The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: the Wisdom of Life
Look on these two pictures--the life of the masses, one long, dull
record of struggle and effort entirely devoted to the petty interests
of personal welfare, to misery in all its forms, a life beset by
intolerable boredom as soon as ever those aims are satisfied and the
man is thrown back upon himself, whence he can be roused again to some
sort of movement only by the wild fire of passion. On the other side
you have a man endowed with a high degree of mental power, leading an
existence rich in thought and full of life and meaning, occupied by
worthy and interesting objects as soon as ever he is free to give
himself to them, bearing in himself a source of the noblest pleasure.
What external promptings he wants come from the works of nature, and
from the contemplation of human affairs and the achievements of the
great of all ages and countries, which are thoroughly appreciated by a
man of this type alone, as being the only one who can quite understand
and feel with them. And so it is for him alone that those great ones
have really lived; it is to him that they make their appeal; the rest
are but casual hearers who only half understand either them or their
followers. Of course, this characteristic of the intellectual man
implies that he has one more need than the others, the need of
reading, observing, studying, meditating, practising, the need, in
short, of undisturbed leisure. For, as Voltaire has very rightly said,
_there are no real pleasures without real needs_; and the need of them
is why to such a man pleasures are accessible which are denied to
others,--the varied beauties of nature and art and literature. To
heap these pleasures round people who do not want them and cannot
appreciate them, is like expecting gray hairs to fall in love. A man
who is privileged in this respect leads two lives, a personal and an
intellectual life; and the latter gradually comes to be looked upon
as the true one, and the former as merely a means to it. Other people
make this shallow, empty and troubled existence an end in itself. To
the life of the intellect such a man will give the preference over
all his other occupations: by the constant growth of insight and
knowledge, this intellectual life, like a slowly-forming work of art,
will acquire a consistency, a permanent intensity, a unity which
becomes ever more and more complete; compared with which, a life
devoted to the attainment of personal comfort, a life that may broaden
indeed, but can never be deepened, makes but a poor show: and yet,
as I have said, people make this baser sort of existence an end in
itself.
The ordinary life of every day, so far as it is not moved by passion,
is tedious and insipid; and if it is so moved, it soon becomes
painful. Those alone are happy whom nature has favored with some
superfluity of intellect, something beyond what is just necessary to
carry out the behests of their will; for it enables them to lead an
intellectual life as well, a life unattended by pain and full of vivid
interests. Mere leisure, that is to say, intellect unoccupied in the
service of the will, is not of itself sufficient: there must be a
real superfluity of power, set free from the service of the will and
devoted to that of the intellect; for, as Seneca says, _otium sine
litteris mors est et vivi hominis sepultura_--illiterate leisure is
a form of death, a living tomb. Varying with the amount of the
superfluity, there will be countless developments in this second life,
the life of the mind; it may be the mere collection and labelling of
insects, birds, minerals, coins, or the highest achievements of poetry
and philosophy. The life of the mind is not only a protection against
boredom; it also wards off the pernicious effects of boredom; it keeps
us from bad company, from the many dangers, misfortunes, losses and
extravagances which the man who places his happiness entirely in the
objective world is sure to encounter, My philosophy, for instance, has
never brought me in a six-pence; but it has spared me many an expense.
The ordinary man places his life's happiness in things external to
him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the
like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the
foundation of his happiness is destroyed. In other words, his centre
of gravity is not in himself; it is constantly changing its place,
with every wish and whim. If he is a man of means, one day it will
be his house in the country, another buying horses, or entertaining
friends, or traveling,--a life, in short, of general luxury, the
reason being that he seeks his pleasure in things outside him. Like
one whose health and strength are gone, he tries to regain by the use
of jellies and drugs, instead of by developing his own vital power,
the true source of what he has lost. Before proceeding to the
opposite, let us compare with this common type the man who comes
midway between the two, endowed, it may be, not exactly with
distinguished powers of mind, but with somewhat more than the ordinary
amount of intellect. He will take a dilettante interest in art, or
devote his attention to some branch of science--botany, for example,
or physics, astronomy, history, and find a great deal of pleasure in
such studies, and amuse himself with them when external forces of
happiness are exhausted or fail to satisfy him any more. Of a man like
this it may be said that his centre of gravity is partly in himself.
But a dilettante interest in art is a very different thing from
creative activity; and an amateur pursuit of science is apt to be
superficial and not to penetrate to the heart of the matter. A man
cannot entirely identify himself with such pursuits, or have his whole
existence so completely filled and permeated with them that he loses
all interest in everything else. It is only the highest intellectual
power, what we call _genius_, that attains to this degree of
intensity, making all time and existence its theme, and striving to
express its peculiar conception of the world, whether it contemplates
life as the subject of poetry or of philosophy. Hence, undisturbed
occupation with himself, his own thoughts and works, is a matter of
urgent necessity to such a man; solitude is welcome, leisure is
the highest good, and everything else is unnecessary, nay, even
burdensome.
This is the only type of man of whom it can be said that his centre of
gravity is entirely in himself; which explains why it is that people
of this sort--and they are very rare--no matter how excellent their
character may be, do not show that warm and unlimited interest in
friends, family, and the community in general, of which others are
so often capable; for if they have only themselves they are not
inconsolable for the loss of everything else. This gives an isolation
to their character, which is all the more effective since other
people never really quite satisfy them, as being, on the whole, of
a different nature: nay more, since this difference is constantly
forcing itself upon their notice they get accustomed to move about
amongst mankind as alien beings, and in thinking of humanity in
general, to say _they_ instead of _we_.
So the conclusion we come to is that the man whom nature has endowed
with intellectual wealth is the happiest; so true it is that the
subjective concerns us more than the objective; for whatever the
latter may be, it can work only indirectly, secondly, and through the
medium of the former--a truth finely expressed by Lucian:--
[Greek: _Aeloutos ho taes psychaes ploutus monos estin alaethaes
Talla dechei ataen pleiona ton kteanon_--][1]
[Footnote 1: Epigrammata, 12.]
the wealth of the soul is the only true wealth, for with all other
riches comes a bane even greater than they. The man of inner wealth
wants nothing from outside but the negative gift of undisturbed
leisure, to develop and mature his intellectual faculties, that is,
to enjoy his wealth; in short, he wants permission to be himself,
his whole life long, every day and every hour. If he is destined to
impress the character of his mind upon a whole race, he has only one
measure of happiness or unhappiness--to succeed or fail in perfecting
his powers and completing his work. All else is of small consequence.
Accordingly, the greatest minds of all ages have set the highest value
upon undisturbed leisure, as worth exactly as much as the man himself.
_Happiness appears to consist in leisure_, says Aristotle;[1] and
Diogenes Laertius reports that _Socrates praised leisure as the
fairest of all possessions_. So, in the _Nichomachean Ethics_,
Aristotle concludes that a life devoted to philosophy is the happiest;
or, as he says in the _Politics,[2] the free exercise of any power,
whatever it may be, is happiness_. This again, tallies with what
Goethe says in _Wilhelm Meister: The man who is born with a talent
which he is meant to use, finds his greatest happiness in using it_.
[Footnote 1: Eth. Nichom. x. 7.]
[Footnote 2: iv. 11.]
But to be in possession of undisturbed leisure, is far from being
the common lot; nay, it is something alien to human nature, for the
ordinary man's destiny is to spend life in procuring what is necessary
for the subsistence of himself and his family; he is a son of struggle
and need, not a free intelligence. So people as a rule soon get tired
of undisturbed leisure, and it becomes burdensome if there are no
fictitious and forced aims to occupy it, play, pastime and hobbies of
every kind. For this very reason it is full of possible danger, and
_difficilis in otio quies_ is a true saying,--it is difficult to keep
quiet if you have nothing to do. On the other hand, a measure of
intellect far surpassing the ordinary, is as unnatural as it is
abnormal. But if it exists, and the man endowed with it is to be
happy, he will want precisely that undisturbed leisure which the
others find burdensome or pernicious; for without it he is a Pegasus
in harness, and consequently unhappy. If these two unnatural
circumstances, external, and internal, undisturbed leisure and great
intellect, happen to coincide in the same person, it is a great piece
of fortune; and if the fate is so far favorable, a man can lead the
higher life, the life protected from the two opposite sources of human
suffering, pain and boredom, from the painful struggle for existence,
and the incapacity for enduring leisure (which is free existence
itself)--evils which may be escaped only by being mutually
neutralized.
But there is something to be said in opposition to this view. Great
intellectual gifts mean an activity pre-eminently nervous in its
character, and consequently a very high degree of susceptibility to
pain in every form. Further, such gifts imply an intense temperament,
larger and more vivid ideas, which, as the inseparable accompaniment
of great intellectual power, entail on its possessor a corresponding
intensity of the emotions, making them incomparably more violent than
those to which the ordinary man is a prey. Now, there are more things
in the world productive of pain than of pleasure. Again, a large
endowment of intellect tends to estrange the man who has it from other
people and their doings; for the more a man has in himself, the less
he will be able to find in them; and the hundred things in which they
take delight, he will think shallow and insipid. Here, then, perhaps,
is another instance of that law of compensation which makes itself
felt everywhere. How often one hears it said, and said, too, with some
plausibility, that the narrow-minded man is at bottom the happiest,
even though his fortune is unenviable. I shall make no attempt to
forestall the reader's own judgment on this point; more especially as
Sophocles himself has given utterance to two diametrically opposite
opinions:--