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The Genius of Schopenhauer
 If Arthur Schopenhauer still merits our attention today, 144 years after his death, it is chiefly because few men have ever matched him in terms of the thoroughness and relentlessness of his pessimism. Even among German philosophers, who already by no small measure outstrip nineteenth-century French poets for gloom, Schopenhauer stands out as an icon of despair. His motto was "It's bad today, and it will daily become worse—until the worst of all happens." Already at the age of seventeen, he was struck, like Buddha, by the futility of life and the misery of all human relationships: "Is not every life story a story of suffering?" He withdrew from society and began to hate everyone around him, and was to hate continuously and enthusiastically for the rest of his life. His relations with women were few and unsatisfactory, and from middle age, his closest companions were poodles, whom he admired for their lack of pretension and the simplicity of their needs. He quoted with approval Voltaire's remark "La terre est couverte de gens qui ne méritent pas qu'on leur parle" (The world is covered with people who are not worth talking to).
If Schopenhauer's pessimism is so valuable, it is because it coincided with the birth of an age of relentless optimism, which continues to rule over us to this day. From the early nineteenth century onward, the West assumed a resolutely bourgeois, scientifically based world view uniting a belief in progress and technology with a faith that every human problem would one day find a solution. Never before had so many people believed so many cheerful things. The Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman ideologies that preceded this optimistic age had placed stress on the essentially tragic, incomplete nature of human life. Humans were not accidentally unhappy; they were so by design, because their desires always outstripped their expectations and because their knowledge was greater than their power to change things.
At just the moment when such pessimism was disappearing from the public sphere, Schopenhauer gave it a new appealing, crystalline form and in the process, gave us much to smile about. I say smile because however sad we are, nothing improves our mood faster than to be made aware of someone else who is enduring even greater suffering. A few pages of Schopenhauer will quickly convince us that our personal worries are part of the normal course of events. The philosopher did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations that would inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when life has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan. The darkest thinkers may, paradoxically, be the most cheering.
Schopenhauer is one of the funniest philosophers ever to have written, because people who are funny are, as is well known, never far from saying something very sad. He gives us licence to indulge our most misanthropic thoughts. He frees us from a need to think well of our neighbours and to go through life with an upbeat, cheerful demeanour. He confirms our worst hunches and even exceeds them. He tells us frankly that life is appalling, that other people are nasty and short-sighted, and that, as Chamfort (one of Schopenhauer's favourite writers) put it, we must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead. We tend to laugh at this, but then forget to eat Toad Flakes for breakfast and so are surprised and horrified when we are betrayed in love or diagnosed with a fatal illness. Schopenhauer did not want to suggest that such events weren't sad. He merely wished to stress, against the counter-suggestion of his age (and ours), that they were normal.
It may seem strange to recommend a reading of Schopenhauer to anyone who is feeling sad. And yet the great insight that emerges from his work is that it isn't sad things that make us sad, rather, it is our expectation of happiness that makes us miserable. We should be grateful to Schopenhauer for managing to express the revolting truths of life so beautifully.
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 Alain de Botton is the author of many internationally bestselling books, including How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Art of Travel, and Status Anxiety. He has also made television documentaries based on his work. Currently, he is at work on a new book and an accompanying TV series about architecture. His lives in London.
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