Schopenhauer: not the creature who suffers but the creature who wants

The easiest sentence anyone can write about Schopenhauer is this one: "The pessimist who saw life as suffering."

True. And it says almost nothing.

What Schopenhauer was doing was not pessimism. It was an attack on the roots of a picture Western philosophy had defended for centuries: the human being as rational, orderly and self-governing.

He was born in Danzig in 1788. In 1818 — at thirty — he published The World as Will and Representation. For years the book did not sell. Fame came only in his sixties, and by way of short essays.

The enemy is not "life" but wanting#

To approach Schopenhauer's pessimism through the sentence "life is bad" is to start in the wrong place.

His problem is the structure of willing.

Follow the cycle.

Someone wants a thing. He gets it. He enjoys a brief satisfaction. Then a new lack opens. The new desire sets a new movement going.

To want is, by definition, to feel a lack. A being that wills must therefore be incomplete for as long as it wills. And when it stops willing, what arrives is not completeness but boredom.

Schopenhauer's world is for this reason an economy of lack. People do not want because they are unhappy; more often they are restless because they want.

This is not merely an observation in psychology. It is a metaphysical thesis.

He took Kant, and turned his world inside out#

To understand Schopenhauer you have to know Kant — and Schopenhauer took himself for Kant's only true heir.

Kant had argued that we know the world not as it is but through the forms of our own minds. That is the distinction between appearance and the thing in itself.

Schopenhauer accepted the distinction: the world appears to us as representation.

Then he asked the question Kant had forbidden: what lies behind the appearances?

His answer: the will.

But this is not conscious "wanting". It is a blind, aimless, insatiable drive to exist. The same thing works in the plant turning towards the light, in the falling stone, in the hunting animal, in human ambition.

His claim about access is original too. The only route to the thing in itself is not observation from outside but the living of one's own body from within. When I raise my arm I both see a movement and undergo the willing from the inside. The body is the will made visible.

That move opened a door for the philosophy that followed. Nietzsche's will to power, Freud's unconscious, the whole modern refusal in psychology to treat the human being as a wholly rational subject — Schopenhauer stands behind all of it.

The quarrel with Hegel#

When he began to lecture at the University of Berlin, Hegel was the philosophical star of the day.

Schopenhauer deliberately scheduled his lectures at the same hour as Hegel's.

The result: an empty room.

The story is more than an anecdote of academic failure. It marks the difference between two pictures of the world.

For Hegel, history is reason and freedom realising themselves — it moves in a direction.

For Schopenhauer, the force at work beneath history is not reason but will — and the will has no direction. Hence there can be no such thing as a philosophy of history for him; history merely shows different variations on a single theme.

David Bather Woods of the University of Warwick has published a philosophical biography with the University of Chicago Press, featured on the Blog of the APA this June, which returns to Schopenhauer's relation to Hegelian system-building and to the young Schopenhauer's fierce reaction against Fichte's lectures.

The most neglected side: compassion#

Now we come to the part that breaks the cliché.

If every individual is an appearance of one and the same will, then individuality is a surface condition. Space and time are a veil that makes what is one look like many — Schopenhauer calls it, borrowing a term from Indian thought, the veil of Maya.

What happens when the veil lifts?

Another person's pain stops being entirely "someone else's" pain.

This is the thought that makes Schopenhauer one of the philosophers who put compassion at the foundation of morality. In his essay On the Basis of Morality he argues that the only motive with moral worth is compassion (Mitleid) — not duty, and not interest.

It also separates him from Kant. In Kant morality issues from reason. In Schopenhauer it issues from a metaphysical insight: the other is not, in truth, separate from me.

His philosophy cannot, then, be reduced to the formula "Life is bad, nothing means anything."

The more accurate formula is this: once we understand the structure of desire, we cannot stay indifferent to another's pain.

That is what separates him from the nihilists.

Why art redeems#

In Schopenhauer's system, art delivers a temporary release from the chain of everyday desire.

The mechanism runs like this. In aesthetic experience we do not look at an object and ask what use it is to us. Disinterested contemplation turns the human being from a willing subject into a pure knowing subject. Desire halts for a moment — and that moment is peace.

Music holds a privileged place among the arts. Where the other arts represent objects in the world or the Ideas, music is the direct expression of the will itself. That is why music can move us so deeply without describing anything.

The thesis had effects well beyond philosophy. Its influence on Wagner is famous. Nietzsche was at first so taken with Schopenhauer that he could pass for his pupil — and then became his harshest critic. There is a broad Schopenhauerian inheritance running through Freud, Thomas Mann, Wittgenstein, Borges and Beckett.

The encounter with Indian thought#

Another thing that set Schopenhauer apart from the German philosophers of his day was his interest in the Upanishads and in Buddhist thought.

Here too one must resist simplification. Schopenhauer was not a Buddhist.

He read Indian thought in a way that would support his own metaphysical system — through the problems of European philosophy. The relationship should therefore be seen less as a Buddhist identity in the modern sense than as part of an attempt to get beyond Western metaphysics.

Its historical importance is considerable all the same: in the nineteenth century he was among the first major European philosophers to take Eastern thought seriously.

Why suicide is no solution#

This is one of the commonest misunderstandings about Schopenhauer. If life is suffering, why did he not recommend suicide?

His answer is consistent: suicide does not abolish the will. It abolishes only one of the will's individual appearances.

More than that: for Schopenhauer suicide is not a denial of the will but an affirmation of it. The person who kills himself rejects not life but the terms life has set him. He is still willing — only for something else.

The solution he proposes is therefore not to leave life but to silence willing: to loosen the tyranny of desire, to pass beyond the limits of the individual ego. That is what he saw in the ascetic traditions.

The objections#

Schopenhauer is not a philosopher beyond criticism.

The objection from consistency: if the will is irrational and unknowable, how can we claim to know anything about it? Is it not a contradiction to accept the Kantian frame, which says the thing in itself is out of reach, and then to name the thing in itself?

The moral objection: an ethics of compassion does not account adequately for justice. Answering suffering is one thing; ordering rights is another.

The social objection: what he wrote about women was prejudiced enough to be found harsh even in his own century, and it is not defensible.

Why he is read today#

Some of Schopenhauer's questions have become more visible in the modern world.

Social media teaches us to want more. The consumer economy manufactures a fresh desire the moment satisfaction arrives. Recommendation algorithms steer attention towards new stimuli without pause. A culture of work makes wanting more compulsory.

Read this way, Schopenhauer's cycle of desire → satisfaction → fresh desire looks almost like a philosophical anatomy of the twenty-first-century attention economy.

Read alongside the file we ran this week on visions of the digital future, the picture completes itself. On one side an economy built on the manufacture of desire; on the other a philosopher who analysed the structure of that desire two hundred years ago.

In conclusion#

To read Schopenhauer only as the philosopher who said "life is suffering" is to miss the most important part of his philosophy.

His real question is more disquieting:

What if a large part of the source of our unhappiness is not what the outside world does to us, but the fact that we must always be wanting something?

The question is still open. And perhaps this is where Schopenhauer's real modernity begins.

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In Turkish, works including İstemek ve Tasarım Olarak Dünya (The World as Will and Representation), Aşkın Metafiziği (The Metaphysics of Love), Yaşam Bilgeliği Üzerine Aforizmalar (Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life), Okumak Yazmak ve Yaşamak Üzerine (On Reading, Writing and Living) and Ahlakın Temeli Üzerine (On the Basis of Morality) have been translated.

Note: the cover image is a daguerreotype of Schopenhauer taken in 1852 — that is, a real photograph. He was among the first great philosophers to live long enough to see photography invented.