You Will Laugh and Cry
Whereas Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel could all count as optimists, believing that human life could improve, Schopenhauer is the first—and perhaps the last—thinker in the Western tradition to have constructed a complete and systematic philosophy of pessimism.
Despite, or because of, this, he may also have been its funniest philosopher.
He is interesting for other reasons too—some of which are close to my heart. 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 continued: ‘He was the first major Western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and had 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 Epigrams
To give you a flavour, here are a few of Schopenhauer’s 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.
Probably, you chuckled while reading these aphorisms. But why did you chuckle?
Why You Laughed
Schopenhauer had 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 the 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 insight. 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 drives us to exist and strive and suffer 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.
Why Schopenhauer Matters
To me, Schopenhauer is important because he is the first philosopher since antiquity to offer a comprehensive solution to the problem of living and suffering.
As well as a great philosopher, Schopenhauer was a fine psychologist, so that we often find ourselves laughing along with him. But almost as often, we find ourselves laughing at him, owing, I think, to the incongruence between his lofty philosophy of temperance and compassion and his own bad-boy ways.
Had Schopenhauer met himself, he would have laughed.
Continue Exploring
Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought. The German Greeks explores his philosophy alongside those of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, tracing the remarkable development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to modernity.
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