On the Suffering in the World PDF

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A summary of Schopenhauer's "On the Suffering of the World"...

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On the Suffering in the World -

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(1)“If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence it the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental” – this seems to be a tragic manifesto (1)“Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence, but misfortune in general is the rule” (1)“if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted”, consciousness is a negation of will, suffering is the reminder of existence (2)“the negativity of well-being and happiness, in antithesis to the positivity of pain” – is this at odds with the assertion life is suffering, or perhaps it suggests that suffering is that which is active about our minds, that which brings us to life, it is almost not pessimistic (2)“good” is the “mere abolition of a desire” – seems to have a Christian heritage, requires us to negate the will in order to achieve the “good”, does this go against the tragic idea that the “good” is what requires moral work, requires positive attitude, and evil is what we descend into? Or perhaps tragedy dramatizes more than just evil, it dramatizes bad (as un-good), whereas evil is something positive at the other end of the moral spectrum (think of Miranda who thinks that he slips into his evil) (3)“The most effective consolation in every misfortune and every affliction is to observe others who are more unfortunate than we” (4) Time “ceases to persecute only him it has delivered over to boredom” (5) “we require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, in order to keep on a straight course” Without suffering – “how would they pass the time?” – how does Gerardo pass the time? Is it as noble as he believes? Schopenhauer’s mistake in his envisaging of the Utopia of ennui is to assume that suffering is inherent at not contingent – we cannot conceptualise such a life, suggesting that suffering and violence is inherent seems more a consolation to the fact that it is pervasive, than a philosophical fact, people do not have all they want, so want to believe that if they did life wouldn’t be better (6)It is not true that our passionate suffering is to achieve only “health, food, covering” – we have created larger griefs, loss, jealousy, despair, disappointment Does tragedy corroborate Schopenhauer’s claim that the highest suffering is selfconsciousness and worries of perception? “The animal’s life consequently contains less suffering but also less pleasure than the human’s, the direct reason being that on the one hand it is free from care and anxiety and the torments that attend them, but on the other is without hope and therefore has no share in that anticipation of a happy future” – a lot of tragic representations of suffering can be accessed by the simple question, were it better to have been a beast, or to not have been at all? 7 – “the reason man’s life is more full of suffering than the animal’s is his greater capacity for knowledge” – Schopenhauer repackages a Christian idea: knowledge leads to the fall, but for Schopenhauer man is inherently postlapsarian – it is an idea seen before Christianity in “Knowledge is in itself always painless” 8 – In likening the opening of the theatre curtains to the start of adult life, Schopenhauer subtly suggests every tragedy to be a loss of innocence, and thus a presentation of the very

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knowledge on which suffering is conditioned. In this way, tragic performance is not merely a representation of cruelty, it is a cruelty itself “Sentenced to life” – sounds pretty familiar, better to have not been born at all, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune 9 – “life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness” Elsewhere he is inverting Christian moral paradigms – sex is sinful when used for procreation, rather than when for pure pleasure For Schopenhauer, the age-old atheistic problem of evil is a “dissonance that cannot be resolved” “our existence resembles nothing so much as the consequence of a misdeed, punishment for a forbidden desire” Schopenhauer suggests that such realisations should encourage “indulgence” in the caprice of one another – tragedy’s response to this, however, seems not to encourage indulgence, since this is a behaviour directly opposed to judgement, if we indulge an act we learn nothing from it

On Affirmation and Denial of the Will to Live -

The world spirit says to us in aside “should I tell him that the value of life lies precisely in this, that it teaches him not to want it?” - this small piece of drama is an illuminating one, tragedy can be an aside from the playwright to the audience, the characters often not hearing it

World as Will and Representation -

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On tragedy: “The unspeakable pain, the wail of humanity, the triumph of evil, the scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and innocent” – are these things that tragedy upholds? Is tragedy useful if pain is unspeakable? Is it useful if evil will triumph? Is it useful if our fall is irretrievable? If morality takes work, can we not work at it? Schopenhauer shows that such doctrines as the labour of morality are inherently optimistic, they imply continuously changing struggles, fortunes and successes, not irreparable damage Tragedy is the representation of “knowledge, purified and heightened by suffering itself, [such that it] reaches the point at which the phenomenon…no longer deceives it. It sees through the form of the phenomenon, the principum individuationis The egoism which rests on this perishes with it, so that now the motives that were so powerful before have lost their might, and instead of them the complete knowledge of the nature of the world, which has a quieting effect on the will, produces resignation, the surrender not merely of life, but of the very will to live” – tragedy is ultimately a negation of will, of will to life In tragedy we are shown so many figures who actually want to rehearse suffering – Paulina, Horatio, Richard II “The true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight, that it is not his own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin i.e. the crime of existence itself” Schopenhauer articulates a familiar feeling, that there is something more tragic about the everyday than about “rare circumstances or monstrous characters” – of course, in this sense modern tragedy will always benefit from a closeness to its audience, an ability to reproduce more exactly a set of circumstances an audience member might recognise to their horror Schopenhauer went to the theatre every day, thus it is unsurprising that for him the theatre was an apt metaphor for everyday life: “The life of every individual, if we survey it as a whole and in general, and only lay stress upon its most significant features, is really always a

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tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy. For the deeds and vexations of the day, the restless irritation of the moment, the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all through chance, which is ever bent upon some jest, scenes of a comedy” Schopenhauer expresses the value that poetry and music have in terms of their internationality, their ability to travel through nations – they must, to him then, express something universal, something that transcends the western tragic ideal “If only the true is beautiful, and the most cherished adornment of truth is nakedness, then an idea which appears great and beautiful in prose will have more true worth than one that has the same effect in verse” – should the prosaic move us more since it is more familiar? Echoes earlier Schopenhauerian claims Tragedy is the sublime, because we “turn away from the will-to-live itself”, “every tragedy demands an existence of an entirely different kind, a different world, the knowledge of which can always be given to us only indirectly” “At the moment of the tragic catastrophe, we become convinced more clearly than ever that life is a bad dream from which we have to awake” Because it raises us “above the will and its interest…we find pleasure in the sight of what directly opposes the will” – this might be adopted into a tyrannical view of tragedy, which would have us subjugate ourselves and which furnishes us with the resources of despair necessary to do so Tragedy shows that the world can “afford us no true satisfaction” – “In this the tragic spirit consists…it leads to resignation” – what about political tragedy? Death and the Maiden is asking us to ask questions, it agitates, can texts not live twin lives? Also a resignation to what? One must have a philosophy or fate to resign oneself to – is t simply the pervasiveness and inevitability of continual suffering Schopenhauer, like Nietzsche, views tragedy from a teleological perspective: it has a “summit and goal”, one which for Schopenhauer is achieved in the present day, and for Nietzsche lay in the days before Euripides Tragedy shows the spectator “the vanity of all its efforts and endeavours” For Schopenhauer tragedy is at its most tragic when “no Christians or even Christian sentiments appear in it” – why? Perhaps because, even if Schopenhauer’s idea of tragedy reproduces the original sin and thus life as punishment for man’s inherent sinfulness, Christianity wrongly provides a route to redemption; while man’s will must be eventually dissolved in the universal Godly will Comedy, conversely, invites the “continued affirmation of the will” “Tragedy, as a rule, ends so that nothing can follow”

Beautiful and Sublime -

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To Schopenhauer, you can contemplate something while turned away from the will, it is not necessary to contemplation (but what of thoughts based on desires, and desires on will?) surely thought is conscious and all consciousness is will? In any case, the sublime is that which has you turn away from the will, but focus not on this hostility but rather on the object that produces it, and “gladly” too, it is explicitly pleasurable, yet how can one feel pleasure disassociated from the will? To Schopenhauer as well as Nietzsche his progeny, tragic knowledge, as sublime knowledge, is knowledge of the Idea, “pure subject of knowledge without even a remembrance of will”, directly oppose to “knowledge with sufficient reason”, something akin to Nietzsche’s idea of Socratism, yet for Nietzsche this knowledge is not merely the opposite, it is positively

harmful, something which seeks to destroy tragedy – for Nietzsche tragedy is under siege from scientific reasoning,

Kierkegaard and Shakespeare -

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Kierkegaard wrote that Hamlet illustrated to him the “all-consuming power of original sin” (Journals) This is important to our understanding of moral identification in tragedy – different times valorise different abstentions, such that Kierkegaard found in Hamlet a nobility in sexual abstinence with Ophelia In Fear and Trembling: Thanks the man who “proffers to the man whom the sorrows of life have assaulted and left naked…the figleaf of the word with which he can cover his wretchedness” – this is thanks to Shakespeare “A poet is not an apostle, he casts out devils only by the power of the devil” Kierkegaard’s motto for “new Danish philosophy” was: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Journals) – again, there is knowledge that by definition should not be had Ruoff demonstrates how Kierkegaard reads “his own childhood agonies into Shakespeare’s story of Richard [III]” – for example assuming he was always a “subject of pity” Ruoff: Kierkegaard believes Macbeth is driven post-murder not by “ambition but by guilt, by sheer energy of despair”, a sort of will to self-destruction Kierkegaard finds in Shakespeare “haunting expressions of his own perplexed existence” – is this the idea reader of tragedy? Fear and Trembling: Tragedy is “a dialectical within the context of morality”, and thus there can be no “teleological suspension of the ethical” as with Abraham’s order to kill Isaac – yet do the Greeks not stage conflicts between moral codes? Abraham is dealing with two moral codes from the same source, God, but Orestes too is dealing with the two moral codes Ruoff on Kierkegaard “In contrast to Abraham, the tragic hero does not enter into a personal relationship with divinity; for the tragic hero, the ethical is divinity” – how to square this with Nussbaum who splits up Greek ideas of absolute (divine) and contingent (human) moral codes Ruoff argues Kierkegaard considers tragedy to be “essentially ethical” Yet, for Kierkegaard, the highest tragedy is that which promotes “ambiguous innocence”, which is “truly tragic”, what Ruoff describes as to “bear an appalling guilt that is not her own” (in Antigone’s case) – now this is familiar ground to Schopenhauer, tragedy shows life as punishment Is evil, as Ruoff has Kierkegaard believe, “ethical, not an aesthetic category” “Kierkegaard urges…that any such illusion of moral autonomy in the hero precludes the realities of God, family, and society, and must therefore be comedy, farce, or melodrama” (interesting to look at in relation to Die Verwandlung, in which all these forces are dramatised “he read Shakespeare’s plays as dramatizations of life, not as religious allegories, and in Shakespeare’s plays he came face to face with himself, not with God” – again, who is the ideal reader? For Schopenhauer, seeing tragedy as a reflection of the self would surely be unforgivable

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Kierkegaard: “Shakespeare himself seems to have shrunk back from the genuinely religious collisions. Perhaps these can only be expressed in the language of the gods. And this language no man can speak”

Fear and Trembling -

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“Just as the recognition is the resolving, the relaxing element in dramatic life, so hiddenness is the tension-creating factor” “Greek tragedy is blind. Therefore it takes a certain abstraction if one is to be influenced by it properly”, because the fate at the end of the play disappears into its “dark, mysterious source” In modern tragedy, “Hiddenness and disclosure…are the hero’s free act, for which he is responsible” The tragic hero distinguishes himself from the comic in hiding something ”related to the idea” rather than just “some nonsense” – is Kierkegaard’s “idea” the same as Schopenhauer’s, something connected to individuality, Esthetic – immersion in sensuous experience, possibility over actuality, egotism, flight from boredom. The aesthete seeks to recreate the world in his own romantically imaginative image. Provoking through irony where necessary in order to stimulate their surroundings. Ethical – In Either/Or KW III – “the very mark of my genius is that Governance broadens and radicalizes whatever concerns me personally”, again, the ideal reader of tragedy, and the ideal tragedy, is that which appeals to the universal – his self-presentation, or lack thereof, is in stark contrast to Nietzsche, who practices what phenomenologists now would call bracketing, creating a subjectivity within The Birth of Tragedy that discloses itself in its entirety, but simultaneously hints to something hidden, in the end both are interested in similar presentations of hiddenness, and require the reader to perform the recognition (anagnoriosis), their dramatic style creates its own tragedy Kierkegaard in his journals describes his attempts to deseduce Regina Olsen, and the despair of learning that “she has faith in me”, a god trying to shake the faith of its people seems to be an apt analogue to Schopenhauer’s idea of tragedy, which would have us ultimately resigned to meaninglessness, and willed away from life In the preface, the pseudonymous Johannes de Silentio speaks of “politeness and modesty”, of a silent questioning of philosophers that push doubt to its limits, a questioning that Johannes restrains from verbalising. In fact the preface is littered with references to “modesty” and to the quietude of the good philosopher such as Descartes “It is proper to say that every duty is essentially duty to God, but if no more can be said than this, then it is also said that I actually have no duty to God”, interestingly, the original Danish is not “it is proper to say” but “Man har derfor Rett at sige”, which could more closely be translate as “one is therefore right to say” – but the Hong translation uses the term “proper”, as a closer glossing to Kierkegaard’s text, which speaks to the concern with modesty, with a subtle hint that what Johannes presents as truth is but the modest kernel of a deeper truth, or even the modest opposite of an immodest truth. These possibilities need not be Kierkegaard’s intention; in any case, they demonstrate a coyness through confidence that anticipates Nietzsche Kierkegaard does not explain esthetics, but it would seem from Problema III that esthetics refers to an aesthetic logic within the universe of a tragedy corresponding to aesthetic logic within the audience, such that a sentimental action is rewarded justly with the object of sentiment, a lover with their object of love. Ethics is that which “does not trifle with

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dignities”, which “enjoins believing in actuality and having courage to do battle with all the sufferings of actuality”, it builds slowly as the real as opposed to aesthetics which represents the ideal. Here Kierkegaard’s subtle underpinning of silent, modest decorum is complicated: ethics demanded he disclosure and punished the hiddenness” In a sort of dialectical way, tragedy demanded both and they conflicted, and the result is doom “Silence is the demon’s trap, and the more that is silenced, the more terrible the demon, but silence is also divinity’s mutual understanding with the single individual” “if I cannot make myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking”, “The relief provided by speaking is that it translates me into the universal” presumably by turning idea into understood

Two Ages -

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One’s “speaking and producing are, in fact, born of silence”, and one’s “personal actuality” is not one’s “legitimate literary property”; “the ideal perfection of what he says and what he produces will correspond to his silence” – if Kierkegaard writes this as a critic of tragedy, does he suggest a responsibility on the ideal reader of tragedy not to project themselves into their discourse? This does not seem in line with existentialist thinking “the holy modesty of ideality” –these are interesting terms to couch the importance of selfdisclosure, for they make reference to the sort of innocence Schopenhauer would have the audience lose when watching a tragedy

Salter – Schopenhauer’s contact with theology -

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defines theology as “reasoned treatment of the first principles of things” – does this hold up? “A philosophy that does not cope with the intimate and deep-lying difficulties that theology attempts to solve is hardly philosophy at all” “Theology” becomes a term that might start to appeal to Schopenhauer scholars, here Salter uses it to describe Nietzsche, who is “comparable to theology” despite being “antitheological” The usefulness of the term for Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard is the appreciation of different orders of knowledge, some accessible and some not, and a recognition of the usefulness of metaphors such as original sin to describe what life and suffering feels like – it is a useful way of separating the use of Christian imagery and metaphors from a subscription to the...