The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism - Arthur Schopenhauer
Allied with this is the contrast between the Greek and the Christian
idea of death. It is strikingly presented in a visible form on a fine
antique sarcophagus in the gallery of Florence, which exhibits, in
relief, the whole series of ceremonies attending a wedding in ancient
times, from the formal offer to the evening when Hymen's torch lights
the happy couple home. Compare with that the Christian coffin,
draped in mournful black and surmounted with a crucifix! How much
significance there is in these two ways of finding comfort in death.
They are opposed to each other, but each is right. The one points to
the _affirmation_ of the will to live, which remains sure of life for
all time, however rapidly its forms may change. The other, in the
symbol of suffering and death, points to the _denial_ of the will to
live, to redemption from this world, the domain of death and devil.
And in the question between the affirmation and the denial of the will
to live, Christianity is in the last resort right.
The contrast which the New Testament presents when compared with the
Old, according to the ecclesiastical view of the matter, is just that
existing between my ethical system and the moral philosophy of Europe.
The Old Testament represents man as under the dominion of Law, in
which, however, there is no redemption. The New Testament declares
Law to have failed, frees man from its dominion,[1] and in its stead
preaches the kingdom of grace, to be won by faith, love of neighbor
and entire sacrifice of self. This is the path of redemption from the
evil of the world. The spirit of the New Testament is undoubtedly
asceticism, however your protestants and rationalists may twist it to
suit their purpose. Asceticism is the denial of the will to live; and
the transition from the Old Testament to the New, from the dominion
of Law to that of Faith, from justification by works to redemption
through the Mediator, from the domain of sin and death to eternal life
in Christ, means, when taken in its real sense, the transition from
the merely moral virtues to the denial of the will to live. My
philosophy shows the metaphysical foundation of justice and the love
of mankind, and points to the goal to which these virtues necessarily
lead, if they are practised in perfection. At the same time it is
candid in confessing that a man must turn his back upon the world, and
that the denial of the will to live is the way of redemption. It is
therefore really at one with the spirit of the New Testament, whilst
all other systems are couched in the spirit of the Old; that is
to say, theoretically as well as practically, their result is
Judaism--mere despotic theism. In this sense, then, my doctrine might
be called the only true Christian philosophy--however paradoxical a
statement this may seem to people who take superficial views instead
of penetrating to the heart of the matter.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Romans vii; Galatians ii, iii.]
If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish
all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better
than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary, a
sort of a penal colony, or [Greek: ergastaerion] as the earliest
philosopher called it.[1] Amongst the Christian Fathers, Origen, with
praiseworthy courage, took this view,[2] which is further justified by
certain objective theories of life. I refer, not to my own philosophy
alone, but to the wisdom of all ages, as expressed in Brahmanism and
Buddhism, and in the sayings of Greek philosophers like Empedocles and
Pythagoras; as also by Cicero, in his remark that the wise men of old
used to teach that we come into this world to pay the penalty of crime
committed in another state of existence--a doctrine which formed
part of the initiation into the mysteries.[3] And Vanini--whom his
contemporaries burned, finding that an easier task than to confute
him--puts the same thing in a very forcible way. _Man_, he says, _is
so full of every kind of misery that, were it not repugnant to the
Christian religion, I should venture to affirm that if evil spirits
exist at all, they have posed into human form and are now atoning for
their crimes_.[4] And true Christianity--using the word in its right
sense--also regards our existence as the consequence of sin and error.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Clem. Alex. Strom. L. iii, c, 3, p. 399.]
[Footnote 2: Augustine _de civitate Dei_., L. xi. c. 23.]
[Footnote 3: Cf. _Fragmenta de philosophia_.]
[Footnote: 4: _De admirandis naturae arcanis_; dial L. p. 35.]
If you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate your
expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable
incidents, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery,
as anything unusual or irregular; nay, you will find that everything
is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of
existence in his own peculiar way. Amongst the evils of a penal colony
is the society of those who form it; and if the reader is worthy of
better company, he will need no words from me to remind him of what he
has to put up with at present. If he has a soul above the common, or
if he is a man of genius, he will occasionally feel like some noble
prisoner of state, condemned to work in the galleys with common
criminals; and he will follow his example and try to isolate himself.
In general, however, it should be said that this view of life will
enable us to contemplate the so-called imperfections of the great
majority of men, their moral and intellectual deficiencies and the
resulting base type of countenance, without any surprise, to say
nothing of indignation; for we shall never cease to reflect where we
are, and that the men about us are beings conceived and born in
sin, and living to atone for it. That is what Christianity means in
speaking of the sinful nature of man.
_Pardon's the word to all_! [1] Whatever folly men commit, be
their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise
forbearance; remembering that when these faults appear in others, it
is our follies and vices that we behold. They are the shortcomings of
humanity, to which we belong; whose faults, one and all, we share;
yes, even those very faults at which we now wax so indignant, merely
because they have not yet appeared in ourselves. They are faults that
do not lie on the surface. But they exist down there in the depths of
our nature; and should anything call them forth, they will come and
show themselves, just as we now see them in others. One man, it
is true, may have faults that are absent in his fellow; and it is
undeniable that the sum total of bad qualities is in some cases very
large; for the difference of individuality between man and man passes
all measure.
[Footnote 1: "Cymbeline," Act v. Sc. 5.]
In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had
better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards
one another. Nay, from this point of view, we might well consider the
proper form of address to be, not _Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr_, but _my
fellow-sufferer, Soci malorum, compagnon de miseres_! This may perhaps
sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others in
a right light; and it reminds us of that which is after all the most
necessary thing in life--the tolerance, patience, regard, and love
of neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore,
every man owes to his fellow.
THE VANITY OF EXISTENCE.
This vanity finds expression in the whole way in which things exist;
in the infinite nature of Time and Space, as opposed to the finite
nature of the individual in both; in the ever-passing present moment
as the only mode of actual existence; in the interdependence and
relativity of all things; in continual Becoming without ever Being; in
constant wishing and never being satisfied; in the long battle
which forms the history of life, where every effort is checked by
difficulties, and stopped until they are overcome. Time is that in
which all things pass away; it is merely the form under which the will
to live--the thing-in-itself and therefore imperishable--has revealed
to it that its efforts are in vain; it is that agent by which at every
moment all things in our hands become as nothing, and lose any real
value they possess.
That which _has been_ exists no more; it exists as little as that
which has _never_ been. But of everything that exists you must say, in
the next moment, that it has been. Hence something of great importance
now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in
that the latter is a _reality_, and related to the former as something
to nothing.
A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing,
after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for
a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he
must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that
it cannot be true. The crudest intellect cannot speculate on such a
subject without having a presentiment that Time is something ideal in
its nature. This ideality of Time and Space is the key to every true
system of metaphysics; because it provides for quite another order of
things than is to be met with in the domain of nature. This is why
Kant is so great.
Of every event in our life we can say only for one moment that it
_is_; for ever after, that it _was_. Every evening we are poorer by a
day. It might, perhaps, make us mad to see how rapidly our short span
of time ebbs away; if it were not that in the furthest depths of our
being we are secretly conscious of our share in the exhaustible spring
of eternity, so that we can always hope to find life in it again.
Consideration of the kind, touched on above, might, indeed, lead us to
embrace the belief that the greatest _wisdom_ is to make the enjoyment
of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only
reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand,
such a course might just as well be called the greatest _folly_: for
that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly,
like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.
The whole foundation on which our existence rests is the present--the
ever-fleeting present. It lies, then, in the very nature of our
existence to take the form of constant motion, and to offer no
possibility of our ever attaining the rest for which we are always
striving. We are like a man running downhill, who cannot keep on his
legs unless he runs on, and will inevitably fall if he stops; or,
again, like a pole balanced on the tip of one's finger; or like a
planet, which would fall into its sun the moment it ceased to hurry
forward on its way. Unrest is the mark of existence.
In a world where all is unstable, and nought can endure, but is swept
onwards at once in the hurrying whirlpool of change; where a man, if
he is to keep erect at all, must always be advancing and moving, like
an acrobat on a rope--in such a world, happiness in inconceivable.
How can it dwell where, as Plato says, _continual Becoming and never
Being_ is the sole form of existence? In the first place, a man never
is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which
he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he
does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the
end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it
is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was
never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it
is over.
At the same time it is a wonderful thing that, in the world of human
beings as in that of animals in general, this manifold restless motion
is produced and kept up by the agency of two simple impulses--hunger
and the sexual instinct; aided a little, perhaps, by the influence of
boredom, but by nothing else; and that, in the theatre of life, these
suffice to form the _primum mobile_ of how complicated a machinery,
setting in motion how strange and varied a scene!
On looking a little closer, we find that inorganic matter presents
a constant conflict between chemical forces, which eventually works
dissolution; and on the other hand, that organic life is impossible
without continual change of matter, and cannot exist if it does not
receive perpetual help from without. This is the realm of _finality_;
and its opposite would be _an infinite existence_, exposed to no
attack from without, and needing nothing to support it; [Greek: haei
hosautos dn], the realm of eternal peace; [Greek: oute giguomenon oute
apollumenon], some timeless, changeless state, one and undiversified;
the negative knowledge of which forms the dominant note of the
Platonic philosophy. It is to some such state as this that the denial
of the will to live opens up the way.
The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked
at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to
be found in them, unless you stand some distance off. So, to gain
anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty
it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better
things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past
back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with
while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence
most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life,
will find that all along they have been living _ad interim_: they will
be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let
slip by unenjoyed, was just the life in the expectation of which they
passed all their time. Of how many a man may it not be said that hope
made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!
Then again, how insatiable a creature is man! Every satisfaction he
attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to
the wishes of each individual will. And why is this? The real reason
is simply that, taken in itself, Will is the lord of all worlds:
everything belongs to it, and therefore no one single thing can ever
give it satisfaction, but only the whole, which is endless. For all
that, it must rouse our sympathy to think how very little the Will,
this lord of the world, really gets when it takes the form of an
individual; usually only just enough to keep the body together. This
is why man is so very miserable.
Life presents itself chiefly as a task--the task, I mean, of
subsisting at all, _gagner sa vie_. If this is accomplished, life is a
burden, and then there comes the second task of doing something with
that which has been won--of warding off boredom, which, like a bird
of prey, hovers over us, ready to fall wherever it sees a life secure
from need. The first task is to win something; the second, to banish
the feeling that it has been won; otherwise it is a burden.
Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be
sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of
needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are
satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing
remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that
existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the
feeling of the emptiness of life? If life--the craving for which
is the very essence of our being--were possessed of any positive
intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere
existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
But as it is, we take no delight in existence except when we are
struggling for something; and then distance and difficulties to be
overcome make our goal look as though it would satisfy us--an illusion
which vanishes when we reach it; or else when we are occupied with
some purely intellectual interest--when in reality we have stepped
forth from life to look upon it from the outside, much after the
manner of spectators at a play. And even sensual pleasure itself means
nothing but a struggle and aspiration, ceasing the moment its aim is
attained. Whenever we are not occupied in one of these ways, but cast
upon existence itself, its vain and worthless nature is brought home
to us; and this is what we mean by boredom. The hankering after what
is strange and uncommon--an innate and ineradicable tendency of human
nature--shows how glad we are at any interruption of that natural
course of affairs which is so very tedious.
That this most perfect manifestation of the will to live, the human
organism, with the cunning and complex working of its machinery,
must fall to dust and yield up itself and all its strivings to
extinction--this is the naive way in which Nature, who is always so
true and sincere in what she says, proclaims the whole struggle of
this will as in its very essence barren and unprofitable. Were it of
any value in itself, anything unconditioned and absolute, it could not
thus end in mere nothing.
If we turn from contemplating the world as a whole, and, in
particular, the generations of men as they live their little hour of
mock-existence and then are swept away in rapid succession; if we turn
from this, and look at life in its small details, as presented, say,
in a comedy, how ridiculous it all seems! It is like a drop of water
seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with _infusoria_; or
a speck of cheese full of mites invisible to the naked eye. How we
laugh as they bustle about so eagerly, and struggle with one another
in so tiny a space! And whether here, or in the little span of human
life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect.
It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an
indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of
Time and Space.
ON SUICIDE.
As far as I know, none but the votaries of monotheistic, that is to
say, Jewish religions, look upon suicide as a crime. This is all the
more striking, inasmuch as neither in the Old nor in the New Testament
is there to be found any prohibition or positive disapproval of it;
so that religious teachers are forced to base their condemnation of
suicide on philosophical grounds of their own invention. These are
so very bad that writers of this kind endeavor to make up for the
weakness of their arguments by the strong terms in which they express
their abhorrence of the practice; in other words, they declaim against
it. They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that
only a madman could be guilty of it; and other insipidities of the
same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is
_wrong_; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world
to which every mail has a more unassailable title than to his own life
and person.
Suicide, as I have said, is actually accounted a crime; and a crime
which, especially under the vulgar bigotry that prevails in England,
is followed by an ignominious burial and the seizure of the man's
property; and for that reason, in a case of suicide, the jury almost
always brings in a verdict of insanity. Now let the reader's own moral
feelings decide as to whether or not suicide is a criminal act. Think
of the impression that would be made upon you by the news that some
one you know had committed the crime, say, of murder or theft, or been
guilty of some act of cruelty or deception; and compare it with your
feelings when you hear that he has met a voluntary death. While in the
one case a lively sense of indignation and extreme resentment will be
aroused, and you will call loudly for punishment or revenge, in the
other you will be moved to grief and sympathy; and mingled with your
thoughts will be admiration for his courage, rather than the moral
disapproval which follows upon a wicked action. Who has not had
acquaintances, friends, relations, who of their own free will have
left this world; and are these to be thought of with horror as
criminals? Most emphatically, No! I am rather of opinion that the
clergy should be challenged to explain what right they have to go into
the pulpit, or take up their pens, and stamp as a crime an action
which many men whom we hold in affection and honor have committed;
and to refuse an honorable burial to those who relinquish this
world voluntarily. They have no Biblical authority to boast of,
as justifying their condemnation of suicide; nay, not even any
philosophical arguments that will hold water; and it must be
understood that it is arguments we want, and that we will not be put
off with mere phrases or words of abuse. If the criminal law forbids
suicide, that is not an argument valid in the Church; and besides, the
prohibition is ridiculous; for what penalty can frighten a man who is
not afraid of death itself? If the law punishes people for trying
to commit suicide, it is punishing the want of skill that makes the
attempt a failure.
The ancients, moreover, were very far from regarding the matter in
that light. Pliny says: _Life is not so desirable a thing as to be
protracted at any cost. Whoever you are, you are sure to die, even
though your life has been full of abomination and crime. The chief
of all remedies for a troubled mind is the feeling that among the
blessings which Nature gives to man, there is none greater than an
opportune death; and the best of it is that every one can avail
himself of it.[1]_ And elsewhere the same writer declares: _Not even
to God are all things possible; for he could not compass his own
death, if he willed to die, and yet in all the miseries of our earthly
life, this is the best of his gifts to man.[2]_ Nay, in Massilia
and on the isle of Ceos, the man who could give valid reasons
for relinquishing his life, was handed the cup of hemlock by the
magistrate; and that, too, in public.[3] And in ancient times, how
many heroes and wise men died a voluntary death. Aristotle,[4] it is
true, declared suicide to be an offence against the State, although
not against the person; but in Stobaeus' exposition of the Peripatetic
philosophy there is the following remark: _The good man should flee
life when his misfortunes become too great; the bad man, also, when
he is too prosperous_. And similarly: _So he will marry and beget
children and take part in the affairs of the State, and, generally,
practice virtue and continue to live; and then, again, if need be,
and at any time necessity compels him, he will depart to his place of
refuge in the tomb.[5]_ And we find that the Stoics actually praised
suicide as a noble and heroic action, as hundreds of passages show;
above all in the works of Seneca, who expresses the strongest approval
of it. As is well known, the Hindoos look upon suicide as a religious
act, especially when it takes the form of self-immolation by widows;
but also when it consists in casting oneself under the wheels of the
chariot of the god at Juggernaut, or being eaten by crocodiles in the
Ganges, or being drowned in the holy tanks in the temples, and so on.
The same thing occurs on the stage--that mirror of life. For example,
in _L'Orphelin de la Chine_[6] a celebrated Chinese play, almost
all the noble characters end by suicide; without the slightest hint
anywhere, or any impression being produced on the spectator, that
they are committing a crime. And in our own theatre it is much the
same--Palmira, for instance, in _Mahomet_, or Mortimer in _Maria
Stuart_, Othello, Countess Terzky.[7] Is Hamlet's monologue the
meditation of a criminal? He merely declares that if we had any
certainty of being annihilated by it, death would be infinitely
preferable to the world as it is. But _there lies the rub_!
[Footnote 1: Hist. Nat. Lib. xxviii., 1.]
[Footnote 2: Loc. cit. Lib. ii. c. 7.]
[Footnote 3: 3 Valerius Maximus; hist. Lib. ii., c. 6, sec. 7 et 8.
Heraclides Ponticus; fragmenta de rebus publicis, ix. Aeliani variae
historiae, iii., 37. Strabo; Lib. x., c. 5, 6.]
[Footnote 4: _Eth. Nichom_., v. 15.]
[Footnote 5: Stobaeus. _Ecl. Eth_.. ii., c. 7, pp. 286, 312]
[Footnote 6: Traduit par St. Julien, 1834.]
[Footnote 7: _Translator's Note_.--Palmira: a female slave in Goethe's
play of _Mahomet_. Mortimer: a would-be lover and rescuer of Mary in
Schiller's _Maria Stuart_. Countess Terzky: a leading character in
Schiller's _Wallenstein's Tod_.]
The reasons advanced against suicide by the clergy of monotheistic,
that is to say, Jewish religions, and by those philosophers who adapt
themselves thereto, are weak sophisms which can easily be refuted.[1]
The most thorough-going refutation of them is given by Hume in his
_Essay on Suicide_. This did not appeal until after his death, when
it was immediately suppressed, owing to the scandalous bigotry and
outrageous ecclesiastical tyranny that prevailed in England; and hence
only a very few copies of it were sold under cover of secrecy and at a
high price. This and another treatise by that great man have come to
us from Basle, and we may be thankful for the reprint.[2] It is a
great disgrace to the English nation that a purely philosophical
treatise, which, proceeding from one of the first thinkers and writers
in England, aimed at refuting the current arguments against suicide
by the light of cold reason, should be forced to sneak about in that
country, as though it were some rascally production, until at last it
found refuge on the Continent. At the same time it shows what a good
conscience the Church has in such matters.