Schopenhauer or Christianity ?

                         

Schopenhauer’s philosophy has not fared well, his aesthetic insights are still worthy, and his basic idealism, however his idea of “will” - by which he really meant force - has been more or less dismissed.

Nevertheless, he paints a picture of reality, ravenous and hellish, that contemporary man feels all too accurate.

Here I compare Schopenhauer to Christianity, and find some major common ground.

Schopenhauer thought that the world as a whole is fundamentally will, from gravity to sexual impulse, nothing but blind idiot will. His proof ? Look inward, he says, you will find this unrelenting force in oneself.

Hence the only way out is freedom from this will.

Of course, the ancients had a different view, the truest freedom is to live as we were meant to live; to love the true, the good, and the beautiful because they’re worth loving; the right goal is not the annulment of our freedom, but its fulfillment.

First, recall Schopenhauer married his philosophy to Newtonian physics and its determinism, which we know to be false. 

Besides which, hard determinism is rather silly, for if it were true, one would not be able to come to that conclusion rationally, but be determined to believe it; hence destroying both rationality and truth.

Also, since Schopenhauer opened himself to Platonic metaphysics, we can note the Platonic mystics too looked inward, but found, beneath all the noise and chaos, something else. “A Platonic man,” George Mavrodes once wrote, “who sets himself to live in accordance with the Good aligns himself with what is deepest and most basic in existence.”

                                                                 

Drawing I myself did - Self & Soul

The power and unruliness of the sexual drive was, for him, the clearest manifestation of the will to live and the way it brings about unhappiness. It mercilessly pushes us into romantic illusions, irrational decisions, and the compulsive scratching of an itch that only ever reappears, all for the sake of bringing about new people who will in turn only suffer the way we do.

Schopenhauer’s chapter on “The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes” in The World as Will and Idea is worth quoting:

“This longing, which attaches the idea of endless happiness to the possession of a particular woman, and unutterable pain to the thought that this possession cannot be attained – this longing and this pain cannot obtain their material from the wants of an ephemeral individual; but they are the sighs of the spirit of the species… The species alone has infinite life, and therefore is capable of infinite desires, infinite satisfaction, and infinite pain. But these are here imprisoned in the narrow breast of a mortal. No wonder, then, if such a breast seems like to burst, and can find no expression for the intimations of infinite rapture or infinite misery with which it is filled…”

Well, that’s perfectly reasonable. But then again, one can take the exact same facts and reach a very different conclusion, In Mere Christianity, Lewis writes:

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

 In his essay “On Suicide,” he notes that “Christianity carries in its innermost heart the truth that suffering (the Cross) is the true aim of life.” But Christianity nevertheless insists that “all things [are] very good,” so that suffering serves an “ascetic” purpose in properly orienting us toward the ultimate good that will redeem it. Schopenhauer shares Christianity’s view that suffering is central to human existence and ought to be faced ascetically, but he rejects the thesis that all things are very good. Hence whereas Christian asceticism is motivated by hope, Schopenhauer’s is motivated by despair.

Ed Feser, the Catholic philosopher remarks,

"From a Christian perspective, he is living a kind of hell because he denies that there is a real object for our infinite desires. There is no fulfillment of desires or infinite satisfaction as he says. No resting in God. This is the cornerstone of Christian self understanding - that our desires, our wills, our sexuality, our appetites, are all disordered because they are not directed or submitted to the one entity that can bring them to fulfillment. And this is God."

        

Schopenhauer, as I say, thought that the world as a whole is fundamentally will, offering examples like the following:

“The one-year-old bird has no notion of the eggs for which it builds its nest; the young spider has no idea of the prey for which it spins its web; the ant-lion has no notion of the ant for which it digs its cavity for the first time. The larva of the stag-beetle gnaws a hole in the wood, where it will undergo its metamorphosis, twice as large if it is to become a male beetle as if it is to become a female, in order in the former case to have room for the horns, though as yet it has no idea of these. In the actions of such animals the will is obviously at work as in the rest of their activities, but is in blind activity.”

Interestingly, such obviously goal-directed tendencies interwoven throughout nature don’t lead Schopenhauer to affirm teleology in the world, but to deny it. The will in question is characterized as “will without a subject.” . Examples of seemingly teleological instances of the world are an odd choice to drive home a point denying its reality.

Really, the existence of both stable natural laws and our ability epistemically to access them count evidentially more in favor of theism than atheism, a personal universe rather than an impersonal one.

That the universe is fine tuned is undeniable. There is order. And yet, there is obviously chaos.

What could explain this ?

Well, the Christian explanation avoids denying either. The story is that the Cosmos was made from nothing, and presently it is in a state of birth, groaning toward true existence when God will be all in all. A thing truly exists when it is filled with Logos, with True Life, with God, and therefore acts in an ordered way. Meanwhile, everything exists in a mix of nothingness and being, meaning breaks down, the Creation falls apart and tends toward chaos, it acts irrational, yet there is clearly a rationality there.

After all, St. Paul states that creation was made “subject to futility”

The Orthodox Theologian John Zizioulas asserts the following:

"Athanasios the Great wrote in his work “On Incarnation” that Creation has “nil” and “death” within its nature. Therefore, “death”, in the sense of “elimination of Creation” is something that is embedded in Creation.".

Or as the Orthodox Theologian David Bentley Hart put’\s it,

“...It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primaeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the “powers” and “principalities” of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender.”

Or as the Orthodox Theologian John Behr says,

“…the world we inhabit as material beings is not created by God, it is made, or at least strictly conditioned by the choices of His creatures and regulated by his providence…

Creation is strictly only the unimpeded expression of God’s rational will…for something to be God's creation it must reflect His will…”

“This world, as we know it, from the Big Bang up until today, has been the world of death,” David Bentley Hart tells us.

Schopenhauer does see some truth in the Eden story, he writes,

“The myth of the Fall of man is the only thing in the Old Testament to which I can concede a metaphysical, although only allegorical, truth: indeed it is this alone that reconciles me to the Old Testament. Thus our existence resembles nothing but the consequence of a false step and a guilty desire.”

In any case Ed Feser concludes,

“ The stripping away of teleology is also the stripping away of inherent goodness and purpose. Nature loses its character as an icon or a quasi sacrament that points to God. And so, we are not taught to properly appreciate our own nature and its various ends either. We are taught to see our nature as completely devoid of goodness in a Manichean flight into pure spirit. Or, in reaction to the flight to the spirit, is an opposing reaction which is a flight to naturalism. An excessive focus and naive belief that the limited natural ends of our human nature can bring us true happiness without reference to our ultimate good.”

                                                              

However, the most convincing thing about Schopenhauer, to me, is his vision of life, its absurd irrational horror.

However, Christians would never deny this.

Elder Nazarius tells us,

“Beguiling and deceptive is the life of the world, fruitless its labor, perilous its delight, poor its riches, delusive its honors, inconstant, insignificant; and woe to those who hope in its seeming goods: because of this many die without repentance. Blessed and most blessed are those who depart from the world and its desires.”

And in his “A complaint against the world,” St Ephraim the Syrian writes :

"No advantages do you offer those who love you, O world, you dwelling-place of sorrows.

All who draw near to you do you seduce with your treasures and with all your delights, but in the day of death both the fair countenance of the beautiful and the might of the strong will be cast down into the grave. Woe to him who loves you and is loved by you, for his joy will be transformed into cries.

O, if only I had never set foot in you, O world that deceives all who enter! those who love you enjoy no pleasures, and those who hate you weep not.

Righteous art Thou, O Lord, and righteous is thy judgement that condemns the world and those who love it!

I have become mired in filth; the waters of the world are drowning me, they do not let me break loose to catch my breath. May Thy Cross, O Lord, be my staff and my support on the path along which I walk.”

And check out this brutal opening of St Silouan’s biography by St Sophrony :

"Revelation concerning God declares, 'God is love,' God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.''

How difficult for us mortals to agree with this! Difficult, for both our own personal life and the life of the world around us would appear to testify to the contrary.

Indeed, where is this light of the Father's love if we all, approaching the end of our lives, in bitterness of heart can lament with Job, 'My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart . . . If I wait, the grave is mine house . .. Where is now my hope?' And that which from my youth my heart has sought secretly but fervently — 'Who shall see it?'"

Christ Himself attests that God is concerned for all creation, that He does not ignore a single small bird, that He clothes the grass of the field,"' and His concern for people is so incomparably great that 'the very hairs of our head are all numbered.

But where is this Providence that is attentive to the last detail?

We are all of us crushed by the spectacle of evil walking unrestrained up and down the world. Millions of lives that have often hardly begun — before they are even aware of living — are strangled with incredible ferocity.

So why ever is this absurd life given to us?"

Christians often point to the absurdity of existence, Seraphim Rose writes HERE,

“In the end we shall find that absurdism, quite against its will, offers its own testimony to this faith and this truth which are... Christian.

The absurd could not even be conceived except in relation to something considered not to be absurd; the fact that the world fails to make sense could occur only to men who have once believed, and have good reason to believe, that it does not make sense. Absurdism cannot be understood apart from its Christian origins.

Camus was quite right when he said, “We must choose between miracles and the absurd.” For in this respect Christianity and absurdism are equally opposed to Enlightenment rationalism and humanism, to the view that reality can be reduced to purely rational and human terms."
                          

Still, what of God’s providence ? It certainly doesn’t look like anyone is in control. Writing about the tsunami HERE David Hart writes,

"The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. 

Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God.

Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism.

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends.

 We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days."

After all Christianity does in fact make existential sense, Hart says,

"As for the Christian vision of reality in which the human person really is a center of spiritual gravity. The vision in which the God who is God is also the man who dies in utter abjection. That is the story I inhabit. The story that makes sense of all reality for me. And the story that has been confirmed--confirmed, not proven--by personal experiences and reflections on history."

                                  

Finally, Schopenhauer extols compassion, and indeed is a very moral philosopher.

However, the existence of a "true and pure love" attainable by philosophy and self-denial seems to be inconsistent with the premises of Schopenhauer's system. For how can there be a selfless love when all that exists is the selfish Will to live? Indeed, for Schopenhauer "existence, life, is itself a crime: it is our original sin. And it is inevitably expiated by suffering and death."

Since for Schopenhauer there is no paradisal innocence, but only original sin, there can be no escape from sin, and no return to paradise, but only the vain and self-contradictory attempt of existence to deny itself, of being not to be.

As Nietzsche clearly saw, if all the world is this ravenous will, whence compassion ? Nietzsche rightly notes that there is no room for his morality or goodness, and that Schopenhauer is borrowing from a Christian worldview. 

And indeed his own life bears this out. A proponent of compassion and moral philosopher he himself notoriously threw an old washer lady down the stairs for making too much noise !

Schopenhauer bases his view by looking within, and finding this ravenous will, yet mystics the world over, from all times and cultures, have likewise looked within, and indeed have found something like this terrible will - but also something else, something higher.

Schopenhauer's philosophy can neither be lived out , nor can it validate affect as pointing to something higher.

We all know there is a spirit, however drowned out by the chaos and bloody horror all about, of purity and goodness. What we make of it depends upon us, but to deny it utterly is surely foolish.

In any case, Christianity is a way of life, one trusts in it little by little, is shaped by liturgical living, and can discover in himself the truth of this reality. After all, faith is not optional, we are all walking toward one way or another. 

Of course, one cannot think oneself out of this predicament, or by mind alone verify one thesis over the other, one must CHOOSE what one wishes to believe, and then partake of those practices to experientially verify its truth.

Habits shape the mind, if one lives like an atheist, or liturgically, this will shape how one receives the world....

"For the religious, knowledge depends not only upon rationality and clarity but also upon ethical living, participation in prayer and liturgy, practices of fidelity, and openness to the Spirit. This is chiefly because in knowing God, we seek to know a person and persons must reveal themselves through cultivated relationships."

- Francis Martin

As I write HERE, Christianity is a way, a direction, not an explanation...