“Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” -Schopenhauer
Every semester I assign “On the Sufferings of the World” by Schopenhauer to my Meaning of Life course. If you haven’t read it, pick it up. It is a RIOT! We open the semester speaking about the value of a virtuous life (Socrates and Aristotle) and a life as free of suffering as possible (Epicurus).
Now that the students are all buttered up, I lay that essay upon them and no one is very pleased. How could I spring such an awful world view upon them?! How could I? Am I the creator of the world? Am I the one who made it such that the essence of life is ultimately to suffer? No, I did not create the world to be the way it is (well, unless my lenses of perception need some scrubbing). The students claim God will make sense of the suffering of the world, or that the suffering will have some greater purpose of good in the end. But, like Dorthy Parker lamented “but tomorrow never comes”
And we are immensely good at suffering. We are very much aligned to our essences as humans when we suffer, no? Some people make suffering the meaning of their life, say that misery is interesting and pain is the only thing we can really know for sure. But those people tend to be tedious and dull and around 15 years old and from a moderate to wealthy home. OR tend to be ex-boyfriends of mine.
But I digress. And I am being a jerk.
But yet, the world seems to be on the more negative side of hedonic value. Many people seem to act in the way that Thrasymachus proposes, not Socrates. We stare at the sky seeking a higher truth or God, only to have a bird poop in our eyes (this happened to me once).
Schopenhauer was a fan of the incongruity theory of humor, and thought that a humorous attitude was aroused when we experienced an incongruity between our Idea of how the world should be and how it is at the moment. Dogs don’t roller skate! Idea: dog, a thing that walks on four legs and does not roller skate. Actual event: dog is on roller skates. HUMOR!
So when I read Schopenhauer, clearly this is happening to me:
Idea: the world is a happy place ultimately, where hard work is rewarded, justice is fair and implemented, and God gives everything a purpose
Actual Event: A bird pooped in my eye for no reason and the bird will be painfully eaten by a hawk, which is hardly retributive justice for pooping in my eye (meaning, life is suffering)
“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.” -Woody Allen, Love and Death
Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favored by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident, and vain.
This as a general fact I suppose everyone knows, though few, I believe, know their own nature; no one can have lived in the world without observing that most people, when in prosperity, are so over-brimming with wisdom (however inexperienced they may be), that they take every offer of advice as a personal insult, whereas in adversity they know not where to turn, but beg and pray for counsel from every passerby. No plan is then too futile, too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption; the most frivolous causes will raise them to hope, or plunge them into despair—if anything happens during their fright which reminds them of some past good or ill, they think it portends a happy or unhappy issue, and therefore (though it may have proved abortive a hundred times before) style it a lucky or unlucky omen. Anything which excites their astonishment they believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.
… [U]pbraiding Reason as blind, because she cannot show a sure path to the shadows they pursue, and rejecting human wisdom as vain; but believing the phantoms of imagination, dreams, and other childish absurdities, to be the very oracles of Heaven. As though God had turned away from the wise, and written His decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind!
Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved, and fostered by fear. … [O]nly while under the dominion of fear do men fall a prey to superstition; that all the portents ever invested with the reverence of misguided religion are mere phantoms of dejected and fearful minds; and lastly, that prophets have most power among the people, and are most formidable to rulers, precisely at those times when the state is in most peril. I think this is sufficiently plain to all, and will therefore say no more on the subject.
[W]e may readily understand how difficult it is, to maintain in the same course men prone to every form of credulity. For, as the mass of mankind remains always at about the same pitch of misery, it never assents long in one remedy, but is always best pleased by a novelty which has not yet proved illusive.
—Benedict de Spinoza
A Theologico-Political Treatise
Why I Laugh 
Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favored by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident, and vain.
This as a general fact I suppose everyone knows, though few, I believe, know their own nature; no one can have lived in the world without observing that most people, when in prosperity, are so over-brimming with wisdom (however inexperienced they may be), that they take every offer of advice as a personal insult, whereas in adversity they know not where to turn, but beg and pray for counsel from every passerby. No plan is then too futile, too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption; the most frivolous causes will raise them to hope, or plunge them into despair—if anything happens during their fright which reminds them of some past good or ill, they think it portends a happy or unhappy issue, and therefore (though it may have proved abortive a hundred times before) style it a lucky or unlucky omen. Anything which excites their astonishment they believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.
… [U]pbraiding Reason as blind, because she cannot show a sure path to the shadows they pursue, and rejecting human wisdom as vain; but believing the phantoms of imagination, dreams, and other childish absurdities, to be the very oracles of Heaven. As though God had turned away from the wise, and written His decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind!
Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved, and fostered by fear. … [O]nly while under the dominion of fear do men fall a prey to superstition; that all the portents ever invested with the reverence of misguided religion are mere phantoms of dejected and fearful minds; and lastly, that prophets have most power among the people, and are most formidable to rulers, precisely at those times when the state is in most peril. I think this is sufficiently plain to all, and will therefore say no more on the subject.
[W]e may readily understand how difficult it is, to maintain in the same course men prone to every form of credulity. For, as the mass of mankind remains always at about the same pitch of misery, it never assents long in one remedy, but is always best pleased by a novelty which has not yet proved illusive.
—Benedict de Spinoza
A Theologico-Political Treatise
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