Arthur Schopenhauer: Counsels and Maxims

In every worthy text, there is at least one passage that unlocks the remainder.  I had thought I found this text's key passage in Schopenhauer's assessment of "Our Relation to Others":

That is a method of reasoning--an enthymeme--which rouses the bitterest feelings of sullen and rancorous hatred (73).

There it was.  As he so often does, Ol' Artie had undone himself in the process of trying to undo others.  When he points the finger at those who, in his perception, are jealous of his self-professed superiority, he is inadvertently incriminating his own jealousy of the ease with which they seem to be living.  The mirror version of his enthymeme is a microcosm of the entire book: all men are lesser than me, and therefore to be avoided.

This gives rise to such demonstrably untrue propositions as "There are few ways by which you can make more certain of putting people into a good humour than by telling them of some trouble that has recently befallen you" (72), or ". . . with most people there will be no harm in occassionally mixing a grain of disdain with your treatment of them" (62).  The syllogism on which Schopenhauer's enthymeme seems to be based is flawed in its premise, to wit: that all human interactions are of the same nature as that of interactions with the specific human, Schopenhauer.

Having thus handily unraveled his approach, I prepared to file this book under the same heading as that under which I filed his "Wisdom of Life": the brilliant tirade of a sad old man.  Humans are indeed deeply flawed, but it is not true to say that they must be avoided at all cost.  The dreary slime of the human soup is only half of the story, and you must eat the soup to get the dessert.  I, in fact, thought myself very clever.

And then yesterday I went downtown for a pleasant outing, only to be approached by an old lady from a booth labelled "동성 변태 시민반대" (citizens resist homo perverts).  It is not only that this refuse exists that infuriated me.  I have experienced it plenty, and know that it will never go away.  The word "pervert" in particular, though, triggered something unpleasant in me, and I boiled over with a rage that would surely have escalated from the most deliciously calibrated and destructive words, to an adrenaline-fueled velociraptor frenzy through the booth--were it not for my more level-headed companion.

Schopenhauer was right.  His enthymeme is spot-on.  We are all trash.  The old woman with the pamphlets is obvious trash, but I am also trash, a hair's breadth away from reptilian violence.  Avoid us at all costs.