Schopenhauer: Humanity’s fall to irrationality

In the third section of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) Friedrich Nietzsche quotes the ancient tragedian, Sophocles, where he writes:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: ‘Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon.’

To readers of Nietzsche it is well-known that, contrary to the pessimism that Silenus’s cruel revelation could induce in a receptive reader, Nietzsche’s own thought turned out to be decidedly contrary to philosophical pessimism – instead of saying ‘No’ to life, Nietzsche said a decisive ‘Yes’ to life, which must have been difficult at times for someone who was plagued by prolonged, unbearable migraines, and who fell prey to the Victorian plague of syphilis. Despite his own suffering, however, he affirmed life till the end.

The person that Nietzsche may have had in mind when he cited Sophocles was Arthur Schopenhauer, probably the most pessimistic of modern Western philosophers who, despite his gift of writing beautifully, said ‘No’ to life. Why? Because Schopenhauer discerned, beneath the superficial veneer of rationality in humans – Aristotle famously defined humans as ‘rational animals’ (a telling oxymoron, if ever there was one) – that they were really, irrevocably, irrational creatures, driven by what he called the blind will-to-live – blind because it merely wills life, without rhyme or reason. The ‘rhyme and reason’ is supplied in retrospect, as it were, in the guise of philosophy, poetry, and art, which ignores the unbearable truth that Silenus disclosed to King Midas.

I have written on Schopenhauer (and Kafka) here before, with a view to clarifying the irrationality which Schopenhauer claimed to be the defining characteristic of human beings in relation to the present. This time I would like to do something else with his radical pessimism, however. I believe that current events in the world show, beyond any doubt, that he was not pessimistic enough. He thought things were bad as far as humanity was concerned. He was wrong – they are worse.

First let me remind you of his extremely low assessment of our species, by way of a movie made by the ‘bad boy’ of Hollywood, David Lynch. Some of you may recall Lynch’s film, Wild at Heart, which is already a suitably Schopenhauerian title, as I argued in a paper in which I interpreted it as a paradigmatic instance of ‘cinema of the grotesque’ (see Chapter 7 in my book, Projections). A crucial passage from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer, A. Dover Publications, 1966; Vol. 2, p. 354) served me well, at the time, to frame the discussion of Lynch’s film as a Schopenhauerian elaboration on the phenomenon of the ‘grotesque,’ understood as metonymy of irrationality. In the extant world, Schopenhauer argued:

…We see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need, and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on in saecula saeculorum, or until once again the crust of the planet breaks. Junghuhn relates that in Java he saw an immense field entirely covered with skeletons, and took it to be a battlefield. However, they were nothing but skeletons of large turtles five feet long, three feet broad, and of equal height. These turtles come this way from the sea, in order to lay their eggs, and are then seized by wild dogs (Canis rutilans); with their united strength, these dogs lay them on their backs, tear open their lower armour, the small scales of the belly, and devour them alive. But then a tiger often pounces on the dogs. Now all this misery is repeated thousands and thousands of times, year in year out. For this, then, are these turtles born. For what offence must they suffer this agony? What is the point of this whole scene of horror? The only answer is that the will-to-live thus objectifies itself.

The irrationality of existence – that of the animals referred to in this excerpt, but also of human beings – is here depicted by Schopenhauer as being absurd; that is, as having no point except the futile, aimless repetition of the cycles of life and death, over and over (which is no point, anyway). In Lynch’s film this absurdity manifests itself, among other things, in the alternation of inordinately long periods of suffering in the lives of the two protagonists, Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicholas Cage), with brief snatches of intense sexual pleasure, neither of which seems to have any meaning beyond simply occurring as the expression of the blind will to live.

As for myself, I have always preferred Nietzsche’s life-affirming philosophy, particularly as articulated in his wonderfully uplifting ‘philosophical novel,’ Thus Spake Zarathustra (a paean to humanity’s earthly, time-bound existence), and I still do, but recent events in the world appear to point irresistibly in the direction of – as already hinted at above – things being even worse than Schopenhauer’s depiction of a world suffused in irrationality.

Sure, it is that, too, but at present it goes beyond irrationality to insanity, the kind of madness that the final scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb inimitably (albeit satirically) captures, with the Captain of a B-52 bomber, having cut the atomic bomb loose from where it had got stuck in the bomb bay, sits astride this harbinger of mega-death, waving his Stetson and shouting something like ‘Yahoo!’ as the bomb descends towards the earth. And in the background one can hear Vera Lynn singing nostalgically: ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…but we’ll meet again some sunny day….’

Appropriately, the etymology of ‘nostalgic’ is something like ‘pain associated with wanting to return home;’ that is, severe homesickness, but in the context of the film it is clearly meant to evoke ‘a melancholic longing for better times (of the past).’ We are obviously at such a point in our history now, but nostalgia will not help us. Only concerted action aimed at putting an end to the wave of insanity currently sweeping over the world will do. It is no coincidence that the pivotal character of ‘Jack Ripper’ in Kubrick’s film is an unhinged US Air Force general, who sets in motion a unilateral, unauthorised nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

Today there are quite a few of those dubious characters around, with the difference that they are not fictional; unfortunately, they are only too real, they are beyond Schopenhauerian irrationality. Why? Because what these characters seem to want to trigger is death on such a massive scale that the very existence of (not just human) life on the planet is at stake. Some people might call it a ‘death wish,’ and it certainly is that, but it could easily be confused with Freud’s ‘death drive’ (or ‘death instinct’) as explored in his book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which is not at all simply a mad desire to end one’s own, and/or other people’s lives.

In fact, Freud’s ‘death instinct’ is ambiguous. On the one hand, it names what all of us know as ‘our comfort zone,’ that place or set of conditions that we tend to return to all the time, where we feel most at home, relaxed, and at ease. This is the ‘conservative’ manifestation of the death drive, and is clearly not a death wish in the sense of a wish for the destruction of life, yours or anyone else’s.

But there is another side to the death drive, and that is its expression in the guise of naked aggression, or the intention to destroy, usually directed at others (as during wartime), but in pathological instances also at oneself. This latter face of the death instinct seems to have assumed the (dis-)proportions of the ‘insane wish to destroy (all) life’ today – if not explicitly, then at least implicitly.

Where does one find evidence for this? First, it is well known that Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is hellbent on destroying Iran, as the resolution for military action against Iran, which he introduced in July of this year demonstrates. Ironically, the resolution reads: ‘To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against the Islamic Republic of Iran for threatening the national security of the United States through the development of nuclear weapons,’ which is rich, considering that the US is the only country in history which has ever used nuclear weapons, and against a civilian population, to boot, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.

But there is a second, more egregious reason, also involving Senator Graham. During an interview (linked above) with Kristen Welker of NBC, Graham told her that it was the ‘right decision’ to drop two nuclear bombs on the two Japanese cities mentioned earlier, while:

Later in the conversation, Graham passionately interrupted Welker and said, ‘Why is it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war. Why was it OK to do that? I thought it was okay?’

Speaking over Welker he said, ‘To Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state. Whatever you have to do!’

Is it necessary to point out that this, right there, is insanity? ‘Insanity’ as in the implicit, incoherent notion of ‘mutually assured destruction,’ that was bandied about during the Cold War, and which was very effectively satirised by Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. How many times must one remind people like Lindsey Graham that, in a nuclear war, there are no winners? Evidently there are more people who are blissfully unaware of this than one tends to assume, as shown when some individuals blithely express their desire for Iran to be ‘nuked’ after its recent missile strike on Israel.

Then there is the recently announced revision of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which is explained as follows by Dmitry Suslov:

Updating Russia’s nuclear doctrine is certainly not a spontaneous step. It is long overdue and is linked to the fact that the current level of atomic deterrence has proven inadequate. Especially given that it failed to prevent the West from waging a hybrid war against our country.

Until recently, the desire to inflict a strategic defeat on us was considered insane and impossible, given that Russia is a nuclear superpower. But it turns out that it is taken seriously in some minds in the West. That is why the current level of nuclear deterrence has proved inadequate in the face of the US-led bloc’s growing involvement in the conflict against Russia, which has already turned into discussions about strikes by Western long-range missiles deep into our territory.

In this regard, lowering the threshold for the use of atomic weapons and expanding the number of situations in which Moscow allows this step is long overdue. Just as the wording of the previous version of the doctrine, which stated that the use of nuclear weapons in a non-nuclear conflict was only possible in the event of a threat to Russia’s very existence as a state, was no longer in line with global realities. Now this threshold has been lowered, and the use of nuclear weapons in a non-nuclear conflict is possible in the event of a critical threat to the country’s sovereignty.

I repeat: not the very existence of our state, but critical threats to its sovereignty.

Regardless of the caution embedded in this statement, one cannot ignore the possibility that certain actions could occur which may, indeed, trigger the use of nuclear weapons by Russia, and then, in retaliation, by NATO countries, or vice versa. Such a scenario is too horrible to contemplate, of course, and one can only hope that cool heads will prevail when the situation deteriorates to the point where the very existence of humanity, and not only of a state, is at stake.

That was the case, fortunately, during the Cuban missile crisis in the early 1960s. But as long as hotheads such as Senator Graham actively encourage the use of nuclear weapons, the uninformed public may actually believe that this would not really be significantly different from conventional warfare. If this were the case, they would be making a grave mistake.