Whereas Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel could count as optimists, Schopenhauer is the first (and last) thinker in all Western philosophy to have constructed a complete and systematic pessimism.

But he is interesting for other reasons too. For his Great Philosophers series (1987), Bryan Magee, who wrote a thick book on Schopenhauer, introduced him as “the only major Western philosopher to draw serious and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought.” 

Magee continues: “He was the first major Western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and more to say about them than any other important philosopher … He was himself among the supreme writers of German prose. Many of his sentences are so brilliantly aphoristic that they’ve been torn out of context and published separately in little books of epigrams.”

Schopenhauer’s humorous epigrams

To give you a flavour, here are a few of his many epigrams:

• Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
• Life is a business that does not cover its costs.
• The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain… 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.
• What everyone most aims at in ordinary contact with his fellows is to prove them inferior to himself.
• Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
• It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

Here’s why you laughed, according to Schopenhauer himself

Probably, you chuckled while reading these aphorisms. But why did you chuckle? Schopenhauer has his own theory of laughter, which is a version of the incongruence theory, according to which laughter arises from a contradiction between a concept (what people think is happening) and its reality (what is in fact happening)—highlighting a failure of reason over perception. Thus, when people laugh at us (rather than along with us) they are filling the gap between our idea of ourself, or people’s general idea of us, and the sad reality.

Many people who read Schopenhauer’s aphorisms laugh only half-heartedly, because they feel threatened by them. But the few who laugh full-throatedly feel liberated by their truth. In this moment of pure perception, while they laugh, they escape, if only for a few seconds, from the tyranny of the Will—the blind, irrational force that, in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, underlies all reality, and forces us to exist and strive without purpose.

Schopenhauer’s theory of weeping

Schopenhauer also had a theory of weeping. Weeping, which is a physical expression of mental misery, is a form of self-compassion. As such, it requires an outside perspective on the self, which is why animals don’t cry, and children don’t cry if no one is watching. Schopenhauer cites the example of a person who did not think to weep over their misery until their case was summarised to them in court and they were brought to reflect upon their suffering—when they suddenly broke into a stream of tears.

When we weep, we become “both the sufferer and the compassionate onlooker.” Because weeping originates from self-compassion, it suggests to others that the crier is capable of compassion, and thus worthy of compassion. Psychopaths don’t cry, or only crocodile tears.

A final reason why Schopenhauer is funny

To me, Schopenhauer is important also because he is the first since antiquity to offer a comprehensive solution to the problem of living and suffering. As well as a great philosopher, he was a fine psychologist, so that we often find ourself laughing along with him. But almost as often, we find ourself laughing at him, owing, I think, to the incongruence between his lofty philosophy of temperance and compassion and his own bad boy ways.