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The World as Will and Representation is Schopenhauer’s principal philosophical work. Championing the ideas of Kant over those of Hegel, Schopenhauer believed that Will is the core of all being. Representation (phenomena such as causality, space, and time—in other words, how we experience our world) is created by the Will for its own needs or satisfactions, whatever they might be. In this passage, Schopenhauer outlines part of his philosophy of pessimism, arguing that pain is positive and happiness negative (since happiness is the absence of pain). No German philosopher apart from Nietzsche (who was inspired by some of Schopenhauer’s ideas) used less jargon.
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Just as a stream flows smoothly on as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, has to have experienced a shock of some kind. On the other hand, all that opposes, frustrates and resists our will, that is to say all that is unpleasant and painful, impresses itself upon us instantly, directly and with great clarity. Just as we are conscious not of the healthiness of our whole body but only of the little place where the shoe pinches, so we think not of the totality of our successful activities but of some insignificant trifle or other which continues to vex us. On this fact is founded what I have often before drawn attention to: the negativity of well-being and happiness, in antithesis to the positivity of pain.
I therefore know of no greater absurdity than that absurdity which characterizes almost all metaphysical systems: that of explaining evil as something negative. For evil is precisely that which is positive, that which makes itself palpable; and good, on the other hand, i.e. all happiness and all gratification, is that which is negative, the mere abolition of a desire and extinction of a pain.
This is also consistent with the fact that as a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected.
A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.
...Work, worry, toil and trouble are indeed the lot of almost all men their whole life long. And yet if every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time? Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is. Thus for a race such as this no stage, no form of existence is suitable other than the one it already possesses.
Source: Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms. London: Penguin [http://www.penguin.com], 1970.
Appears in
Schopenhauer, Arthur; Metaphysics; Pessimism; Philosophy, Western
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