Who can climb And remain silent?

On the way to Toulon they visited the notorious fortress where Louis XIV kept for many years a state prisoner in detention -the mysterious, unidentified Man in the Iron Mask. For Arthur this was a mental preparation for the impressions he would gain in the great arsenal of Toulon, the quarters of the galley slaves. Visitors were admitted there as if to a zoo: the convicts were chained up but could be viewed. Anyone was bound to be seized with horror. Arthur's mother reflected in her travel account on what might happen if the slaves were to break out one day: 'a neighbourhood full of horror'.

Arthur reacted differently. His imagination was stimulated not by fear for the intact world outside but by dismay at the pitiable world inside. 'They [the galley slaves] are divided into three classes,' he wrote in his diary on 8 April 1804; 'the first is made up of those who have committed only minor crimes and are here for a short time, deserters, soldiers guilty of insubordination, etc.: they only have an iron ring around one of their feet and walk about freely, i.e. within the arsenal, for no for<;at is allowed into the city. The second category consists of major criminals: they work in twos, chained together by their feet with heavy chains. The third category, the most serious criminals, are forged to the benches of the galley which they do not leave at all: these are employed on such work as they can perform sitting down. The fate of these unfortunates seems to me far more terrible than a death sentence. The galleys, which I have seen from the outside, seem to be the dirtiest, the most revolting place of sojourn imaginable. The galleys no longer put out to sea; they are old condemned ships. The beds of the for<;ats are the benches to which they are chained. Their food is only water and bread, and I do not understand how, without more substantive nourishment and consumed by grief, they do not succumb to their heavy labour; for during their slavery they are treated entirely like beasts of burden: it is terrible to think that the life of these miserable galley slaves, if that is not an exaggerated word, is totally devoid of joy: and for those whose sufferings have no end even after twenty-five years, also totally devoid of hope: can one imagine a more terrible sensation than that of one of those wretches, chained to a bench in the dark galley, from which nothing but death can sever him!-For some perhaps his sufferings are made worse by the inseparable company of the one chained to him by the same chain. And when finally the moment arrives which he has longed for with desperate sighs for ten or twelve years: the end of his slavery: what is to become of him? He returns to a world for which he has been dead for ten years: what prospects he might have had when he was ten years younger have vanished; no one wants to take in anyone coming from the galley: and ten years of punishment have not purged him of a moment's crime. He is bound to become a criminal for a second time and to end up on the gallows - I had a shock when I heard that there were six thousand galley slaves here. The faces of these men might provide appropriate material for physiognomical reflections' (TD, 15 5 ).

Arthur Schopenhauer attached more than mere physiognomical reflections to these impressions. The arsenal of Toulon left in him a supply of garish images, to which he was to refer back later in elucidating, in his Metaphysics of the Will, the fettering of individual existence and reason to the anonymous will to live: we are all galley slaves of the will that passes through us. Before all reason we are chained to a blind urge of self-assertion. The chain from which we are dangling simultaneously links us to our fellow men. Any movement we make ultimately causes pain to another being.

In Toulon, Arthur experienced that captivity from outside, as a kind of spectacle approached by an observer. But if captivity is universal, where then is the point of the observer? Where is there an outside? How can the universal become a spectacle? To this question Arthur Schopenhauer would subse-quently give a very delicate answer, an answer formulated in the language of subject philosophy, of Buddhism, of Pietist mysticism and of Platonism: there is a transcendental immanence, there is a super-earthly height without a heaven, there is divine ecstasy without God: the ecstasy of pure cognition is possible; the will can turn against itself; it burns in itself and becomes all eye: it no longer is, it only sees.

Still on his tour young Arthur Schopenhauer found occasion to experience the first models of such metaphysics of height. These were experiences of height in the literal sense.

Three times on his journey Arthur climbed a mountain: first the Chapeau near Chamonix, then Mount Pilatus, and finally the Schneekoppe in the Bohemian Giant Mountains. Each time he wrote an extensive report in his diary. The entries are high flights stylistically as well. Whereas normally he recorded his experiences with what could be a good deal of dutiful pedantry, these accounts of his climbs vibrate with the sense of an overwhelming experience, lending the report vigour and splendour.

First the ascent of the Chapeau. His way led him past an extensive glacier massif known as the Mer de glace. It was furrowed by rifts and crevasses, and at times masses of ice hurtled thunderously into the abyss. 'This spectacle, the sight of the huge masses of ice, the booming crashes, the roaring torrents, the rocks all round with waterfalls, up above the floating summits and snow-capped mountains, all this bears an indescribably wonderful imprint, one sees the enormity of nature, it is no longer everyday nature here, it has stepped out of its bounds, one feels one is closer to it' (TD, r 86).

This was an ennobling, a proud proximity; up there like and like were joined, down below were everyday things. Whoever climbs a mountain seeks nature at its best, but also at its most merciless, when anything human is rejected. 'In striking contrast to this sublime grand view was the laughing valley far below!' (TD, r 86). Up there, where Arthur stood, there was nothing to laugh about. Man is eclipsed, nature can step out of its 'bounds'. Whoever stands up to it passes the test of heroic solitude.

All this, of course, is still half play-acting; there was no real danger about this mountain tour. The height reached was considerable only to a lowlander. But realism is of no importance here. Arthur Schopenhauer experienced the mountain as meaning. Scenery gave him an experience, and his experience chose a definite scenery: that of height.

Three weeks later, on 3 June 1804, he climbed Mount Pilatus with a guide. 'I felt dizzy as I cast a glance at the crowded space I had before me .... I find that such a panorama from a high mountain enormously contributes to the broadening of concepts. It is so utterly different from any other view that it is impossible, without having seen it, to gain a clear idea of it. All small objects disappear, only what is big retains its shape. Everything blends; one sees not a multitude of small separate objects but one big colourful radiant picture, on which the eye lingers with pleasure' (TD, 219).

Arthur sees what is flattering to him. What is small disappears, blends, swarms. One is no longer part of it. What is big retains its shape. And he who views what is big and is removed from the swarm, is great himself. One is no longer tied to 'separate objects', one is now only an 'eye' resting on a 'colourful radiant picture'. Later, Schopenhauer would call this distant-view enjoyment the 'world eye'.

Finally, on 3 o July 1804 -the journey was nearing its end-came the ascent of the Schneekoppe. It was a two-day excursion. At the foot of the peak Arthur and his guide spent the night at a chalet: 'We entered a room full of carousing servants .... It was unbearable; their animalic warmth ... gave off a glowing heat' (TD, 265). The 'animalic warmth' of humans crowding together - later Arthur Schopenhauer would find for this the image of porcupines huddling together against cold and fear.

Having torn himself away from the spiky proximity of humans, Arthur reached the peak of the mountain at sunrise. 'Like a transparent ball and much less radiant than when one views it from below, the sun floated up and cast its first rays on us, mirrored itself first in our delighted glances, below us in the whole of Germany it was still night; and as it rose higher we watched the night creeping back lower and eventually yielding also down below' (TD, 266).

He was already in the light while down below darkness still reigned. 'One sees the world in chaos below one.' On top, however, all is of incisive clarity.

And when the sun finally lights up the valley, it does not discover there smiling, delightful plains but offers to the gaze 'the eternal repetition and the eternal alternation of mountains and valleys, forests and meadows and towns and villages' (TD, 266).

Why then undergo the hardships of descent? Eventually, however, it grew too cold at the top. In the chalet on the mountainside was a book in which hikers could leave their names for posterity. Arthur's entry has been found there:

Who can climb 

And remain silent?

Arthur Schopenhauer from Hamburg.

Quote from the book Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy
by Rudiger Safranski

Schopenhauer - On physiognomy

 That the exteriora of a human being graphically reproduces his interiorb and the face expresses and reveals his whole essencec is an assumption whose a priori nature and thus certainty are demonstrated by the universal desire, which appears at every opportunity, to see someone who has distinguished himself in any way, bad or good, or who has produced an extraordinary work or, failing this, at least to learn from others what he looks like. Hence, on the one hand, the rush to those places where he is expected to be, and on the other the efforts of the daily newspapers, especially in England, to describe him minutely and strikingly, until soon thereafter painters and engravers give us graphic portrayals and finally Daguerre’s invention,d so highly valued for precisely this reason, satisfies our need most perfectly. Likewise in ordinary life everyone examines the physiognomy of everyone they meet and tries secretly to ascertain his moral and intellectual nature in advance from his facial features. All this could not be the case if, as some fools imagine, the appearance of a man were of no significance, as if the soul were indeed one thing and the body another, relating to the former as a coat to the man himself.

On the contrary each human face is a hieroglyph which truly can be deciphered, indeed whose alphabet we bear within us ready-made. A human being’s face even says more and is more interesting, as a rule, than his mouth, for it is the compendium of everything that he will ever 672 say, being the monogram of all this human being’s thinking and striving. It is also the case that the mouth expresses only the thoughts of a man, while the face expresses a thought of nature. Therefore everyone is worthy of being carefully observed, even if everyone is not worth talking to. – Now if each individual is worth observing as an individual thought of nature, then so too in the highest degree is beauty, for it is a higher, more universal concept of nature: it is nature’s thought of the species. This is why it compels our gaze so powerfully; it is nature’s fundamental and main thought, whereas the individual is only a secondary thought, a corollary.

Everyone tacitly proceeds from the principle that everyone is as they appear, which is a correct principle; but the difficulty lies in the application, the capacity for which is partly innate and partly to be gained by experience and which no one completely masters, so that even the most practised individual catches himself in mistakes. Nevertheless the face does not lie – regardless of what Figaro may saya – but it is we who read from it what is not there.1 To be sure, the deciphering of a face is a great and difficult art. Its principles2 can never be learned in the abstract.b The first condition for it is that we perceive our man with a purely objective look, which is not so easy. For at the faintest hint of dislike, affection, fear, hope or even the thought of what kind of impression we are now making on him, in short, as soon as anything subjective gets mixed in, the hieroglyph becomes confused and falsified. Just as the sound of a language is heard only by someone who does not understand it, because otherwise the signified immediately displaces the sign from consciousness, so too the only one who sees a person’s physiognomy is someone to whom that person is still a stranger, i.e., who has not become accustomed to his face through frequently seeing or even speaking with him. Therefore, strictly speaking, it is only at first glance that we have the pure objective impression of a face and thus the possibility of deciphering it. Just as odours affect us only when they first set in and we notice the taste of a wine really only with the first glass, so faces also make their full impression only the first time. This is why we should pay careful attention to it and make note of it, indeed, with individuals 673 who are important to us personally, we should write down our impression, that is, if we are to trust our own physiognomical feelings. Our subsequent acquaintance and socializing will efface that impression, but the sequel will someday confirm it.

Meanwhile we do not want to deny that the first sight is often extremely unpleasant – but then most people do not count for much! – With the exception of beautiful, good-natured and intelligent faces – and these are extremely few and rare – I believe the sight of every new face will generally arouse a sensation related to shock in a person of refined feelings, inasmuch as it presents something unpleasant in a new and surprising combination. It really is, as a rule, a gloomy sight (a sorry sight).c Indeed there are some whose faces display such a naïve coarseness and baseness of character, accompanied by such an animalistic limitation of the understanding, that we have to wonder how they even go about with such a face and do not wear a mask instead. Indeed, there are faces the mere sight of which makes us feel sullied. Therefore we cannot blame those whose privileged circumstances allow them the luxury of withdrawing and buffering themselves so that they remain entirely removed from the painful sensation of ‘seeing new faces’. – In the metaphysical explanation of this matter we have to consider that everyone’s individuality is precisely that from which he will be reclaimed and corrected by his existence itself. If on the other hand the psychological explanation suffices for us, then we must ask ourselves what kind of physiognomy is to be expected from those in whose hearts very rarely anything has stirred throughout their lives but petty, lowly, miserable thoughts, and crude, selfish, jealous, bad and malicious desires. Each of these has carved its impression on the face for as long as it has lasted; over time and through frequent repetition, all these traces have furrowed deeply and become like wagon ruts, so to speak. This is why the sight of most people causes us to be startled at first and we only gradually become 674 accustomed to their faces, that is, become so deadened to their impression that it no longer has an effect on us.

But precisely that slow formative process of the enduring facial expression through countless transitory, characteristic contractions of the features is the reason why intelligent faces develop only gradually and even achieve their elevated expression only in old age, whereas portraits from their youth show only the earliest traces of it.3 On the other hand, what I just said about the first shock is in keeping with the above observation that a face only makes its correct and full impression the first time. For in order to receive this impression purely objectively and unfalsified, we must not have any kind of relationship to the person, indeed if possible not have spoken with him yet, since every conversation has a befriending effect, to some extent, and introduces a certain rapport, a mutually subjective relationship under which the objectivity of perception immediately suffers. Moreover since everyone tries to win respect and friendship for himself, the one to be observed will immediately apply all kinds of dissimulation techniques already available to him, and with his various looks will dissemble and flatter until we are so corrupted that we can no longer see what the first glance clearly showed us. Accordingly we then say that ‘most people gain from a closer acquaintance’, but we should be saying most people ‘fool us’. But when negative circumstances later set in, the judgement of the first glance is usually vindicated and often asserts itself scornfully. If on the other hand the ‘closer acquaintance’ is hostile from the start, then likewise we will not discover that people gained anything by it. Another cause for the alleged gain from closer acquaintance is that the man whose first glance warned us of him no longer shows merely his own nature and character once we converse with him, but also his education, i.e., not merely what he really is by nature, but also what he has acquired as shared property with the whole human race; three-quarters of what he says does not belong to him but has entered him from outside,4 then we are often surprised to hear such a minotaur speaking so humanely. But if we proceed from the ‘closer acquaintance’ to an even closer one, then ‘the 675 bestiality’ promised by the face will ‘soon be splendidly revealed’.a – Thus whoever is gifted with physiognomical acumen should pay careful attention to the expressions which preceded all closer acquaintance and were therefore unfalsified. For the face of a human being says precisely what he is, and if it deceives us, then it is our fault, not his. Conversely, the words of a human being say merely what he thinks, and more often only what he learned or even what he merely pretends to think. To this must be added that when we speak with him, or even hear him speak to others, we abstract from his actual physiognomy by setting it aside as the substratum, the strictly given, and pay attention only to its pathognomical dimension, the play of facial expressions while he is speaking; but he arranges this in such a way that he puts forward only the good side.

Now when Socrates said to a young man who was introduced to him for the purpose of testing his abilities: “Speak, so that I can see you”, then he was right (assuming that by seeing he did not mean hearing) to the extent that only when speaking do someone’s features become animated, especially the eyes, and his intellectual means and abilities make their imprint on his facial expressions, allowing us then to provisionally assess the degree and capacity of his intelligence, which was exactly Socrates’ goal here. Otherwise, however, we should qualify this by saying first that it does not include the moral qualities of a person, which lie deeper, and secondly that what we gain objectively in the clearer development of his facial features through his facial expressions, we in turn lose subjectively through our personal relationship, into which he immediately enters with us and which brings about a mild fascination that does not leave us unbiased, as explained above. Therefore it would be more correct given this latter point of view to say: “Do not speak, so that I can see you.”

For in order to comprehend the true physiognomy of a man purely and deeply, we must observe him when he is alone and left to himself. Any socializing and conversation with others already cast a foreign reflection on 676 him, mostly to his advantage, since he is set in motion by action and reaction and elevated by them. On the other hand, alone and left to himself, stewing in his own thoughts and sensations – only then is he completely and utterly himself. Then a deeply penetrating physiognomical glance can comprehend his entire nature in general at once. For on his face, in and of itself, the fundamental tone of all his thoughts and strivings is impressed, the irrevocable decreea of what he has to be and what he only completely senses himself when he is alone.

Now for this reason physiognomics is a principal means to knowledge about people, because physiognomy in the narrower sense is the only thing that cannot be reached by their techniques of dissimulation, since its realm is merely that of pathognomy and mimicry. This is precisely why I recommend that everyone be interpreted when he is alone and focused on himself and before we have spoken with him, partly because only then do we have the physiognomical before us purely and unalloyed, since in conversation the pathognomical immediately rushes in and he then applies his deliberate dissimulation techniques, and partly because every personal relationship, even the most fleeting, makes us biased and thus subjectively contaminates our judgement.

One more thing I need to point out is that generally it is much easier physiognomically to discover a man’s intellectual abilities than his moral character, since the former tend to display outwardly and have their expression not only in the face and its play of expressions, but also in the gait, indeed in every movement no matter how small. Perhaps one could even distinguish from behind a dummkopf, a fool, and a man of intellect. The dummkopf is characterized by the leaden sluggishness of all his movements; foolishness stamps its imprint on every gesture; intellect and reflection do the same thing. This is the basis of Labruyère’s observation: ‘There is nothing so subtle, so simple and so imperceptible that it does not contain a mannerism that betrays us. A dummkopf cannot enter, exit, sit down, stand up, keep silent or stand on his feet like a man of intellect.’b Incidentally this explains that ‘sure and prompt instinct’c which ordinary 677 minds possess, according to Helvétius, so as to recognize people of intellect and flee them. The matter itself is based first of all on the fact that the larger and more developed the brain and the thinner the spinal cord and nerves in relation to it, the greater are not only intelligence but at the same time the mobility and suppleness of the limbs, because they are then more directly and decisively controlled by the brain and consequently everything is pulled more by one string, such that every movement expresses its precise purpose. But the whole affair is analogous to and indeed connected with the fact that the higher an animal is on the scale of beings, the more easily it can be killed by an injury to a single spot. Take for instance the batrachia; just as they are sluggish, lethargic and slow in their movements, so too are they unintelligent and yet extremely tenacious of life, all of which can be explained by the fact that they have very thick spinal cord and nerves despite a tiny brain. Generally speaking, gait and arm movement are mainly functions of the brain, because the outer limbs receive their movement and every modification thereof, no matter how small, from the brain by means of the spinal cord nerves. This is also precisely why voluntary movements exhaust us, and this exhaustion, like pain, has its seat in the brain and not, as we imagine, in the limbs, and therefore it induces sleep; whereas those not stimulated by the brain, that is the involuntary movements of organic life such as the heart, lungs and so on proceed tirelessly. Now since the same brain is responsible both for thinking and controlling the limbs, the character of its activity is expressed in the one as in the other according to the constitution of an individual; stupid people move like automata, while in intelligent people every joint is expressive.5 – Nevertheless, intellectual qualities are much better recognized from the face than from gestures and movements, from the shape and size of the brow, the tension and mobility of the facial features and above all from the eyes – ranging from the small, cloudy, dull and dim eyes of a pig through all the intermediate stages up to the radiant and flashing eyes of a genius. – The look of cleverness,a even of the finest, differs from that of 678genius in that it bears the stamp of service to the will; the latter, on the other hand, is free of it.6 – And so the anecdote taken from Petrarch’s contemporary Joseph Brivius and related by Squarzafichi in his life of Petrarch is quite credible, namely that once at the court of the Visconti, as Petrarch stood among many gentlemen and nobles, Galeazzo Visconti instructed his son, who was at that time still a boy and later would become the first Duke of Milan, to pick the wisest man among all those present. The boy looked at all of them for a while, but then took Petrarch by the hand and led him to his father to the great admiration of all who were present. For nature presses the stamp of its dignity so clearly on the privileged of our species that a child can recognize it. Therefore I would advise my perspicacious countrymen that if they ever again get the urge to trumpet an ordinary brain for thirty years as a great mind, they at least do not select such a tavern keeper’s physiognomy as Hegel’s, on whose all too familiar face nature had written ‘ordinary fellow’a in her most legible handwriting.

But things are different from the intellectual when it comes to morals, to the character of a human being; this is much more difficult to recognize physiognomically because, as something metaphysical, it lies incomparably deeper and while it is indeed also associated with corporality or the organism, this only indirectly and not in connection with a specific part and system of it, like the intellect. We must add that whereas everyone is generally very satisfied with their understanding and strives openly to display it at every opportunity, morals are very rarely exposed to the light of day and are in fact for the most part deliberately concealed, the long practice of which brings about great mastery. Meanwhile, as detailed above, bad thoughts and worthless aspirations gradually leave their mark on the face, especially the eyes. Accordingly when judging physiognomically it is easy for us to guarantee that a man will never produce an immortal work, but not that he will never commit a major crime.

adas Aeußere

bdas Innere

cWesen

d [The daguerreotype, an early form of photography]

a [Figaro says ‘My face lies, but not I’ in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Act II]

bin abstracto

c [Schopenhauer’s English in parentheses]

a [Goethe, Faust, I, 2297–8]

aarrêt irrévocablebIl n’y a rien de si délié, de si simple, et de si imperceptible, où il n’y entrent des manières, qui nous décèlent: un sot ni n’entre, ni ne sort, ni ne s’assied, ni ne se lève, ni ne se tait, ni n’est sur ses jambs, comme un homme d’esprit. [Caractères (Characters), I, ch. 2]

cinstinct sûr et prompt [De l’esprit, Disc. II, ch. 3]

aKlugheit

aAlltagsmensch

Parerga and Paralipomena 2

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer - On noise and sounds

 

§378

Kant wrote an essay on the living forces,a but I would like to write a dirge and a threnody on them, because their all too excessive use in knocking, hammering and ramming has been a daily pain to me my whole life through. Of course there are people, indeed quite a few who smile at this, because they are insensitive to sounds; but these are the same ones who are also insensitive to reasons, thoughts, poetry and works of art, in brief, to spiritual impressions of any kind, due to the tough and unyielding texture of their brain matter. On the other hand, in the biographies or other accounts of personal utterances of almost all great writers, for instance Kant, Goethe, Lichtenberg,1 Jean Paul, I find complaints about the anguish caused to thinking men by noise; indeed, if such information is missing in any one case, then it is merely because the context did not lead to it. I interpret the matter as follows: just as a large diamond cut into pieces is equal in value only to so many small ones, or an army shattered to pieces and dissolved into small units is no longer capable of anything, so too a great mind is no more capable than an ordinary one as soon as it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted and diverted, because its superiority is conditioned by concentrating all its powers on one point and object, as a concave mirror does all of its rays, and precisely this is prevented by the noisy interruption. This is why eminent minds have always abhorred every kind of disturbance, interruption and diversion, especially those of a 680 violent nature through noise, whereas others are not especially bothered by this. The most sensible and intelligent of all European nations has even called the rule ‘never interrupt’b its eleventh commandment. But noise is the most impertinent of all interruptions, since it breaks up and indeed breaks down even our own thoughts. But where there is nothing to interrupt, noise is of course not particularly sensed. – Occasionally I am tormented and bothered by a moderate and constant noise before I am clearly aware of it, in that I sense it merely as a constant hindrance to my thinking, like dragging a weight with my foot, until I realize what it is. –

But transitioning now from the genus to the species, I have to denounce as the most irresponsible and scandalous noise the truly infernal whip-cracking in the echoing streets of the cities, which robs life of all peace and all pensiveness. Nothing provides me with a clearer notion of the obtuseness and thoughtlessness of mankind than the condoning of this whip-cracking.2 This sudden, sharp, brain-numbing crack, which cuts to pieces all contemplation and murders every thought, has to be painfully felt by everyone who bears anything resembling a thought in his head; therefore each of those cracks must disturb hundreds in their mental activity, however inferior it may be in quality, but they chop through a thinker’s meditations as painfully and disastrously as the executioner’s blade severs the head from the body. No sound cuts through the brain as sharply as this damned whip-cracking; the very tip of the lash can be felt in the brain, affecting it like a mimosa when it is touched, and lasting just as long. With all due respect for most sacred utility, I still do not see why a fellow who hauls off a load of sand or manure should therefore be granted the privilege of nipping in the bud every successively emerging thought in the heads of ten thousand people (for a half hour along a city route). Hammer blows, dogs barking and the screaming of children are appalling, but only the crack of a whip is the real murderer of thoughts. It is designed to crush 681 every good and pensive moment that someone might have here and there, and as the most horrific of all sounds it would only be excusable if no other means were available to drive draft animals.3 But quite the contrary: this damned whip-cracking is not only unnecessary but even useless. For the intended psychic effect on horses is completely blunted and missing because they have become desensitized by the constant misuse of the whip; they do not quicken their pace in response, as can be seen especially in the case of coachmen looking for fares and whipping constantly even though driving at the slowest pace, and the slightest touch of the whip is more effective. But assuming that it would be unavoidably necessary to remind the horses of the presence of the whip by using this sound, then a sound a hundred times weaker would suffice, since it is well known that animals notice even the slightest, indeed scarcely noticeable signs, audible as well as visible, of which trained dogs and canaries provide the most amazing examples.4 Accordingly this situation turns out to be nothing but a case of pure impudence, indeed5 of insolent scorn on the part of society that works with its arms directed against those who work with their heads. That such an infamy is tolerated in cities is a crude barbarism and an injustice, all the more so as it would be very easy to prevent by a police-mandated knot at the tip of every whip cord. It cannot hurt for the proletarians to be reminded of the mental work of the class standing above them, for they have a boundless fear of all mental work. But now a fellow who rides through the narrow streets of a populous city with free post horses or on a free cart horse, or for that matter walking along beside the animals6 and incessantly cracking his fathoms-long whip with all his might, clearly deserves to stand down immediately in order to receive five earnestly delivered blows with a stick – all the philanthropists in the world, along with the legislatures that for good reasons abolish all corporal punishment will not persuade me otherwise. But we can often enough see something even more egregious than this, namely a coachman walking 682 the streets alone and without horses, yet incessantly cracking his whip; so habituated has this man become to whip-cracking, as a result of irresponsible coddling.7 With all this universal tenderness for the body and all its gratifications, is the thinking mind the only thing that never gets the least consideration, nor protection, let alone respect? Coachmen, porters, errand boys and so on are the beasts of burden of human society; they should by all means be treated humanely with justice, fairness, consideration and care, but they should not be allowed to obstruct the higher endeavours of the human race through impudent noise. I would like to know how many great and beautiful thoughts these whips have already cracked out of the world. If it were mine to command, then an indestructible association of ideasa would be created in the minds of coachmen between whip-cracking and getting a beating.8 – We would hope that the more intelligent and finely sensitive nations will make a start on this as well, and then by way of example the Germans could also be brought along.*,9 Meanwhile, Thomas Hood (Up the Rhine) says of them: ‘For a musical people, they are the most noisy I ever met with.’b But that they are so is not based on the fact that they are more inclined to noise-making than others, but on the insensitivity stemming from the obtuseness of those who have to hear it, who are not disturbed in any thinking or reading simply because they are not thinking, but merely smoking instead, which is their surrogate for thinking. The universal toleration of unnecessary noise, for instance of the extremely ill-mannered and vulgar slamming of doors, is nothing short of a sign of the general obtuseness and thought vacuum of their minds. In Germany it is positively as though the plan were for no one to come to their senses on account of noise, such as pointless drumming, for instance.10Finally now as regards the literature dealing with the subject treated in 683 this chapter, I have only one work to recommend, but it is a beautiful one, namely a poetic epistle in terza rima by the famous painter Bronzino, entitled On Noises.a For here the anguish one has to endure from the many kinds of noise of an Italian city is described in detail, with both humour and wit, in a tragic-comical style. This epistle can be found on page 258 of the second volume of Burlesque Works of Berni, Aretino and othersb apparently published in Utrecht in 1771.

a [Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte (Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces), 1747]

b [Schopenhauer’s English]

anexus idearum

b [Quoted in English]

aDe’ romori, a Messer Luca Martini

bOpere burlesche del Berni, Aretino ed altri

* According to a ‘Bulletin of the Munich Animal Protection Society’ of December 1858, in Nuremberg superfluous whipping and whip-cracking are most strictly forbidden.

Parerga and Paralipomena II

During conversation

We should not dispute someone’s opinion, but take into consideration that, if we wanted to talk him out of all the absurdities that he believes, we might grow as old as Methuselah without finishing the task.

We should also refrain from correcting people during conversation, however well-intentioned our remarks may be; for it is easy to offend people; to improve them is difficult, if not impossible.

When the absurdities of a conversation that we happen to overhear start to annoy us, we should imagine that it is a scene in a comedy between two fools. This is well-tried. Anyone who has entered the world to instruct it seriously in regard to the most important matters can count himself lucky to escape unscathed.108

Sunic - Schopenhauer and the Perception of the Real or Surreal Postmodernity

There is a danger in interpreting the text of some long gone author, let alone of some heavyweight philosopher, such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860). The interpreter tends to look at parts of the author’s prose that may best suit his own conclusions, while avoiding parts that other critics may find more relevant, and which the interpreter may consider either incomprehensible or irrelevant. This is true for Schopenhauer in so far as he deals in his multilayered work with diverse subject matters, ranging from the theories of knowledge, to the role of women, sex, eugenics, religion, etc., while offering aphoristic formulas on how to live a more or less liveable life.  Moreover, in his entire work Schopenhauer deals extensively with the perception of objective reality, our self-perception, and how our self-perception reflects itself in the perception of the Other, for instance in the mind of my political foe or friend. It’s no wonder that when Schopenhauer is read along with some postmodern authors, his work can retrospectively yield some groundbreaking insights, of which even he was not aware.

The devil is often in the details, but harping on the details alone may often overshadow the whole. Just because Schopenhauer was critical of Jewish monotheism, or made some critical remarks about women, should not lead us to the conclusion that he was a standard-bearer of anti-Semitism or a hater of women. The fact that Adolf Hitler was one of his avid readers should not overshadow the fact that the father of modern psychoanalysis, the Jewish-born Austrian Sigmund Freud, learned a get deal from him on the how irrational will is expressed in sexual drive.

An Apolitical Meta-politician

How relevant is Arthur Schopenhauer? At first sight Schopenhauer’s prose may be dated for our understanding of the world today. Schopenhauer can be catalogued as a thinker of the so-called intellectual conservative revolution in so far as many thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Vilfredo Pareto, Julius Evola and others, one hundred years later, were heavily influenced by his writings. Neither can these authors be properly understood unless the reader becomes familiar with Schopenhauer’s writings first. Secondly, Schopenhauer’s teachings about the primacy of the will spearheading our perception of reality can also be of help in grasping the political hyperreality of the modern liberal system.

Schopenhauer’s name is usually associated with cultural pessimism. Nevertheless, he is far from the caricature of a suicidal author harping ceaselessly on the culture of death, as was the case with many of his 20th-century successors, including the magisterial Emile Cioran. In his aphorisms Schopenhauer provides some handy recipes as to how to minimize a life of pain and sorrow and how to discard the dangerous illusion of happiness. As a fine connoisseur of human psychology, Schopenhauer justly remarks that where there is a violent outburst of joy, a disaster looms just around the corner. It is therefore with maximum efforts that we need to curb shifts in our mood: anxiety is just the other side of ecstasy. One must not give vent to great jubilation or to great sorrow as the changeability of all things can transfigure those at any moment. By contrast, one must enjoy the “here and now,” possibly in a cheerful manner — this is the wisdom of life. (Die Kunst glücklich zu sein. C.H. Beck 1999, p. 56).

Schopenhauer does not deal with political treatises in his work, nor does he discuss the political sociology of the rapidly industrializing Europe, or governmental institutions of his time. The political changes he witnessed, however dramatic they were, such as the Napoleonic wars in Europe, the rise to power of America, and the post-Napoleonic era, were of no interest to him. Quite consistent with his misanthropic views about human nature, he stayed above the political and historical fray to the point of total disinterestedness.

Schopenhauer refuses any formula for any ontological, political, or ethical system whatsoever. Instead, he demolishes all doctrines and all systems, be they religious or political. He resented politics and he can be justly depicted as an “anti–intellectual” in a modern sense of the word.

For Schopenhauer, the world is fundamentally absurd and no political philosophy can alter its absurdity. A French theoretician of postmodernity, the philosopher Clément Rosset, is probably one of the best authors who summarized the significance of Schopenhauer for our times.

“Man has forever been successful in passing off past events for new events. He has been thought to be able to act within free and regenerating time. In reality, though, he has been in the arms of the cadaver. A retrospective horror extends to his past, in which he has lived ever since, although, just like his future, that time had lapsed for good. This time-illness, a profound source of intuition about the absence of all finality, expresses itself in the obsessive theme of repetition.” (Clément Rosset, Schopenhauer, Philosophe de l’Absurde, 1967, p. 97).

In other words, however much we may yearn to affect the flow of time or assign it some goal or purpose, its merciless cyclical nature always bring us to further delusions and the inevitable status quo.

Nowhere is this absurd repetitive will of living visible as in man’s sexual desire — which Schopenhauer describes in his famous chapter and essay “The Metaphysics of Sex.” Once a sexual appetite is assuaged, the will continues to manifest itself again and again in ceaseless sameness of sexual desire.

It follows from this absurd repetitiveness that the entire history of the human species is the entanglement of re-enactments. World affairs and political decision-making are manifestations of a self-inflicted desire for something new. Based on such perceptions of repetitive reality, Schopenhauer shows no interest in history, noting that it is always the same people who take the world stage, with the same ideas, albeit framed in a different rhetoric. In short, his target of criticism is the philosophy of optimism and the idea of progress which lay embedded in the eighteenth century teaching of the Enlightenment.

For Schopenhauer there is nothing new under the sun, as with every fleeting second the new becomes the old and the old becomes the new; the wheel of time turns forever. Time for Schopenhauer is devoid of historicity. Therefore, a study of some historical event, or of some political drama, is totally irrelevant. Schopenhauer advocates the abandoning of the illusory will to create a better world. He was a willy-nilly supporter of monarchical government because that form of rule offered some semblance of authority and stability.

Despite his static philosophy that rejected human and political betterment, Schopenhauer ventures often in his lengthy work into interesting and well-founded analyses, such as his brief study on the importance of heredity. But one must be careful not to extrapolate his scattered comments on race and heredity and assume that they make up the bulk of his work. He believed in the hereditary improvement of mankind and some of his remarks about biological betterment are right on target. Irrespective of the fact that he does not delve much into the subject of heredity, one must agree that Schopenhauer could be easily used as a weapon by modern sociobiologists or race realists.

“If we could castrate all scoundrels, and shut up all stupid geese in monasteries and give persons of noble character a whole harem and provide men, and indeed complete men, for all maidens of mind and understanding, a generation would soon arise what would produce a better age than that of Pericles” (The World as Will and Idea, p. 331, “Heredity.”)

Schopenhauer’s remarks on heredity are perfectly compatible with his teachings on the independence of the will. Just as we can never change the predetermined nature of our genes and our genealogy, we cannot change the predetermined nature of the will:

“The only freedom that exists is of a metaphysical character. In the physical world freedom is an impossibility. .. [T]he will itself, as something that lies beyond time, and so long as it exists at all, never changes…  Hence it is that every man achieves only that which is irrevocably established in his nature, or is born with him.(Free Will and Fatalism).

The Will vs. the Deceptive Reality

The main driving force of the entire university is the will. Ideas, concepts and images are merely the objectification of our will at different levels of perception. The will is a blind force; it is subject neither to time nor to space, neither does it obey the principles of causality, nor is it subject to accidents.

In this sense Schopenhauer represents a big break with the teachings of rationalists and idealists of his time, who were enamored with the principles of causality, and henceforth viewed necessity as a cornerstone of life on Earth. Schopenhauer stood out as an oddity in his times which were imbued with the heritage of the Enlightenment.

The will is more important than the thought. However, at the conceptual level, as some scholars pointed out, one must carefully distinguish between the will and the instinct, as his later critical admirer and commentator, the National-Socialist Minister, Alfred Rosenberg, noted in his chapter “Will and Instinct” in his now famous book, The Myth of the 20th Century. “Will is always the opposite of instinct (“Trieb”), and not identical with it, as Schopenhauer seemed to teach.”

In other words contrary to Schopenhauer, Rosenberg objects that Schopenhauer uses the term “will” in an overly general manner. Similar to Nietzsche and his followers, Rosenberg argues for the “implementation” of the free will for Promethean and political goals while contrasting it to the primeval biological impulses which he calls the “instinct.” (Trieb).

Man is originally not a being of knowledge but a creature of instinct and will — a will that comes alive in cyclical time and in a non-linear way. Will is the fundamental reality of the world, the thing-in-itself, and its objectification is what is visible in external phenomena, such as objects or political events that we witness daily. In practical life the antagonism between the will and reason arises from the fact that the will is a metaphysical substance, whereas the reason is something accidental and secondary: an “appendage” to the will. The will is an autonomous desire, that is to say, an irrational need to act or to do something. The will is free in every single thought process and action, but it need not and generally does not follow the precepts of reason.

Unlike the majority of philosophers of his time, including Hegel, Schopenhauer does not hold reason in high regard. Our illusions, based on self-serving perceptions, remain so entrenched despite the most sophisticated appeals to reason. Therefore, Schopenhauer can be justly labeled as the greatest anti-rationalist philosopher of all time. Only the genius has some capacity for objectivity in so far as he can harness his will and become the pure knowing subject.

The absurdity of Schopenhauer’s “free” will is that man is enslaved by it without ever knowing its origin and reason. Humans act but do not know why they act the way they do: apart from a few geniuses, their self perceptions are nothing more than illusions. This leads us to a dreadful life, full of anguish on the one hand and ecstatic expectations on the other. The absurdity of our will is not how to reach the river and quench our thirst: the absurdity consists in the will for being thirsty! The will has no cause and, given that it excludes causality, it does not have any necessity or purpose.

That the being is without any necessity is already a dreadful problem. But that this very being is in addition unhappy and miserable only emphasizes the absence of a raison d’être. (Rosset, p. 16)

Schopenhauer’s theories of representation and perception can easily rank him today in the category of the founding fathers of postmodern theory of the Double and the Hyperreal. Everything that we see is fleeting “representations” and not the actual physical phenomena. We dream even when we are awake.  Well, how then tell the difference between the real political truth and the fabricated political truth?

Schopenhauer is a crucial source in understanding the psychopathological impact of religions, myths and the systems of beliefs. At times he labels them “allegories” whereas in other places he describes them as the “metaphysics of the masses” or “people’s metaphysics” (Volksmetaphysik). Just as people have popular poetry and the popular wisdoms or proverbs, they also need popular metaphysics. They need an interpretation of life; and this interpretation must be suited for their comprehension. The great majority of humans have at best a weak faculty for weighing reasons and discriminating between the fact and the fiction.  Does this sound familiar?

No belief system, no ideology, no religion is immune from self-serving delusional tenets linked to false perceptions of reality, although, in due time, each of them will undergo the process of demythologization and eventually become a laughing stock for those who see the illusions underlying these delusional myths.

We can illustrate this changing masquerade of history repeating itself when observing the mindset of modern opinion makers. People have always wished, by means of different allegories, to transcend their cursed reality and make frequent excursions into the spheres of the hyperreal, the unreal, or the surreal — in order to offset the absurdity of their existence. It is natural that they resort to religious and ideological devices, however aberrant or criminal these allegorical devices may subsequently turn out to be.

Accordingly, the motor of religious mass mimicry, which Schopenhauer describes, is again our objectified will. Consequently, the whole course of human life is patterned along the principle of imitation, where even the smallest thing in our perception is borrowed from that role model who is viewed now as a path-breaking innovator or a new messiah. Mimicry is the powerful motor of the will, the theme which was later expanded by Schopenhauer’s disciples, such as Gustave Le Bon.

Intelligent individuals amidst our modern rootless masses realize that some beliefs are fraudulent and harmful, but for the sake of social conformity they accept them. They will rather listen to others than trust their own head. As Schopenhauer writes, the bad thing about all religions is that instead of being able to admit their allegorical nature, they conceal it. Absurdities form an essential part of popular beliefs.

Schopenhauer’s teaching on religions, including his denunciation of the will to political power, was borrowed from the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. He has good words for Catholicism though, which for him is a religion of pessimism (The World as Will and Idea, p. 372). But it would be a serious error, based on a fragmentary reading of his work, to conclude that he was rejecting one religion at the expense of the other. Although Schopenhauer may be described as an atheist or agnostic, his sense of spirituality was very strong. Of all religions Judaism is the worst religion, notes Schopenhauer in his famous book Parerga und Paralipomena.

“The genuine religion of the Jews … is the crudest of all religions (die roheste aller Religionen.) The ongoing contempt for Jews, amidst their contemporary peoples, may have been to a large degree due to the squalid (armsälig) qualities of their religion. … In any case the essence of any religion consists, as such, in its persuasion that it provides for us, namely that our actual existence is not only limited to our life, but that it remains timeless. The appalling (erbärmlich) Jewish region does not fulfil this; indeed, it does not even try to. … Therefore, this is the crudest and the worst of all religions consisting only in an absurd and outrageous (empörend) theism. … While all other religions endeavour to explain to the people by symbols and parables the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry (Kriegsgeschrei) in the struggle with other nations” (pp. 136–137).

Some of Schopenhauer’s words about the power of the blind will can easily be applied to our postmodern times — for example, how the will to believe in something has been hijacked by liberal political elites.

The Hyperreal: The Denial and its Double

We can now jump over to the 20th and 21st century and observe how Schopenhauer’s ideas provide a good fit to the mass illusions accompanying the rising tide of the democratic mystique. How does the will objectify itself in the political arena today? As I wrote in my essay, Vilfredo Pareto and Political Irrationality, politicians are inclined to project their perception of the real world into its embellished Double. Example: None of us is entirely happy with his looks; no political theorist is happy with the world as it is. We all strive to be someone else; we all wish to project either our physique or the present political order into its loftier, distant, and more romantic substitute. As a result, the masses, but also our politicians, assess values and objective reality not as they are, but rather as they’d like to see them. Our passionate need for a change, as a rule, results in inevitable disappointments and feelings of betrayal.

Following Schopenhauer’s logic, it is a serious error to assume that some contemporary politician in the US, the UK, or in Croatia is a liar or a crook just because we feel or think that we are being cheated or oppressed by him. More likely, such wicked political leaders are themselves the victims of self-delusions. Their manic desire for world improvement is based on honest and self-proclaimed “scientific”, “reasonable,” and “truthful” wishful thinking, which they benevolently wish to share with us or with their subjects or constituents.

To illustrate the will for self-delusion, one may observe contemporary leftists and antifascist militants within Schopenhauer’s framework of analysis. What they say is already based on their prior self-persuasions, which are the reflections of the prevailing beliefs of their time. Pareto, as a valiant disciple of Schopenhauer’s methods, notes that ”many people are not socialists because they have been persuaded by reasoning. Quite the contrary; these people acquiesce to such reasoning because they are (already) socialists.” Their will, however aberrantly it may objectify itself in the ravings for some communistic mystique, defies any empirical argument.

Schopenhauer is of paramount importance in understanding our perception of postmodern reality, or our hyperreality, as some authors call it. The surreal world of the liberal dogma — that is, the world in which we live — fits perfectly Schopenhauer’s teaching on the flawed perception of the real. Moreover, Schopenhauer’s work is a useful tool for deciphering liberal mendacity, which has become today the cornerstone of the new world order. The postmodern West is enveloped in the virtual reality of the electronic age (the “videosphere”) and media make-believe, which incessantly turn every real political event into a virtual image.

How does the liberal mystique or, to use Schopenhauer’s word, ‘allegory’, operate today? The process that started with the abstraction of the objective, as a result of the mass media, has ended now in integral reality, as the postmodern author Jean Baudrillard writes. “The virtual itself is “negationist,” or denial-prone. The virtual takes away the substance of the real. “We are living in a society of historical denial by virtue of its virtuality.”

Disbelief reigns everywhere, even if there are solid and empirical proofs of the opposite. No longer is some historical or political event perceived as “real” or truthful. For instance the memory of the Holocaust functions today as the largest civic religion of the West. The Holocaust is a system of belief serving not only a commemorative goal; it is also a cognitive paradigm for interpreting all aspects of our contemporary society. The issue, however, is no longer the body count of people who died in the Holocaust; rather, the issue is the fact that the postmodern virtual world by definition minimizes or maximizes the hyperreal at the expense of the real.

This rule of the hyperreal or the double applies now to all grand narratives, especially those teeming with victimological themes. Even honest historians or social theorists can no longer be taken as real.  Why? The big postmodern question will immediately start hovering over their heads: What if that guy is telling the lies? What if he does not tell the truth? Victimologies, and victimhoods no longer sound persuasive as they have found their media hyper-substitutes, which either re-enact, or deactivate the real past crime.

Therefore, the modern media and politicians must make post-prophylactic political decisions in a desperate attempt to dismantle the previous real, i.e., the previous bad decision, the previous inaction by making it up to the real victim with an overkill of repenting rhetoric and post-prophylactic decision making (massive security checks at airports, always new mass commemorations, etc.). If the lives of the masses of people who perished cannot be restored, let us restore their memory by the hyperreal media! Why resuscitate the living, when the resuscitation of the dead is a far better business?

One can analyze the postmodern wars, the so-called Gulf War in 1991 and the war in Bosnia in 1995 using the concepts of the hyperreal and the double. When these wars were televised and commented on by talking heads on TV screens, their real and horrible reality was cancelled out. Spectators were therefore much more likely to support these wars.

Neither can our history writing be a matter of academic discussion any more. Historical narratives about real or surreal fascist crimes or White man crimes or the current mantra on White man guilt have attained a grotesque level of psychological saturation, to the point that for politically conscious Whites they soon sink into oblivion — and laughter — as they are deconstructed. Even if some past mass crimes are empirically verifiable, the masses will start reconstructing its negative Double — after first deconstructing its Real antecedent.

The Age of Postmodernity is basically the age of deconstruction, where no single verity can hold sway for a long time. Here is the vicious circle of the hyperreal. If one is encouraged to deconstruct the real world and denounce political beliefs as a passing allegory, as Schopenhauer did, why not deconstruct new contemporary civic religions, such the monotheism of the capitalist market or the civic religion of victimhood?

Spectral Verities, Viral Lies

We all live the hyperreal, as the French philosopher Rosset writes; we all crave for the Double—be it in its negative or the positive form.  We all wish to be something we are not; the duplicate of ourselves.  “In place of the world as it is, we invent a ‘duplicate’ or a ‘double,’ a parallel universe which functions as a phantom rival to the existing world.”

The disadvantage of living in the real world is that life in it is drab, frightening, or boring; the advantage of the “doubled” life lies not only in the fact that such life does not exist, but that such life doesn’t even have to exist in order for us to believe it to be true and real! In other words, this desire for a spectral world is not so much a desire for something different, as it is a desire to get rid of the real world.

Who are the new paradigms or role models of our hyperreal postmodernity? Once upon a time the role model for Western man was a rugged individual, a Prometheus unbound, a war hero, a conqueror like Cortez, Columbus, or General Lee. Today the will for the hyperreal requires his double or his denial, or better yet the “doubled denial.”  As a result, the new role models for the West are the degenerates, the retards, the non-Whites, the pederasts, the pathetic and the perverts. Baudrillard: “The Courtier was the most remarkable figure of the aristocratic order. The Militant was the most remarkable figure of the social and revolutionary order. The Penitent is the most remarkable figure of our advanced postmodern democratic politicians.”

But these degenerate role models are in turn subject to deconstruction, especially by proud, psychologically healthy White people who are being victimized by the legitimization of these role models.

Granted, we are witnessing the end of the big narratives, such as antifascist victimology. However, the unresolved work of mourning the real (or hyperreal) victims of fascism or racism is in full swing. In other words, the antifascist, antiracist war (with all its political, media and legal prohibition) continues unabated. Even if real racism and fascism are dead and gone, they need to be resurrected in a negative doubled manner in order to give the mourners an opportunity to repent for the failed duty to prevent it from happening. Never again, never again! — this is a  new war cry of our hyperreal discourse.

This strategy of the hyperreal “never again”, is directed not only at preventing similar events from happening again in the future — as expressed in the forms of a myriad of  memorial centers commemorating the Holocaust. It is also meant to be a tool of unraveling, in a vicarious and imaginary way, of the real past historical disaster that befell the Jews or the non-Whites. Likewise, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are waged today as the post- prophylactic double; indeed, they are not just the wars for stopping the terror; they are the wars for removing the past sins of the political class, which led to the real terror of the dreadful 9/11! The goal is now to retroactively cancel out the inflicted national disgrace and humiliation of the ruling elites. This is why the actual wars and our public discourse all over the West are “non-events”. Never again, never again!

And this is why the hyperreal or the double are pure illusions. They cannot last. The violent and the objective real is waiting in the wings and it will soon take the upper hand. Is it for real?

Tomislav Sunic

Every page of the Parerga und Paralipomena is packed with ideas and suggestions that have preserved their interest and sometimes their novelty to this day. It is in itself an education

But the two authors that probably exerted the greatest influence on me in my early twenties were Schopenhauer and Schiller. The former enlightened me enormously on psychology, and I still regard him as the greatest European psychologist who appeared between Montaigne and Freud. Indeed, there is much in his work that anticipates Freud’s discoveries, a fact to which I have more than once called attention, and Nietzsche owed him many a profound observation, the source of which, however, is rarely acknowledged.

I can never forget the surprise and excitement with which I started to read the Parerga und Paralipomena. I can have hardly been more than nineteen at the time, and on my way home from Fleet Street one day, happening to pass through old Holiwell Street, Strand, a detour I constantly made so as to have a look at the bookshops there, I was lucky enough to pick up a copy of this book. Impatiently, I started reading, and for days thereafter could not put the book down. Only those who know this brilliant series of essays can appreciate what they must have meant to me at this time. For no-one can read them and remain the same person. Nor does it now seem possible that such a work can have been refused by three leading publishers in succession before A. W. Haym of Berlin at last undertook its publication, though without paying the author anything for it. Schopenhauer was then sixty-two years of age, and had already suffered the mortification of seeing the greater part of the first edition of his masterpiece, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, turned into waste paper.

Every page of the Parerga und Paralipomena is packed with ideas and suggestions that have preserved their interest and sometimes their novelty to this day. It is in itself an education, and I felt as Nietzsche declares he did when he first started reading Schopenhauer. ‘I understood him,’ he says, ‘as if he had written for me alone.’

Schopenhauer’s style is not difficult, and I had, in any case, prepared myself as a reader of German by sedulously working my way through most of the more or less second-rate fiction of France and England in their German translations issued by the Engelhorn Bibliothek—such works as Georges Ohnet’s Les dames de croix-mort93 and Charles Reade’s It’s Never Too Late to Mend—for I found a German translation of a French or English work easier to follow than a book written originally in German. I used to take these translations out with me on my journeys through London and would often stop at a bookstall and pick up a dictionary to find the meaning of a word or expression I did not understand.

My mother, who was quick to notice the change Schopenhauer had wrought in me, signified her disapproval of many of my views, and particularly of their German source, by constantly referring to my philosophic hero with playful scorn, and with a hint at his gloomy pessimism, as ‘Chapeau Noir.’ But I was not to be moved by banter, even from her, for Schopenhauer was in many respects a finishing school for me. When I agreed with him it was not necessarily because he said things I had long felt to be true, but for which I had so far failed to find the right expression, but because the moment I read them, and looked again on the world, I at once perceived their truth, unfamiliar though they had been a moment previously.

Anthony Ludovici
Confessions of an Anti-Feminist

Schopenhauer on happiness

Generally, the sages of all ages have always said the same, and the fools, i.e. the vast majority in all eras, have always done the same, namely the opposite; and so it will always be. Therefore, Voltaire says: ‘We will leave this world as stupid and nasty as we found it when we came into it.’

*

All the advantages of rank, birth, even royal birth, wealth, and so on, relate to genuine personal merits – such as a great mind or a great heart – as kings on the stage relate to kings in real life. Metrodorus, the first disciple of Epicurus, already titled a chapter: ‘The cause of happiness that arises from within ourselves is greater than that which[336] comes from things.’ – See Clement of Alexandria, Stromata II, 21, p. 362 of the Würzburg edn. of the Opera Polemica.a,1 And the principal element in the well-being of human beings, indeed, in the entire manner of their  existence, is what exists or happens within themselves. For it is actually here that our inner satisfaction or dissatisfaction is immediately located, which is primarily the result of our sensing, willing, and thinking, whereas anything external only has an indirect influence on it. Hence the same external events or circumstances affect each one of us completely differently; and even in the same environment, everybody lives in a different world. For we are immediately concerned only with our own representations, feelings, and movements of the will; external things only influence us as far as they cause these. The world in which everybody lives depends first of all on our apprehension a of it; therefore, it conforms to the diversity of minds; accordingly, it will turn out poor, dull, and superficial, or rich, interesting, and full of meaning.

*

In the same way the melancholic person sees tragedy in a scene, where the sanguine person has only an interesting conflict before him, and the phlegmatic one something without meaning. All this is due to the fact that each reality, i.e. each fulfilled present, consists of two halves, subject and object, albeit necessarily and closely connected, like oxygen and [337]hydrogen in water. Hence with the same objective half, but a different subjective one, the present reality is completely different, just as it is in the converse case: the most beautiful and best objective half combined with a dull, poor subjective one renders only a bad reality and present, like beautiful scenery in bad weather or in the reflection of a bad camera obscura. Or to put it more plainly: We all are stuck in our consciousness, as in our skin, and immediately live only inside of it; hence we cannot easily be helped from the outside.

*

Since everything that exists and happens for human beings always exists only in, and happens for, their consciousness, obviously the constitution of consciousness itself is first of all essential, and in most cases more depends on this constitution than on the shapes that appear in consciousness. All luxuriance and pleasures, reflected in the dull consciousness of a dunce, are utterly poor when compared with the consciousness of Cervantes as he wrote Don Quixote in an uncomfortable prison. – The objective half of reality and the present is in the hands of fate and, consequently, is changeable; the subjective half is we ourselves, and so is essentially unchangeable. Accordingly, the life of every human being, despite all changes from the outside, bears the same character throughout and is comparable to a series of variations on one theme. No one can escape his individuality. And just as it is with animals, which in all the circumstances in which we place them remain limited to the narrow sphere that nature has irrevocably drawn around their essential being – which is why, for instance, our attempts to make a beloved animal happy must always remain within narrow bounds due to the limits of its being and consciousness – so it is with human beings: because of their individuality the measure of their possible happiness is determined in advance. In particular, the limits of their mental powers have once and for all established their capacity for higher pleasures. (See The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, p. 73. a) If these limits are narrow, all efforts from the outside, everything that people, everything that good luck does for them, will not be able to raise them above ordinary, half-animal human happiness and comfort; they remain dependent on pleasures of the senses, homely and cheerful family life, base company, and vulgar pastimes. Even education, on the whole, cannot do much, just a little, to widen this horizon. For the highest, most diverse, and most permanent pleasures are those of the mind, as much as we may deceive ourselves about this when we are young; but these depend mainly on an inborn capacity.4 – This makes it clear how much our happiness depends on what we are, on our individuality; whereas for the most part we take into account only our fate, b only what we have, or what we represent. Fate, however, can improve; moreover, we will not ask much of it if we are inwardly rich.

*

For what somebody is in himself, what accompanies him in solitude, and what nobody can give him or take away from him, is obviously more essential to him than anything that he possesses or that he may be in the eyes of others. A witty person, all alone, has excellent entertainment in his own thoughts and fantasies, whereas in a dullard the continuous diversion of parties, plays, excursions, and amusements cannot fend off the torments of boredom. A good, moderate, gentle character can be contented in meagre circumstances, whereas a greedy, envious, and malicious one is not in spite of all his wealth. Indeed, for the person who continuously enjoys an extraordinary, intellectually eminent personality, most of the generally desired pleasures are entirely superfluous, even just troublesome and annoying. Hence Horace says of himself:

Gems, marble, ivory, 

Etruscan figurines, pictures,

Silver, clothes dyed in Gaetulian purple,

Many there are who own none, one who does not care to own.

And Socrates, when looking at luxury articles displayed for sale, says: ‘How many things there are I do not need.’

*

From this it follows that people can be much less influenced from the outside than we normally think. Only all-powerful time exercises its right even here; all bodily and intellectual advantages gradually succumb to her; the moral character alone cannot be touched by it. In this respect the goods[340] of the last two categories, of which time does not immediately rob us, have an advantage.

*

For what wealth can accomplish beyond the satisfaction of actual and natural needs has little influence on our real well-being; on the contrary, our comfort is disturbed by the many inevitable worries created by preserving a large estate. Nevertheless, people are a thousand times more anxious to acquire wealth than culture of the mind; whereas what we aresurely contributes much more to our happiness than what we have. Hence we see quite a few people, in restless activity, industrious like ants, trying from morning to night to increase the wealth they already have. Beyond the narrow horizon of the means to this end they know nothing; their minds are empty and hence unreceptive to anything else. The highest pleasures, those of the mind, are inaccessible to them; and in vain do they try to replace them by the fleeting, sensuous ones, costing little time but a lot of money, which they indulge in now and then. At the end of their lives then, as a result, they really have a large pile of money, if they are lucky, which they leave to their heirs either to increase further or to squander. Such a life, though plainly lived with an air of great seriousness and importance, is as foolish as many another that wore a fool’s cap as its symbol.

Hence what somebody has in himself is most essential for his life’s happiness.

*

The emptiness of their inner life, the dullness of their consciousness, the poverty of their mind make them seek company, which, however, consists of people just like them, because ‘like takes pleasure in like’. a So together they hunt for diversion and entertainment, which they initially seek in sensuous pleasures, in every kind of amusement, and finally in excesses. The source of the fatal extravagance with which many a son of a family entering life with riches squanders his large inheritance within an incredibly short period of time, is really nothing but the boredom that has its source in the poverty and emptiness of mind just described. Such a young man was sent into the world outwardly rich, but inwardly poor, and now tried in vain to supplant inner with external wealth by wanting to receive everything from outside – like old men who seek to strengthen themselves through the perspiration of young women. And so in the end, inner poverty also led to external poverty.

*

However, if the individual character is badly constituted, all pleasures are like delicious wines in a mouth full of bile. Accordingly, in good times and bad times, leaving aside great calamities, it is less important what befalls us in life than how we feel about it, hence what is the nature and the degree of our receptivity in every respect. What someone is and has within himself, in short, personality and its worth, is the only thing that immediately counts for his happiness and well-being. Everything else is mediate; consequently, its effects can be frustrated, but those of personality never. For that reason, envy directed towards personal merits is the most unforgiving, as it is also the most carefully concealed.

*

But since the genius too depends on an excess of nervous power and hence sensibility, Aristotle quite rightly remarked that all excellent and superior human beings are melancholic: ‘All men who have distinguished themselves – either in philosophy, or politics, or poetry, or arts – seem to have been melancholic.’a Undoubtedly, this is the passage that Cicero had in mind in his often quoted statement: ‘Aristotle said that all geniuses are melancholic.

*

The most general overview shows us the two enemies of human happiness to be pain and boredom. In addition, we can observe that to the degree that we succeed in removing ourselves from the one, we come closer to the other, and vice versa, so that our life actually presents a stronger or weaker oscillation between them. This arises from the fact that both stand in a double antagonism to one another, an external or objective, and an internal or subjective antagonism. For externally, want and privation cause pain, but security and abundance cause boredom. Accordingly, we see the lower classes in a perpetual struggle against want, hence pain, and the rich and noble world in a persistent and often really desperate struggle against boredom.*,8 The inner or subjective antagonism rests on the fact that in the individual, susceptibility to one is inversely proportional to susceptibility to the other, in that this susceptibility is determined by the person’s mental powers. For intellectual obtuseness is always associated with dullness of sensation and lack of sensitivity, a constitution which makes one less susceptible to pain and sorrow of whatever sort and magnitude. This intellectual obtuseness gives rise to that inner emptiness, pronounced in innumerable faces and betraying itself through the constant lively attention to even the most trivial events in the external world, an emptiness that is the true source of boredom and constantly craves external stimulation in order to stir intellect and mind through anything at all. Hence it is not fastidious[350] in its choice, as attested by the pitiful pastimes that people resort to, and also by the nature of their sociability and conversation, and no less so by the people who stand around in doorways or gape out of windows. Mainly from this inner vacuity arises the craving for company, diversion, enjoyment, and luxury of any kind, which leads many to extravagance and then to squalor. Nothing prevents us so reliably from this aberration than inner wealth, the wealth of the mind; for the more closely it approaches eminence, the less room it leaves for boredom.

*

But on the other hand, the immediate condition for increased intelligence is a heightened sensibility, and its root is a greater vehemence of the will, hence of passionateness. Out of their association grows a much greater strength of all affects and an increased sensitivity for mental and even physical pain, also greater impatience with all obstacles or even just disturbances. The vividness of all representations, hence also the repulsive ones, springing from the strength of imagination, greatly contributes to heightening all of this. What has been said applies proportionally at all the intermediate stages that fill the wide space between the dullest blockhead and the greatest genius.

*

 The ingenious person will above all strive for freedom from pain and annoyance, for tranquillity and leisure, and consequently seek a quiet, modest life, as undisturbed as possible, and accordingly, after some acquaintance with so-called human beings, choose seclusion and, if in [351]possession of a great mind, even solitude. For the more somebody has in himself, the less he needs from the outside and the less others can be to him. Therefore, intellectual distinction leads to unsociability. Indeed, if the quality of society could be substituted by quantity, then it would be worth the effort to live in the world at large; but unfortunately a hundred fools in a pile still do not make one intelligent person. – In contrast, the person at the other extreme, as soon as his needs let him regain his breath, will seek diversion and company at any price and readily make do with anything, trying to escape from nothing as much as from himself. For in solitude, where everybody is referred back to himself, it becomes apparent  what he has in himself; there the dunce in purple garment groans under the inescapable burden of his pathetic individuality, while the highly talented person populates and animates the most dreary surroundings with his thoughts. Therefore, what Seneca says is very true: ‘All stupidity suffers from weariness with itself’, a as is Jesus ben Sirach’s statement: ‘The life of the fool is worse than death.’b Accordingly, we will find on the whole that people are sociable to the degree that they are intellectually poor and generally common.*,9 For in this world we have little more than the choice between solitude and vulgarity. The most sociable of all human beings are said to be the negroes, who indeed are intellectually definitely inferior; according to accounts from North America in French papers (Le Commerce, c 19 October 1837), black people, free ones and slaves all together, shut themselves up in large numbers in the smallest space, because they cannot look often enough at their black snubnosed faces.

*

But what does leisure yield for most people? Boredom and apathy, as long as[352] sensuous pleasures or follies do not fill the time. How utterly worthless it is becomes apparent through the way in which they spend it – it is Ariosto’s ‘eternal leisure of ignorant men’.e Common people are merely intent on spending time – whoever has some talent, on making use of it. – That limited minds are so much subject to boredom is due to the fact that their intellect is nothing but the medium of motives for their will. Now if for the time being there are no motives to be grasped, the will rests and the intellect takes a holiday, the latter because, like the former, it does not become active by itself; the result is terrible stagnation of all powers in the whole human being – boredom.

*

Lacking those, the dull-witted person makes do with rattles and drums, with anything he can lay his hands on. For him, even a cigar is a welcome substitute for thoughts.10 – Hence in countries everywhere card games have become the main occupation at all social gatherings; they are the measure of their worth and the declared bankruptcy of all thought. For, since they do not exchange ideas, they exchange cards and try to take each other’s money. Oh what a pitiful race!

*

Furthermore, just as that country is happiest that needs little or no imports, so also human beings are happiest who are content with their inner riches and need little or nothing from the outside for their entertainment, since such influx is expensive, makes us dependent, creates dangers, causes annoyance, and in the end is still an inferior substitute for the products of one’s own soil. For from others, from the outside, we cannot expect much in any respect. What one can be to the other is strictly limited; in the end, everyone is alone, and then it all comes down to who is alone.

*

Hence Aristotle is quite justified in saying: ‘Happiness belongs to those who are independent of others’, b in other words: Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient in[354] themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are by their nature utterly uncertain, precarious, transient and subject to chance and might, therefore, even under the most favourable conditions, easily dry up; indeed, this is inevitable, insofar as they cannot always be close at hand. In old age, they all, of necessity, stop almost completely; love, banter, wanderlust, delight in horses, and aptitude for social intercourse desert us; even friends and relatives are carried off by death. Hence what we have in ourselves is more than ever important, since this will hold up the longest. But at every age this is and remains the true and solely permanent source of happiness. There is nothing to be got in the world anywhere; privation and pain pervade it, and boredom lies in wait at every corner for those who have escaped them. Moreover, wickedness usually reigns, and folly does all the talking. Fate is cruel, and human beings are pathetic. In such a world, the people who have much within themselves resemble the bright, warm, merry drawing-room at Christmas in the middle of the snow and ice of a December night.

*

People with superior intellectual powers, on the other hand, are capable, and in fact, in need of the most lively interest by way of mere cognition, without any interference of the will. But this interest then transports them to a region where pain is essentially alien, into the atmosphere of the lightly living gods, ‘of the gods who live at ease’. a In contrast, the life of the others passes in apathy, in that their thoughts[359] and aspirations are entirely directed towards the petty interests of personal welfare and hence to miseries of all kind, which causes unbearable boredom to befall them as soon as occupation with these purposes comes to an end and they are thrown back onto themselves, since only the fierce fire of passion is able to move the stagnating mass. On the other hand, the existence of people with predominantly intellectual powers is rich in ideas and full of life and meaning; worthy and interesting subject matters occupy them as soon as they can devote themselves to them, and they have within themselves a source of the noblest pleasures.

*

Because of all this, they naturally have one need more than the others, the need to learn, to see, to study, to meditate, to practise, and thus also the need for leisure. But since, as Voltaire rightly observed, ‘there are no real pleasures without real needs’,b this need is the condition for their having access to pleasures that others are denied, for whom beauty of nature and in art and intellectual works of all kinds, even if they accumulate these around them, at bottom are only what mistressesa are to an old man. As a result, such privileged people, aside from their personal life, lead a second, namely an intellectual life, which gradually becomes their real purpose and for which they see the first only as a mere means, whereas for the rest this stale, empty, and sad existence must itself be regarded as the end. Consequently, the former are primarily occupied with the intellectual life, which attains, through continuous increase in insight and knowledge, cohesion, steady augmentation, and wholeness and perfection, completing itself more and more, like a slowly maturing work of art. On the other hand, the life of the rest, which is merely practical, merely aimed at personal welfare, [360]merely capable of growing in length, not in depth, stands in sad contrast to it, but must nevertheless count as an end in itself, whereas it is a mere means for the former sort of people.

Our practical, real life, if not moved by passions, is boring and stale; but when moved by them, it soon becomes painful; for that reason only those are lucky who have been meted out some excess of intellect, beyond the measure required for service of the will.

*

leisure without literature is death and is like being buried alive for a human being’. (Seneca, Epistles, 82.

*

And such an intellectual life protects not only against boredom, but also against its pernicious consequences.19 For it becomes a bulwark against bad company and the many dangers, misadventures, losses, and dissipations into which we stumble when seeking our luck entirely in the actual world. For example, my philosophy has never earned me anything, but it has spared me a lot.

An ordinary human being, on the other hand, depends on things outside of him in regard to enjoying life, on property, rank, wife and children,  friends, society, and the like; these prop up his life’s happiness, and this is the reason it is destroyed if he loses these things, or when he sees himself deceived by them. In order to express this relation, we can say that his centre of gravity falls outside of himself. Consequently, he has constantly changing desires and whimsies; when his means permit it, he will now buy country-houses, now horses, now give parties, travel, and in general live in great extravagance, since he seeks satisfaction from the outside in all kinds of[361] things, just as the debilitated person hopes through broths and medicines to regain the health and strength whose true source lies in his own vital force.

*

Hence it is only for this kind of human being that undisturbed occupation with himself, his thoughts and works, is an urgent need, that solitude is welcome, leisure the highest good, and everything else expendable, indeed, when present, often merely a burden. Only of such a human being, therefore, can we say that his centre of gravity falls entirely within himself. This explains why the exceedingly rare people of this nature, even when possessing the best character, nonetheless do not show that intimate and unlimited sympathy for friends, family, and community of which some others are capable; for in the end they can console themselves about anything if only they have themselves. Therefore, they possess one more isolating element that is all the more effective, as others never really satisfy them completely. For that[362]reason, they cannot look at them as quite their equals, and indeed, since they always feel the heterogeneous in everything, they gradually get accustomed to walking among people as different beings and, in their thoughts about them, to using the third, not the first person plural. – Our moral virtues mainly benefit others, whereas the intellectual ones benefit primarily ourselves; consequently, the former make us universally popular, the latter, objects of hate.

*

When somebody is destined to impress the trace of his intellect on the whole of humanity, there is for him only one kind of happiness and unhappiness, namely to be able to perfect his talents and to complete his works – or to be prevented from doing so. Everything else is insignificant for him. Accordingly we see the great minds of all times attach the greatest value to leisure. For the leisure of each person is worth as much as he himself is worth.21 ‘Happiness seems to exist in leisure’, says Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics X, 7), b and Diogenes Laertius (II, 5, 31) reports that ‘Socrates praised leisure as the best of all possessions.’c In keeping with this, [363]Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics X, 7, 8, 9) declares the philosophical life to be the happiest. Also what he says in the Politics (IV, 11) belongs here: ‘The happy life is that lived without impediment in accordance with virtue’,d which, properly translated, means: ‘Real happiness is the ability to exercise one’s excellence, whatever its nature, without hindrance’, which coincides with Goethe’s words in Wilhelm Meister: ‘Whoever is born with a talent and can realize it, finds in it his most beautiful existence.’a – However, possessing leisure is alien not only to ordinary fate, but also ordinary human nature; for the natural destiny of a human being is to spend his time procuring what is necessary for his own and his family’s existence. He is the son of need, not of free intelligence.

*

On the other hand, we must consider against all this that the great intellectual gifts, as a result of a predominant nervous activity, lead to a greatly enhanced sensitivity for every form of pain and, further, that the passionate temperament that is the condition for these gifts and at the same time the greater vividness and completeness of all representations that is[364] inseparable from them, leads to an incomparably greater intensity of the affects stirred by them – however, in general there are more painful than pleasant affects. Finally, these great intellectual gifts alienate their possessor from other human beings and their activities, since, the more he has in himself, the less he is able to find in others, and a hundred things that greatly please them are to him insipid and unpalatable, so that the law of compensation, which asserts itself everywhere, may perhaps remain in force here too. For it has been maintained often enough, and not without evidence,c that the intellectually most limited person is, to all intents and purposes, the happiest, even if no one may envy him this happiness.

*

According to it, he is a human being without intellectual needs. Several things follow from this: first, in respect of himself, that he remains without intellectual pleasures, according to the already mentioned principle: ‘There are no true pleasures without true needs.’h No keen urgei towards knowledge and insight for their own sake animate his existence, nor one towards actual aesthetic pleasures, which are definitely related to the first urge. Such pleasures as are imposed on him by fashion or authority, he will dispose of as quickly as possible as a kind of forced labour. Real pleasures for him are the sensuous ones alone; in them he finds compensation. Accordingly, oysters and champagne are the highpoint of his existence, and the purpose of his life is to acquire everything that contributes to bodily well-being. And he is lucky enough if this purpose keeps him busy! For if those goods are already conferred on him in advance, he will inevitably fall prey to boredom, against which all possible means are tried: ballet, theatre, society, card games, gambling, horses, women, drinking, travelling, and so on. But all of these are not sufficient to ward off boredom, when a lack of intellectual needs makes intellectual pleasures impossible. Hence a dull, dry seriousness, close to that of animals, is characteristic of the philistine. Nothing delights him, nothing excites him, nothing rouses his interest. For sensuous pleasures are soon exhausted; a society made up of philistines just like him soon becomes boring; card games finally become tiresome. At most, he is left to enjoy the pleasures of vanity in his own way, consisting in his exceeding others in regard to wealth, or rank, or influence and power, by whom he is then honoured, or in associating with people who excel in such things and thus basking in[366] the reflection of their splendour (a snoba). – From the fundamental qualities of a philistine we have described it follows secondly, in respect to others, that, since he has no intellectual, but only physical needs, he will seek out the person who is able to satisfy the latter, not the one who can satisfy the former. Hence among the demands he makes on others, the least will be that of predominant intellectual abilities; on the contrary, if he encounters these, they will arouse his dislike, even his hatred, because in reaction to them he has only an annoying feeling of inferiority and, in addition, one of dull, secret envy. This he carefully hides by trying to conceal it even from himself, which is why it sometimes grows into a secret rage. Therefore, it will never occur to him to measure his appreciation, or deep respect, in accordance with such qualities; this is exclusively reserved for rank and wealth, and power and influence, which in his eyes are the only true merits in which he wishes to excel. – But all this follows from the fact that he is a human being without intellectual needs.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Parerga and Paralipomena

(The Cambridge Edition)