On the way to work this morning, I was reflecting on whether Arthur Schopenhauer could be considered a pessimist (as many have suggested) or an optimist. Most would argue that he is pessimistic based on such pithy lines in Counsels and Maxims as "life is given us not to be engaged but to be overcome..to be got over." (p.8) While these kinds of remarks suggest an attitude of resignation, I have to wonder if in fact it is only a strategy to allow life to be fully lived, in spite of its hardships. What Schopenhauer seems to be doing is creating a rhetoric of despair, not so that people can wallow in self-pity, but so that they can overcome their attachments to certain desires in life, including the longing to be loved and admired by everyone around us, or even the longing for human comfort.
What I gather from Schopenhauer's philosophy is that life is so much more livable when (perhaps paradoxically) there is not so much attachment to living itself. It's perhaps not a coincidence that Schopenhauer later inspired Nietzsche, since the two philosophers seem closely associated with a heroic romanticism, or a kind of exalting of a melancholy but defiant individual in the face of difficulty and challenge. It later leads to existentialism which, in my opinion, epitomizes the paradoxical embrace of choice over and above life itself. By valorizing the sense of choice or human will over and above the despair of life, these philosophies suggest that there is still a great deal that one can choose to be even given the very tight and limited controls that are thought to hem in a life.
Buddhism seems to depart from these philosophies in the sense that its practices challenge the notion of an individual who chooses from a certain vantage point, such as a particular body or 'attitude'. In doing so, there is no sense of the world as a thing that is to be controlled or controlling me in turn, and there isn't any of this negotiating of the 'terms' of a person's life which is often found in Schopenhauer--that is, trying to size up or assess the opportunities given to life after all suffering has been accounted for. Rather, the sense is that all experiences, including suffering, lead to mind, and this leads to a notion of phenomena as being constructions of the mind.
This doesn't mean that one necessarily has to change negatives to positives. Instead, the practice is to investigate what 'mind' is that undergirds these changing and shifting experiences. To put it in a different way, as soon as I set up the notion of 'I decide this', I already create a prison for myself, because I attach to this 'I" that is only a fleeting moment in time. The same goes with attaching to the notion of worth, value or 'the good'. In The Diamond Sutra, for example, we read: "the minds of all Bodhisattvas should be purified of all such conceptions as relate to seeing, hearing, tasting , smelling, touching and discriminating. They should use the mental faculties spontaneously and naturally, but unconstrained by any preconceptions arising from the senses" (In Goddard, 1994, p.94).
It's interesting to reflect on these sentences, because they suggest that suffering does not arise from attitude or 'frame of mind' so much as it arises from this mistaken illusion of a self that lives only in this body and are bounded by specific senses. It's not long before the view of the 'mind' bounded by senses becomes a living prison.
Think of the example of a driver cutting you off while you are driving or crossing the street on a busy day. If none of my stories or explanations of that story contain an "I", would there be so much suffering in it? Instead of "she/he cut me off!", how would the story be to say that this total and present moment is just happening as the result of previous conditions coming to fruition, and there is no individual actually suffering the outcome? Maybe it is just what it is, and there is no 'self' that is accumulating anything from the experience. In this way, I don't necessarily need to monitor myself to deal with situations, so much as recollecting that none of the elements of the experience constitute an enduring sense of self.
Goddard, D. (ed) (1994). A Buddhist Bible. Boston: Beacon Press
Schopenhauer, A. (Saunders, T.B trans). (1995). The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims. Amherst: Prometheus Books
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