Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy by Neiman Susan

Author:Neiman, Susan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

SCHOPENHAUER: THE WORLD AS TRIBUNAL

Consider Schopenhauer as exclamation point. He was out of touch with his times, a century he saw scrambling to get rid of Kant and drink to Leibniz (Schopenhauer 1:510). Kant gave metaphysical expression to crisis and fracture. Those following him sought to heal it. Old models of Providence could not survive attacks like those of Hume and Sade. Struggling to articulate those attacks, the late eighteenth century showed its awareness that those models had broken down. The nineteenth century, by contrast, struggled to find a replacement for them. In the process, thinkers tried everything from history to economics to biology. No wonder Schopenhauer felt out of place. In an age bent on inventing whole sciences to detect signs of progress, his vision of a cosmic trend toward self-destruction was bound to be ignored.

Schopenhauer’s dry elegance masks a despair so thoroughgoing that it may even remain untimely for darker epochs. In all of his writings,

[l]ife presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desireable the object was; hence we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions, when we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by them. Accordingly happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. (Schopenhauer, 2:573)

His work was devoted to showing that suffering is the essence of existence. Only the form of the pain is a matter of accident. Our lives move between pain and boredom; we are pushed toward the one in an effort to avoid the other. These elements of reality are so fundamental that we even project them into that afterworld in which Schopenhauer had no faith.

[A]fter man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom. (Schopenhauer, 1:312)

Schopenhauer was casual about the means he used to establish his claims. He was happy to blend empirical observation and a priori argument, happiest of all when he could present some perverse contradiction built into the nature of things. He was convinced that all these support him.

He was well aware of those who preceded him. Though his plans to translate Hume’s Dialogues came to naught, he was full of praise for Voltaire. His gratitude toward his predecessors was matched by his lack of mercy toward the views he opposed. He called Rousseau’s work the superficial philosophy of a Protestant pastor (Schopenhauer, 2:585). Everything was fuel for his fire. To anyone who viewed the sexual impulse as a sign of harmony between human and natural purposes, he offered alternatives. He maintained that the sexual impulse is “the real lord of the world.

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