Human condition is inherently tragic
No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.
Arthur Schopenhauer is the gloomiest of them all, and yet at the very same time, the most consoling. If a reader accepts his offering, it should calibrate their expectations for life to a manageable level, and this may in turn, make it all a bit more tolerable. The premise is: most of circumstances, if not all, are beyond one’s ability to change, and those circumstances are, by default, dire.
Schopenhauer’s favourite themes repeat in various forms: Pain is the only real thing. There are no real pleasures. The pleasure experienced is but the absence of pain, therefore pleasure is the negative.
Human condition is inherently tragic.
The misfortune is the rule. For if not to suffer was the purpose of life, then our existence is most ill-adapted to its purpose. No-one really pays attention to things going according to our wishes, rather we only notice our will being thwarted, or something hindering us.
The only consolation is to see how someone else has it even worse!
Confess: there is something not entirely displeasing about other peoples misfortune, as was said by another thinker.
For us living in our equity-oriented and equality-loving age, good old Arthur comes off (sometimes for rather good reasons) as elitist, a chauvinist, a misanthrope, and even downright inappropriate.
However, he viewed Power, not as admirable thing, but as a tragic consequence of the raw Will. It is the inherent need to dominate, not a virtue by any means.
He was obviously not a proponent of equality. He believed people were almost entirely fixed in nature and in character, unalterable. He believed them to be bound by degrees of existence: a Savage; not much more than an ape running on base instinct, or a Merchant; a man of means planning things ahead and building a House and a Legacy, but completely material, or a Scholar; one interested in finer things and pondering issues beyond himself, or even a Poet / Philosopher; one who transcends it all.
Being ‘common’ meant to him that one only possesses what is common to all, nothing more.
A peculiar part of his belief in the fixed nature of a man was his endorsement of an idea called “Physiognomy”. Many of Schopenhauer’s gloomy, pessimistic views can still be seen in favourable light, but this is hardly one of those. Physiognomy asserted that a person’s moral character and intellect can be deciphered from the persons external appearance. The facial features will tell who is trustworthy, good, moral, and who is not.
Beauty equals moral excellence.
Us living in the age of Internet influencers need no further proof of this idea being utter horseshit.
Would be nice if it was true, though.
Another fixed feature of a human that got the old pessimist to separate the wheat from the chaff was sex.
Typical for his era, he was a misogynist, but the level of his misogyny was unusual. The examples of this line of thinking are plenty, but surprisingly there were also opposite examples in his writing: he actually encouraged getting advice from a woman in some situations!
According to him, women, unlike men, look at only what is right at hand, right in front of them, and do not think further. This in his opinion would be a useful counterbalance to men’s very philosophical and analytical thinking.
Don’t know about that.
Arthur also thought that women excel in empathy. No contest there.
Another hilarious observation of his was that all women are in the same business: business of getting a man. Therefore they are all rivals, and eventually end up hating each other.
Men, on the other hand are in various trades: one is a tradesman, other one a philosopher and the third one is a politician.
These views may be difficult to defend now, but some of us still find them funny as hell!
So, is his view of the completely fixed human wrong, after all?
It probably is mostly wrong, but not entirely. Even modern understanding says that there is a written-in-stone -side in human. Some things are inherited, some things are learned early on, and one doesn’t have much influence over these things.
Arthur just vastly overshot with this idea of fixedness.
In reality, people are able to change their behaviour, albeit with great difficulty. People can learn new skills and sometimes their views really are changed.
Another area where Schopenhauer’s scepticism of goodness of people became apparent was his thoughts on reading. As much as he believed that not everyone is equipped for thinking original thoughts, he also believed most reading to be useless.
Most books are written by idiots for other idiots. Read them and you will actually go backwards in your intellectual journey, if there even is such thing as a “journey” here!
Whenever a fool writes a pamphlet for fools, he always finds a large audience!
And that, my friends, is Arthur Schopenhauer for you.
His writing hurts, but he was mostly right about us!
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