selfishness, and the horrors of married life and extend, a tragic, dignified, melancholy sympathy to the human race. It's fitting that Schopenhauer's own work fitted his description of what philosophy and art should do for us. It, too, is deeply consoling in its morbid, bitter pessimism. For example, he tells us, "To marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other. Every life history is the history of suffering. Life has no intrinsic worth but is kept in motion merely by desire and illusion."
After spending a lot of time trying yet failing to be famous and trying yet failing to have good relationships, towards the end of his life, Schopenhauer did eventually find an audience who adored his writings. He lived quietly in an apartment in Frankfurt with his dog, a white poodle whom he called Atman after the world soul of the Buddhists but whom the neighboring children less respectfully referred to as Mrs. Schopenhauer. Shortly before his death, a sculptor made a famous bust of him. He died in 1860 at the age of 72, having achieved calm and serenity. He is a sage for our own times, someone whose bust should be no less widespread and no less revered than that of the Buddha he so loved.