STUDIES IN PESSIMISM***


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THE ESSAYS OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER: STUDIES IN PESSIMISM

TRANSLATED BY

T. BAILEY SAUNDERS, M.A.







CONTENTS.


  ON THE SUFFERINGS OF THE WORLD
  ON THE VANITY OF EXISTENCE
  ON SUICIDE
  IMMORTALITY: A DIALOGUE
  PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS
  ON EDUCATION
  OF WOMEN
  ON NOISE
  A FEW PARABLES




NOTE.

The Essays here presented form a further selection from Schopenhauer's
_Parerga_, brought together under a title which is not to be found
in the original, and does not claim to apply to every chapter in
the volume. The first essay is, in the main, a rendering of the
philosopher's remarks under the heading of _Nachtraege zur Lehre vom
Leiden der Welt_, together with certain parts of another section
entitled _Nachtraege zur Lehre von der Bejahung und Verneinung des
Willens zum Leben_. Such omissions as I have made are directed chiefly
by the desire to avoid repeating arguments already familiar to readers
of the other volumes in this series. The _Dialogue on Immortality_
sums up views expressed at length in the philosopher's chief work, and
treated again in the _Parerga_. The _Psychological Observations_ in
this and the previous volume practically exhaust the chapter of the
original which bears this title.

The essay on _Women_ must not be taken in jest. It expresses
Schopenhauer's serious convictions; and, as a penetrating observer
of the faults of humanity, he may be allowed a hearing on a question
which is just now receiving a good deal of attention among us.

T.B.S.




ON THE SUFFERINGS OF THE WORLD.


Unless _suffering_ is the direct and immediate object of life, our
existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon
the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and
originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as
serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate
misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional;
but misfortune in general is the rule.

I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of
philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is
just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt. Leibnitz is
particularly concerned to defend this absurdity; and he seeks to
strengthen his position by using a palpable and paltry sophism.[1]
It is the good which is negative; in other words, happiness and
satisfaction always imply some desire fulfilled, some state of pain
brought to an end.

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_, cf. _Theod_, sec. 153.--Leibnitz
argued that evil is a negative quality--_i.e_., the absence of good; and
that its active and seemingly positive character is an incidental and
not an essential part of its nature. Cold, he said, is only the absence
of the power of heat, and the active power of expansion in freezing
water is an incidental and not an essential part of the nature of cold.
The fact is, that the power of expansion in freezing water is really an
increase of repulsion amongst its molecules; and Schopenhauer is quite
right in calling the whole argument a sophism.]

This explains the fact that we generally find pleasure to be not
nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or,
at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader
wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare
the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in
eating the other.

The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will
be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than
yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But
what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole!

We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of
the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.
So it is that in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil Fate
may have presently in store for us--sickness, poverty, mutilation,
loss of sight or reason.

No little part of the torment of existence lies in this, that Time is
continually pressing upon us, never letting us take breath, but always
coming after us, like a taskmaster with a whip. If at any moment Time
stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the misery of
boredom.

But misfortune has its uses; for, as our bodily frame would burst
asunder if the pressure of the atmosphere was removed, so, if the
lives of men were relieved of all need, hardship and adversity; if
everything they took in hand were successful, they would be so swollen
with arrogance that, though they might not burst, they would present
the spectacle of unbridled folly--nay, they would go mad. And I may
say, further, that a certain amount of care or pain or trouble is
necessary for every man at all times. A ship without ballast is
unstable and will not go straight.

Certain it is that _work, worry, labor_ and _trouble_, form the lot of
almost all men their whole life long. But if all wishes were fulfilled
as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? what would
they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and
ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained
his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of
boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and
murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on
itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like
children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there
in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a
blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we
foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent
prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all
unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every man
desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it
may be said: "It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to-morrow; and so
on till the worst of all."

If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery,
pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course,
you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little
as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life;
and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.

Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing
the blessed calm of non-existence. And, in any case, even though
things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the more
clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is _a disappointment,
nay, a cheat_.

If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are
old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling
they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete
disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be
carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it
lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so
much--and then performed so little. This feeling will so completely
predominate over every other that they will not even consider it
necessary to give it words; but on either side it will be silently
assumed, and form the ground-work of all they have to talk about.

He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits
some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the
performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to
be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to
deceive, their effect is gone.

While no man is much to be envied for his lot, there are countless
numbers whose fate is to be deplored.

Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say _defunctus est_;
it means that the man has done his task.

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason
alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather
have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the
burden of existence? or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose
that burden upon it in cold blood.

I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless--because
I speak the truth; and people prefer to be assured that everything the
Lord has made is good. Go to the priests, then, and leave philosophers
in peace! At any rate, do not ask us to accommodate our doctrines to
the lessons you have been taught. That is what those rascals of sham
philosophers will do for you. Ask them for any doctrine you please,
and you will get it. Your University professors are bound to preach
optimism; and it is an easy and agreeable task to upset their
theories.

I have reminded the reader that every state of welfare, every feeling
of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it
consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of
existence. It follows, therefore, that the happiness of any given life
is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to
which it has been free from suffering--from positive evil. If this
is the true standpoint, the lower animals appear to enjoy a happier
destiny than man. Let us examine the matter a little more closely.

However varied the forms that human happiness and misery may take,
leading a man to seek the one and shun the other, the material basis
of it all is bodily pleasure or bodily pain. This basis is very
restricted: it is simply health, food, protection from wet and cold,
the satisfaction of the sexual instinct; or else the absence of these
things. Consequently, as far as real physical pleasure is concerned,
the man is not better off than the brute, except in so far as the
higher possibilities of his nervous system make him more sensitive to
every kind of pleasure, but also, it must be remembered, to every kind
of pain. But then compared with the brute, how much stronger are the
passions aroused in him! what an immeasurable difference there is in
the depth and vehemence of his emotions!--and yet, in the one case,
as in the other, all to produce the same result in the end: namely,
health, food, clothing, and so on.

The chief source of all this passion is that thought for what is
absent and future, which, with man, exercises such a powerful
influence upon all he does. It is this that is the real origin of
his cares, his hopes, his fears--emotions which affect him much
more deeply than could ever be the case with those present joys
and sufferings to which the brute is confined. In his powers of
reflection, memory and foresight, man possesses, as it were, a machine
for condensing and storing up his pleasures and his sorrows. But the
brute has nothing of the kind; whenever it is in pain, it is as though
it were suffering for the first time, even though the same thing
should have previously happened to it times out of number. It has
no power of summing up its feelings. Hence its careless and placid
temper: how much it is to be envied! But in man reflection comes in,
with all the emotions to which it gives rise; and taking up the same
elements of pleasure and pain which are common to him and the brute,
it develops his susceptibility to happiness and misery to such a
degree that, at one moment the man is brought in an instant to a state
of delight that may even prove fatal, at another to the depths of
despair and suicide.

If we carry our analysis a step farther, we shall find that, in order
to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number
and pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much
more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all
its forms; delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous
liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things than he
considers necessary to his existence.

And above and beyond all this, there is a separate and peculiar source
of pleasure, and consequently of pain, which man has established for
himself, also as the result of using his powers of reflection; and
this occupies him out of all proportion to its value, nay, almost more
than all his other interests put together--I mean ambition and the
feeling of honor and shame; in plain words, what he thinks about the
opinion other people have of him. Taking a thousand forms, often very
strange ones, this becomes the goal of almost all the efforts he makes
that are not rooted in physical pleasure or pain. It is true that
besides the sources of pleasure which he has in common with the
brute, man has the pleasures of the mind as well. These admit of many
gradations, from the most innocent trifling or the merest talk up to
the highest intellectual achievements; but there is the accompanying
boredom to be set against them on the side of suffering. Boredom is
a form of suffering unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural
state; it is only the very cleverest of them who show faint traces
of it when they are domesticated; whereas in the case of man it has
become a downright scourge. The crowd of miserable wretches whose one
aim in life is to fill their purses but never to put anything into
their heads, offers a singular instance of this torment of boredom.
Their wealth becomes a punishment by delivering them up to misery of
having nothing to do; for, to escape it, they will rush about in all
directions, traveling here, there and everywhere. No sooner do they
arrive in a place than they are anxious to know what amusements it
affords; just as though they were beggars asking where they could
receive a dole! Of a truth, need and boredom are the two poles
of human life. Finally, I may mention that as regards the sexual
relation, a man is committed to a peculiar arrangement which drives
him obstinately to choose one person. This feeling grows, now and
then, into a more or less passionate love,[1] which is the source of
little pleasure and much suffering.

[Footnote 1: I have treated this subject at length in a special
chapter of the second volume of my chief work.]

It is, however, a wonderful thing that the mere addition of thought
should serve to raise such a vast and lofty structure of human
happiness and misery; resting, too, on the same narrow basis of joy
and sorrow as man holds in common with the brute, and exposing him
to such violent emotions, to so many storms of passion, so much
convulsion of feeling, that what he has suffered stands written and
may be read in the lines on his face. And yet, when all is told, he
has been struggling ultimately for the very same things as the brute
has attained, and with an incomparably smaller expenditure of passion
and pain.

But all this contributes to increase the measures of suffering in
human life out of all proportion to its pleasures; and the pains of
life are made much worse for man by the fact that death is something
very real to him. The brute flies from death instinctively without
really knowing what it is, and therefore without ever contemplating it
in the way natural to a man, who has this prospect always before his
eyes. So that even if only a few brutes die a natural death, and most
of them live only just long enough to transmit their species, and
then, if not earlier, become the prey of some other animal,--whilst
man, on the other hand, manages to make so-called natural death the
rule, to which, however, there are a good many exceptions,--the
advantage is on the side of the brute, for the reason stated above.
But the fact is that man attains the natural term of years just as
seldom as the brute; because the unnatural way in which he lives, and
the strain of work and emotion, lead to a degeneration of the race;
and so his goal is not often reached.

The brute is much more content with mere existence than man; the plant
is wholly so; and man finds satisfaction in it just in proportion as
he is dull and obtuse. Accordingly, the life of the brute carries less
of sorrow with it, but also less of joy, when compared with the life
of man; and while this may be traced, on the one side, to freedom from
the torment of _care_ and _anxiety_, it is also due to the fact
that _hope_, in any real sense, is unknown to the brute. It is thus
deprived of any share in that which gives us the most and best of our
joys and pleasures, the mental anticipation of a happy future, and the
inspiriting play of phantasy, both of which we owe to our power of
imagination. If the brute is free from care, it is also, in this
sense, without hope; in either case, because its consciousness is
limited to the present moment, to what it can actually see before
it. The brute is an embodiment of present impulses, and hence what
elements of fear and hope exist in its nature--and they do not go very
far--arise only in relation to objects that lie before it and within
reach of those impulses: whereas a man's range of vision embraces the
whole of his life, and extends far into the past and future.

Following upon this, there is one respect in which brutes show real
