Schopenhauer's pessimism holds that all willing arises from want, so conscious life begins in lack, felt as pain. Satisfaction removes only one want, and the will as a whole has no goal, so new want or boredom follows. The treadmill largely holds; the claim that all pleasure is negative does not.
Berlin, March 1820. A thirty-two-year-old lecturer at the university puts his course on at the same hour as Hegel's. He asked for that slot himself, and he'd already called Hegel a charlatan. By one account Hegel drew over two hundred students. Schopenhauer got a handful.
Hegel had still voted to let him lecture.
His main book had been out since December 1818, with 1819 on the title page, and almost nobody cared. Then in 1851 he published a collection of essays called Parerga and Paralipomena, Greek for appendices and omissions. Leftovers, by its own name. Within a couple of years, helped by an unsigned 1853 review in the Westminster Review, people were finally reading him. It wasn't overnight, whatever the legend says. The ideas hadn't changed much in thirty years, so it's fair to ask what had changed in the readers.
What this episode argues
- The treadmill holds. Desire does tend to renew itself, and his own advice about pacing wish and satisfaction is a usable guide to living.
- The claim that all pleasure is negative fails. Some joys arrive with no want in front of them.
- Nothing in his pessimism licenses contempt for particular people, and his own conclusion leans toward compassion and calm.
The first move
He starts from something small and hard to deny.
"All willing arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering."
Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Idea, Vol. 1, Book III (trans. Haldane and Kemp)
To want something is to be without it. You don't want the cup of tea you're already drinking. And being without something you want is, at least a little, unpleasant. It nags. That's the whole first step, and I think most people grant it before they notice they've granted anything.
Then satisfaction. Say you've spent two years wanting a job at one particular firm. You get it. That want is gone, cancelled, and for a while there's relief. Look at what didn't happen, though. You didn't stop wanting. Inside a few months there's a better desk, a promotion, a different city, or else a flat, restless sense that you'd expected to feel more. He puts it unkindly:
"it is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive to-day that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow."
Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Idea, Vol. 1, Book III
Why should it go on like this forever? Here's the distinction that carries the argument, and it's worth getting exactly right because the rest depends on it.
"every particular act of will has its end, the whole will has none"
Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Idea, Vol. 1, Book II
Each single wanting has a target. The job. The tea. Hit the target and that wanting stops. The will itself, his name for the blind striving he thinks is the inner nature of everything, isn't aimed at anything. It has no finish line, so no achievement can satisfy it as a whole. It just produces the next target.
Put those two pieces together and you get the treadmill. Every particular want can be met. Wanting as such can't be. So the ordinary condition of a conscious creature is lack, interrupted now and then by the brief gap after one lack closes and before the next one opens. That gap is what we call happiness.
It's a tight argument, and the second half of it, the bit about the goalless will, is harder to dislodge than people expect.
The first half rests on an assumption about what pleasure is, and that assumption is exactly where it starts to give.