Schopenhauer's Genius Philosophy - Why We Act Irrationally

What drives us to get out of bed every morning?  What motivates us to go on living? What’s behind the human will that is pushing us forward,  achieve great things or do stupid things?

European philosophy had two somewhat contradictory  answers. Some explained human motivation as god-given. Since god has created us, he has  also installed a free will inside us to achieve things in life through the carrot and stick of  heaven and hell.

But since the 15th century, science started to challenge the religious  doctrines for being too simplistic, so European philosophers offered an alternative  answer. Rationality. Since we are rational beings, we first think and then we act to  push things forward.

So generally, the two answers for our motivation to act  was explained through god or rationality. The German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer,  however, rejected both god and reason as a motivator of human action, so he offered  an alternative to both religion and rationality. Nature.

He argued that we are driven to live  because there is a mysterious force inside us, bestowed upon us by the universe itself.  A unified force that unites all humans, animals and even objects. We have little  or no control over this mysterious force, yet we are all bound by it.

So our rational  conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg. While many philosophers ignored Schopenhauer, he  had a profound influence on artists, musicians, novelists but most significantly psychoanalysts  such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Today, I’ll look at Schopenhauer’s life,  summarise his philosophical ideas and tell you why pessimism is good for you in today’s  world.

So sit back, get yourself some German sausage and beer, and let’s talk pessimism and  Schopenhauer.  But first, who was the man himself? Life Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 into  a German-Dutch merchant family in Danzig or modern-day Gdansk in Poland, back then part of  the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

5 years after his birth, the city was annexed by the Kingdom of  Prussia so the family moved to Hamburg to expand on the business and experience a bit more freedom.  In 1797, when Schopenhauer was 9, he was sent to live in the northern part of modern-day France.  Since his family owned a business, as a young boy, he was sent to many European countries to teach  him some business skills.

His family belonged to the new merchant class to they were not religious,  which explains Schopenhauer’s atheism later on. Back then the church was a huge obstacle for  capitalism to grow as money and profit were seen as somewhat dirty. You were meant to be poor  because getting to heaven was through the eye of a needle.

Schopenhauer’s family even supported the  French Revolution in the hope of more freedom from religion and traditions. But Schopenhauer didn’t  enjoy the merchant training program his family was offering, instead he was more interested in  philosophy, music, literature, and poetry. He was a big fan of Goethe, the greatest German poet,  who incidentally attended his mother’s parties.

In 1805, his father drowned in a canal,  perhaps accidentally. Schopenhauer, however, thought his father had jumped on purpose because  he suffered from bouts of depression and anxiety. Schopenhauer himself, had the premonition that  he might have inherited the same paranoia from his father.

Just as I discussed in the  Japanese writer, Akutagawa who had a similar anxiety of inheriting his mother’s  insanity. While Akutagawa ended his life, Schopenhauer continued on living despite being  nicknamed today as the father of pessimism. The death of his father, allowed Schopenhauer  to tap into his generous inheritance he had left behind.

He invested his money  and lived off the interest alone, but he still wanted to pursue his education  to become a university professor. In 1809, he enrolled at the university of Göttingen  to study medicine. While at university, he also attended classes on philosophy, psychology  and metaphysics.

A year or so later, he switched to philosophy. As a moody, pessimistic man, he  knew the sight of blood and open surgery wouldn’t do him much good. With philosophy at least you can  sit in a chair and write books or give lectures.

He was interested in Plato’s idealism and Kant’s  rationalism. Not just that, he switched town, moved to Berlin University, but unfortunately  he came to dislike most of his teachers. The more he studied, the more he got bored of  religion and became more and more atheist.

In 1813, as he received his doctorate from the  University of Jena, the French bad boy Napoleon was tearing through Europe like a tornado.  Schopenhauer fearing he might be drafted into the Prussian army, fled Berlin to take refuge  as his family home. The pessimist was also a pacifist.

Napoleon is one thing but returning  home, he saw his mother living with her boyfriend, a man 12 years younger than her, he was disgusted.  He could never imagine her with a man other than his own father. He moved to a small town,  Rudolstadt, where he spent his time hiking in the mountains, or forest bathing—something  Nietzsche too enjoyed—while also writing his university thesis, titled On the Fourfold  Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which became a precursor to his most famous  work, The World as Will and Representation, which I will elaborate later.

The  thesis was praised by his hero, Goethe. But Schopenhauer angered the great  German giant by criticising his work on the colour theory, presenting a subjective version  to Newton’s more objective explanation of colour. Also I should point out that his mother was a  very well-known writer who unlike many female authors of the time, didn’t use a pen name.

In  fact the first German woman to use her own name, Johanna Schopenhauer. She published a few  novels, travel books and biographies. But Schopenhauer himself wasn’t a big fan of his  mother’s writing career.

The two trashed each other’s writing. The mother said nobody would  read his son’s writing in the years to come and he in return said people would remember  him for centuries to come. The son was right.

In 1814, when Schopenhauer was around 28, it was  the last time, the mother and son met each other. For almost 17 years, they didn’t exchange  emails, phone calls or DMs. Joking aside, the mother was a party animal who enjoyed life  while the son was somewhat of a pessimist recluse who brooded over life.

Only in 1831, they started  sending letters to each other. His mother accused Schopenhauer of being too moody, pessimistic and  arrogant stuck in his ways. The son blamed his mother for his father’s death allegedly through  suicide.

While his father was sick in bed, his mother would go out partying, drinking and  enjoying life as a self-centred and narcissistic woman. Schopenhauer had a low opinion of  women in general, perhaps, due to his mother. In 1814, he moved to Drsden.

It was around 1816,  when he was introduced to the Indian philosophy of Upanishads, and Buddhism. He says, quote: “In  the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads.  It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.

”—Arthur Schopenhauer.  While in Drsden he focused on his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation,  which was eventually published in 1819. While waiting for the publication, he travelled  to Italy, where he got worried about his money running out because he was enjoying pizza  a little too much.

As a cautious pessimist, when he returned to Berlin, he found  himself a job at the University of Berlin, where he began to teach right next door  to another German giant, Georg Hegel. The two disliked each other a lot. Their  philosophies are extremely different.

Since Schopenhauer studied natural science and  medicine, he called Hegel a clumsy charlatan who knew very little about the deeper reality of  the world. He thought Hegel was too superficial in his understanding of reality as a progressive  historical process. All Hegel saw was smoke, but had no idea of the fire beneath.

But here’s the  irony though, Hegel attracted hundreds of students with history-based dialectical philosophy,  while Schopenhauer only a few students. To make matters worse, one of his neighbours, a  woman, sued him for pushing her down the stairs which she won and he had to pay her a pension  for almost 20 years due to her disability. To leave his troubles behind in Germany, he  traveled to Italy again.

He spoke good English, so he enjoyed the company of English tourists and  dandies who followed the footsteps of Lord Byron, escaping the gloomy weather in England.  He also tried to learn Spanish so he could read Don Quixote, his favourite book, in  the original Spanish. He also had some liaison with a few women.

He wasn’t keen on  monogamy and preferred polygamy or polyamory. In 1831, he fled Berlin, but this time instead  of Napoleon or army conscription, he was scared of a cholera epidemic. He moved to Frankfurt where  he lived for the rest of his life.

As a cautiously pessimistic man, he enjoyed taking a walk to  keep himself healthy. He cherished his solitude. He says, quote: “We can only be entirely  ourselves as long as we are alone; therefore, whoever does not love solitude, also does not love  freedom; for only when we are alone, are we free.

” As his writing career progressed, he become more  and more well-known, especially among artists, musicians like Richard Wagner, novelists such  as Gustave Flaubert and philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche. There’s also an argument that  Schopenhauer’s philosophy may have influenced the biologist Charles Darwin. But his influence on  psychoanalysis is perhaps the most profound.

In 1860, he died in his sofa,  aged 72. He never married, nor had any children. There are theories that  he might have fathered two kids.

Today Arthur Schopenhauer is considered one of the most  influential philosophers of the 19th century. Now I will discuss Schopenhauer's philosophy. Philosophy Schopenhauer’s most important philosophical  work is The World as Will and Representation, published in 1819.

In it he outlined his main  philosophical outlook. But to set the scene let’s talk about another German giant. As was the  case with most German philosophers of his age, he had to respond to Immanuel Kant who  revolutionised western philosophy by reconciling two divergent schools of philosophy: rationalism  and empiricism.

Rationalists say we have innate knowledge of the world that unfolds itself as  we develop in life from birth to adulthood but empiricists argue everything we know about the  world comes from outside through our senses. Kant brought them together saying that it’s  a bit of both. Humans have an innate rational faculty that makes sense of the world by putting  a structure to it.

Without our mental structure, our knowledge of the world would be so chaotic  and disorganised that we cannot make sense of it. So Kant made the human lens central to  understanding of the world. In other words, Kant argued that we humans are not passive  receivers of knowledge from outside world, but we also impose our mental  structure to the world.

Kant also divided up reality into two  distinctive realms: phenomena which is our experience of the world through our five  senses of smell, touch, sight, hearing and taste, and noumena which is the world in itself which  we cannot know. We can see a mountain but we can never fully grasp what it feels like to  be a mountain. So for Kant phenomena is our way of knowing the world and noumena is the  world in itself, which is hidden from us.

Schopenhauer took Kant’s distinction between the  knowable world of phenomena and the unknowable world of noumena to develop his own theory of  Will and Representation. For Kant the empirical world we experience is only the appearance of the  noumena, but the noumena itself we cannot fully know. For Kant it made sense, since he believed  in god who imparted humans with rationality, a kind of window to organise the world and  give it a structure.

Although Kant is not considered a Christian philosopher, his worldview  was from that of a western Christian tradition of seeing humans as somewhat separate from the  world, almost god-like creatures of god, exiled from the Garden of Eden. Of course, Kant was a  rationalist but rationalism as a philosophical tradition has its origin in ancient Greece but  it has been closely aligned with Christian view of reality that god has given us our rational  faculty. Schopenhauer was not religious, so his argument is not based on us humans being separate  from the world, but very much part of the world.

Schopenhauer argued that there is no distinction  between the two Kantian worlds of phenomena and noumena, they are one and the same thing  or two sides of the same coin. It’s will. It’s the driving force in the universe. 

But we only see its representation, not the actual will. Thus it may appear as though  there is a distinction between our experience and the objective world. But in reality, there is  no distinction between the objective world and a subject who experiences it.

For example, when  I talk, I can also hear myself. Or when I walk, I can see my legs moving but I also feel  what it’s like to walk. In other words, the experience is both external, legs movement  but also internal, the feeling or intuition I get from my legs moving.

Schopenhauer argues  that they are both one. He calls it will. But it is hidden from us, and we only see its  manifestation or shadows.

Schopenhauer’s idea of the hidden will is somewhat similar to  Plato’s theory of ideal form and the shadow. For Schopenhauer there is no such thing as  outside or inside world. It’s one and the same thing.

We might think, anything outside our  skin is separate from us, but Schopenhauer says, as soon as your skin touches an object, it’s no  longer outside experience. So for Schopenhauer to think that we are separate from the universe  is a mistake. We are one and same thing.

To explain Schopenhauer’s will, let’s talk about  love. If you ask someone why you got married, they say it is because they fell in love.  But for Schopenhauer it’s the surface-level representation of something entirely different. 

It’s the will to life. We are driven by the urge to procreate and love is just a convenient  surface-level representation of the sexual urge to procreate. For Schopenhauer, will is  the blind driving force in the universe that motivates us to have sex and representation  is our perception of that blind will which we call love.

So the will to life is our passion  for life that we share with all living beings, including animals and plants. Since the will  is blind and universal, we each become its eye through which it looks out to the world. For  example in humans, the will uses each individual to find the opposite sex to make babies.

Love is  nothing but the representation of our biological urge to procreate. If we go about sex in a  rational manner and consider the consequences of having a child, the cost, the time, effort and a  lifetime of constant worry about the children that result from sex and anguish about their health, we  would not have sex. The cost of sex for women is higher due to 9 months pregnancy and childbirth,  while this makes them more cautious and selective, it still doesn’t stop them from having sex.

For  men, however, there is no physiological cost to having sex, the urge is so extremely strong that  men work hard and even put their lives in danger to acquire resources, status, power, fame and  everything in order to have access to more women. So everything we do in life, acquiring wealth,  status, makeup, fashion, fitness, plastic surgery, etc we ultimately do to attract a mate  to procreate with. The best time we can have a rational mental clarity is right  after sex when the sexual goggles are off.

A great example of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic  outlook on love is depicted in one of the most beautiful novels of the 20th century, Marcel  Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which I have discussed here a lot. The novel’s depiction of  love as ultimately a disappointing experience when the one hand boredom or on the other hand  jealousy seeps in to ruin things for the lovers. Perhaps a crude metaphor for will is a gigantic  iceberg.

While our human consciousness or perception of it is only the tip of that iceberg,  which became a metaphor for psychoanalysis of the unconscious mind. Schopenhauer says it is  impossible to know the will, because as soon as you observe it, it becomes a representation  of that will. It’s like in quantum mechanics, your observation of a particle changes the  position of the particle.

So it is a kind of catch 22. To understand Schopenhauer’s idea  of the will is to imagine everything in the universe is one thing, let’s say a single atom  that oscillates between everything that exists. For Schopenhauer we are sandwiched between a rock,  the irrational and chaotic will and a hard place, our rational desire for order.

On an intellectual  level we want order, happiness, fulfilment, etc, but on a deeper level, our innate blind will  to life is illogical, chaotic, directionless and endlessly striving. This causes us suffering. Our  intellect seeks order but the blind will doesn’t obey order.

On an instinctual level, we want  sex, food, and company almost endlessly. But in reality, we cannot fulfil those desires all  the time, so our rational mind tries to tame or put a limit on those things, but the blind will is  insatiable. As a result we are constantly crashed between a rock and hard place.

So ultimately when  it comes to this will, we are not free. But the will itself is free. If it doesn’t achieve its  goal through us, it is happy to destroy us and go through someone else.

We want to tame it,  but our attempt often makes us frustrated. In other words, we can act freely, but we cannot  will freely as Albert Einstein said. For example we cannot eliminate our innate sexual drive,  which is the biggest cause of suffering for men.

We can temporarily satisfy it but we  can never eliminate it. Schopenhauer says since we have a body, we are all at the mercy  of this blind will that urges us to do things. To fully understand Schopenhauer’s  will, it is important to discuss the Buddhist idea of the self, because he was  massively impressed by Buddhism.

He says, quote: “If I wished to take the results of my  philosophy as the standard of truth, I should have to concede to Buddhism pre-eminence over the  others. ” —Schopenhauer (Will and Representation) According to Buddhism the thing we call the self  or I is nothing but an illusion or mirage. For the Buddhists, consciousness is universal but the  self is a mere mirage we acquire in our lifetime.

In other words our essence is not the self we call  me or I. Our essence is consciousness. The self is a fake identity or ego we create around that  consciousness.

Once we feed this ego, it becomes insatiable with desire to have things, like money,  power, fame and food. So this self or ego becomes the main sources of suffering in life. We suffer  because our ego wants things and never satisfied.

In Buddhism, they practice non-attachment to  reduce suffering. We all want shiny toys but we have to suffer to get them, but once we get them,  we want more or newer toys. This never stops.

So Buddhists practice discipline by refusing to obey  the blind will or inner desires. But in Buddhism, it goes even deeper, which is called the negation  of the self. In other words, you get rid of the thing you call the self, an imposter who is making  you do things, chase money, sex, drugs or food.

Schopenhauer has a similar solution. The only  way out of suffering is the negation of the self when you become one with the universe because in  the deeper reality there is no self as me and you, but one universal will, we individuals are  merely its eyes that it glances to the world. Also since Schopenhauer believed in a single  universal will manifested in us all, he saw compassion as the recognition of this blind will. 

The word compassion literally means passion with. So recognising the blind will is one way  to understand compassion. Schopenhauer’s compassion is different from the conventional  morality.

For example, a lion eating a gazelle seem awfully cruel, but Schopenhauer says  they both obey the same blind will. We humans judge things through the lens of pleasure and  anything that reduces pleasure is considered suffering therefore immoral. But the blind will  doesn’t see things through the individual lens.

The only way to cope with this suffering is  through intellect and art which allow us to move to a state of non-existence like the Buddhist  nirvana. Artists while creating art as well as us while enjoying that work of art experience a  moment of non-being while in awe of its beauty. When an art takes our breath away, we truly  experience non-existence, a kind of blissful moment.

Schopenhauer influenced the German  composer Richard Wagner whose music represents Schopenhauer’s volatile and oscillating blind  will. For Schopenhauer music didn’t represent the phenomenal world, therefore it was free from the  will and urges, instead it fostered compassion. When we experience beauty, artistic or otherwise,  we move beyond the distinction between will and representation or subject and object.

He says,  quote: ”It is as if the object alone existed without anyone perceiving it, and one can thus no  longer separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, the entirety of  consciousness entirely filled and occupied by a single perceptual image”. —The World  as Will and Representation Volume, p. 34 Experiencing artistic beauty liberates us  from the blind will so we become "pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of  cognition".

You enter a world of ideas, not worried about the physical world of matter.  You are so mesmerised by the object of beauty that everything else becomes irreverent to you.  For Schopenhauer music represented the purest of all artistic forms because music is timeless,  universal, and understood by everyone and everywhere.

Even the ancient Greeks saw music and  mathematics coming from the same source: nature. Schopenhauer vs Hegel To understand Schopenhauer, let me discuss  Hegel. Between the two, Hegel has been far more influential in the last two centuries,  through the works of Marx in particular, but Schopenhauer’s influence has been more in  the realm of psychology and evolutionary biology.

Hegel was a German idealist whose  philosophy was entered on the idea of progressive historical process. He believed  we are the product of history. In other words, we think or behave the way we do because  we are born and brought up in this period of history.

An ancient Greek and modern  German are vastly differently in their thinking and behaviour simply because they lived  in different historical periods. In other words, time makes us and history shapes us.  History is a continuous progression of time.

Schopenhauer thought there was something  far deeper than time. Time is just the surface-level veil and beneath is chaos and  aimlessness all ruled by the blind will. Hegel says we build upon those who come before  us, all the while things are progressing and improving.

His dialectical process was when two  opposites, thesis and antithesis come together to make something new called synthesis which is an  improvement on the previous things. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, says we have the illusion  of seeing things improve because we don’t see the blind will. The will has no destination or  a perfectionist utopia in mind.

It’s aimless, restless and eternal. A pendulum that oscillates  forever, but always stuck between wanting more and quickly getting bored of them after you  get them. It’s like kids wanting new toys but soon they get the said toy, the are bored of  them.

The same with shopping, drugs, food, sex, etc. While Hegel is correct that an ancient  Greek child may have craved a different toy to a modern German child, but the wanting of the  toy and getting bored of that same toy is still the same. So Schopenhauer says historical progress  means nothing to our insatiable desires and urges.

Hegel believed in aristotelean teleology or  progress of history that is moving towards the betterment of the human race. For instance  progress means more freedom, more food, more comfort and more equality. But for Schopenhauer,  history, culture, progress are all an illusion or surface level as in Maya in Hinduism, and beneath  is chaos and aimlessness, and terrifying will.

Since the will is aimless, it makes no  sense to talk about progress. You could say, Hegel’s progressive philosophy is somewhat  similar to the Christian view of us heading towards heaven, which Marx took and turned it  into a communist state of the future in which everyone lives happily and equally. Schopenhauer  might say that’s nothing but a pipe dream because we are ruled by the blind will inside us.

No  matter how beautiful the outside world becomes, you cannot change human nature. That’s why  Schopenhauer is called a philosopher of pessimism. Hegel has an optimistic outlook on history that  things are getting better as we travel into the future, but Schopenhauer thinks in the grand  scheme of things, progress is just an illusion.

The ancient greeks suffered as much as the modern  man does despite their societies being vastly different, because on an innate level, we are  stuck between a rock that’s the blind will urging us to chase sex, food, power, and more, and a hard  place that those things are not always available and even if they are available, we soon get bored  and want something else. To give an example, we get addicted to food, drugs, shopping, social  media etc just to quench the thirst that that blind has bestowed upon us. This has not changed  since the dawn of time.

Even in a future utopia, we will still seek the objects of our desires and  get bored of them soon enough. So Hegel was an optimist, albeit slightly utopian, Schopenhauer,  however, was a realist. Hegel thought humans were becoming better while Schopenhauer thought the  hardware changes but the wiring remains the same.

Now, the question is, is Schopenhauer's  pessimism a good thing in modern society? Pessimism In physics the second law of thermodynamics is  entropy meaning that everything is moving towards chaos. In other words, the universe moving  towards disorder.

To put simply it is easier to destroy than build. It is easier to cause pain  and suffering than pleasure and joy. Our conscious mind is more alert to pain than pleasure. 

According to Schopenhauer the pain of losing something or someone is far greater than the joy  of wining something or someone. In other words, as we age, we become more and more cautious  and careful. Despite having a good chunk of inheritance, Schopenhauer was never fully  confident in his income.

Why? Because he says pain is infinite and joy is finite, our human mind is  wired to avoid pain at all cost. This has become the basis of our rationality.

Rationality is  our way of minimising pain. So our mind is burnt more by negative experiences than positive ones.  Past traumas often prevents us from future joys.

Schopenhauer also says, we are no here to  be happy but to procreate and continue life. So understanding the blind will, Schopenhauer  says, allows us to lower our expectation. Today, the modern humans have an insatiable desire  for happiness that almost everything we do is tied to our goal for happiness.

For Schopenhauer  happiness is nothing but an illusion for striving, struggling and oscillating between desire and  the wall. Just as love is an illusion for sex, happiness is an illusion for our attempt to  escape the will by satisfying its insatiable desire. For example, in order to feed a  fire, we have to throw more wood into it.

So Schopenhauer’s pessimism allows us to lower  our expectations. The biggest enemy of happiness is having a high expectation which is constantly  crashes by reality. Schopenhauer brings us back to the reality of life that’s full of irrationality,  suffering, pain and restlessness.

Understanding reality might sound pessimistic but  it helps us manage our expectation, so it can ultimately help us become more content  with the harsh reality of life. Life’s not about happiness, comfort or blissful order. It’s all  chaos, disorder, discomfort, and suffering.

Arthur Schopenhauer dedicated his life  to philosophy in an attempt to find a non-religious explanation of life. He  finally settled on a simple idea. We are driven by a blind will to continue life. 

He was thinking about our evolutionary drive some 40 years before Darwin articulated in  his theory of evolution being at the heart of life on earth. So we are just tools  in the hands of nature and evolution. Thank you for listening.