Arthur's Mom (Has Got it Going On)
6 November 1807.
You are not an evil human; you are not without intellect and education; you have everything that could make you a credit to human society. Moreover, I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you. All of your good qualities become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others; of wanting to improve and master what you cannot command.
With this you embitter the people around you, since no one wants to be improved or enlightened in such a forceful way, least of all by such an insignificant individual as you still are; no one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself, least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection. If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.
– Letter from Johanna Schopenhauer to her son, Arthur.
The grumpy philosopher
I love this. It’s hard for me to articulate just how fascinating and amusing these letters are to me.
In my mind, Arthur Schopenhauer is the quintessential philosophical pessimist. He’s certainly the most famous one in the Western canon, at least. He is probably most known for his conception of the Will – a ceaseless, aimless drive underlying all existence, from gravity to instinct to human desire. Because the Will is never satisfied, and every desire fulfilled just breeds a new one, existence is fundamentally characterized by lack, striving, and suffering. Satisfaction is temporary; boredom or new want always follows.
He argued, contra Leibniz, that this is far from the best of all possible worlds. If anything, it’s one of the worst. His ideas helped shape Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and even later Existentialist thought more broadly.
Especially interesting to me is his relationship to Buddhism. Despite conflating Vedantic principles with Buddhist thought (Eastern scholarship was a bit rough back then), he was excited that his philosophy and Buddhism arrived at similar truths independently. He recognized suffering (dukkha) as integral to existence. His ideas around craving tracks with the Second Noble Truth. His ethics (all manifestations of one Will, so harming others is self-delusion) echoes Buddhist non-duality and universal compassion.
Ultimately, Schopenhauer projected his own system onto an incomplete understanding of Buddhism, but the parallels are still clear. He considered it the “best of all religions” and kept a small Buddha statue on his desk.
Even his mom didn’t like him
With the background info out of the way, let’s turn to that wild letter from his mom. Taken on its own, one could read it as just a bitter mother complaining about her son’s post-Enlightenment emo phase. However, when we consider it in light of Schopenhauer’s life and work, we can read it as an indictment of philosophers generally and their often insufferable temperaments.
In other occupations, feedback is real and immediate. A shitty engineer knows he’s shitty when the bridge falls down. The chef realizes his failure when the dish gets sent back. There’s no such occupational hazard with purely intellectual pursuits like philosophy. Arguments at that level rarely provide that decisive external check. Just look at the number of people who “lose” debates but still walk away convinced of their victory.
Schopenhauer built up a systematic philosophy, an all-encompassing framework, that seemed to explain everything. Every conversation with him probably turned into an occasion to demonstrate its application. He was irritating in his morose evangelism.
His intellectual attainment, which had the potential to free him on so many levels, turned into another kind of bondage. He traded the veil of contemporary ideas for the blinders of his own making.
I guess the lesson is obvious: stay humble and stay agile. Your highfalutin ideas aren’t impressing anybody. Get out of your head every so often. If you don’t, even your mom will hate you.