While Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel can be considered optimists (people who think that human life will improve), Schopenhauer is the first (and last) thinker in the entire West. philosophy to build a complete and systematic pessimism.
But it is also interesting for other reasons. For him Great philosophers series (1987), Brian Magee, who wrote a thick book on Schopenhauer, introduced him as “the only major Western philosopher who drew serious and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought.”
Magee continues: “He was the first great Western philosopher who was openly and clearly an atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and spoke more about them than any other important philosopher. . . . He was himself among the best writers of German prose. Many of his sentences were so brilliantly aphoristic that they were published separately and apart from the book. Epigrams.”
Funny epigrams of Schopenhauer
Here are a few of Schopenhauer’s many epigrams to give you a taste:
- Talent hits a target that no one else can hit. Genius hits a target that no one can see.
- Life is a business that does not cover its costs.
- It is said that the pleasure of this world is greater than the pain… If the reader wants to see briefly whether this statement is true or not, let him compare the mutual feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
- What everyone aims for in a normal relationship with their colleagues is to prove that they are inferior to them.
- Almost all of our grief comes from our relationships with other people. There is no other wrong way happiness rather than worldliness.
- Happiness is hard to find within yourself, but it cannot be found anywhere else.
As Schopenhauer himself said, why did you laugh?
You probably laughed while reading these aphorisms. But why did you laugh? Schopenhauer has his own theory laughterthis is a version of incongruity theory, according to which laughter arises from a conflict between perception (what people think is happening) and reality (what is actually happening)—emphasizing the failure of reason over perception. So when people (not with us) laugh at us, they fill the gap between our self-image or people’s general idea of us and the sad reality.
Many people who read Schopenhauer’s aphorisms only half laugh because they feel threatened. But the few who laugh outright feel free because of their understanding. In this moment of pure insight, they escape, if only for a few seconds, the tyranny of the Will—the blind, inscrutable force that underlies all reality in Schopenhauer’s philosophy and compels us to exist, to strive, and to suffer aimlessly.
Schopenhauer’s Theory of Crying
Schopenhauer also had a theory of crying. Crying, a physical expression of emotional poverty, is a form of self-pity. So it requires an external perspective on itself, so animals don’t cry and children don’t cry when no one is watching. Schopenhauer cites the example of a person who did not think to weep over their misfortune until their case was summed up in court and they were brought to think about their suffering, when suddenly they burst into tears.
When we weep, we become “both a sufferer and a compassionate seer.” Because crying comes from self-compassion, it shows others that the person crying is capable of compassion and therefore deserving of compassion. Psychopaths do not cry, or only crocodile tears.
The final reason why Schopenhauer is funny
Schopenhauer is very important to me because he was the first from ancient times to offer a comprehensive solution to the problem of existence and suffering.
As much as he was a great philosopher, he was a great psychologist, so we often laugh with him.
But almost as often, we find ourselves laughing at I think it’s because of the inconsistency between his philosophy of arrogance and compassion and his bad boy ways.
Neel Burton is the author of a newly published book German Greeks: German Philosophy and German Philosophers.
