Arthur Schopenhauer: On Human Nature, The Art of Controversy, Counsels and Maxims

Where did Schopenhauer go wrong?  How did a man capable of unearthing such marvelous insights as 

"When you come into contact with a man, no matter whom, do not attempt an objective appreciation of him according to his worth and dignity.  Do not consider his bad will, or his narrow understanding and perverse ideas; as the former may easily lead you to hate and the latter to despise him; but fix your attention only upon his sufferings, his needs, his anxieties, his pains.  Then you will always feel your kinship with him; and instead of hatred or contepmt, you will experience the sommiseration that alone is the peace to which the gospel calls us" (On human Nature, 7)

Find the nerve and the obliviousness to utter with the same pen:

"Hence it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice.  This is mainly due to the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the powers of reasoning and deliberation" (Studies in Pessimism, 65)?

My working framework was to assume that Schopenhauer was the proverbial frog in a well, which is to say that he saw rather clearly the things that were in his own experience as a cis, straight, educated, comfortable, white man; and that when presented with anything that was at all removed from that world, he was utterly unable to conceive of it.  This reading served me well, and it wasn't until the last essay in this collection, "Genius and Virtue", that I recognized it as a symptom of a larger failure on his part.

The dichotomy that Schopenhauer sets up in this essay, namely that of the Intellect and the Will, is a theme that runs throughout these hundreds of pages.  It sometimes takes another guise--individuation and universality, Mind and Soul, Virtue and Genius--it is this central conflict that occupies the great majority of his deliberation. It is to be recognized in more modern works as the Subject and the Object, and though Sartre and de Beauvois would probably shoot him on sight, they are not immune to his influence.

Only in "Genius and Virtue" does it become clear the depth of Schopenhauer's error: he has misidentified the two, and accordingly chosen the wrong one.  For him, Genius, intellect, and Mind are the truly subjective states, those with true agency and clarity.  Will, soul and Virtue, on the other hand, and whimsical forces of nature, mere objects, that must be endured, if not disregarded entirely. How Sartre must have laughed.  

Is there anything more truly an object than the Mind?  For Schopenhauer, the Mind perceives and regards the soul as an object, but how thoroughly opposite is the reality.  I think.  I am.  Thinking does not me.  The I precedes the mind in every conceivable way, and it is only the Will that can be thought of as a true subject.  How terrifying such a thought would have been for Schopenhauer, and how utterly incapable of facing it he was.  All he had was his intellect.  It is no wonder that his Will, the finger of attention, pointed to it as the very end of existence. It's the oldest trick in the ego's book: look over there!  Schopenhauer saw his intellect as a penetrating beam of light that revealed the nature of all existence.  In reality, it was a mirror that revealed nothing but itself.

Seneca: Letters

Kant's critique of Utilitarianism, to the effect that if everyone practiced it everyone would be miserable, seems to apply equally well to Stoicism as it is commonly perceived.  Self-abnegation, unremitting seriousness, and general tsking at life hardly seems like a way of life worth the effort, however virtuous it may be.  Virtue is its own reward, of course, but too often it is also its own punishment.  Such a Calvinist belief in the virtue of suffering ends up responsible for far more human suffering than it prevents.

Militant Stoics look rather askance at Seneca, accusing him of lip service to Virtue without actual practice of it.  How hard is it to resign oneself to life when life is affluent and sociable, after all? Isn't Stoicism serious business?  Isn't life itself serious, dreary, and grim?  What business does one have owning a vineyard in the midst of all this, after all?

Whether he intended to or not, however, it is exactly through this "lip service" that Seneca revealed the purest form of Stoicism.  A true Stoic knows and embraces that money, vineyards, love, and friendship are of only illusory worth.  Seneca takes that assertion a step further, and says that not only are they ultimately worthless, but they are laughable.  They are not important, and therefore why should one go to any lengths to avoid them?  If one sees such things for what they truly are, they become not pitfalls to be avoided, but illusions to be enjoyed or not, as the occasion demands.  If my vineyard is of no consequence, why should I go to the effort of ridding myself of it?  If love and sex and friendship are vain and illusory, why go to the trouble of avoiding them?  Is not the whole picture of existence, namely that "whether a hundred or a thousand flagons go through your bladder, all you are is a strainer," rather more hilarious than grim (LXXVII)?  In which case, why not face it with a smirk and a quip than a frown and an empty stomach?

There's nothing better or worse about good bread than bad.  If presented with the latter, one has the choice of relishing in the suffering, or taking the more realistic (and practical) decision to "wait, then, and not eat until I either start getting good bread or cease to be fussy about bad bread" (CXXIII).

Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity

If de Beauvoir's goal in writing this was to demonstrate that it is possible to live with purpose and virtue in a world torn by the dichotomy of subject and object, of individual and collective, then surely she succeeded.  If it was her goal to clarify what the criteria of such a life are, what ethical standards could find application in such a world, the her success is less clear.

This is not surprising.  She herself asserts that "Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art" (134).  A set of rules and principles that could lead one to an ethical life would need to be infinitely complex, to account for the endless variety of situations and humans that exist.  To delineate the what of ethics is an endless and impossible task.  The why, however, turns out to be far more attainable, and it is this that she aims to bring to the surface.  

What one does cannot be said to be ethical or unethical.  Why one does it, however, is much more vulnerable to judgement.  The product is neutral, but the process is not.  The closest de Beauvoir comes to putting this clearly is when she says, ". . . what distinguishes the tyrant from the man of good will is that the first rests in the certainty of his aims, whereas the second keeps asking himself, 'Am I really working for the liberation of men?'" (133)

I'm tempted to propose that this book be given the subtitle "The ambiguity of ethics".  It is not so much about how to be ethical in an ambiguous, paradoxical world.  It is rather about how to address the ambiguity--and subjectivity--of what such an ethics needs to be.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera

The appeal of Marquez has always, for me, been his characters.  Every character in his books not only has a fully realized inner life, but also a magical reality that could serve as the subject of its own novel.  In Cholera, for example, not only are the three central characters vibrant and heightened to the point where their humanity is recognizable, but not taken for granted; even those with barely a sentence of mention, down to the pets, are so real in their magicality that one's skepticism is never triggered.  We know people in our real lives who similarly skirt the margins of what seems possible, and it is no surprise at all to find them in a novel.

What makes this world magically real, as opposed to simply real, is not the nature of its denizens, but rather the quantity of them.  It is no surprise to meet characters who bend credibility; it is a surprise that each and every one of them do.  This trait could be seen as a forebear of modern day heightened realities such as one sees in 30 Rock, Kimmy Schmidt, or Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  We are used to knowing such magical/heightened people; we simply aren't used to being surrounded by them.

I especially enjoy these worlds, the magical and heightened realities of literature, because their distorted reflection of experienced reality is the other side of my personal looking glass.  Reading and being immersed in the world of Cholera gives me an idea what it must be like for an outsider to experience the world of my friends and me.  Each and every one of us is vaguely magical, of the sort that it is not uncommon to meet on occasion, but overwhelming to meet all at once.