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Daily · Philosophy

Studies in Pessimism

Arthur Schopenhauer · philosophy essays, 1851·2 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • Schopenhauer opens by declaring suffering is life's whole purpose. He calls pleasure merely 'the absence of pain' and pictures us as lambs in a field, unaware that the butcher is 'choosing out first one and then another for his prey.'
  • Existence itself is structured as a trap, not just painful. In 'The Vanity of Existence' he compares a life to a man running downhill: he cannot stop without falling, so he is forced to keep moving toward an end he cannot avoid.
  • He calls the Christian ban on suicide baseless, not brave. He argues no religious text actually forbids it and quotes Pliny that 'an opportune death' is one of nature's best gifts, noting English juries fake verdicts of insanity just to allow burial.
  • His essay on women reduces them to permanent children. He claims a man matures at 28 and a woman at 18 only because her reason stays 'niggard in its dimensions,' and compares her fading beauty after childbirth to a female ant that sheds its wings once fertilized.
  • A single cracking whip could ruin his entire day's thinking. In 'On Noise' he calls whip-cracking 'the most inexcusable and disgraceful of all noises,' says it 'murders thought' like an executioner's axe, and proposes a police ban requiring a knot tied in every whip's tip.
  • The book ends on the porcupine's dilemma, his most famous image. Porcupines huddle for warmth, prick each other with their quills, and scatter, then repeat the cycle until they settle on 'a little distance from one another,' which he names as the true origin of politeness.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it distills Schopenhauer's entire system into essays anyone can read in an afternoon, including the porcupine's dilemma, the single image later borrowed by Freud to describe human intimacy.

Schopenhauer argues pain is the real business of life and happiness is only its temporary absence, then follows that logic straight through suicide, women, and a huddle of porcupines.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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