Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger: sex, death and boredom (Julian Young)

‘Nietzsche always admired Schopenhauer as a ‘knight of truth’ who said ‘No’ to the facile optimism of Hegel, in particular, and the nineteenth century, in general. But his endorsement of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is confined to his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, a celebration of his friendship with Richard Wagner who was an even more passionate Schopenhauerian.‘

Like Keats, Schopenhauer tells us that, metaphysically speaking, life is but a (bad) ‘dream’. And whereas Kant argues that since we cannot escape the fabric of our own minds, reality ‘in itself’ is unknowable by us, Schopenhauer thinks he knows what it is. (At least he thinks he does in his youth. Later on he retreats, somewhat, from the claim.) What underlies the surface of things, Schopenhauer claims, is the tormented and tormenting ‘will’. (I shall discuss why he thinks this later on.)

When we turn to social life of human beings, is true that civilization mostly ameliorates the cruder cruelties of nature. Yet even here we face a life of conflict between one will and another. If one individual wins a sexual partner, job, wealth, or social status another loses out. Like non-human nature, human social life is a ruthless game played between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Even one’s internal psychology is essentially an arena of conflict. If my will is unsatisfied then I suffer: if my desire for food is unsatisfied I suffer the pain of hunger, if my desire for friends is unsatisfied I suffer the pain of loneliness. But if the will is satisfied, very quickly I become bored—that is I suffer. After a fleeting moment of pleasure, the new Porsche becomes just ‘the car’, the new Omega wrist watch just ‘the thing for telling the time’. Hence life ‘swings like a pendulum’ between the suffering of lacking and the suffering of having.

(Marx attributes this reduction of things to their functional properties to capitalist ‘commodification’, but if he had read Schopenhauer he would have realized that it is rooted in the human condition as such.) Because things show up in will-impregnated ways—because everything shows up as either a threat or a solicitation—ordinary consciousness is permeated by anxiety, anxiety that a threat may be realized or a solicitation withdrawn. Occasionally, however, we find ourselves suddenly captivated by a sunset over the ocean, by the play of moonlight over gently rippling water, or by the enhancement of these effects in great art. We are, as we indeed say, ‘takes us out of ourselves’ so that, for a moment, we become oblivious to the threats and solicitations that surround the ordinary self. Our consciousness frees itself from the will, becomes (this, for Kant, is what defines aesthetic consciousness) ‘disinterested’. And because is disinterested, for a fleeting moment we are free of anxiety, achieve that ‘bliss and peace of mind always sought but always escaping us on the path of willing’.

In aesthetic consciousness we enter that ‘… painless state, prized by Epicurus as the state of the gods; for a moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the will. We celebrate the Sabbath from the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still’ Very often, when we call an object ‘beautiful’, we are actually not describing the object but rather expressing this subjective state of peace.

The importance of this experience in Schopenhauer’s overall argument is that it’s an intimation of ‘salvation’, of ‘how blessed must be the life of a man in whom the will is silenced, not for a brief moment, as in enjoyment of the beautiful, but for ever’. Of course, since to live is to will, the will can never, in fact, be entirely silenced in the life of ‘a man’: only death can silence the will ‘for ever’. And so, says Schopenhauer, his philosophy, like that of Socrates, is ultimately a ‘preparation for death’, something, he further argues, which, properly understood, is not to be feared but rather welcomed as a friend.

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Why do you think this makes it, when combined with his idealism, a kind of egoism and what’s wrong with that?

JY: I don’t think it’s his account of the sublime that commits Schopenhauer to a kind of egoism but rather his ethics. Virtue, he holds, is altruism; that is, in a world of suffering, compassion. But given that the only pain I know about is my own, given that I have no experience of the suffering of another, the existence of altruism is puzzling and demands an explanation. Schopenhauer’s explanation is given in terms of his metaphysics. The everyday world, as Kant proved, is mere appearance. But it is also the only world in which we can make sense of the idea of a plurality of distinct individuals. We can only distinguish things as different if they occupy different regions of space-time. It follows (a point Kant missed but which the mystics have always understood) that reality ‘in itself’ is ‘beyond plurality’ and is, in that sense, ‘One’. In reality, individuality is an illusion since the One is the real self of each one of us. People who are just in their actions have a certain limited intuitive insight into this deep truth, the person of compassionate love a much deeper insight. What Schopenhauer does, therefore, is to explain this-worldly altruism in terms of metaphysical egoism. We are all the same ‘I’ so that, as the enlightened understand, there is no distinction between your pain and mine. Since this is an all-inclusive egoism I see nothing ‘wrong’ with it.

 Nietzsche does accept Schopenhauer’s pessimism on behalf of both himself and the Greeks. (That the Greeks were Schopenhauerians before their time is shown, he says, by the myth of Silenus. Captured by king Midas and forced to reveal his wisdom, the demi-god tells him that ‘the best thing is not to be born, the second best is to die soon’.)