The only winning move is not to play

Trying on Schopenhauer's philosophy

The Book:

The World As Will and Representation, Vol. 1
By Arthur Schopenhauer
Translated by E. F. J. Payne
First Published in German in 1819

The Talk:

In his 1819 book The World As Will and Representation, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer lays out his philosophical worldview. He attempts to resolve (or at least reframe) some of the core problems of Western philosophy into one coherent description of reality: Why does the external world seem illusory? Why do I feel like a unified self when I am made up of parts? Why does my will feel free even as my actions seem obviously determined? Why is there pain and suffering? And why does it feel unjust? How is it that I know I will die but live as if I’m immortal?

Last August I wrote about Thomas Nagel’s book The View from Nowhere. Nagel similarly runs through these problems of the “inner” and the “outer.” He thinks these problems are currently unresolvable (barring scientific breakthrough) and so we must live in the “absurd.”

One must arrange somehow to see the world both from nowhere and from here, and to live according.

Schopenhauer’s approach is to argue that the the inner and the outer are one and the same. The external world is not external but rather the universal will perceiving itself. The world is “will” (the subject) and “representation” (the object). There is no causality between the two. For example, Schopenhauer writes, “My body is the objectivity of my will.” When I observe my body, I’m perceiving my will. And when I see plants grow or ocean waves crash or planets collide, I’m observing the representation of the will that is everything.

May the Will be with you¹

The will for Schopenhauer follows no reason or logic. It’s outside all categories: It has no past, no future. As mentioned before, it is not a cause. It never begins or stops. It has no purpose or goal or end. It is free because it is free of all categories. Reason, in the form of the principle of sufficient reason (as defined in a previous work by Schopenhauer), perceives the will and sorts it into categories like time and space, past and future, cause and effect.

Just as a magic lantern shows many different pictures, but it is only one and the same flame that makes them all visible, so in all the many different phenomena which together fill the world or supplant one another as successive events, it is only the one will that appears, and everything is its visibility, its objectivity; it remains unmoved in the midst of this change.

Schopenhauer gives the example of gravity. A rock on the ground presses toward the center of gravity. It can be opposed, but it never stops pressing. It could press for a billion years and never quit. The whole universe could collapse into a point and gravity would still go on pressing inward forever. Science can only tell us how it does so or why (causally) it does so. It can describe the logical structure of this force, insofar as science is a working out of the principle of sufficient reason—but that’s all it can do.

In the biological world, a plant pushes and pushes. To what end? To create a seed. A seed that will push and push to create another seed. And on and on. There’s no goal but more pushing. It is, for Schopenhauer, the force behind all of life that goes on forever, never reaching an end, with no goal but to keep pushing. This is the same will that pushes within us to keep going as long as we live, to procreate, to survive, with no other purpose than to keep striving. We are no different than plants; we can simply see the inside of the process inside ourselves, and what we see we call will. If a plant could observe itself from the inside, Schopenhauer argues, it would observe exactly what we observe in ourselves.

In traditional philosophical conceptions, our will follows from our reason. We have beliefs, and those beliefs give rise to actions. But for Schopenhauer, these are decoupled and reversed. Our reason attempts to predict more or less accurately what our will will do. The will then does. And our reason explains our will’s actions more or less satisfactorily.

Knowledge factors into what our will decides to do in pursuit of fulfilling its desires in a given situation (this is what perception is for, of course) but that knowledge is simply in service to the will, not its guide. Moreover, the will certainly doesn’t require knowledge and will continue on without it:

Even in us the same will in many ways acts blindly; as in all those functions of our body which are not guided by knowledge, in all its vital and vegetative processes, digestion, circulation, secretion, growth, and reproduction.

The princess is in another castle

All suffering in the universe follows from this endless striving will. From within the individual, the universal will strives toward whatever it can (the aim doesn’t really matter). When it achieves its desire, it is briefly satisfied, only to find the satisfaction was empty. And it either finds a new desire, a new thing to suffer toward, or it sinks into boredom, which is just another blind grasping for some kind of desire to pursue.

Schopenhauer gives the image of a man running in a circle which contains long stretches of hot coals broken up by brief patches of cooler ones. The man is spurred by the hot coals to run faster to the cool ones, while the cool ones give the man just enough relief to run across the next stretch of hot coals.

He also describes life like a beggar who gets enough food today so he can beg tomorrow. We receive relief from our pains only so we can suffer again tomorrow. But what’s worse, we actively seek out the suffering of desire. Not desiring anything is as intolerable—perhaps even more intolerable—than desiring something.

So what’s the solve? How can we be happy or at least at peace in an existence where we are the will that makes us suffer?

According to Schopenhauer, the most practical option for most of us is to make our lives a series of easily achieved desires satisfied in quick succession. In this way, we shorten our suffering and boredom, while maximizing the frequency of (fleeting) satisfaction. Schopenhauer writes:

It is fortunate enough when something to desire and to strive for still remains, so that the game may be kept up of the constant transition from desire to satisfaction, and from that to a fresh desire, the rapid course of which is called happiness, the slow course sorrow…

Interestingly, this is the basic principle behind the design of many games today. Like Mario, just think of designing your life as coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin coin.

It’s no solution, but it’s a way to get by.

Even so, Schopenhauer decried in his own day the popularity of card games, which he judged as a bad way to escape boredom.

But this need for exciting the will shows itself particularly in the invention and maintenance of card-playing, which is in the truest sense an expression of the wretched side of humanity.

The wretchedness of games is (I think) that it’s like giving yourself little pains, little agonies on purpose, creating little struggles out of thin air just to avoid the misery of boredom. Schopenhauer may also have in mind gambling, too, in which we voluntarily put ourselves into anxiety for entertainment purposes. Draft Kings, anyone?

Rest is resistance

Schopenhauer cautions up front that his philosophy provides no prescription for behavior.

Now my philosophy is certainly not so ordered that anyone could live by it.

It is only later in the book that it becomes clear why. To do something is to activate the will. To activate the will is to fire up the very thing you’re trying to overcome. To will against the will is only to end up with the will as conqueror, which ever side wins.

Schopenhauer describes this in relation to the Lutheran theological idea of salvation by faith. There is no salvation by works because all our works are de facto in service to our will. Salvation is only possible through surrender of the will, denial of the will, renunciation of the will. And this is only possible through faith (i.e. knowledge) as given by grace (from outside ourselves). Of course there are no other options!

Those who are familiar with Zen Buddhism² will recognize this matches up, almost point for point: Doing nothing, we open ourselves to a state of pure perception in which we, effortlessly and without trying, receive enlightenment, i.e., true awareness of ourselves and reality, which is coextensive with a total cessation of striving and, thus, suffering.

Most importantly, the more you strive for enlightenment, the further away you get. Or, alternatively, you must strive so hard so that you realize the futility and thus reach enlightenment that way.

The will itself cannot be abolished by anything except knowledge.

According to Schopenhauer, we can experience these moments of will-less perception briefly throughout our life, if we are dispositionally open to them. When we experience the natural world in a contemplative way, not seeing it as material for our desires, but as representation, we find our will automatically quiets, our sense of self melts away, and we experience equanimity, serenity, or awe. Perhaps today we call this mindfulness.

Schopenhauer also identifies these moments in art, not when art stirs up our desire, but when it leads to a kind of objective, disinterested, observation of the world. When we look at a still-life painting, for example, we find it absorbing but in a calming way³.

Some poetry and music also offer, in a way that we can contemplate, a representation that gives us relief, albeit only temporarily. Schopenhauer’s theory of art is too complex to get into here, but at least part of what art gives us is representation without will. We see the representation of the world minus the will, and in this there is rest.

At the same time, the world as representation, if we consider it in isolation, by tearing ourselves from willing, and letting it alone take possession of our consciousness, is the most delightful, and the only innocent, side of life.

Nevertheless, most stories and music and games portray what we cannot enjoy in life—a final satisfaction. Schopenhauer says that every story shows people striving, struggling, grasping for an aim and then reaching it. And then the curtain must come down because otherwise we’d discover the goal led on to further suffering and another pointless journey would ensue. (All episodic comedy shows, if they go on for enough seasons, eventually reach this kind of hell-like horror.) In this way, all art seems to lie, insofar as it is representational.

This is the way

Schopenhauer would say that the ability to experience these moments of relief in nature and art is uncommon. One can’t live in that state forever. And yet these moments of will-less perception point the way to a more complete road to salvation, what Schopenhauer calls “the serious side of life.”

Even as the will-to-life (the drive to procreate and survive) pushes us on, the suffering it causes calls us to resignation. The pleasures of life keep us willing, keep spurring on our desires. But if we embrace the suffering that comes our way, says Schopenhauer—perceive it, know it—we can cease the striving.

Sometimes the suffering of an individual is so great that this transformation into total resignation occurs on its own; otherwise, this path is rarely attempted, and only completely achieved in the world’s greatest saints and mystics. In figures like Jesus and the Buddha, we see figures who have turned away from all worldly pleasures and fully embraced their own suffering—the full resignation. What they offer to the world as salvation is knowledge of ultimate reality identical with the complete resignation of the will, the final cessation of all suffering.

The ultimate reality that saints and mystics perceive directly is that we are all one will. Your neighbor is yourself. Your enemy is you. As Schopenhauer puts it, “Tormentor and tormented are one.” From this flows the will-denying, ascetic precepts in the Christian and Indian traditions.

We find commanded in the Apostles love for our neighbor as for ourselves, returning of hatred with love and good actions, patience, meekness, endurance of all possible affronts and injuries without resistance, moderation of eating and drinking for suppressing desire, resistance to the sexual impulse, even complete if possible for us.

In the Hindu tradition we see:

…it ordains love of one’s neighbour with complete denial of all self-love; love in general, not limited to the human race, but embracing all that lives; charitableness even to the giving away of one’s hard-won daily earnings; boundless patience towards all offenders; return of all evil, however bad it may be, with goodness and love; voluntary and cheerful endurance of every insult and ignominy; abstinence from all animal food; perfect chastity and renunciation of all sensual pleasure for him who aspires to real holiness; the throwing away of all property; the forsaking of every dwelling-place of all kinsfolk…

In both traditions we see the welcoming of suffering and the rejection of pleasure as the path of salvation.

And yet, as our will is defeated by knowledge, the will fights back harder and harder—temptation increases, suffering increases, Jesus goes to the cross. All allurements, all attachments must ultimately be personified as the devil. (Get behind me, Satan.) But then, at last, in the final renunciation of the will-to-life, the will is defeated for good⁴.

The will is the self. The will is also the world. The will is endless suffering. When the will is defeated, the self, the world, and all suffering are defeated in the same event. Behold, I have overcome the world.

But we should be clear-eyed about the salvation on offer here: The annihilation of the self and the world. The escape from the cycle of suffering is the escape to nothingness. The final salvation is the destruction of the world.

No will; no representation; no world.

The crucifixion is the apocalypse.

How about a nice game of chess?

It is at the point, in the final chapters of Schopenhauer’s book, that what he means exactly is unclear to me.

On the one hand, this enlightenment only occurs at the individual level. It cannot be transferred, as it is nothing but perception. Philosophy can conceptualize it, but it can’t make anyone see it. Reading Schopenhauer’s book doesn’t give the wisdom that Schopenhauer presents. In some Zen traditions, the experience of enlightenment is passed on from teacher to student but not conceptually. You can’t read it in a book. You can know the ideas, the concepts, and not have it. (Similarity, in Christianity, “saving knowledge” is not intellectually transferable.)

In Schopenhauer’s final estimation, there is individual salvation—but it is extremely rare. A thing you read about but never experience yourself.

On the other hand, if the reality is that I am the world, and the world is myself, then Jesus is me, and I am Jesus. (Some of his sayings suggest as much.) My life is the life of the world, and every saint and mystic’s will is my own, as I am every saint and mystic (as well as every mass murderer, despot, con artist, and crank) even though I do not perceive it, do not truly know it.

So the salvation of nothingness is not achievable for me—but already is so?

The final two sentences of the book (volume one) read:

On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete absolution of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is—nothing.

Related:

Schopenhauer explains it all

Wisdom is seeking wisdom: Dogen's contemplative path

Robert Frost and the darkness

Similarity, difference, and Plato's Timaeus

1. This is gonna sound crazy, but in my opinion one is not too far off if one thinks of the will like the Force in Star Wars, primarily because Schopenhauer draws heavily on Eastern philosophy and religion, which also inspires the mystical pastiche of the films. If there’s a moral to the Star Wars universe, it’s that the Force always balances, and that the project of the Jedi is folly. As the imagined universe grows larger and larger, all victories for the good guys become ever more temporary and ironic. The battle between light and dark becomes both pointless and endless.

2. Schopenhauer draws heavily on the Vedas and Upanishads and other Indian sources. I am not as familiar with these. (Something I want to learn much more about) Apologies for the reliance on the Eastern philosophy I know better.

3. It makes me wonder what Schopenhauer would’ve made of Rothko.

4. The meaning of Jesus’ death is elucidated by considering what it would mean if Jesus had committed suicide. It wouldn’t have meant anything at all. Instead, Jesus offered himself up to death, deliberately walking into a trap and refusing multiple obvious exits, which seems only a hair’s breadth of difference from suicide. And yet in suicide, the will conquers; in the crucifixion, the will is conquered.