Some Reflections on Last Evening's Discussion

Kudos to our sixteen discussants who braved chilly March winds to attend last night's Schopenhauer discussion.

The group had a mixed verdict on "Schopy." Based on the biographical information given in the reader (for example, when he died Schopenhauer left a substantial legacy to his poodle), many felt his philosophy was too metaphysical and ignored our need for human attachments.

We talked quite a bit about fear of death vs. the knowledge of death. The former is what animals possess as a basic instinct, the latter a realization humans attain through our mental faculty. The knowledge of death sets us apart from the animals and creates what many call "the human condition."

Our reading was an excerpt from the chapter "On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of our Inner Nature," from Schopenhauer's voluminous philosophical tract The World as Will and Representation.

Schopenhauer considered the will, and specifically the "will-to-live" to be a powerful motivating factor in our lives. The capstone question of our discussion was "What, according to Schopenhauer, should be our proper attitude to the will-to-live, since we all have to die?" The group concluded that Schopenhauer's answer would be we give up the will-to-live, just as it gives us up. We thereby achieve a state of nothingness, nonbeing, extinction, nirvana.

Is there consolation in this grim scenario? One of our participants took heart from Schopenauer's lovely ode-in-prose to the cycles of nature. We are each of us like a leaf on a tree, he says, "[f]ading in the autumn and about to fall, this leaf grieves over its own extinction, and will not be consoled by looking forward to the fresh green which will clothe the tree in spring, but says as a lament: 'I am not these! These are quite different leaves' Oh foolish leaf! Whither do you want to go? And whence are the others supposed to come? Where is the nothing, the abyss of which you fear? Know your own inner being, precisely that which is so filled with the thirst for existence; recognize it once more in the inner, mysterious, sprouting force of the tree."

My next-door neighbor puts it another way. Every year he stands on his back deck and makes what I call "the announcement":

"Spring, sprang, sprung!"