Schopenhauer: Suffering is Real | On the Sufferings of the World 01

[Music] hi this is a new series about shanower I will be reading his short work on the sufferings of the world and offering some of my commentary this comes from a book titled studies in pessimism some of schopenhauer's late writings translated by T Bailey Saunders in the 1890s let me tell you a little bit about Mr Saunders Thomas Bailey Saunders was a British barrister he did little original work but he was known and well respected for his translations of schopenhauer and harach into English these were thought to be quite readable and quite popular uh Saunders

I'll be reading by the way from this book of essays on of schopenhauer Saunders offers a translator's note to the beginning of this volume studies on pessimism explaining a little bit about uh this work and its its origin so here's what son writes the first essay is in the main a rendering of the Philosopher's remarks Under The Heading nakre der together with certain parts of another section entitled nakre so the what Saunders has done is to take two parts of schow's um paragra a work of short writings from about 1850 and combined them and edited

them together himself in translating them uh those two titles are roughly uh additional remarks on the doctrine of the suffering of the world and additional remarks on the doctrine of the affirmation and denial of the will to live Saunders also says such omissions as I have made are directed chiefly by the desire to avoid repeating arguments already familiar to readers of the other volumes in this series so the text we're going to get here under the title on the sufferings of the world is Saunders title with uh Saunders combining two uh sets of uh aphoristic

additional remarks by schopenhauer in his translation so with that caveat that we're getting kind of shophow filtered by T Bailey Saunders let's let's uh start the text this by the way is 18 pages long in this version I'll be taking it in a couple of Parts on the sufferings of the World unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life our existence must entirely fail of its aim it is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world and originates in needs and Necessities Inseparable from life itself as

serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance each separate misfortune as it comes seems no doubt to be something exceptional but Misfortune in general is the rule I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character evil is just what is positive it makes its own existence felt libnet is particularly concerned to defend this absurdity and he seeks to strengthen his position by using a palpable and poultry sophism it is the good which is negative in other words happiness and

satisfaction always imply some desire fulfilled and some state of pain brought to an end so that's the first page first two paragraphs of this text and we have here I think another iteration of the main axis of schopenhauer's practical philosophy pain and suffering are real they are the positive element in life that truly exists and happiness and pleasure are a negative uh fact defined in relation to that positive existence they are the cessation of pain and to forget that or to live a sort of a Fantastical optimistic philosophy like lives is to go fundamentally wrong

in orienting yourself to the actual World in which you live so schopenhauer here is is going to recommend something many things under the heading of of his General pessimism saying at the beginning of course that uh unless we make suffering the direct and immediate aim of our object of our life unless we sort of put that front and center as what we are going to be going through we will uh find life to be absurd so let's go on next next page this explains the fact that we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so

pleasant as we expected and pain very much more painful the pleasure uh in this world it has been said outweighs the pain or at any rate there is an even balance between the two if the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true let him compare the respective feelings of two animals one of which is engaged in eating the other schopenhauer has turned here to talk about our subjective experience of Pleasure and Pain we have this is this uh uh we generally find that the pleasures of life are good but they're not as

good as we had kind of hoped and the pleasures of life are the Pains of Life are much more painful than we had wished that they might be why is that that's because of this fundamental mistake that many of us are making in being optimistic rather than pessimistic and then this kind of brutal observation right there is uh it is generally thought that there's more pleasure than pain in the world or at least we break even the the truth is quite the opposite that there is vastly more pain and suffering in this world than pleasure

and the image then uh two animals one of which is eating the other well one is getting some pleasure out of consuming a meal the other is suffering but the magnitude of the suffering is vastly more than the magnitude of the pleasure on the part of the eater so that that's schopenhauer I think has a kind of talent for for clear expression and for really Punchy images like that one going back to the text now the best consolation in Misfortune or Affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a

still worse plight than yourself and this is a form of consolation open to everyone but what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole we are like Lambs in a field disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher who chooses out first one and then another for his prey so it is that our in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil fate the of the evil fate may have presently in store for us sickness poverty mutilation loss of sight or Reason no little part of the torment of existence lies in

this that time is continually pressing Upon Us never letting us take breath but always coming after us like a Taskmaster with a whip if at any moment time stays his hand it is only when we are delivered over to the misery of boredom I'll pause here again on this second page schopenhauer here giving us um another uh Insight that although the um the experience of suffering May for the individual be uh ignorable right while I'm not currently in pain I can pretend as though the coming pain is not something I really need to concern myself

with I can enjoy my moments of pleasure or at least of respit from Pain the collective situation of humanity is rather terrible so the situation of mankind is collectively awful but individually endurable maybe is a good way of thinking about schopenhauer's thought as a whole and there's also this idea then that the pauses in our work when time SE to drive us forward are then we we leave one kind of suffering for another we lapse into the state of of boredom where we're no longer able to find anything to distract ourselves so a sort of

um inversion of of some of what what Pascal has to say about boredom perhaps going on no little I'm sorry no little part but Misfortune has its uses for as our bodily frame would burst a ther if the pressure of the atmosphere was removed so if the lives of men were relieved of all need hardship and adversity if everything they took in hand were successful they would be so swollen with arrogance that though they might not burst they would present the spectacle of unbridled Folly nay they would go mad and I may say further that

a certain amount of care or pain or trouble is necessary for every man at all times a ship without ballast is unstable and will not go straight certain it is that work worry labor and trouble form the lot of almost all men their whole lifelong but if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose how would men occupy their lives what would they do with their time if the world were a paradise of luxury and ease a land and flowing with milk and honey where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any

any difficulty men would either die of boredom or hang themselves or there would be Wars massacres and murders so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of nature so another kind of bold statement here that uh Miss Fortune is like the pressure of the atmosphere that holds Us in or like the ballast of a ship that keeps us steady if all of our desires were satisfied we would go mad or uh even worse if the whole human race experienced this sort of sudden

Prosperity comfort and total ease a paradise of luxury and ease men would go mad they would start killing each other they would hang themselves they would commit violence Massacre and murders that in the end they would inflict far more suffering on themselves than they than would have been inflicted by nature in the ordinary course of things this is maybe something to contemplate uh in the uh age of prosperity and also profound unhappiness so perhaps schopenhauer has something here going on in early youth as we contemplate our coming life we are like children in a theater

before the curtain is raised sitting there in High Spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin it is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen could we foresee it there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners condemned not to death but to life and yet and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means nevertheless every man desires to reach old age in other words a state of of life in which it may be said it is bad today and it will be worse tomorrow and so

on till the worst of all also here again shop andhow are um sounding sounding rather bitter but uh giving us a portrait right children sitting waiting for the curtain to rise what is my life going to be like and he's saying as an old man now um with a kind of old man's Wisdom they they're excited and happy and optimistic because they don't know what's coming they don't know what what life has in store for them but despite all of that nobody wishes to end his life everybody wishes to go on enduring as well as

he can endure there again is another sort of portrait of life it is suffering if we acknowledge that and face it squarely we have the strength to to go on as you might say as pessimists so continuing if you try to imagine as nearly as you can what an amount of misery pain and suffering every kind of of every kind The Sun Shines upon in its course you will admit that it would be much better if on the earth as little as on the moon the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life

and if here as there the surface were still in a crystalline State it's a version of schopenhauer's well-known statement that that it would be better if there had been no life if if we had never been Bor born again you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode disturbing the Blessed calm of non-existence and in any case even though things have gone with you tolerably well the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that on the whole life is a disappointment nay a cheat I'll pause again here for comment wow a bit um

very uh very hard sayings uh some of these the amount of misery pain and suffering on the earth should make us think that it would be better if the Earth were as lifeless as the moon and as free of suffering as the moon and that I wonder wonder if any of us feel feel this or or feel the opposite of it um you get on as tolerably as well as you can but the older you get the more you feel that life is something of a disappointment and a cheat that you were promised more you

sort of hoped and expected more than you in fact got okay I'm not sure here if schopenhauer is thinking here of the um the disappointment of the optimistic philosopher or simply a universal experience that we all have it seems to be seems to be the latter he's going to illustrate this next with uh two hypothetical cases and here they are if two men who were old friends in their youth meet again when they are old after being separated for a lifetime the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one

of complete disappointment at Life as a whole because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn it promised so much and then performed so little this feeling will so completely predominate over every other that they will not even consider it necessary to give it words but on either side it will be silently assumed and form the groundwork of all they have to talk about he who lives to see two or three generations is like a man

who sits sometime in the conjurer's booth at a fair and Witnesses the performance twice or Thrice in succession the tricks were meant to be seen only once and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive their effect is gone okay so here are these two hypothetical cases shopen Hower uses to illustrate this idea that our existence is really kind of a ripple in what would otherwise better be an unbroken uh plane of non-existence two old friends meet after a lifetime and so what what is so prominent in both their emotional lives is

that life has been a disappointment thinking back to what they hoped for together as young men and what they've now achieved as older men the whole thing seems to uh be such such a profound disappointment that neither one of them has to give it voice but it's lies in the background of everything that they do as they reminisce and catch up I don't know if schopenhauer writing this as an old man is thinking of his own experiences or if he is speculating but this certainly seems to fit with and give a a um a A

fitting illustration of his overall philosophy of pessimism the other one the I do like this image that stays with me these images of the theater this is uh watching uh watching your children and grandchildren watching young people as an adult and then as a middle-aged and an older person come up see them rise up with hopes for the world and hopes for their life it's like watching uh a magic show for the second or for the third time you know what the tricks are other people don't and so they're still impressed they're still really attentive

and interested and as you watch it you may begin to think back well I guess that pulling the rabbit out of the Hat was kind of fun the first time I saw it when I didn't know what it was all about but now that I'm seeing it for the third time it's you know it's underwhelming it's it's even boring so again the suggestion that that all of life is like that really so here's more shopen hour life is a task to be done it is a fine thing to say it is a fine thing to

say defus EST that is uh he is dead or it is the uh the institution is is no longer it is a fine thing to say defunct toest it means that the man has done his task if children were brought into the World by an act of pure reason alone would the human race continue to exist would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence or at any rate not to take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in Cold Blood that's

the last I'm going to read here for today but wow again uh life is a task to be done so when one reaches the end of his life we say he has finished his task he's finished his suffering has come to an end not as a release but as an accomplishment okay he is he's now defunct or finished or out of business and uh it's over for him good thing it's a fine thing to to be able to say this about someone and this last uh kind of for me very haunting statement as someone with

children and now grandchildren um if children were brought into the World by pure reason wouldn't sympathy with the recognition of the suffering that people will endure incline people not to have any children to spare this generation the burden of existing this is one thing for schopenhauer to write in the 1850s before the um hormonal birth control revolution of the mid and late 20th century but we might take a look at falling birth rates in our own time and place and reflect back upon schopenhauer's Insight if people gain more and more deliberate rational control over bringing

other human beings into existence would th their overall recognition of the suffering of the world caus them to bring about fewer of them and this is this is uh seems to me uh rather Grim uh for both for all of us sort of evaluating our own lives and for the human race in general especially for societies with rapidly declining birth rates that are creating uh threats of social dislocation and economic problems in the near future so just an observation of mine those are the first couple of pages of shelen hour's work uh titled by bayy

Saunders on the sufferings of the world I hope you've enjoyed it we'll take a look at the next couple of pages in another video thanks for watching today goodbye [Music]