Enduring Meaning in the Strive to Transcend: A Critical Analysis of Schopenhauer’s Pessimistic Formulations of Pain and Pleasure
Introduction
Following the Kantian epistemological tradition of distinguishing phenomena from noumena, Schopenhauer saw our reality as consisting of things as they are represented and a metaphysical core of the universal and indivisible thing-in-itself, namely, the transcendental will, which is a blind and aimless impulse foundational to all beings. In his philosophy, we come to know the will through our subjective feelings, where the will governs our embodied existence internally and appears as “the will to life” (WWRI, p.301). This will forms the objecthood of appearances and initiates our endless strivings for survival, procreation, and happiness that passes as mere satisfaction of desires. However, we constantly experience unpleasant resistance in our strivings toward any desirable goal, and Schopenhauer deems those impediments to be the sources of suffering. The wants and needs to maintain life stem from some fundamental lack of the will, such as hunger and pain, which then converts our existence into a “contracted debt” (WWRII, p.580). This debt presupposes the inevitable pain experienced in the unsatisfied and the incessant suffering entailed in a lifetime of failed repayment through the endless cycles of striving where every pleasurable satisfaction is only transient and awaits new painful strives to repel the interim boredom. Therefore, Schopenhauer concludes existence to be unworthy as “a business that does not cover the costs” (WWRII, p.574) where we always find ourselves in a sustained deficit of pleasure where the hedonic costs of striving, namely pains, are always quantitatively and qualitatively greater than the fleeting returns of pleasure.
In this paper, I overview his articulations of life as a costly business by breaking down his argument of pessimism into components of pain and pleasure. I argue that Schopenhauer’s conceptions of the two components fall prey to an unwarranted temporal factor where the striving pain can be impermanent and mild with uncommon exceptions of prolonged suffering, and enduring happiness can be found in the pleasurable strive to transcend finitude through meaningful creations. This re-calculation of the hedonic balance sheet alters the resulting pessimism and computes life to be a worthy business with a surplus of pleasure.
Essential and Lasting Pain VS. Contingent and Fleeting Pleasure
Schopenhauer’s value statement on life’s unworthiness relies on a hedonic scale that evaluates pain and pleasure and lands on the former, outweighing the latter. This evaluative thesis that disparages existence and praises non-existence is dependent upon Schopenhauer’s descriptive thesis that considers pain as fundamental to human life and happiness as brief and of no intrinsically positive value. This section will unpack Schopenhauer’s pessimistic evaluation of human life through his formulations of pain and pleasure.
Human essence, for Schopenhauer, is our natural and egoistic will to life, “a striving without aim and without end” (WWRI, p.347) that objectifies and preserves the well-being of individuals. It is a perceptual representation of the metaphysical will, “a blind and inexorable impulse, devoid of cognition” (WWRI, p.301), that pervades all representations and is made aware to us through subjective desires. This will “continuously fills consciousness and keeps it in motion” (WWRI, p.220), which propels us to satisfy any lack or want through the act of striving that “constitutes the kernel and in-itself of everything” (WWRII, p. 336). This striving can take the form of survival instincts, such as the urgency for food or sex. It could also take the form of artificial needs, such as the want for money and prestige.
Importantly, Schopenhauer considers these persistent desires to be sourced from frustration, where “the basis of all willing is the need, lack, and thus pain…”(WWRI, p.338). The will then strives to eliminate the pain of having something unsatisfied. What follows is another form of pain “when an obstacle is placed between [the will] and its temporary goal” (WWRI, p. 336), which Schopenhauer defines as suffering. In other words, for Schopenhauer, pain is contained in the constant dissatisfactions necessitated by our essence of the restless will to persist instinctually and socially. It is also apparent in the subsequent process of striving to alleviate that painful dissatisfaction where unavoidable obstacles are to be encountered to impose suffering. For a simple example, the most basic desire for food is a source of pain in itself, and the following strive to gather food could be annoying with cooking tasks to overcome, which makes us suffer in more pain. Similar analogies could be made for the absence of social needs for power or love, where pain is omnipresent from the source to the end. This is the first component of Schopenhauer’s conception of pain as induced by suffering (PS), either inherently from the origin of a lack or causally in the triggered process of striving.
Moreover, there is another component of pain that follows striving where desires are temporarily satisfied. After the task of fulfilling a lack is momentarily completed, there comes the second task “of warding off boredom, which, like a bird of prey, hovers over us, ready to fall when it sees a life secure from need” (VE). The satisfaction of desires brings a state of brief content free of privation, but the aimless will is still in motion. Without an immediate object to produce, the will generates feelings of emptiness and boredom. A new goal must emerge to fend off the nothingness whereby the striving pain repeats itself in a fresh cycle of striving. As Schopenhauer puts it, “life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom; in fact, these are the ingredients out of which it is ultimately composed” (WWRI, §57, p. 338). The vanity of existence is also revealed in the inevitable banishment to boredom at the end of every satisfaction, which induces pain again (PB). When PS and PB are put together, the painful nature of existence is, for Schopenhauer, a priori and ineradicable, given our inescapable entrapment in the opposites of striving and boredom that proceeds from our psycho-physiological will to life.
In terms of happiness, Schopenhauer allotted a limited and liminal space for its occurrence, which is the momentary satisfaction of desires on route to being swallowed by boredom and upcoming rounds of painful strives. This makes happiness “only ever negative and absolutely never positive” (WWRI, P.345), defined conditionally on the negation of the preceding pain. Also, because there is no destination for the fulfillment of desires, happiness becomes elusive to obtain where there is no ultimate satisfaction to anchor us in a lasting and stable state of pleasure. This pleasure induced by the short-lived liberation from desire (PL) is then, by nature, contingent and transitory.
Overall, Schopenhauer’s metaphysical will, represented in humans as the endless, aimless, and mindless will to life, ascribes pain as the essential component of human existence. Pain is induced by the act of striving to fulfill desires and the fundamental lack that causes us to strive (PS). It also lingers on when the fleeting pleasure of a liberated desire (PL) leads to unavoidable boredom where pain is resuscitated (PB). The incessant will then demands us to desire again in the infinite loop of pain-pleasure-pain until a voluntary negation of the will or the eventual death. On a quantitative scale based on the positively essential pain and the negatively contingent pleasure, pleasure is outweighed by pain in absolute hedonic value (PS+PB>PL). On a qualitative scale, pain is deemed more profound in the omnipresent reality, and ephemeral pleasure is always more apparent as memories or in the envisioning of future accomplishments but never fully ingrained in the present. The qualitative difference between pain and pleasure here is mainly associated with a temporal factor where lasting pain can innumerously intensify the present experience than fleeting pleasure can, such that pain outweighs pleasure qualitatively ([PS+PB]*t1>[PL]*t2).
Based on these two calculations of the hedonic balance sheet, Schopenhauer affords an unbalanced account between the essential and lasting pain and the contingent and fleeting pleasure where human existence becomes fundamentally more painful than pleasurable. Therefore, this costly business that can never gather positive hedonic returns leads Schopenhauer to land on his pessimistic conclusion that non-existence is preferable to existence.
Episodic Pain VS. Meaningful Pleasure
To evaluate the soundness of Schopenhauer’s argument, the premises of pain and pleasure should be examined more closely. This section criticizes Schopenhauer’s ideas of pain and pleasure and argues that life is not as painful as he concedes with the meaningful presence of pleasures, given the temporal intricacies and inter-connectedness of the two hedonic elements.
The major component of pain for Schopenhauer is induced by the striving (PS) toward satisfaction. But this claim has an underlying equivocation of the entire process of striving to pain, regardless of the duration of striving. When empirical experiences are considered, this assumption is in danger of collapsing. In simple desires such as hunger, a few hours of striving may be entailed before it is satisfied. By Schopenhauer’s definition, these few hours are painful suffering as long as one is still away from the finish line, experiencing obstacles, big or small. However, an average experience of hunger usually consists of brief moments of extreme wants of food that can be painful, but one is usually adapted to that want very quickly. When hunger is temporarily normalized, the urgency of desire reduces together with the duration and intensity of pain. Furthermore, when one is amidst the cumbersome tasks of cooking, the smell of food and anticipating a feast can be a source of enjoyable pleasure instead of pain.
This example has several implications for the nature of pain and pleasure. To start with, Schopenhauer greatly overestimated the temporal factor associated with pain during the process of striving. Severe timestamps of pain are usually present but vanish swiftly due to psycho-physiological adaptation. PS now only occurs episodically (t1) with significantly less qualitative intensity. Objections can be raised with counter examples where extreme suffering is experienced as lasting, such as cancer patients receiving years of treatment or women going through domestic abuse. These examples imply prolonged periods of substantial suffering that support the qualitative potency of PS. Nevertheless, when the pain of the entire population is viewed collectively, these extreme cases fall in the history of the human race on the tail ends of a normal distribution, where the summation of the extremities in size does not amount to massive agonies that tramples over the commonly experienced passing pain. Even for the individuals experiencing them, the adaptative effect still emerges to neutralize the pain. In all, PS for Schopenhauer should be granted only for the prolonged cases of suffering with enormous pain, which severely undermines the pessimistic strength of the collective PS in human life.
In addition, the hunger example shows how pleasure can also occur during the process of striving in the form of anticipation (PA). PA is even more discernible in the striving towards long-term goals or meaningful life projects, such as the desire to create artistic masterpieces. This form of pleasure is not dependent upon the pain of a certain lack but is positively valuable. When an artist is asked about why she wants to create, other than the underlying need for success and reputation, which might not even arise for some, such as the Renaissance artists who painted the chapel ceilings or the women writers who had to use lifelong pseudonyms, the answers are usually highlighted by an overwhelming passion for creation where pleasure is apparent in each advancement. During creation, each incremental step of progress defeating a challenge is intertwined with a pleasurable smell of deliciousness that anticipates the finished work. PA then quantitatively reverses pleasure to be an essential and interweaving part of suffering.
Moreover, this activity of striving is tumultuously more pleasurable precisely because of how challenging and sufferable it is. The normally disturbing barriers impeding completion are read by the creator as opportunities to be a causally efficacious agent. In this sense, to create is not motivated by any dissatisfaction of needs but a transcendent desire to break free from the pendulum of pessimism by being the causal will itself. Only through conquering the hurdles and directly effecting changes to the world of representation through a course of action, one feels as free as the universal and omnipotent will, only more aimful and structured. In other words, the creative strives can be intrinsically pleasurable by being meaning-enhancing (PM) for causal agents to transcend the finitude of life during and after this process. This transcendent meaning is more explicit after the completion of creations that have an ever-lasting impact exceeding the creator’s expectations. The history of literature, cinema, philosophy, science, or any discipline that requires creative endeavors to be inherited and succeeded is a demonstration for PM to be much more qualitatively enduring in time (t2) and much less to be assuaged by boredom than Schopenhauer intended. And the very fact that I am writing about Schopenhauer’s philosophy, more than 200 years old, may be a signal for him to doubt his own formulation of pleasure as fleeting and meaningless.
Schopenhauer may object by claiming that the meaning of being a transcendent causal agent is not valuable to human beings as mere representations with constrained existential spans. Once we die, the transcendent meaning of creation is no longer pleasurable for us, and the temporary freedom we feel in creating would be an illusion that masks our destined finitude. As a response, I argue that the joy of creation can spread throughout one’s life as an underpinning pillar of existence. And after death, creations become sources of joy for others to savor, where more pleasure is transmitted across human existence overall. For Virginia Wolf, who suffered from manic depression, writing was a way of self-defining expression that separated her from her mental illness. This separation is a phenomenological method of modern psychiatric treatment (Davidson, 1992) that encourages the intentionality to build a sense of self through creative endeavors and reconnected her to the vital meanings of existence. For many women writers like her, creating is an outlet to escape the bounded existence full of suppression and transcend one’s gendered cage as an autonomous being. The pleasure intrinsic to creation is what grounds their lifelong existence to seek emancipation. After their deaths, their striving towards being the transcendent will is preserved in these writings for future generations to derive pleasure from and be inspired by. In general, creative pleasure is drastically more overpowering than what Schopenhauer allows it to be. It carries the transcendent spirit that not only triumphs over the suffering of individual confinements but also unwaveringly proliferates in the human population. In the end, the enduring meaning of creative pleasures and the rare occasions of prolonged suffering amount to a pleasurable existence overall ([PS+PB]*t1<=[PL+PA+PM]*t2).
Conclusion
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic evaluation of the unworthy existence consists of the fundamental and permeating essence of pain in the strivings directed by the will to life and the contingent and ephemeral pleasure that temporarily lingers at the tip of satisfaction. However, I offered contrary interpretations of pain and pleasure that defy Schopenhauer’s assumptions of the temporal factors within and the interactions between them. I argued that, on the one hand, the pain associated with suffering is seldomly sustaining anguish but dissipates through adaptation; on the other hand, pleasures are necessarily presupposed in striving as anticipation, and their qualitative value is infinitely greater as the boundless spirit in the creative strives to transcend human finitude and generate enduring meaning for oneself and for human life as a whole.
