Schopenhauer on Weeping

     Schopenhauer - 

wrote something profound and moving on weeping.

 

This is also the place to discuss one of the most striking peculiarities of human nature, weeping, which, like laughter, belongs to the manifestations that distinguish man from the animal. Weeping is by no means a positive manifestation of pain, for it occurs where pains are least. In my opinion, we never weep directly over pain that is felt, but always only over its repetition in reflection. Thus we pass from the felt pain, even when it is physical, to a mere mental picture or representation of it; we then find our own state so deserving of sympathy that, if another were the sufferer, we are firmly and sincerely convinced that we would be full of sympathy and love to help him. Now we ourselves are the object of our own sincere sympathy; with the most charitable disposition, we ourselves are most in need of help. We feel that we endure more than we could see another endure, and in this peculiarly involved frame of mind, in which the directly felt suffering comes to perception only in a doubly indirect way, pictured as the suffering of another and sympathized with as such, and then suddenly perceived again as directly our own; in such a frame of mind nature finds relief through that curious physical convulsion.

  In this passage I find everything I love and hate in Schopenhauer, whose metaphysics I would caricature (but I hope my caricature is of something there) thus: 1) reality, Being, the world is necessarily human constructions of reality, and our constructions (re-presentations, Vor-stellungen) necessarily cannot reach their objects; we are cut off from any knowledge or true understanding of Being; 2) with one exception: we know our acts of willing directly; they are least are not constructed, no matter how constructed the objects are to which are will is directed; 3) thus, ultimate reality is the blind, cruel will-to-exist; the phenomenal world we live are manifestation of this underlying force; 4) the will-to-exist expresses itself only in the self-assertion of the individual existent in the battle to survive, to expand, to increase its power (the range of willing); 5) there is no other meaning or purpose to existence; existence is horrible; pain is its essence; better not to have existed 6) knowing this is sublime, a negative sublime, a kind of disgust or horror; 7) the point is to escape this prison of the will – art allows temporary escape, especially music; above all, pity, compassion negates the will-to-exist, the source of all suffering; 8) pity and compassion can ultimately only be for the self-as-center-of-willing, the only reality any of us can know, the only reality any of our acts can be directed to; 9) thus when we pity the suffering of others, we negate our own will, we become objects of our own pity.

      This weird conclusion follows only if it is true that our compassion reveals nothing about its object – another human being, an animal, or whatever. But other human beings, in Schopenhauer’s system, can be nothing other than constructs, re-presentations – they are never fully real. But to love another human being, without sentimentality or false pathos, is just a response to something deeply real – no less that response to the beauty of a sunrise is a response to something real in nature and not just a construction of nature, though of course it can be that, too, and often is (a travel brochure enticing paying tourists to the beach with a picture of a sunrise). For Schopenhauer pity is the only form of love that reveals reality. Other forms are masks for the ruthless, pitiless primeval will. We are lovable only in our suffering. 

      To me the problem with so many philosophers, metaphysicians like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – they take a common perversion, mistake the perversion for some a priori truth about whatever they are writing about, and then draw metaphysical conclusions about the reality of nature or humanity. Nietzsche perceptively sees resentment at work in much of what is called morality and Christian religion; he then writes as though morality and the Christian religion as a whole were nothing but masked expressions of reality such that we know, a priori, that when we encounter moralists and Christians we know at some level they are eaten up with resentment. So Schopenhauer: he has a good insight – much of life is ruled by unconscious forces expressed through the will that one might see as a blind struggle for survival, kind of war of all against all. He makes that into a metaphysical principle such that we know, in advance, that anything and everything anyone does, except in rare moments of compassion and moments when we are entranced by great art, is nothing but the expression of this blind instinct. So weeping is a form of pity for existence itself.

      More charitably, apart from any reading of his metaphysics, I guess one could see in this passage the recognition of a common humanity in a community of suffering, a kind of ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’ thought. I still love this passage though.