Arthur
Schopenhauer: The Two Things That Stop Us From Being Happy
Not
many people looked to Arthur Schopenhauer in his lifetime, but his thinking
about human nature has deeply influenced a long list of subsequent writers and philosophers.
He was
one of the first major Western thinkers to incorporate aspects of Eastern
philosophy into his work, except that many of his conclusions were generally a
little more pessimistic.
He saw
reality as driven by a blind will that manifested itself in
humans as illogical and pointless desires. For him, the only way out of this
was through a kind of asceticism, where much of our material pleasures are
given up as to fight against this irrational will.
The
biggest criticism of Schopenhauer is indeed this defeatist view, one that
didn’t attempt to strike a balance. Nonetheless, it’s clear that he had thought
deeply about these issues, and even if his conclusions were unsatisfactory,
there was still a kernel of truth to them.
In his
essay The
Wisdom of Life, he
did something unlike him. He deviated away from his pessimism and tried to
outline what it would take to live a happy life in this world as it is. In
doing so, he insightfully pointed to one of the chief struggles of our
existence:
“The most general survey shows us that the two foes of
human happiness are pain and boredom. We may go further, and say that in the
degree in which we are fortunate enough to get away from the one, we approach
the other. Life presents, in fact, a more or less violent oscillation between
the two.
The reason of this is that each of these two poles
stands in a double antagonism to the other, external or objective, and inner or
subjective. Needy surroundings and poverty produce pain; while, if a man is
more than well off, he is bored. Accordingly, while the lower classes are
engaged in a ceaseless struggle with need, in other words, with pain, the upper
carry on a constant and often desperate battle with boredom.”
Stuck in the Pleasure/Pain Axis
Traditional
psychology and neuroscience have assumed that humans have innate biological
pathways embedded into us by evolution, expressed as feelings like anger and
joy.
This
reasoning holds that emotions are universal and specific and that we can map
them out if we study the human body in close detail across a variety of
cultures and environments.
This
view is so deeply ingrained in popular culture that most of us, too, would
argue that there is something specific like anger and joy that we can identify
in others at different times.
The
theory of constructed emotions, however, argues otherwise. While, yes,
something we roughly identify as anger is experienced by us, it doesn’t exist
in the concrete and specific way that we think it does. It’s a complex and
summarized mixture of everything going on in our body at a particular time (as
to orient us), and it varies from one instance to another.
According
to this view, the only thing that exists is the pleasure/pain axis, which
serves to absorb information both from our body and our surroundings to give a
rough idea of what we need. Within this axis, we experience affect — an ever-changing conscious
reality.
Everything
else — particularly
emotion and cognition — only exists because we
create linguistic distinctions between them. Anger is only anger because we
collectively call it anger.
The
interesting thing is that Schopenhauer takes it a step further with his
distinction of pain and boredom. While pain can be constant and ever-present
(it’s a call to action, so if you don’t respond to it, it persists), pleasure
(or a similarly good feeling) isn’t and turns into boredom if you have
everything you need (if it didn’t, survival would be out of the question).
In a
way, as Schopenhauer points out, we are essentially stuck in this fluctuation.
If we get away from one, we move towards the other, and neither provide any
long-term satisfaction.
Now,
it’s easy to see how pain is unwelcome, but a deep existential boredom can be
similarly torturous. In some cases, perhaps even more so, leading to nihilism
and depression.
There
is a lot we are still uncertain about in terms of how we experience our
conscious reality, but the fact that we are living within the pleasure/pain
axis seems close to certain.
Cultivating a Mind/Body Connection
To
solve this problem, Schopenhauer suggests that we leave behind our
preoccupations with the world around us and instead retreat to the world of
thought and create inward wealth.
Well,
he doesn’t necessarily suggest that physical pain can be escaped in the mind,
but he does make the case that we can break the shackles of boredom, at least,
with thought.
By
ignoring the external world and the associations we have in it with pleasure
and pain, he argues that we can somehow leave behind this pleasure/pain axis
altogether within the mind. And this, perhaps, is where Schopenhauer sounds
better on paper than in real life.
If the
theory of constructed emotions is right, then there is really no hard
distinction where thought somehow lives outside of the pleasure/pain axis. It’s
all one side of the same coin.
In
fact, thought, in some instances of boredom and pain, does nothing but augment
what causes dissatisfaction. Quite often, it’s not as simple as thinking about
something else to get away from what you don’t want to face. We don’t always
have control over that.
A
better solution, maybe, is to create inward wealth by cultivating a more
holistic mind/body connection, where you pay just as much attention to the body
as you do to your thoughts.
In
many cases of pain and boredom, when it is thought which augments the
dissatisfaction, observing the body and the sensations on it, without attaching
yourself to them as thought does, you can see the ever-changing nature of the
affect that you are experiencing.
Very
few people consciously spend time in their body, experiencing movements and
feelings that arise, but when it’s done with intention, it can be just as
therapeutic as a mental escape.
It
reminds you there is more to what you experience on a daily basis than whatever
it is that boils to the surface. By default, we don’t think about being in our
body because we have automated the parts of our awareness that consciously pay
attention to it, and it’s precisely for this reason that getting in touch with
that awareness can point us in a new direction.
The
problems of pain and boredom can’t be solved by retreating to one or the other,
either thought (subjective, internal) or body (objective, external), but they
have to work together.
The Takeaway
Regardless
of whether Schopenhauer was right about everything, it’s hard not to respect
his courage in trying to see reality for what it is rather than settling for an
unfounded idealism.
His
whole philosophy works in a fairly coherent fashion, and much of it is
understandable enough to apply to our day to day life in a way that clears out
some of the muddy waters.
The
chief struggle experienced in the human condition, as identified by
Schopenhauer, says something that modern biology has known since Darwin and
takes it a step further: we live in the pleasure/pain axis, yes, but sustained
pleasure almost always leads to boredom.
Pain
gives us information that something is wrong and we need to fix it, and some
form of it tends to persist until the problem is solved. Pleasure, on the other
hand, is a reward, but if the reward is continuously present, it ceases to be
rewarding, leading to a certain dullness.
While
there are ways to escape this dullness by retreating to the mind and to
intellectual thought, we can’t completely sever the link between experience and
the pleasure/pain axis.
To
balance the ever-changing affect we live with, in a healthy way, we need to
develop a mind/body connection, one that holistically incorporates the two to
manage change.
By
watching and paying attention to our body, outside of the boundaries of
thought, we can bring to the foreground the feelings and sensations that are
masked by an inattentive mind.
When
stated, it’s quite evident that the mind and the body work together, that they
have a feedback loop that connects them, but in reality, we often ignore this
at our own peril.
Dissatisfaction
exists whether we want it to, but how we deal with it makes all the difference.
Zat Rana
https://medium.com/personal-growth/arthur-schopenhauer-the-two-things-that-stop-us-from-being-happy-301c014e4cbahttps://medium.com/personal-growth/arthur-schopenhauer-the-two-things-that-stop-us-from-being-happy-301c014e4cba
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