Two years ago I have read The World as Will and Representation by Arthur
Schopenhauer and I have written a few blogs about it, too. Then I put the book
in my bookcase and I never read it again, for actually it is not my type of
philosophy. Therefore, what I remember from this book is not much and it can
actually be summed up in a few words: To live is to suffer. This seems to be
Schopenhauer’s idea of life. Leafing through the book today, I saw a passage
that I had underlined and that expresses this idea, too: “... so the view forces
itself on us that life is a business and that the gains of this business are by
far not enough to cover its costs”: In other words, life is an unhappy affair,
if we could make a cost-benefit analysis. But would this really be possible?
For how should we calculate the value of happy and unhappy episodes in life?
How much happiness balances how much suffering? I suspect that it is an
impossible task.
I think that there is at least one philosopher who
would disagree with Schopenhauer, if he could – if he could: for he lived
before Schopenhauer – :
Michel de Montaigne. Despite his own sufferings – he lost his best friend
Étienne de La Boétie, which determined the course of the rest of his life; he
had kidney stones for many years and he died of it – Montaigne had a
positive outlook on life. He knew how to live. And although he knew that a life
could be happy or unhappy in its totality, he didn’t want to pass a judgement
before it had ended.
In his essay “That men are not to judge of our
happiness till after death” (Essays, Book I, Ch. XVIII) Montaigne defends
the thesis that an event at the end of someone’s life can push the final
verdict in the opposite direction. Someone’s life looked happy, but he has been
murdered in a cruel way. Therefore, we must judge his life as a whole as
unhappy, Montaigne seems to defend in this essay. Or, to take an example by him,
“I have seen many by their death give a good or an ill repute to their
whole life. Scipio, the father-in-law of Pompey, in dying, well removed the ill
opinion that till then every one had conceived of him.” Montaigne says in this
essay that the last act a person does in his life, especially if he died during
this act, can shape a reputation of this person that comprises his whole life
and give it a positive or negative turn: “Wherefore, at this last, all the
other actions of our life ought to be tried and sifted: ‘tis the master-day, ‘tis
the day that is judge of all the rest, " ‘tis the day," says one of
the ancients,—[Seneca ...]— "that must be judge of all my foregoing
years." ”
Well, I have my doubts. It’s not that I think that
someone’s last act cannot influence the judgment on this person’s life, or that
it cannot have even a strong influence, but a life lasts many years. Some
people are criminals during their younger years and become saints during their
last years. Do then only the last years count? I think that it would be better
to say that we have here, for instance, the case of a person who has seen the
light, or, if a life develops in the opposite direction, the case of a person who
got into low water. Summarizing a life in this way gives a better look on the
phases a person lived through than just saying that someone’s life was good or
bad as a whole – or happy or unhappy. But what remains is: How to measure
happiness or goodness? Or how to balance one phase of life against another
phase, like a happy event at the end of your life against a
very unhappy youth fifty years ago (or the other way round)? Actually it implies
the question what the influence of the time perspective must be on your
judgment and also the question whether one can compare time as a moment (the
final act of your life) against time as a process (the flow of actions that
made up your life). I think that seen this way we compare incomparable
variables, if we ignore the ups and downs and want to press a whole life in one
word.
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