Episode Two

Life Denial Part 1: Is Life Suffering?

INTRODUCTION

In the fifth century Eastern Roman Empire, there was a young boy, a teenager, a shepherd boy named Simeon. The story goes that after hearing about the Jesus of the gospels – that is, after hearing that one must lose his life on earth to gain it in heaven, that, contrary to the rule of the world, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are the pure in spirit – after hearing this, Simeon was so moved that he quickly joined a monastery and devoted his life to Christ. But this was no normal teenage boy. Nor was he to be a normal monk. So great was Simeon’s fervor to deny this life and gain eternity that he developed ascetic practices so extreme that they shocked even the other monks. He would not eat for weeks. He would not sit for weeks. He would wrap his body in ropes until his skin festered. He even lived in a dried cistern for a while so as to live out his own burial. He would endure anything so as to assure himself that he cared not about this world, that his heart and mind were on God and God alone. After a few years, the monks finally sat him down and explained that monastic life, a communal life, was not for him. “It is solitude you seek,” they told him.

So Simeon left. He found a cave outside town. It was small, but it would do. He lived there for a while. He continued his practices, deepened his devotion, deepened his prayer, deepened his commitment to despise this life. But soon enough word had spread about this holy man, this wild man with miraculous capacities who lived in a cave, and visitors began to overwhelm Simeon. He was kind. He was gracious, of course. But it became clear that he must move once again, must once again seek higher ground, away from the world, closer, as it were, to God.

Soon he found a nine foot pillar amongst some ruins in the Syrian mountains. It was sturdy enough, he thought. So he constructed a platform on top of the pillar, climbed on, and from that point on Simeon would come down from one pillar only long enough to construct a higher one, and then a higher one, higher, until finally he sat himself atop a pillar fifty feet tall and remained there until his death thirty seven years later. Thirty seven years, exposed to the blistering sun, exposed to the cold rain, most of the time standing, most of the time praying, most of the time fasting. Thirty seven years – a man on a pillar.

In the sixth century, after Simeon had been recognized as Saint Simeon for such a remarkably devout life, a plaque was made as a devotion. It displays Seimon atop his pilar. His eyes focus on scripture, his mind on God and God alone. A serpent coils itself around the structure, has climbed far enough to sink its fangs into Simeon, and one imagines it would, if only the devout ascetic would blink. But we know he won’t. The serpent is evil, of course. Evil from below the pillar, the evil of the world from which Simeon has escaped only by total renunciation.

Listen to this. In Volume 2 of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, he praises the most austere ascetics from the East for

“Aspir[ing] to real holiness; the throwing away of all property; the forsaking of every dwelling-place and of all kinsfolk; deep unbroken solitude spent in silent contemplation with voluntary penance and terrible slow self-torture for the complete mortification of the will, ultimately going as far as voluntary death by starvation, or facing crocodiles, or jumping over the consecrated precipice of the Himalaya, or being buried alive, or flinging oneself under the wheels of the huge car that drives round with the images of the gods amid the singing, shouting, and dancing of bayaderes. [...] That which has remained in practice for so long in a nation embracing so many millions, while it imposes the heaviest sacrifices, cannot be an arbitrarily invented freak, but must have its foundation in the very nature of mankind” (WWR II: 389).

Perhaps these figures seem too foreign, too extreme, too far from us here in the west. Well, then, what about the man who has shaped the Western world more than any other. Consider – Jesus of Nazareth. Is he the man of the so-called “health, wealth, and prosperity” gospel so popular in America’s protestant mega churches? The one according to which devotion to God will enrich your earthly existence, give you straight white teeth, the one who will ensure that your crops grow to abundance, that your bank account soars, that tragedy and hardship passes you over? Far from it. Jesus was a radical. He was a man of harsh truths. The Jesus of the gospels called his disciples to despise this life. Over and over and over again does he disparage our typical concerns for food, for money, for status, success, even for family and country. After all, what are such earthly concerns in comparison with eternity? How important are they next to one’s eternal soul? Think of Matthew 8, where a would-be disciple asks Jesus if he can bury his father before departing to spread to gospel. What did Jesus say? With a straight face, he said, “Let the dead bury their dead.” And what did he say about the cost of discipleship. What does he say in Luke 14: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even hate their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” And again in John 12: “Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Finally, in Matthew 6, he tells us that, in the end, we must choose our master: is it this world or the next? We cannot have both, he says. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven [...] For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. … No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” If you have to choose between this life and the next, says Jesus: despise this life. Detach from it. And seek heaven? Well, then, did St. Simeon get it right after all?

Here’s my question about Schopenhauer, about Simeon, about Jesus and the ascetics of East: what are we to make of these men? Of these practices? They renounce the world, you understand. It is not just lamborghinis and super models and cocaine that they reject. They renounce family. They renounce country. They renounce all that is not eternal – which is to say, everything on earth. What is that? Is that – wise? Do their practices reflect some profound truth? Or is it something else? Are they sick? Have they been misled? Or perhaps they are right. Perhaps we must wash ourselves clean of all these ashes, all of this dust.

The question isn’t new. It was central to Nietzsche’s work. “In every age,” he writes in Twilight of the Idols:

About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: “To live — that means to be sick a long time [...].” Even Socrates was tired of life. What does that prove? What does it demonstrate? At one time, one would have said (and it has been said loud enough by our pessimists): “At least something must be true here! The consensus of the sages must show us the truth.” Shall we still talk like that today? May we? “At least something must be sick here,” we retort. [...] (TI, PS, 1).

Nietzsche says these men are sick. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not, but they have arguments for their positions, and one ought to consider those first. That’s what I’d like to do in this mini series on the life denying perspective, the perspective according to which the potential fruits of life are unworthy of pursuit and salvation requires renouncing them totally, and by the potential fruits of life, I mean many of the characteristics that many of us would say constitute a good life: our health, success in our endeavors, intimate love, family, and so on. Is that true? Should we climb the pillar? That’s our question. Welcome to Gods Will Be Gods.

I have mentioned Christianity, Schopenhauer, Buddhism and Hinduism as examples of life-denying worldviews. I should say upfront that it’s an open question whether the label is apt, or at least with respect to some within this group. In this episode, I’m going to focus primarily on the ones about which, to my mind, anyway, there is no question as to whether they deny life: Schopenhauer and the most extreme ascetics of the east. In this latter category I include Jainism, and ancient Indian religious group that still has followers today, notorious, perhaps, for starving themselves to death, something for which Schopenhauer was quite proud of them, and some extreme sects of the Vedic/Hindu tradition. I should say upfront here that these latter groups from the East are the very ones that the Buddha himself rejected as too extreme on his way to spelling out the Middle Path. We’ll consider whether Buddhism is a life-denying philosophy in another episode, but it’s worth saying here that, to my mind, anyway, it is both more nuanced, a bit more optimistic than Schopenhauer, even if, in the end, the Buddhist does see life on the wheel of samsara as something from which we ought to escape. In any case, though, the Middle Path does – wisely, in my opinion – avoid the extremes of Schopenhauer and others from the ancient East. I should also say upfront that, I’m actually not going to talk about Christianity in this episode. This is a mini-series, and we likely won’t see Christianity again until the 5th or 6th episode of this season. Christianity must be treated on its own. It’s exceptional within the group of what I’ve called life-denying perspectives. Whereas Schopenhauer and the most extreme views of the East criticize earthly pursuits on their own terms, Jesus typically criticizes these pursuits comparitively, and that it is an important distinction. So, for example, Schopenhauer argues that earthly ends – think success, or material possessions, love, and so on – never live up to the hype of anticipation, the pleasures they bring never last long, etc. Jesus may well agree with that, but that’s not how he talks in the gospels. He compares heavenly or eternal things such as God or Eternal Life or the Soul with worldly and impermanent things, and it is on these comparative grounds that he rejects the latter. We saw that earlier: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth [...] But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,” and so on (Matthew 6:19-21).”

This is worth lingering on for a moment. Jesus says that, compared to eternal life in heaven, life on earth is insignificant, worthy of renunciation. Well, whether or not it is easy to accomplish, it’s difficult to argue with. On the assumption of eternal life in heaven, where there is no sickness, no death, no worry, where lions lie with the lambs and so on, life in this world, with all of its troubles, seems nasty, brutish and short, to borrow Hobbes’ phrase. It’s comparatively insignificant. And yes! If you can potentially forfeit an eternal perfect life by giving yourself over to this earthly one, then it is rather clear that you should do whatever you need to avoid that. Sit on a pillar if that’s what it takes. Why risk eternity for such brief and paltry pleasures as earth provides?

The point is that Jesus’ form of life-denial is inextricably wound up with his claims about the Father, about the soul, about the afterlife, metaphysical claims that I am certainly not going to resolve today (or probably any day) and that would distract us from our main focus in this episode’s de of the resolute denial of the value of earthly life on its own terms. I could add here that, unliked Schopenhauer and the Eastern ascetics, Christianity does not explicitly call for the total extirpation of desire, but we’ll save that discussion. Today I’m going to focus on Schopenhauer and the ancient Eastern traditions. They look at life and what it offers, and they argue that those fruits, taken on their own terms, are unworthy of pursuit. And we ask, again: is that true?

Consider these ascetics. Why do they live this way? If these figures seem odd, other-worldly, perhaps, it’s important to understand that they are not mad. These are not just wild men isolating themselves, mortifying themselves for no… reason. Whatever we come to think of these so-called holy people, they do have their reasons.

So, consider first a quote from the Acaranga Sutra wherein prescriptions are spelled out for the Janaist monk:

“He should not long for life, nor wish for death; he should not give way to sorrow or joy. He should bear pain and disease, cold and heat, without any attachment. He should wander about, homeless, without a fixed abode, and take food only once a day, not desiring delicious food. He should not clean his body, nor adorn it; he should wear coarse garments, and sleep on the bare ground. He should meditate day and night, restraining his mind, speech, and body, and practice the severest penance.”

Ācārāṅga Sūtra (Book II, Lecture 15, Lesson 1, translated by Hermann Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, 1884)

The monk is cultivate a state in which he is unmoved by the external world: unmoved by emotion, by the senses, unmoved by a home or a lack of one, unmoved by food of the lack thereof; he is not to have desires for tasty food or handsome clothes, unmoved by a lack of comfort; he is to focus everything on meditation, practicing, as it says, “the severest penance.” Why? Why the detachment from emotions, affects, and desires that, to most everyone, are not only normal, but natural?

We’ll look shortly at one of the main arguments underpinning these prescriptions, but for now I want to understand just the general rationale.

I’m going to use the analogy if an addivct. So, consider an addict. An alcoholic, for example. Let’s say the alcoholic comes to see his drinking as a problem, as the problem, as the cause of his suffering. Well, what is the reasonable thing for him to do? He should stop drinking, of course. He should make every effort to distance himself from the temptation to drink. Stay away from the bars. Keep the bottles out of the home. Remove himself from relationships in which drinking is primary, and so on. In short: he ought to divorce himself from alcohol by any and every means necessary. It is, after all, what ails him.

Well, the general rationale is the same for the ascetic.m, butThe Schopenhauerian or the Eastern ascetic sees not just one particular desire as his ailment, but desire itself. All if it. Striving for things. Wanting things. Craving for things, he thinks, is his problem. That might sound ridiculous, of course, because desire is obviously natural to us. But that’s exactly why these extreme forms of asceticism are so radical: they see our natural state – which is full of manifold desires – as problematic, as the cause of our suffering. We’ll look at exactly why these ascetics believe this in a moment, but for now just think: if one does believe that desire itself is the cause of his suffering, what ought he do? Just like the alcoholic who seeks to cure himself by removing alcohol from his life, so, too, do the ascetics seek to extirpate desire totally by starving the will, by starving desire.

As for what that looks like, we’ve just seen in the passage above. But also consider this, what is, I think, one of the best descriptions of the mental state of an extreme ascetic. It’s from Herman Hesse;s Siddartha, a fictionalized version of the life of the Buddha, in which Siddartha describes his mental state at the height of his ascetic phase:

Siddhartha gave his garments to a poor Brahman in the street. He wore nothing more than the loincloth and the earth-cloured, unsown cloak. He ate only once a day, and never something cooked. He fasted for fifteen days. He fasted for twenty eight days. The flesh waned from his thighs and cheeks. Feverish dreams flickered from his enlarged eyes, long nails grew slowly on his parched fingers and a dry, shaggy beard grew on his chin. His glance turned to ice when he encountered women; his mouth twitched with contempt, when he walked through a city of nicely dressed people. He saw merchants trading, princes hunting, mourners wailing for their dead, whores offering themselves, physicians trying to help the sick, priests determining the most suitable day for seeding, lovers loving, mothers nursing their children – and all of this was not worthy of one look from his eye, it all lied, it all stank, it all stank of lies, it all pretended to be meaningful and joyful and beautiful, and it was all just concealed putrefaction (12).

If the term ‘life-denial’ seems like a pejorative, a critical term meant to disparage these extreme ascetics, I think we can see now that it isn’t necessarily a label they would reject. The whole point of extreme asceticism actually is to deny, to repudiate, to willfully kill the forces at work in the natural state of the human being. These desires we have for food, for comfort, for success, even for love, these are, the thinks the life-denier, the source of our suffering, and if we can starve the will within ourselves to death, we might thereby escape the cycle of suffering so common to humanity. When we talk about life-denial and extreme asceticism, that is what we are talking about.

The Arguments for Life-Denial: Practical and Moral

Well, as I’ve said, they have their reasons. It’s important to say upfront here that I’m not going to entertain every single argument for life-denial put forward by its proponents in this one episode. I want to treat these arguments as well as I can, and that takes time. This mini-series on life-denial will take at least 4 or 5 episodes, I think. . In this one, I want to consider an idea you’ve probably hear before, namely that life is suffering. This claim is, I think, the crux of both the Schopenhauerian and the Eastern arguments for why life-denial is the highest form of life. And before I begin, it’s worth saying that the best way to see for yourself whether the following summary of the claim is accurate is just to read the primary texts yourself (so, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, Volume I (if not the whole thing, at least Bk. 4).

Life is Suffering

On its face, the claim that life is suffering strikes us as absurd. The proper response seems to be: “Well, no! Of course there is joy. Have you not seen a mother hold her newborn child? Have you not seen young lovers frolick through a field on a sunny day? Have you not seen a champion athlete celebrate her victory? Have you no ear for a beautiful melody? No eyes for sun and sea? No tongue for sweet wine? Of course there is joy!”

But the claim is a little more nuanced than the bald statement suggests. Neither Schopenhauer nor the Eastern ascetics mean that life is just always and everywhere physical and emotional pain. The idea is a bit, well, deeper than that. No one is denying that there is such a thing as joy. The insight of the life-deniers is that the joys in life are rarer than we like to admit, they are short lived, and that, in any case, however long they last, the occur within a scenario that ends in death. To put that last part a bit differently: everything that makes up a moment of joy – so, consider the newborn child; well the child born, the mother to whom it is born, the doctor that delivers it, the home the mother brings it to, and so on, all of these things, everything that makes up that moment of joy will eventually wither and die. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. The point is that whatever joy there is in life, it is, as it were spoiled by its impermanence. The joy is enveloped in suffering. Or you might say that joy takes place on a stage of what is undeniably a tragic play. After all, we all know how it ends: with the decay and death of everything on stage.

That’s the general picture, but let’s go a bit deeper. Another important insight, and, what is to my mind the most important insight from Schopenhauer and the Eastern traditions is that we are by nature willing beings. In other words, we are born wanting things, and it never stops. As Schopenhauer puts it somewhere in the bowles of WWR, we are “concrete willing through and through.” In other words, willing is our nature. From the second we are born, the desires start. We want our mother. We want comfort. We want food, and so on. We grow older, but the cycle is the same: we want more things, we want different things, but the want is still there. We want to feel certain ways, we want to achieve certain things, and so on. Always we are striving towards some end or other. But no matter what it is that we are after, once we get it, it’s not as if from that point on, we’re all good. Nope! The joy only last a short time before yet another desire comes to the fore, and we’re back off to the races. (This is why, by the way, meditation is so difficult, why it takes so much practice. Sitting there, undistracted by thought or desire, is entirely unnatural to us.) So this cycle of striving goes on and on, never ceasing because, and here is a crucial point, because nothing on this earth can satisfy us completely. We are never fully content. We are never fully satisfied. The new car begins to look old again. The new lover, it turns out, is only human, and no matter how much we love them, there will be problems in the relationship: fights, disagreements, betrayals, and so on. Our children grow and need us less and want less of us. The house decays. Our bodies decay. And every one of these dissapointments brings with it a new desire for relief. The general cycle plays out millions of times throughout our life, until, finally, we die. So, as it turns out, whatever happiness we achieved could never have lasted forever, not in this world, not in this world in which nothing is permanent. For the life-deniers, that is life as a willing creature in an impermanent world. That is the sense in which life is suffering. Life is suffering because this impermanent world offers no final satisfaction for our perpetual willing. Better, then, to extinguish desire, to extirpate it, to renounce the world, escape the cycle, and, finally attain peace through the back door.

Here is Schopenhauer, cheery as always:

"The life of man oscillates, like a pendulum, to and fro between boredom and suffering. In fact, when we lack something, we suffer from want; but when we have it, we are not content, but are bored. Then the cycle begins anew.” (WWR I: ch. 57)

Elsewhere he says that

“... Life is a constant dying, and why suffering is its essential nature; for the will’s striving is perpetually frustrated by the transitoriness of its objects, and death is merely the final confirmation of this futility” (WWR II: ch. 41)

Do you see it now? If that description of life strikes you as true, then it’s worth asking: why not climb the pillar? Why not extinguish life, rid yourself of this putrid sore of striving and craving with which we are plagued? Perhaps, then, these men are wise. Perhaps they are above the fray, see life for what it is, and wisely, as I said, quietly exit through the back door.

Okay, so, here’s the critique, or at least the beginning of it, anyway. Let me ask you this: are you convinced? Ready to climb he pillar? If I had to guess, probably most of you aren’t, and it’s worth asking yourself why. Most people don’t renounce life, extinguish desire, become a monk. That’s not much of an argument, of course – we’ll get to that – but I do think this common reaction is telling towards an argument. I think most of us probably agree that there is a tragic element to human life, maybe even that human life can generally be described as a tragedy. Most of us might agree with that, and yet! – yet we don’t rush off to renounce life. Why? Is it just that we don’t think we have the willpower? Is it that we are delusional about our prospects? We’re all dumb enough to think we can have a wortwhile life? I don’t think so. I think that even those of us who accept that life has a tragic character make something along the lines of the following assessment: “You know what? Sure – life may be tragic, but, in the end, there is also a lot of joy and beauty in the whole mess of it, and in any case it’s not so bad as to warrant total escape.”

Now, again, that’s not much of an argument, but I do think it points to one: Schopenhauer offers a description of life that many of us, including myself, will accept as true: We are willing beings. Life is a series of cycles of willing or striving, brief moments of satisfaction, followed by more striving and so on until an inevitable death. That’s true. But that’s only a description, a set of facts, and Schopenhauer and the Eastern traditions take those facts to warrant rather extreme universal normative judgments (or value judgments), and I’m not sure they have the philosophical grounds for that. For example: they say that our natural state is filled with striving. True. But they also say that all striving is suffering, that suffering is always bad, and so suffering is so overwhelming in life that it is best to escape it. Is that necessarily true? Must we agree that all striving is a form of suffering? Must we agree that all suffering is bad? Must we agree that our inability to find final satisfaction in this world spoils life? That final satisfaction is the only thinking that could make life worthwhile? Again, I’m not so sure.

Critique of Life is Suffering

There’s a book from the early 20th century titled Schopenhauer and Nietzsche by George Simmel. Simmel says – and I’m paraphrasing here – something along the lines that Schopenhauer (and one can add the Eastern ascetics) seems to confuse the logic of striving with the psychology of it, and I think that’s exactly right. Sure, life is filled with striving for things, and insofar as we are striving for something we don’t have it, we are in that sense deprived of it. We don’t have what we want. That’s true, but that doesn’t mean that the experience of striving is thoroughly negative, or even that it is overwhelmingly negative. Striving isn’t always suffering, or anyway not always suffering that we don’t evaluate positively. What’s the cliche? “It’s the journey, not the destination.”

I mentioned in the previous episode that I used to enjoy running in the mountains, and that at one point I became rather obsessed with achieving the fastest time up and down Mt. Leconte in the Smokies. Well, I never got it. I wound up with only the second fastest time, and even that time didn’t last long before some other guy obsessed with the same thing beat it. So that’s how my efforts wound up. Short. All of that being true, though, it strikes me as silly to say that all the work I put in, all the early morning speed sessions before work, all the evening long runs, all those weekends with countless miles and countless hours running through the mountains, all of it was pure suffering that could only have been redeemed by a win, and not only a win, but a win that somehow stood for all eternity. In fact: I was in great shape. I felt great. On some of those runs I felt like an unstoppable machine just performing its task. I wasn’t, of course. Actually, I fell a lot. Even got beat up pretty bad a few times. And yet! Here I am, years later, joyfully recalling the experience, remembering what it was like to feel that great running through one of the most beautiful natural landscapes on the planet. I loved it.

Not all striving is suffering. Often, actually, striving towards a goal that is meaningful to at least oneself can be a persistent form of joy that lasts quite a long while. And when the striving is done, by the way, common and good advice has it that after a brief respite, its probably best to set another goal and start striving again. Why is that good advice? Because that sort of striving can be a source of joy, that self-overccoming makes one stronger, because, generally speaking, one can achieve a good life by engaging in a series of cycles of striving towards worthwhile ends. Now, sure, that’s not the case with every cycle of striving. Some of it really is tedious or painful or even tortuous, but not all of it is, and that fact alone opens the door for a revaluation of the general fact of striving in human life. Perhaps one can come to see his striving as meaningful progress, striving that is often joyous, striving that is on the whole worthwhile work, necessary to build a good life.

Now: you might be able to anticipate the response from the life-deniers. They will say, “Look, fine. Sometimes striving is joyous. Sometimes it is meaningful and worthwhile to you. But don’t forget that however good you feel, and whatever it is you’re striving for, it will come to an end. You will never be satisfied completely because, again, there is no final satisfaction on earth.”

Well, there is an important insight here. Most of us have felt at one time or another, or probably many times over, that if we could just get x (a degree, a job, a lover, a better physique, if we could just learn this skill or that, or achieve this or that form of pedigree), if we could just get x, well, then, life would be grand, as if the achievement of that one thing, whatever it is, would put an end to all of our problems, and we could, at last, just enjoy life. But then, after much toiling, we often do achieve x, only to find out that the life of one with x consists of new problems, new troubles, and in this way we find ourselves again, unsatisfied. And it’s true. No one thing is going to solve every problem you have. Humans just have too many, and too manifold a set of problems for literally all of them to be solved forever. That is just the nature of being a willing creature in an imperfect and transient material world. The life-deniers use this truth to underline their claim that, in the end, even if there is joy, even if striving sometimes feels meaningful and worthwhile, at its core life is inherently unsatisfactory. Better to escape.

But, again, says who? Even if it is our nature to will, to strive, and even if it is the nature of the world to change, to decay, and even if there is no final satisfaction, who’s to say that one cannot reorient himself to that reality? One might begin, for example, by questioning the supposed supreme value of a “final satisfaction.” Is it really so clear that a final satisfaction is what we want? If our lives are characterized by striving and craving, why should that mean that what we want is for it to – stop? That we want an end to the striving, an end to the craving. Again, don’t get caught up in the logic of striving here. Sure, insofar as we are striving for a thing, we want it and don’t have it and that makes striving seem bad. But don’t forget: striving can be joyous; striving can be a necessary and worthwhile process towards valuable ends. So, again – are we sure we want that to stop? Perhaps that sounds appealing to someone in the throes of true suffering, but for many of us I am equally sure that it sounds – well, like death. So perhaps the very same elements that Schopenhauer and the Eastern ascetics correctly point out as inherent to human life – willing, striving, caving, obstacles, decay, mortality – perhaps these same characteristics of life are actually the conditions for the possibility of value and meaning.

Let me try putting it this way: The life-deniers hold up the ascetic, the one who renounces life completely, as the highest form of life. In other words, if one could choose to be anything, he ought to choose to be a successful ascetic, one who has attained salvation, freedom from willing. Okay, now consider a hypothetical old man, one who has lived what many of us would recognize as a good life. Sure, like all lives, it contained suffering, in some instances even profound suffering. There were moments of shame, of inability, of hopelessness, even of tragedy. But let’s say this man also created art. Let’s say he has also loved and raised a child who turned out well. He appreciates nature. He engages deep and difficult ideas and finds it all quite moving and enjoyable. In other words, he has engaged life, strived much, and has had the good fortune that nothing went too far off the rails.

Now, the life-denier tells this man that, were he a little wiser back in the day, he would have renounced life early on, that he could have ceased striving, could have achieved salvation by starving the will until it died within him, finally resting in a will-less existence. When the man denies that that even sounds preferable, even as an old man nearing death by old age, what can Schopenhauer say to him? That he is delusional about his own life? That the meaning he felt was illusory? That the love he experienced was futile? That he would have been better off denying the will? What, then, if the man says, “Sir, the will is precisely the condition that gave me everything I found most beautiful, most meaningful, most valuable in my life. Yes, I was fortunate. Many others are certainly less so. But what can I say? The will has generally been good to me. I have no reason to deny it.”

Again – what can the life-denier say to such a man? There are no universal facts of human experience to which he can point and say, “See! Life is something to escape! Get out while you can! And his negative judgment rings hollow to the happy man.” In the end, then, the life-denier must make his case on metaphysical grounds. He must insist that the happy man is delusional, but he also must show us the facts of the world against which the happy man’s beliefs are delusional, and those facts must be something beyond subjective experience.”

This is an important point. I haven’t provided some knock down argument with respect to Schopenhauer – such arguments are rare, if they exist at all, in philosophy – but I hope I have made some progress in that direction. I hope to have shown that neither Schopenhauer and the ascetis of the East can base their case for the claims that life is suffering and something to escape from on the grounds of subjective experience. They can’t say, “Hey – if you really look at your life, you’ll see! If you knew that there is no final satisfaction, well, you’d realize how awful you really have it.” They can’t do that, because, in fact, people can acknowledge these facts about life and evaluate them differently. They can even do so in plausible ways. The happy man doesn’t strike us crazy, right?” And sometimes especially Schopenhauer does talk like that, as if anyone who really looks at life will admit that they are right. So they can’t make their case on experience because of its subjective nature.

WWR, Volume II, Chapter 46, “On the Vanity and Suffering of Life” (p. 573):
“If we look attentively at life, we see that suffering is its essential nature, and that happiness is only an interval between two pains… Every life is a history of suffering, and if we look at it closely, we see that it is a continuous series of frustrations and sorrows.”

Again – what about the happy man? If Schopenhauer wants to say he is delusional, he’s going to have to make his case on metaphysical grounds. That is, they are going to have to say, “Here are the facts of the way the world is, independent of human experience and the facts of the world show that, however the happy man feels within his own life, and however he evaluates the worth of that life, he is, in fact, delusional. The happy man thinks he’s found real meaning and beauty and value and that his life is worthwhile. Well, here are the facts that show they are wrong.”

Well, that’s exactly what Schopenhauer’s going to do, or at least what he’s going to try to do, and that’s what we’re going to consider in the next episode. Those of you with a background in philosophy or just a background in these traditions, you might have thought of this already. You might have been thinking, “Hey! What about metaphysics? Schopenhaue’rs going to say to the happy man, ‘ Fine, based on your experience, you say that life is good, or at least good enough not to deny it. And maybe there’s nothing I can point to to disprove your personal experience and show that I’m right. But here’s the thing: Guess what? That world you find so much value you in. The ends to which you attach yourself. The beauty in life you find so mesmerizing, all of that belongs to what is ultimately an illusion. The world of people and jobs and subjective meaning and value, all of that belongs to the world of perception, and, again, that world isn’t fundamental reality. What is more, wait until you find out what reality actually is, since you’re so stubborn you can’t see it in your own life. Fundamental reality,” says Schopenhauer, actually is just a blind, insatiable will or force, perpetually toppling over on itself to the great suffering of all of its manifestations. So, fine, you want to affirm life. Well, guess what? What you’re affirming, it turns out, is exactly the source of every instance of suffering the world over. Affirming life,” says Schopenhauer, “that’s affirming the blind force responsible for every evil on earth.” So, asks Schopenhauer of the happy man, “What now? Do you still say of life, “This is good?”

Ha. Again, cheery fellow. If that sounds a bit wild to you – and perhaps it should – we’ll go much deeper into Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in the next episode. We’ll see if Schopenhauer can establish that, actually, even if some people can achieve what they think is a good life, they have no right to affirm life totally, and, in fact, if they only knew what it was, thinks Schopenhauer, surely they would deny it, surely they would join Simeon atop his pillar.

Alright guys. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed. The entire transcript of this episode is available online. All of it is free. Link in the show notes. See you next time.