by Ken Coates
The brutes, animals without consciousness, cannot throw off the shackles of nature. But man through his intellect and self-awareness has the capacity to look at his own existence as it were from outside and free himself from bondage to nature. To achieve emancipation, i.e. ultimate freedom from the grip of the will to live, it is necessary to practice asceticism including celibacy which leads to freedom from all worldly desires and the renunciation of the world. Thus purged of the will to live one can meet death with perfect calm, resignation and indifference secure in the knowledge that one has attained a state of willlessness, and death only ends the physical residue of the manifestation of the will. However Schopenhauer realizes that the struggle to achieve willlessness is a difficult one as the presence of the will within us always tempts us to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. Yet to be an ascetic and a world-renouncer one must avoid pleasure and embrace pain and suffering. Only a small minority of individuals seem capable of attaining the knowledge that liberates and the ascetic practices that lead to the conquest of the will. But the lives of saints and ascetics of many lands and of many beliefs and faiths show what human beings can achieve. Their holiness, unworldliness and state of blissfulness stand as shining examples of liberation from the quagmire of existence. Here Schopenhauer’s conception of the transcendence of the will comes very close to the Hindu concept of Moksha and the Buddhist notion of Nirvana. It is a state of beatitude that is beyond comprehension and beyond description in terms of subject-object distinction, for it lies beyond these dualities. From our worldly point of view it appears as a void or nothing but from the viewpoint of those who have freed themselves from the will, this our world appears as nothing. Such is Schopenhauer’s world-view in a nutshell. What we offer below are a few critical comments and observations on his vision of existence and the road to liberation, the focus of our study.
On the evils of existence: Schopenhauer emphasizes pain and suffering as the defining characteristics of life. And although the pointlessness and futility of existence is a part of his conception of this ‘evil’ it receives far less attention and emphasis. It is the moral rejection of the world that he emphasizes rather than its metaphysical worthlessness as a contingent phenomenon. Schopenhauer analyses and discusses human sexuality at great length and with impressive insight. An important omission, however, is the suffering of young humans through a long period of sexual deprivation and frustration, a form of suffering, which animals do not have to undergo. Although he lambasts ‘optimism’ for its disregard of the glaring evidence of gratuitous suffering all around us he fails to emphasize that all procreators and existents are directly or indirectly responsible for the world’s evils and its perpetuation. And although Schopenhauer expresses strong anti-natalist views he stops short of considering, not to say advocating, anti-natalism as a means of liberating those still unborn from existence. In other words the idea of prevention is almost entirely missing from his notion of liberation which is focused exclusively on individual salvation for those already here. While he notes in passing that non-procreation by all would mean the disappearance of the human race, a prospect that he should clearly welcome, he does not consider it as an act that would at least in part deny the will to live by way of abstaining from procreation. Against this it might be argued that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is essentially about explaining the world rather than changing it. In short it is largely descriptive rather than prescriptive although his idea of salvation, i.e. the denial of the will and its methodology, takes him into the realm of practice. According to his metaphysics of the will, salvation can only come from the total denial of the will which requires extremes of asceticism and self-mortification in order to break down the will to live. That is why he also rules out metaphysical suicide as a form of denial of existence and the triumph of the intellect over the will. For Schopenhauer this act of self-destruction does not extirpate the will to live but simply its physical embodiment. In fact it would count as an act of the affirmation of the will. As we shall see below this somewhat narrow and dogmatic view of salvation, which undoubtedly stems from his metaphysics of the will, is also contradictory.
Schopenhauer equates the will, the all-pervasive thing-in-itself, with the will to live. In short, all willing is affirmation of life. Yet the ascetic or the world-renouncer implicitly wills the denial of the will to live which is obviously incoherent. Schopenhauer tries to resolve this problem by suggesting that the ascetic cannot deny the will through volition. Rather with real knowledge of the nature of the will and with ascetic practices the individual reaches a stage when the will simply turns against itself, it ‘denies itself’. As Janaway points out, if all willing is will to live then the ascetic cannot will the denial of the will to live. And this is the main position of Schopenhauer (Janaway 1994, 95). Indeed Schopenhauer compares his idea of salvation with the Christian notion of grace, i.e. something that comes to the individual from outside. The denial of the will, he writes, ‘comes suddenly, as if flying in from without’ which the Church calls ‘the effect of grace’ (Schopenhauer 1969, V. I., 408). This is a strange quasi-religious notion of salvation coming from an atheistic philosopher! However elsewhere he writes that the ascetic has to wage a constant struggle against the will to live which is always seeking to affirm itself within him ( Janaway 1994, 95).
Thus Schopenhauer’s portrayal of the beatific state of willlessness comes up against his notion of the constant struggle that the ascetic has to wage in order to conquer the will and maintain the state of willlessness as long as he lives. In this regard his notion of salvation cannot compare with the Buddhist nirvana which is akin to a mystical state of transcendence and tranquility. Many Schopenhauer scholars have commented on his fuzzy and incoherent notion of the state of willlessness, both in respect of its nature and how it is arrived at (Navia 1980, 178-9; Janaway 1994, 94-5).
Overall Schopenhauer’s view of existence – the fundamental pointlessness of life with its endless willing and striving and which involves much pain and suffering – has a great deal of coherence and validity. In the last analysis, it amounts to a moral and metaphysical rejection of life. On the other hand, as we argue below - and this point has been often noted - his notion of liberation from the shackles of the will to live remains unconvincing and unsatisfactory in the extreme. The main reasons are as follows.
Paths to Liberation: According to Schopenhauer there are two paths to liberation. The first, arrived at through a real understanding of the nature of the will to live, can lead to its complete denial. Such knowledge has to be followed by extreme ascetic practices in order to break down and overcome the will. However, only a few people are capable of attaining this insight or knowledge and even fewer that of denying the will. Saints, holy men and mendicants are prime examples of those who achieve liberation in this way.
The second and, according to him more common, route to salvation is through the breakdown of the will as a result of an inordinate amount of suffering. Many individuals, having suffered a lot and lost out in life, suddenly come to realize the vanity of existence and of all striving and willing and deny the will to live. However Schopenhauer is hard put to find credible examples of such people. One of these is Gretchen, a fictional character, in Goethe’s Faust. Others he mentions are condemned criminals waiting execution, noblemen, adventurers and kings. As Nietzsche and others have observed, the idea of salvation resulting from extremes of suffering and despair is nothing short of grotesque (Janaway 1999a, 341). In any case Schopenhauer’s examples are somewhat exceptional and generally speaking extremes of suffering do not necessarily lead to resignation and loss of the will to live. Suicide or a life of neglect and apathy could well be the more likely outcome. But the latter does not connote Schopenhauerian willlessness. In any case for the vast majority of humankind Schopenhauer’s philosophy seems to offer no hope of liberation. They must continue to be driven by the will to live and remain in bondage to nature.
A further difficulty with Schopenhauer’s idea of
liberation, stemming from his deterministic philosophy of the will, is the question of choice. As we saw above the will to live cannot be denied intentionally. Given the right conditions it has to ‘happen’ as it were. As commentators on Schopenhauer have noted the entire subject of how one arrives at the right knowledge about the will and translates this knowledge into the denial of the will is shot through with ambiguities and complexities. But one thing is clear. The individual is not free to choose to deny the will. All of this is in contrast with the logical approach of Buddhism where the road to salvation and ultimate nirvana is laid out systematically as the eight-fold path consisting of right knowledge and right action. And it is open in principle to all individuals who decide to embark on this difficult road to emancipation. Here the responsibility lies with the individual and emancipation is something earned through merit rather than received as ‘grace’. True, in both cases all willing and striving ceases, the will to live is extinguished and the liberated individual attains something like a mystical state of being. In both cases the end state might be the same but who gets there and how seems rather convoluted, and also contradictory in the case of Schopenhauer.
As we pointed out earlier, his conception of the self and the will is overly subtle and self-contradictory and this is a part of the problem (Janaway 1994, 94-5, Chs. 3 and 4 passim.). He has to resort to quite convoluted arguments to reconcile these contradictions and inconsistencies. The mystical sense of ‘oneness’ with all existence and living beings felt by the will-less is reminiscent of the Hindu conception of moksha where the atman or the individual self recognizes itself as identical with Brahman or the cosmic order. Indeed Schopenhauer uses the term ‘god’ to indicate the state of being after denial of the will which cannot be expressed in words because we have no conception of that state of being. Thus Schopenhauer’s conception of the state of salvation, in common with Brahmanism and Buddhism, turns out to be quasi-religious, It also invokes a mystical state rather than a void or nothingness, pure and simple.
It is interesting to note another element of similarity among all three. For both Hinduism and Brahmanism, which believe in the transmigration of the soul or the inner self, birth as a human being is a great opportunity to liberate the self from entrapment in the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth. Similarly according to Schopenhauer human beings possess the advantage over other forms of life of a more developed intellect and consciousness which enables them to see through the ruse of nature and free themselves from bondage to nature. He writes, “nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist” (quoted in Janaway 1999, 13 ). Elsewhere he remarks, ‘the value of life lies precisely in this, that it teaches him (man) not to want it’ (Schopenhauer 1970, 65 ). Yet as he admits only a few are capable of attaining to the necessary knowledge and fewer still to succeed in freeing themselves from the will to live. In fact Schopenhauer’s path to liberation is so thorny, so lofty, so extreme and also so fortuitous ( the will cannot be denied by intention but has to deny itself through ‘grace’ ) that very few are willing or capable of following such a path.
There are two issues here. First, Schopenhauer believes in the total denial of the will which leaves no scope for a partial denial of the will. As we have noted above, future generations could be spared the sufferings of existence through prevention, i.e. non-procreation. This does not require those extremes of asceticism and self-mortification in order to break down the will. As Schopenhauer himself remarks, ‘If the act of procreation were neither the outcome of a desire nor accompanied by feelings of pleasure, but a matter to be decided on the basis of purely rational considerations, is it likely that the human race would still exist? Would each of us not rather have felt so much pity for the coming generation as to prefer to spare it the burden of existence, or at least not wish to take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?’ (Schopenhauer 1970, 47-8). However we have to acknowledge that in Schopenhauer’s time contraception was scarcely developed and it was almost impossible to break the bond between coitus and procreation. It is also true that Schopenhauer puts a great deal of emphasis on total sexual abstinence as a part of asceticism, which leads to the denial of the will. But refraining from procreation as such is not a course of action suggested by him. Yet it is an important part of the denial of the will, being one of the strongest expressions of the will to live. As we shall see later, in the present day context Benatar argues the case for abstaining from procreation as an eminently desirable and feasible course of action available to all which would spare future generations from being brought into existence. It should also be noted that in common with Brahmanism and Buddhism, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is also concerned with the salvation of existing individuals through attaining willlessness rather than saving future generations from the pain and suffering of existence. It is a reasonable assumption that the two routes to salvation proposed by Schopenhauer are likely to involve mature individuals who most likely have already created progeny. Thus their own salvation and denial of the will may be seen as compromised - a Pyrrhic victory over the will - since they have already colluded with nature in bringing to life new existents and new victims of suffering. This is a point to which Schopenhauer pays no attention.
There is another issue that deserves notice. Schopenhauer claims that man’s intelligence ‘is already sufficient for imparting to the will that knowledge in consequence of which the will denies and abolishes itself’ (Schopenhauer 1969, V. II., 610). Elsewhere he writes that those with a lower level of intellectual development are less likely to see through the real nature of existence, i.e. their intellect still remains in service of the will (610). The implication surely must be that with the spread of education in future years and with more and more people receiving higher education intelligence will become more autonomous of the will. Thus more and more people will seek to liberate themselves and future generations from bondage to nature. In fact Schopenhauer makes several references to the intellect and will as a source of potential conflict. As Janaway (1999, 5) remarks, the central thought of Schopenhauer’s work is that ‘knowledge culminates in a kind of abnegation’ i.e. self-realization results in self-cancellation. While this is clearly true at the individual level the question is whether it goes further than that.
According to Atwell, Schopenhauer implies that human development is leading towards a single purpose, viz. that of the intellect and consciousness becoming increasingly aware of the nature of the will and denying it. This is the meaning of the statement that “nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist” (13). Elsewhere Schopenhauer writes that with greater knowledge intelligence ceases to be a tool of individual nature, i.e. animal nature, and turns away from existence with its ‘mere repetition and tedium through endless time’. And finally, and even more clearly, ‘the aim of all intelligence can only be a reaction to a will; but since all willing is error, the last work of intelligence is to abolish willing, whose aims and ends it had hitherto served’ (Schopenhauer 1969, V. II, 610).
Clearly Schopenhauer’s assertion of reason’s triumph over will is incoherent in that the will to live is the primary driver of human existence and conflict between will and reason (intelligence) is not a part of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. It lacks plausibility. As Janaway remarks, ‘does the world as a whole strive in order to reach its own non-existence?’ Rather it seems that ‘ultimate reality endlessly strives simply to be’ (Janaway 1999, 13). Indeed as Schopenhauer himself points out even the enlightened saints and dedicated ascetics have to wage a constant battle in order to overcome the allurements of will. How then does he expect human existence to come to an end as a result of increasing knowledge and intellectual advancement of mankind? This is an important point which needed more detailed consideration. As we shall see later Hartman, whose philosophy is in many ways indebted to Schopenhauer, puts forward the thesis of the grow
ing ascendancy of the intellect over the will in the course of evolution which will eventually lead to humanity’s self-annulment. But the conflict between will and reason is not something Schopenhauer cares to dwell on or develop. Since his philosophy has no place for history or human development this important issue relevant to the future of liberation remains unexplored. We shall take up this point later. For the moment we conclude this section by reiterating the point that Schopenhauer’s notion of liberation from existence is neither clear nor consistent. Moreover its practicality seems extremely limited. Does Hartmann have a better answer? We consider Hartmann’s philosophy next.
Eduard von Hartmann: Reason over Will
Hartmann’s philosophy has many similarities with that of Schopenhauer. For Hartmann, as for Schopenhauer, the pain and suffering involved in life far outweigh its pleasures. And for Hartmann too the evils of existence are fundamental and irremediable. He differs from Schopenhauer in that he looks for a collective rather than individual solution to overcoming existence. Secondly, unlike Schopenhauer he has an historical and evolutionary perspective on the process of world-transcendence (Hartmann 1884, V.III).
Hartmann interprets all living phenomena in terms of an underlying element - the Unconscious. It comprises the will or the non-logical element – the driving force - and reason or idea which is the logical element. With the evolution of the world process the logical element develops and becomes stronger. It is embodied in consciousness, which is most fully developed in man. For Hartmann it is the heightening of consciousness in the course of evolution and the increasing realization of the true nature of existence that is the key to emancipation. However before this stage can be reached humanity, the most conscious part of existence, has to go through a series of ‘illusions’ which keep it trapped in the cycle of existence. There are three stages or forms of illusions concerning happiness. The first is that well-being and happiness can be achieved in the here and now; the second is that earthly life is inherently evil in nature and can never satisfy but that there is life after death which will bring blissful immortality; the third illusion is that man can achieve mastery over the world and that material progress can lead to a happy and fulfilling existence. In short a better world can be attained in the future ( 12, 79, 94).