Misanthropy Read online

  This means that the forms of knowledge are representations, as The World as Will and Representation states: ‘The world is my representation. This is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being’ (WW1, p. 3). Schopenhauer accepted the Kantian view that we cannot know the world in itself. When we represent something, we represent its appearance, the phenomenon only, doing so according to the principle of sufficient reason. There is no access to the object outside the subject. We cannot arrive at a representation of the ‘innermost being’ or ‘kernel’ of either the object or the world, the Ding an Sich (thing-in-itself, WW1, p. 31). If a fabulously gifted alien from another planet with such a superior capacity landed on earth, we would find what she was saying utterly incomprehensible (see WW2, p. 185).

  Hence relations are unimportant. Things perceived in their relations are not seen ‘in their absolute essence and existence’ (WW1, p. 11). This is the limit of the principle of sufficient reason: it can never present us with more ‘than the relation of one representation to another’ (WW1, p. 28). Thus all its forms are ‘empty and unreal as any dream’ (WW1, p. 7). Relations are valid only within certain horizons, and it is only on earth and for men that such forms of representation are binding (WW1, p. 6). The philosopher must look beyond them and ‘apprehend the universal in beings’ (WW2, p. 372). This is the task of philosophical reason.

  So far, the argument hardly seems to portend anything grimmer than an advanced if idiosyncratic form of Kantianism. Yet in fact we are at the top of a slippery slope. For the ‘universal’ that Schopenhauer apprehends in beings is will. The world is will, and only will. Will exists beyond the principle of sufficient reason and ‘may therefore in this respect be called groundless’ (WW1, p. 101), and hence is ‘completely and fundamentally different from … representation’, the forms and laws of which ‘are wholly foreign to it’ (WW1, p. 99). It exists within the subject doing the representation, but also in the world itself, and appears as such not only in animal but also ‘in inorganic and vegetable nature’ (WW1, p. 275).

  Will, then, is not just or even principally human. Nor is it energy or vital force, as in the vitalisms (Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze). Schopenhauer is explicit about this. He thought people needed metaphysics, not radical materialisms, and therefore aimed to provide a metaphysics of will. In the long run, Schopenhauer takes will for Being. When he tells us that it would be better not to exist (WW2, p. 605), the gloomy snarl also involves an ontological assertion. It is clear that ‘this world’s non-existence is just as possible as its existence’ (WW2, p. 171). But what determines, then, that the one should prevail over the other? The answer is will. Will is what ensures that there is not nothing. Indeed, conceived of more subtly, the will is even ‘an expression of … nothingness’ (WW1, p. 149); they are the two sides of a single coin. If the will is finally terrible, that is because nothing is its most intimate companion.

  The will strives for existence, and that is all it does. We can be only as will, and will is simply intent on asserting existence, whether that of a prime minister, a billionaire or a lump of mud. It is inexorable, the larger impersonality that encompasses our personality, so the condition of the subject is total unfreedom. But the will itself is not free either. Like ‘the young spider which has no idea of the prey for which it spins a web’, it is mere ‘blind activity’ (WW1, p. 114). It springs forth lustily from death, to which it is indifferent, like a dark moth from a cocoon, proclaiming with Goethe, ‘“A new day beckons to a newer shore!”’ (WW2, p. 501). The irony to Schopenhauer’s quotation is unmissable. The will does this quite meaninglessly and to no good end, save that the universe may continue to have being. We should stress that it is the universe that is at stake: the will is never principally concerned with the survival of the individual entity. In living beings, at least, the concern manifests itself above all in the imperative of continuing the species, of self-preservation, nourishment – and propagation. This is notably the case with humans, as is obvious in the primacy of the sex drive, which is practically an outrageous trick of the will, since, as ‘cool reflection’ suggests, sex is actually repugnant and even disgusting (WW2, p. 569). Schopenhauer himself actually had quite a bit of it, but then, he made no claims to have outsmarted the will.

  Here the grounds for Schopenhauer’s disbelief in humanity become clear. For Descartes, the reason of the cogito confers unity on the world, but Schopenhauer brutally undermines the Cartesian consolation. It is will that serves as the unifying force. Unconsciousness, not reason, is ‘the original and natural condition of all things’ (WW2, pp. 141–2). This decisively closes the gap between human and non-human. The essence of man has nothing to do with reason or ‘the so-called soul’, but is the same as the essence of the polyp or slug (WW2, pp. 205–6). Indeed, ‘the will proclaims itself’ no more ‘in the action of man’ than ‘in the fall of a stone’ (WW2, p. 299). Thought, knowledge, representation, the principle of sufficient reason are all parasitic on the will, functions of it, the means to sheer persistence. Will is the core of the person, and no particular value attaches to his or her humanity.

  Of course, the will endlessly achieves its simple purpose. But as the drive is quenched, so it at once begins afresh. Satisfied desires can only give birth to new ones. This means that ‘the phenomena in which the will objectifies itself’ are involved in an ‘endless and implacable struggle’ with each other (WW1, p. 153). All creatures compete for the air of being, as if in an infinite jungle crammed with feuding forms. The will buries its teeth in its own flesh: life forms eliminate each other. Admittedly, the human race is exceptionally good at this, regarding nature as manufactured for its own use, subduing all the other species and ‘necessarily devastating its world’ in the process (WW1, p. 147). But the will also feasts on itself within humanity. As, according to Schopenhauer, La Rochefoucauld supremely knew, the individual is ready to annihilate the world in order to maintain his or her own self. This is how we get Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes. Everyone ‘wants everything for himself, wants to possess, or at least control, everything, and would like to destroy whatever opposes him’ (WW1, p. 332). Moreover, in yet another turn of the screw, the naked will-to-live in animals is clothed, in man, by ‘the capacity for dissimulation’ (WW1, p. 156). In the end, refer to Dante’s hell: it is a magisterial portrait of the actual world, and Luther was right to suggest, in his Commentary on Galatians, that the devil is ‘prince and lord’ of the world, and we are all subject to him (WW2, p. 580). Optimisms are pervasive, but they are peculiarly fatuous if not pernicious manifestations of the will. The only good thing about Leibniz’s Theodicy is that it provoked Voltaire’s Candide.

  The conduct of men towards one another is determined by the general struggle, which stems from an irreducible ‘want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction’ (WW1, pp. 308–9). The ‘ultimate constituents’ of human experience are trouble, anxiety, craving, ‘pain and boredom’, ‘the terrible envy that dwells in all’. We are weighed down by ‘the heavy earthly atmosphere of need’, the definitive lack that generates endless longing and rage (WW1, p. 313, WW2, pp. 388, 578). Yet these are the very whips ‘that keep the top spinning’ (WW2, p. 359). Human life ‘presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as well as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desirable the desired object was’ (WW2, p. 573). What Schopenhauer calls ‘the in-itself of life’ is therefore ‘a constant suffering’ (WW1, p. 267). The great tragedians have the profoundest grasp of this, because they know such suffering for what it is, the immitigable consequence of the hellishness of the will, the ferocious combat of the phenomena (WW1, p. 253). But the will is ‘so closely concealed behind [its] masks’ that it can usually not recognize itself (WW2, p. 318). Thus, for example, humans turn a blind eye to the meaning of their indifference to others’ sufferings. They cannot bear to see themselves as they are, that is, as mere functions of will. Schopenhauer explicitly filters Kant through the seventee
nth-century French occasionalist Nicolas Malebranche, with very un-Kantian results. For Malebranche, human beings paste illusions of freedom and autonomy over a condition of definitive enslavement. Even the slightest movement of my little finger is the ‘occasion’ of other activity, caused by a volonté, a will beyond me which is the sole cause of all. True, for Malebranche, the volonté is God’s: God is the direct occasion of my actions, rather than just making me the kind of person disposed to perform certain kinds of action. But Schopenhauer has no interest in this line of thought. He keeps Malebranche’s concept of the occasion, but thereby turns man into a figure who stalks through the world like a sleepwalker, a regulated automaton, a puppet ‘set in motion by an internal clockwork’ (WW2, p. 358).

  Furthermore, if human beings can only live in a world determined by the principle of sufficient reason, in which everything becomes their representation, they also unwarrantably extend the principle of sufficient reason far beyond its sole province, beyond the empirical, given, immediately historical world. By virtue of doing so, they think they know far more than they do, when in fact they are condemning themselves to live in error, illusion, maya, a preposterous synecdoche. We can therefore understand how ideas ‘can reign’ over mankind ‘for thousands of years’ without having the slightest purchase on anything real or true (as in the case of the religions). ‘The ignorant and dull mob’ never escape error, or even bother to try (WW1, pp. 35, 47). Human beings in general are infinitely impressionable. The Chiliasts who, in 1818, moved from Würtemberg to Ararat because they thought the kingdom of God was imminent were typical if extreme cases of a total imbecility.

  So we are playthings in a senseless game. The true ‘being-in-itself’ of every living thing ‘lies primarily in its species’ (WW2, p. 510). But if the purpose for which individuals exist is clear, for what purpose does the species itself exist? This is a question to which nature makes no reply. The drive to life is not a measure or result ‘of any objective knowledge of the value of life’; indeed, ‘life is a business whose returns are far from covering the cost’ (WW2, p. 352), and ‘no one has the remotest idea why the whole tragi-comedy exists’ (WW2, p. 357). One can finally take only the objective view of the will to live, which is that it is a folly, or the subjective one, which commits one to a delusion (WW2, p. 357). Thus Schopenhauer is ambiguous about whether the species should survive or not. He will not preach annihilation, but he thinks that, for our own sake, we should admit that it would be better for both us and the world if we were not to be. ‘Our existence is happiest when we perceive it least; from this it follows that it would be better not to have it’ (WW2, p. 575). This leads him to the arresting view that ‘it is quite superfluous to dispute whether there is more good or evil in the world; for the mere existence of evil decides the matter, since evil can never be wiped off, and consequently can never be balanced, by the good that exists along with or after it’ (WW2, p. 576, my italics). Evil has a vivid moral reality that good does not. For evil is felt positively, while good, like happiness and pleasure, is the mere negation of evil. Everything that surrounds us bears the traces of the moral reality of evil, ‘just as in hell everything smells of sulphur’ (WW2, p. 577). One should therefore admire Lessing’s son, who ‘absolutely declined to come into the world’, had to be ‘forcibly dragged’ out into the world by forceps (WW2, p. 579), and died very soon thereafter. Schopenhauer even has his own distinctive consolation for the dying: ‘You are ceasing to be something which you would have done better never to become’ (WW2, p. 501).

  Not surprisingly, then, he is often brusquely dismissive of the supposedly most precious or significant aspects of human experience. Love, for example, does not survive his ‘gross realism’ (WW2, p. 535): ‘All amorousness is rooted in the sexual impulse alone’ (WW2, p. 533), and therefore in the will within the species, its drive to continuation. Men seldom feel sympathy or compassion; the more human response to others’ sufferings is Schadenfreude. Individuality and liberty are meaningless counters. We are tied to what we have to be by character, which is a splinter of will. As for politics, the State springs from egoism, and exists merely to serve it by managing it. Religion is bred of boredom and emptiness, with man creating gods, demons and spirit-worlds in his own image (WW1, pp. 322–3). Morality is futile, because it does not motivate us. Only self-love does that, but ‘what springs from it has no moral worth’ (WW1, p. 367). The intellect is incapable of governing the will, and ‘no system of ethics which would mould and improve’ the will is possible (WW2, p. 223). The struggles of conscience are therefore a waste of time and effort: the emotions are bound to break loose and rage. Eminence is rooted in self-delight, an ‘arrogant, triumphant vanity, a proud, scornful, contemptuous disdain of others’ (WW2, p. 233). Indeed, human projects themselves are of trifling importance, for they are just expressions of will, and any serious commitment to them is merely a way of giving oneself airs. In general, all our judgements and preferences, our concepts of what is ‘fair, just and reasonable’, ‘the prejudices of social position, rank, profession, nationality, sect, and religion’, are hollow, for they are all determined by interest, by ‘the deceptions of inclination and liking’ (WW2, pp. 217–18).

  But there are also two features of the Schopenhauerian vision that tend to lighten the gloom, his affirmations of art and asceticism. These alone can liberate a subject from servitude to the will. If representation is limited by its being of the phenomenon only, we can also abstract from our representations and represent them all over again, as Ideas. The object passes ‘out of all relation to something outside it’, so that ‘what is thus known is no longer the individual thing as such’. For its part, the abstracting subject passes ‘out of all relation to the will’, and becomes the pure ‘subject of knowledge’ (WW1, p. 179). This act of abstraction is the basis of every work of art, and the state of ‘pure objectivity of perception’ in which the subject also becomes ‘the pure subject of knowing’ is a fundamental constituent of aesthetic enjoyment (WW2, p. 371). In art, the will turns on itself, displaying itself for what it is.

  This is as close as we can come to the only true purity conceivable, that of being beyond or outside will – with one exception. For the saint or ascetic can cure his or her heart of ‘the passion for enjoying and indeed for living’ (WW2, p. 635). Saintly knowledge brings about ‘the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still’ (WW1, p. 196). The will no longer ‘affirms its own inner nature’, but rather experiences a horror of it, which ‘proceeds from the immediate and intuitive knowledge of the metaphysical identity of all beings’ (WW1, p. 380, WW2, p. 601). Furthermore, because the original sin is the affirmation of the will-to-live, the saint also comes to understand the ‘heavy guilt’ the human race incurs simply ‘through its existence itself’ (WW2, p. 604, italics mine). But such understanding is constant pain, a ‘hairy garment that causes its owner constant hardship’ (WW2, p. 607). This pain can only be allayed by a denial of the will in oneself. Yet that at last leads to the better wisdom. One sees that the apparently ‘exceedingly desirable benefits’ of life are in fact ‘chimeras’, and acknowledges ‘the true end of life’ as ‘a euthanasia of the will’ (WW2, pp. 635, 637).

  Schopenhauer’s thought is therefore another form of the exceptionalism we have occasionally remarked on. As voluntary suppressions of the will, art and asceticism are exceptions to the rule. Schopenhauer quotes Spinoza’s Ethics: ‘All that is excellent and eminent is as difficult as it is rare’ (WW1, p. 384). The genius of the artist, in particular, is ‘something foreign to the will’, to the ego proper. Since the will is ubiquitous, genius is always added ‘from outside so to speak’, and is therefore uncustomary, and even unnatural (WW2, pp. 377–8). Indeed, genius only rarely takes possession of its subjects. By these very tokens, it is a sealed book ‘to the dull majority of men’ (WW1, p. 234). So, too, goodness, beauty, nobility, saintly asceticism and wisdom appear but scantly. For the will itself closes the mediocre mind t
o genius, and insists that it must contest and depreciate it.

  Like Hobbes, then, Schopenhauer works from a misanthropic presumption, yet also scrapes value together on the basis and in the teeth of it. Schopenhauer contends that, on rare occasions, the will may turn against itself (WW1, p. 146). Yet this can happen only as a kind of abnegation of life, if it suffers a kind of hypertrophic growth that introduces a glitch into an otherwise altogether normative system, since, in the end, art and asceticism are ways of not living. Schopenhauer is a quietist, a philosopher who finally recommends disinterest, the wisdom of letting go of the world. He agrees wholeheartedly, or perhaps faint-heartedly, with Artabatus in Herodotus: there has never been a man who did not wish he did not have to live through the following day.22 That one’s life is likely to be short is one of the very few things to be said in its favour.

  ‘Only with me’, wrote Schopenhauer, ‘are the evils of the world honestly admitted in all their magnitude’ (WW2, p. 643). One obvious source of this conviction is his emphatic repudiation of historical thought. Schopenhauer loathed Hegel, and the reasons are not far to seek. Hegel thought historically, even supposing that there was a unity to history. ‘The Hegelian pseudo-philosophy’, Schopenhauer writes, ‘that is everywhere so pernicious and stupefying to the mind’, comprehends ‘the history of the world as a planned whole’ (WW2, p. 442). But no plan has ever existed. Hegelians nourish a fantasy about ‘inexistents’, entities that, historically, do not exist and have never existed. On the basis of their assumed plan of the world, according to which everything is managed for the best, they believe that an inexistent like justice or the Good ‘is supposed to come into existence’ (WW2, p. 443). In fact, no inexistents pass into existence at all. The only unity to history is ahistorical, the nunc stans, ‘an endless present’ (WW2, 479).