He was of the opinion that human life was such a tragedy
that one ought to mourn a birth and celebrate a funeral. For Arthur
Schopenhauer the mourning started on February 22, 1788 in Danzig, Poland and
didn’t end until September 21, 1860 in Frankfurt, Germany.
His one great work was The World as Will and Representation.
He published it when he was thirty and had to wait another thirty years for it
to make him famous. In the meantime, he consoled himself with the theory that
the greater the man the longer it took for him to be recognized as great and
the longer his fame would last. In the meantime, he never ceased bellyaching
about what a miserable, sad, unfortunate, unsatisfying thing it was to be alive.
Life is the manifestation of a malevolent spirit, he
thought, blindly seeking to perpetuate itself, driven by an insatiable hunger
for satisfaction. We, as human beings, are nothing more than temporary,
disposable vehicles of that awful will.
His father was a successful businessman. But he didn’t seem
to have had any sunnier a disposition than did his son. It’s suspected that he
offed himself when Arthur was seventeen. His mother wrote successful romance
novels, of which her son was mortified. She was a competitive, vain, and silly
woman, at least according to Schopenhauer. She told him her novels would be
read long after his incomprehensible books of “philosophy” were forgotten. She
always got under his skin.
Schopenhauer played the flute.
He fathered an illegitimate daughter with a servant. The
baby died within the same year.
He taught at the University of Berlin at the same time Hegel
taught there. He thought Hegel was an oafish, double-speaking phony. But Hegel
was all the rage back then and packed the lecture hall. Schopenhauer could
barely muster half a dozen students for his lectures. Schopenhauer quit
academia in disgust.
Human life, he concluded early on, must be some kind of
mistake.
He was sued by a woman who claimed he pushed her down the
stairs. She won the lawsuit and Schopenhauer had to pay her damages for the
next twenty years until she finally croaked, a happy day, as Schopenhauer
recorded it. She was, he said in his own defense, making too much noise outside
his apartment door.
He fell in love twice. Once with an opera singer. But he had
no taste for marriage, which he thought a bum deal for a man who thereby
“halves his rights and doubles his duties.” The second time he fell in love he
was in his early forties; the girl was seventeen. Let’s just say she didn’t
take him very seriously.
From that point on, Schopenhauer was a committed bachelor.
When he needed a woman, he found prostitution a more amenable institution than
marriage. For companionship, he found nothing beat a poodle. He had a series of
them throughout his life. He always named them Atman and Butz.
For nearly thirty years he lived quietly and frugally in a
Frankfurt apartment. His main source of income was his father’s inheritance. When
fame finally came for him, he was pleased but smug. His attitude was something
like “Well, now that you're here you might as well come in. By the way, what took you so long?”
“Getting older,” he wrote, “is a condition where things are
bad and continue to get worse until the worst of all possible happens.” According
to his philosophical views, you could just as easily apply the same sentiment
to life as a whole.
As we’ve already seen, Schopenhauer liked his quiet time. He
shunned noise and noisemakers. He theorized that the emptier and stupider a
person was the louder he or she was likely to be.
He was heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy and readily
ascribed to the Buddhist notion that the suffering of life could be relieved by
abstinence, asceticism, and a general refraining from participating in the
world.
He also thought aesthetic contemplation offered a
depersonalizing liberation from
our doomed selves, particularly music.
A philosophical irony: Schopenhauer devoted his entire
intellectual career to saying “No!” to life while his early admirer and
successor Friedrich Nietzsche devoted his life to reversing Schopenhauer’s “Great
No!” into an unqualified and resounding “Great Yes!” Schopenhauer died quietly on
his couch at the age of seventy-two accompanied by his cat. Nietzsche died stark raving mad at
fifty-six accompanied by his duplicitous and self-serving sister. So much for the benefits of optimism!
Jorge Luis Borges idolized him; Ludwig Wittgenstein came to
dismiss him as a “shallow thinker.”
Schopenhauer said: A man can be himself only so long as he
is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is
only when he is alone that he is really free.
He’s often thought of as a misogynist since he said things
like: Women are adapted to act as
the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that
they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted—in a word, are big
children all their lives, something intermediate between children and men.
And:
Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call
the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex.
Ouch!
He was vehemently opposed to animal cruelty and believed
that you could reliably judge a person’s character by the way they treated a
dog or cat.
He considered patriotism a form of mental retardation.
He said: National character is only another name for the
particular form which the littleness, perversity, and baseness of mankind take
in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.
Take that, you flag-flapping yahoos!
And he considered religion: The masterpiece of the art of
animal training.
Take that, you Bible-thumping bumpkins!
Of society and the company of others he said: We forfeit
three-quarters of ourselves to be like other people.
And:
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with
other people.
Rascals, Schopenhauer concluded are always sociable. Conversely,
the nobler the character, the more likely it is to seek solitude.
On being alone, he would have agreed with Garbo, even though
she was a woman.
No comments:
Post a Comment