On the Suffering of the World: Arthur Schopenhauer

                                                                 

                                                                 

Recently when I put up the picture of a grizzled elderly geezer on my Facebook page, some may have correctly guessed that the man was not my great-great-great-grandfather. I did not put the picture there for any fanciful Facebook posturing that needed a twee caption to achieve maximum effect, it was uploaded for my own personal diversion - in the same way a teenybopper would put a poster of Justin Bieber on the wall of her room.
     The man in the painting is indeed my ancestor. Now look at our heads - although his balding pate is bordered by coiffed puffs of hair, we are both thin on top. Arthur Schopenhauer is my philosophical ancestor, apologies to Harold Bloom who proposed the concept of ‘literary ancestors.’ Like Friedrich Nietzsche, his fellow countryman, Schopenhauer straddles both the ‘lunatic fringe’ and the ‘mainstream’ of philosophy - both men are iconoclasts, they share a penchant for grand expressive appeal and sheer intellectual gall. But for me Schopenhauer’s appeal - in certain ways - is grander than Nietzsche’s.    

     Which was why I returned to a collection of his writings a few days ago while browsing through the double-cased miscellany that Penguin Books calls Great Ideas. The collection comprises 40 slimline books and parades stellar works by Plato, Darwin and Freud and 37 others. When I lit on Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering of the World, I could not but reread the essay - the umpteenth time - and the one that comes after it, On the Vanity of Existence.

      It is not possible to expand to a great degree on Schopenhauer’s complex and quietly yeasty life here - a vignette will do. And for the purpose of immediacy, I would like to relocate the philosopher in historical present. Arthur Schopenhauer is a lifelong bachelor, a lone wolf who does not try to hide his wolfhood, he yaps, snarls, growls. Although he goes out of his way to love a woman for some time, well enough to think of marrying her, the plan falls through. Whereupon Schopenhauer decides to live with a relay of dogs, he becomes a canophilist (dog-fancier), writing philosophy and, in his aloneness, escaping further into what the Neoplatonist thinker, Plotinus, describes as ‘the alone.’

     Schopenhauer is a pessimist, a misanthrope, a miserabilist, the patron saint of grumpy middle-aged men. Although I am now on the cusp of youth and middle-age, I discovered Schopenhauer long ago, as a hypercurious adolescent quester after truths. I knew even then that Schopenhauer was the real deal, although a less determined young reader would have chucked out the philosopher’s book that I found then. The book was The World as Will and Representation, by no means an impenetrable book, as philosophy goes, but then moving from reading penny-dreadfuls like James Hadley Chase to anything serious was bound to be tricky. The influential essay, On the Suffering of the World, came later.

     There is something else: Schopenhauer is a misogynist, his views about women are uncharitable, every so often scurrilous. This is unfortunate, though - to borrow from psychoanalysis, a theory inaugurated by one of those he influenced - one might connect the contempt in which Schopenhauer holds women with the difficult relation he had with his mother. He sees women as no more than outsized children. He scorns, ‘Women remain children all their lives, they never see anything but what is closest to them, cleave to the present moment.’

     Certainly, my disposition towards women, towards the female gender in general, is diametrically opposed to Schopenhauer’s. I remember how, as an impressionable youth, I resurrected the dated phrase ‘New Man’ to describe what I intended to become - a man who preaches and practises equality of the sexes. When Schopenhauer was at the age I was, his gynophobia was well-nigh calcified. And his boorishness, his tetchiness, and his inability to humanise himself before anyone he came in contact with - an attitude which is again in opposition to my own.

     So why do I see him as a philosophical ancestor? The nub of his worldview, cheerless and bleak as it may seem, rings true and resonantly to me. Schopenhauer believes that a continuum of pain, suffering, hurt and boredom is the lot of humankind, that there is no way anyone can escape it, and that states like happiness and pleasure are default stopgaps. ‘Existence is typified by unrest,’ he says. And continues: ‘for the world is Hell, and men (and women) are the tormented souls...’ He cannot comprehend why ‘a god like Jehovah should create this world of want and misery... and then go so far as to applaud himself for it, saying all is very good.’

     Of course before Schopenhauer, Voltaire had used the character Dr Pangloss in Candide to lampoon Leibnitz’s declaration that this (world) is the best of all possible worlds. What atheist Schopenhauer does better than deist Voltaire is to grab you by scruff of your neck and tell you in his pissed-off way that this (world) is as awful and dire a world as any you can find. In On the Vanity of Existence, Schopenhauer drives a monster coach and horses through the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, he refuses to strike any balance between such extremes as ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure.’ So far as he is concerned, if all is vanity, then all is unrelievedly vanity - there is no playful dingdong like it is in the bible’s book. Although I lost my Panglossian - unreasonable optimism - side decades ago, I am not sure I am as deep-dyed a dismalist as Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer suggests that the only way to alleviate the suffering of human existence is through the arts: music, fine art and literature, with music having more tonicity - although he is doubtful whether it would provide any life-long elixir.

     Apropos of the arts and their pursuit, a visit to Fela Kuti’s Afrika Shrine in the early 1990s had put me in mind of Schopenhauer (and Freud). When he was bantering between spurts of Afrobeating, Fela had said something which Schopenhauer would have wholeheartedly agreed with. The musical genius declared that adult humans should reconsider the normal address of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman,’ it is better, he declared, to be truthful and say ‘Penis’ and ‘Vagina’ since that is what a lot of adults think about when they meet other. Of course, Fela’s attempt to annul Freudian superego might be impossible, even perverse, but there is some truth in the jokey proposition.

    Like Fela, Schopenhauer believes that sex is as important in humans’ wretched lives as food, that it is a nutriment of sorts, he opines that one should have as much of it as one can manage, although expectedly, he sours this up by saying that sexual gratification is no more than a source of ‘brief pleasure and protracted suffering.’ Even then he likes sex well enough to father an illegitimate child who dies early, thus seating Schopenhauer prettier in his antinatalist - better-never-to-have-been-born - comfort corner.

    Fela’s seemingly salacious utterance also recalls Schopenhauer’s view that ‘the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not Monsieur, Sir, but Fellow Sufferer.’ While I would not address anyone as Fellow Sufferer, I remain inexorably tough-minded about the human condition - unlike religionists, I refuse to sugarcoat its overwhelmingly thorny aspects. To the best of my ability, I use art - reading, writing, fine art, music - for the purpose Schopenhauer suggests it should be used, as balm.

     Which is perhaps why only a few would dismiss me as a grouch or a cur. And which is where Schopenhauer major flaw lies - he lives all of his long life in a state of pickled curmudgeonliness.