The path to a happy life according to Schopenhauer

PalmaSchopenhauer's Aphorisms is a treatise on happiness that collects both personal experiences and the wisdom and reflections of classical and modern writers and philosophers, such as Socrates; Plato and Aristotle; Diogenes of Sinope and his disciple Crates; Epicurus, the great master of happiness; Menander; Homer; Epicharmus; Sophocles; Juvenal; Stobaeus; Horace; Terence; Lucretius; Celsus; the historians Tacitus, Sallust, and Plutarch; Seneca and Cicero; Diogenes Laërtius; Petronius; Petrarch; Saadi; Shakespeare; the writers of the Spanish Golden Age Baltasar Gracián and Calderón de la Barca; Leandro Fernández de Moratín; Hobbes; Giordano Bruno; Silesius; Queen Christina of Sweden and Descartes; Francis Bacon; Osorius, the ‘Portuguese Cicero’; Gellert; the enlightened Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, and Rousseau; the French moralists La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, and La Bruyère; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; Leibniz; Goethe and Schiller, promoters of Weimar Classicism; the German Lichtenberg, one of the great masters of aphorisms, and other authors of anonymous maxims and proverbs.

Schopenhauer shares the Aristotelian definition of happiness, understood as the freedom to exercise virtue. He also agrees with the Stagirite in identifying the philosophical life as the happiest, the idea that happiness comes from within, from the free exercise of one's own faculties, and the importance given to the free enjoyment of leisure, understood as a free existence. Thus, for Schopenhauer, the happiest man is the one who is most intellectually gifted and who freely has time to develop his innate spiritual faculties, while the unhappiest is the ordinary and stupid man, lacking inner life, who seeks happiness in external things. He also emphasizes that health and tranquility are fundamental to our happiness.

Schopenhauer considers that the levels of happiness, tranquility, and joy can be increased by limiting the influence of external opinions and, therefore, reducing the effects of what we are in the eyes of others, that is, the representation of what we are defined by rank, honor in its different variants (bourgeois, official, sexual, chivalrous, and national) and fame. According to the philosopher, one of the most effective remedies to reduce the weight of external opinions and comments is to adopt a retired and solitary lifestyle that favors silence and self-concentration. Let us remember that Schopenhauer prioritizes what we are in relation to what we have or represent. Hence, the praise for the tranquility of spirit achieved by the Cynics through the renunciation of material possessions.

Avoiding pain

Among the rules for a happy life proposed by Schopenhauer, the negative moral rule of avoiding pain stands out, given that it is a very common mistake to “want to turn this vale of tears into a place of joy,” and to believe, like fools, that happiness consists in achieving the maximum possible pleasures instead of aiming to avoid evils. The conduct of the cynics serves as a good example of acting wisely because it is oriented towards avoiding pains and sufferings instead of seeking pleasures. It is about aspiring with resignation to make life bearable and to adapt to its tragic sense, assuming the idea that “the surest means to not be very unhappy is not to pretend to be too happy” and reducing aspirations to inauthentic fame, rank, honor, and property.

Schopenhauer proposes that we evaluate the degree of happiness by knowing the magnitude of what saddens us. Other advice he gives is that we should direct our attention towards the present and the future, in an equitable manner; in addition to simplifying relationships; being self-sufficient; not being envious; loving solitude and deep isolation; fleeing from vulgarity and leading a withdrawn life separate from others; knowing ourselves and being in harmony with ourselves; reducing needs; meditating well on a project before carrying it out and also after having started it; adopting a fatalistic and conformist attitude towards unfortunate events that have occurred; avoiding flights of fancy; learning to value what we have as if we had lost it; imagining misfortunes to accept them more easily at the moment they occur; controlling one's own thoughts to keep them ordered and prevent them from interfering with each other; limiting desires and moderating instincts; being busy with intellectual activities or producing something profitable; preventing fancy from determining decisions and favoring, instead, clear judgments and thoughts; mastering impressions and intuitions through reason and thoughts; being indulgent and cautious; living and letting live, accepting individualities and letting everyone be as they are; avoiding talking to fools and simpletons; seeking like-minded people; occupying time thinking; avoiding being too complacent or kind; avoiding relationships with people of low social status; being critical of others' vices and flaws in order to feel and correct our own; getting rid of relationships based on material interests and establishing ideal bonds with people with similar feelings and ways of thinking; cultivating authentic and sincere friendships, those that feel a pure and disinterested interest in our pain or pleasure.

Schopenhauer also advises us not to be bothered by mistrust, because the trust we feel towards others is often due to laziness, selfishness, and vanity; he believes it is convenient to be courteous, respectful, and prudent; not to take others as role models nor to fight or contradict their opinions; not to be vain nor to fall into the temptation of self-praise; to act reflectively according to one's own character; to discover liars by feigning credulity; to be discreet about what is said and not to disclose personal matters to anyone; to remember the character, attitudes, and conduct of others towards us, but without accumulating any kind of malevolence; not to show anger or hatred through words but through deeds; to speak without affectation; not to trust fortune or destiny; to act taking into account present circumstances, while hoping that the decisions made will bring us closer to the desired objective; to anticipate mentally and passively what may happen, without accelerating the passage of time.

Foresee misfortunes

It also says that we should not be too picky when dedicating efforts to avoid misfortune; that it is necessary to foresee and prevent misfortunes in order to successfully face any setback and adopt a stoic attitude of immutability in the face of life's events; to be insensitive to daily annoyances, such as gossip, impertinences, and other similar things. He does not believe that acting hastily is good at all, but, on the other hand, he recommends being brave and not cowardly, but without becoming reckless and being tenacious in the face of adversity.

Finally, he recommends accepting fatalism; extending to the whole life the Pythagorean rule of taking stock of what has been lived during the day and drawing all the lessons from it. And, in short, to follow a series of rules to preserve health, which are: to do physical exercise, to rest if we are ill, to take care of our senses, to let the brain rest during digestion and after having made intense physical efforts, because if we do so we will be able to think clearly.