Part 12

But when we say “a world of appearances” we seem to hint at a something that appears, and appears not to the eye that follows the mechanical behavior of bodies in space and time but as revealed to the thought of one who asks: Wherefore this agitated phenomenon? Just as, watching my neighbor move and gesticulate, I ask myself: What is it all about? so, seeing Nature a-quiver, I ask myself: What does she mean? And just as my neighbor’s conduct is understood when I have caught the purpose, the motive that inspires it, so I may be expected to have reached the “real nature” of the fleeting world if I can but find the will which it expresses.

It is then the World as Will that profoundly interests Schopenhauer, as it has profoundly interested all men, from the most primitive that have implored the gods, to the most cautiously reflective who, like Kant, have felt confident of at least this much, that no definition of a good life was possible that did not postulate a world-purpose.

Now the plainest man can assure himself that there are enough--alas, too many--purposes to be found in nature for the looking. There are mine and yours, that of our country, of our human race, of other races too, for the lower animals have disputed the world with us, as the vegetables have disputed it with them. But when one asks oneself: What ultimate purpose is served by all this disputing for a foothold? then indeed one’s imagination is put to the test. There are too many purposes, there is too little purpose, to let this search for nature’s will with us end in a quick and happy finding.

All this is matter of common knowledge and common experience, yet how few have had the courage to give up hope in an ultimate happy finding, and how easily is this hope deceived with dreams, how willingly does it dispense with proof. Here indeed is the region in which “the heart has its reasons that the reason does not understand.” Well, it is Schopenhauer’s great act of courage that the purpose he was unable to find he refused to hope for; the reason that the reason could not understand he closed his heart to. Resolutely, he searched the dark corner and finally stared at the shadow.

“Everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict and alternation of victory.”

“Every kind of being fights for the matter, the space, and the time of the others. This strife may be followed throughout the whole of nature, but most distinctly in the animal kingdom. For the animals have the whole of the vegetable kingdom for their food, while within the animal kingdom every beast is the prey and food of another. So does the will to live everywhere prey upon itself till finally we come to the human race. This, because it subdues all others, regards nature as a manufactory of things for its use. Yet even the human race reveals within itself with terrible distinctness the same conflict; the same variance with itself of the will to live, and we cry homo homini lupus.”

This picture of universal warfare is the first scene in Schopenhauer’s world-tragedy; but it is far from the climax. It is in itself not even tragic, for is it not an aspect of nature that however much it may suggest of defeat and suffering it must reveal just as much of triumph and glory? For every victim a victor, and may we not suppose that some principle of justice awards the pains and pleasures of it all?

But no, Schopenhauer goes relentlessly on. The conqueror is crowned with vanity and his spoils are illusions:

“The inner being of nature is a striving without rest and without respite.... a willing and striving that may very well be compared to an unquenchable thirst. But since the basis of all willing is need, deficiency and thus pain, the nature of brute and man alike is originally and of its very essence subject to pain. If on the other hand, it is deprived of objects of desire through too easy satisfaction, such void and ennui fills the heart that existence becomes an unbearable burden to it. Thus life swings like a pendulum from pain to ennui, from ennui to pain.” And Schopenhauer finds an odd unconscious recognition of this truth in the popular imaginings concerning heaven and hell. “After man had transferred all pain and torments to hell,” he notes with an amused cynicism, “there then remained nothing but ennui to furnish heaven with.”

The survivor of the struggle for existence is on these terms hardly a being to be envied, and the “terque quaterque beati” must often come to his lips as he recalls those who have fallen. Indeed, it is exactly that place in the scale of existence which gives advantage in the struggle, that brings with it a consciousness of the vanity of this same struggle. It is exactly to man, who in his moment of pride has thought nature a “manufactory of things for his use,” that is given the most poignant sense of alternating hunger and satiety. This most necessitous of all beings “stands upon the earth, left to himself, uncertain about everything except his own lack and misery. Consequently the care for the maintenance of that existence under exacting demands which are renewed every day occupies as a rule the whole of human life. To this is directly related a second claim, the propagation of the species. Here he is threatened from all sides by the most different kinds of danger, from which it requires constant watchfulness to escape. With cautious steps and casting anxious glances around he pursues his path--thus he went as a savage, thus he goes in civilized life; and there is no security for him.

“Qualibus in tenebris vitae, quantisque periclis Degitur hoc oevi, quodcumquest.

“Life is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools which man avoids with the greatest care and solicitude, although he knows that even if he succeeds in getting through with all his efforts and skill, he comes thus but the nearer at every tack to the greatest, the total, the inevitable shipwreck, death.”

And Schopenhauer rounds off the whole with these lines, “Thus, between desiring and attaining all human life flows on. The wish is in its nature pain, the attainment ... satiety: the end is an illusion and possession takes away charm. The wish, the need, presents itself under a new form, or when it does not, follows desolateness, emptiness, ennui against which the conflict is just as painful as against want.” And just as the superior animal is the most suffering of all animals, so the superior man is the most suffering of all men. The calm joy of science, the pleasure of the beautiful, the delight in art--“these things demanding rare talents are granted to very few, and to those few only as a passing dream. And then even these few on account of their higher intellectual power are made susceptible of far greater suffering than duller minds can ever feel. Moreover such men are placed in lonely isolation by a nature obviously different from that of others, so that here too accounts are squared.”

As for the ordinary man, his being “is a weary longing and complaining, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death--accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts.”

“Every human being and his course of life is but another short dream of the endless spirit of nature, the persistent will to live; is only another fleeting form which [nature] carelessly sketches in its infinite pages ... allows to remain for a time so short it vanishes into nothing ... and then obliterates to make new room.”

* * * * *

From a previous passage touching on the life and character of Schopenhauer it may have been gathered that his was no very lovable personality. And being unlovable, it is not surprising that he was little loved; neither by wife nor child, which he had not; neither by mother nor sister, which he had and offended; nor yet by close friends which if he had for a moment he usually managed to estrange. It is true, perhaps, that his dog loved him, the inseparable poodle whom the children of the neighborhood used to call der junge Schopenhauer, for the tenderest side of Schopenhauer’s make-up was turned toward dumb animals. But the love of a dog is a poor substitute for all other loves, and it is not surprising that certain minds to whom optimism is a foregone conclusion should have dismissed Schopenhauer with the observation that to him who looks through clouded glasses the world must needs be dark.

If we are tempted to make this easy comment, we should remember the note that Schopenhauer is never tired of appending to his pages, the reminder that he stands not alone but is the expression of whole races and civilizations. He is heir to the deep pessimism of the East, of Brahminism, of Buddhism, that called life a “veil of illusion,” and figured one attached to its purposeless turning as “tied to the wheel of things.” He is the voice of that Christianity that fled to the desert, and hid itself in monasteries. He could repeat after the “Imitation of Christ,” “Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. The more spiritual a man desires to be, the more bitter does this life become to him; because he sees more clearly and perceives more sensibly the defects of human corruption. For to eat and to drink, to sleep and to watch, to labor and to rest, to be subject to the necessities of nature is a great misery and affliction to a religious man, who would gladly be set loose.”

No, Schopenhauer did not stand alone--the past was behind him, and as it proved the future ready for his message. Not merely among the technical philosophers is his influence to be traced, but in that sensitive expression of what is passing in the heart of his age--the artist. Never has art had the courage it now displays to conceive the tragedy of life as Schopenhauer thought it out--not indeed the drama of guilt and its punishment, the ideal of justice working itself out at the cost of individual pain. This is the older conception of tragedy--Schopenhauer would say it is not tragedy at all. To the modern conception tragedy lies in the perception that there is no justice in the world--only indifference, only chance, only stupidity. One might cite works of Flaubert, tales of Maupassant, pages of Anatole France; but most notable of all, pretty much the whole literary output of Thomas Hardy, that tireless recorder of “Life’s Little Ironies,” that bold acknowledger of crass casualty as the only god of things. Schopenhauer does not stand alone against a background of forgotten gloom if one may still hear the voice of nature questioning as Hardy heard it:

“When I look forth at dawning, pool, Field, flock, and lonely tree All seem to look at me Like chastened children sitting silent in a school.

“Their faces dulled, constrained and worn, As though the master’s ways Through the long teaching days Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne.

“And on them stirs, in lippings mere (As if once in clear call, But now scarce breathed at all) ‘We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here.

“‘Has some vast Imbecility Mighty to build and blend But impotent to tend Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardy?’

“Thus things around. No answer I ...”

It is time we come to the question: What then? Life is a misery, and then what?

“The door is open,” said Marcus Aurelius. “The door is open, if the house is smoky, leave it.” It is the solution of antiquity, and Schopenhauer himself finds it much more reasonable than most of the reasons that have been urged against it. Yet it is not through this easily opened door that he sees a way of escape from the ironic will to live. If that will had a date and a local habitation, then indeed to kill the body in which it dwelt would put an end to the monster. But such is not the case. Among the accidents of time and space you happen to be one; but had you not been one, or were you no longer one, the game would play itself out by the same rules, only another pawn would be on the spot that was yours. Now the evil of the game is not that you happen to be one of the pieces, but rather that it should be played at all. Not the pawn, but the player must be killed, and the player is always that brutal Will to Live, pitted against itself, winning as it loses and losing as it wins. Step out of it if you will, what does he care? But stay in it, and by doing your part not with but against him you may not only emancipate yourself but have your share in putting an end to the game itself. What is this part to be played by each against the Will to Live? We shall come to Schopenhauer’s account of it in due time, meanwhile it is certainly not the impatient gesture of self-destruction.

From the past again comes another answer to the question: What then? It takes the form of a wine song, and we catch its refrain from the lips of singer after singer. “Another and another cup,” cries Omar, “to drown the memory of this insolence.”

Well, for this solution too Schopenhauer has his sympathy. Not for the wine that is red, to be sure,--its intoxication is too brief, the awakening too bitter--but for the wine of beauty wherever it is to be found in nature or in art. It is most natural that Schopenhauer--for whom the woe of life springs from the possession of an aggressive, fighting selfhood--should have looked for solace to that beauty in which, we say, we forget ourselves, before which we stand rapt. The effect every one knows--the cause? That was Schopenhauer’s peculiar contribution to the theory of the beautiful. In a word his explanation is this. We forget our own individuality with all its torment, because we are seduced by the beauty of the thing we look at to forget its individuality.