
Philosophy | What Schopenhauer said (Part 4)
Schops gets serious.
This part is, for Schopenhauer, the most serious as it concerns the action of men.
Philosophy’s role is, according to Schopenhauer, to investigate not prescribe actions for men.
Besides, he believes that philosophy cannot provide a guide to action because we are each driven by our own particular Daemon.
What a man is, he is.
Philosophy may only deconstruct the generalities of the web in which that man is nested.
This means that all you naughty girls and boys may relax if Schopenhauer is correct.
There is nothing that can be done to make you virtuous anymore than anything can be done to make you a genius.
Schopenhauer’s point: Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls.
And how!
§
The Will is blind, and the Will demands life.
Life and death — as the old Indian scriptures say — cancel each other out.
My death, from my standpoint, may seem lamentable; but my death is only one manifestation of a general coming and going into and out of existence that characterises the Will.
I am only one manifestation of the Will. In order to function in human society I live under the illusion that I am an individual.
When I search for the ‘I’ that drives me it is nowhere to be found.
This point was made by that fine Scotchman, David Hume.
The ‘I’ is a useful fiction, and it is the ‘I’ that dies when my life ends (even before then the ‘I’ is coming into and out of existence moment by moment).
What persists is the Will, which one could choose to call God — though it is far from the anthropomorphic God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
We know all too well, says Schopenhauer, that sleep is like death. This is, in part, why those in a depressed state sleep all day.
Death is a suspension the game of life akin to death, though — as noted in previous sections — we cannot really tell if what we call ‘life’ is but a dream from which we have yet to awaken, since the only way we know we are not dreaming is to awake.
There is only the present. Our past lives are as illusionary as history and the millions upon millions of people who died before us.
The Will demands that we have a timeline to orientate ourselves in the world.
But there only is, only was, and only will be: Now.
We are in nature. We cannot be apart from nature.
The point Schopenhauer develops has a common thread from Spinoza to Schopenhauer himself to Nietzsche to Freud to Jung — and beyond.
Our task is not somehow to reform ourselves.
That would be like making a grizzly bear a vegetarian — possible only by deforming the very nature of the bear, and probably fatal.
Our task is to remove the illusion that we are other than we are. We must become like water — as the Zen Buddhists entreat — and follow our course without resistance.
How do we do this?
We don’t need to do anything. We will do what we will do. We may stop casting illusions that we can do otherwise.
But even casting our illusions may be part of our nature.
And so a very subtle form of self-acceptance is the type that no longer tries to dispel the illusions, but accepts that we live with necessary illusions.
And in that moment of acceptance — perhaps — we may live with our illusions without being disturbed by our illusions.
And, perhaps not. If it is your nature…if that is your fate.
§
A man is like a tree, says Schopenhauer, the leaves upon his branches spring again and again with slight variations — each is different, but related to this man’s nature.
So it is we often read a novelist or philosopher only to find we are reading the same book again and again.
When I read Graham Greene and Slavoj Žižek I feel that I am reading the same book again and again.
I am.
These books are merely a variation on a theme of Greene and Žižek.
And, indeed, I feel in my own life that every action I take is the same as when I was a child, and each act — even as an adult — is a new variation on the themes I was born to complete in ever renewed details.
Forget free will, except as an illusion to help us function day-to-day.
This where a naïve or teenage reading of Nietzsche often occurs. People mistake Nietzsche’s affirmation of life as an affirmation of radical free will.
But Nietzsche is standing on Schopenhauer’s shoulders to tell us not that we may overcome all by simply ‘willing’, in the everyday sense of that word, ourselves to a position of remarkable power.
Rather, I believe Nietzsche is asking us to radically accept what we are without illusions; and, above Schopenhauer, see our self-acceptance bring not a mere equanimity, but a positive celebration of what we are.
§
Schopenhauer does not believe that people are static. He says that we start in innocence, and through action we come to know ourselves.
There are those, says Schopenhauer, whose wicked traits grow with age.
These are the men who fail to mirror life. The Buddhists tell us to cultivate the mirror mind to nature, if we do so we objectify the Will and so bring to knowledge our actuality.
In knowing this actuality we come to channel the course of the Will in new ways.
A mugger, shown the distress his actions have caused, may — if he was a mirror-like mind — come at once to know what was wicked in what he did.
And here the correction begins. It is not through an effort to ‘be’ good, or through ‘trying’ to be good; it is, instead, through an opening.
What goes for moral action also goes for seduction.
A woman creates an opening, an absence in which she mirrors her beloved.
It is into this absence that a man is drawn.
There is a quote by someone famous to this effect, but I have quite forgotten who said it.
You have the gist.
Often, we know ourselves so well that we become afraid of what we are.
We peak cautiously at our own reflection in the mirror. We do not want to see what we have brought to actuality.
§
Schopenhauer observed how anguish is mental in essence.
We may balance pleasure with pain in equanimity if we know one must follow the other, and that pain — the absence of pleasure — is also predicated on illusionary ideas about the past and future.
But when our mental anguish is too much we poke, prod, cut, and tear at ourselves as a substitute distraction.
In Schopenhauer’s time men pulled their hair out, and in our time teenagers cut themselves where no one may see.
Schopenhauer approaches the essence of sadomasochism.
He perceives that our pains and pleasures lie in our abstractions. We may rearrange our abstractions in such a way that apparent physical pain creates intense mental pleasure, and vice versa.
He notes the old legend of Eulenspiegel, a man who laughed as he carried a heavy load of water up a hill, and cried on the lighter journey on the way day.
The Eulenspiegel Society is, I understand, an important organisation for those interested in recreational sadomasochism.
Schopenhauer also notes that a child may cry not with the pain of hurt, but the anticipation of the hurt their pain may cause in another.
We would be better with simple, animal pain — but then an animal knows no way to relieve this pain, while we do.
§
How do we attain character?
We attain character by learning our limits and then acting in accordance with those limits.
If we act outside those limits we will be acting irrationally, and so never form a character.
Women would have difficulty attaining character in Schopenhauer’s sense.
This is because women are by nature mimetic.
This is their great strength, since their can transmit ideas and fashion with great speed and so weave (women in ancient mythology always weaved for this reason) societies together.
But this mimetic nature prevents a woman from knowing her limits, and so women are always falling behind their capabilities or overestimating themselves.
They often cannot gain self-knowledge in the way a man may — although, of course, not all men are capable of the self-reflection required to attain character.
We are only discontented with ourselves in so far as we have not recognised our limitations.
Once we have accepted our limitations, or that certain events cannot come to pass, we become at rest.
We are reconciled.
But this is very hard to attain.
And Nietzsche is relevant here again. He suggested that perhaps our nature is not to be reconciled, but to strive fruitlessly in search of new limits to be beaten back against, or — for we never know unless we make the attempt — to transcend.
Schopenhauer would have us all accept what is.
Nietzsche would have us potently rage, rage against the dying of the light!
§
We live between suffering and ennui.
We inflict pain upon ourselves. We experience a moment of elation when the pain ends on Saturday — and, what then?
Why, within a day we think: “I wish I were back at work.”
Men, for the most part, cannot simply contemplate the nature of the world.
They must arouse it and tease it.
And so at great monuments they are not content with the splendour, but must write graffiti.
“I woz ‘ere. I woz.”
Great joy and great suffering usually occur in the same person. This is no surprise for Schopenhauer, since he perceives that pleasure and pain depend upon each other.
When great misery is relieved there is, accordingly, great joy.
Great joy and great suffering are, of course, delusions. If one has sufficient knowledge one is aware that joy and suffering must follow each other.
And where there is no surprise there can be little suffering — or rather, there may be proportional suffering.
Those who do not learn this are like men on a small raft in a large ocean who do not know the elementals of sailing, and so risk capsize with even the smallest wave.
Those who are ignorant of this fact seek relief from pain externally.
They eat. They drink. They take holidays. They change jobs. They change partners. They have affairs. They take up new hobbies. They shop.
It’s our whole civilisation, no?
There is no external escape. The answer lies in the self’s perception and the perception alone.
The lesson may be very painful, though.
Mothers generally love their sons — particularly, though not always, their first sons — more than their daughters. And fathers love their daughters more than their sons.
Perhaps more accurately one may say, mothers love their sons more easily than their daughters; and fathers love their daughters more easily than their sons.
A child of the same sex to you is, after all, a mirror of a kind. And, as Schopenhauer observed, we do not like looking at mirrors too much.
But, if one can accept this bitter unfairness, there is much consolation in the tumult and discord that often accompanies family life.
If only all were equal — but it is not so. And when we attempt to make all equal or fair we often achieve the very opposite to our intentions.
§
We are not satisfied with our own sufferings, and so we must create demons, sprites and other creatures from the netherworld to persecute us.
Our superstitions come, for Schopenhauer, from our boredom and ennui.
§
The genitals are, for Schopenhauer, the potent repository of the Will.
Thus, the ancients worshipped the phallus whereas the moderns have — still do, even in our supposedly liberated age — repress the sexual in order to create a civilization a little more attuned to the nature of things.
With our minds we mirror the world, and so annihilate ourselves in order to find freedom from the battering between pleasure and pain.
And when we submit to the Will and our sexual drives we become slaves to pain — and pleasure.
§
What is wrong with a lie?
A lie is, Schopenhauer notes, an extension of power over an individual.
When we withhold information we place others in our power. We coerce them.
It is violence — violence seeks to coerce — without physical force.
But it is the violence of weakness. There is honesty in physical force.
Therefore, remember Solzhenitsyn: “Live not by lies”.
But, we must allow ourselves to use deception if deception is used against us. We may recover what is lost with less loss through a lie than would occur if we were to use open violence.
We must remember to always ignore a person’s words, and watch their actions. There is where the truth lies.
We are easily hypnotised by words.
§
The Will lies outside time.
Suicide is no escape from its eternal recurrence.
Escape comes only when we submit to the Will.
Death, says Schopenhauer, is like the setting of the Sun.
Those without knowledge believe the Sun has been swallowed up, but it merely burns on another part of our globe.
§
It is in the dance of opposites that illumination occurs. And our true virtue occurs when we recognise ourselves in other, and them in ourselves.
We can illuminate ourselves through knowledge for a while. We may see that all suffer as we suffer.
Jew. Hindu. Conservative. Socialist. Fascist. African. South American. Lawyer. Preacher. Teacher. Bin man. European. And on.
But we cannot sustain this position for too long. We are drawn back into our world of illusions. We must play at opposing the conservatives or the socialists.
And the names will change, but the oppositions will remain — each a variation on the same Will.
