Excellent personal qualities should beg to be excused or conceal themselves, for intellectual superiority offends by its mere existence without any desire to do so. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It is not things that disturb men, but opinions about them. ~ Epictetus

True wealth is only the inner wealth of the soul. Everything else brings more trouble than advantage. ~ Lucian

Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics divided the good things of human life into three classes:

1. Those outside
2. Those of the soul
3. Those of the body

Arthur Schopenhauer described them in more detail.

1. What a man is and therefore personality in the widest sense. Accordingly, under this are included health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence and its cultivation.
2. What a man has and therefore property and possessions in every sense.
3. What a man represents. We know that by this expression is understood what he is in the eyes of others an thus how he is represented by them. Accordingly, it consists in their opinion of him and is divisible into honour, rank, and reputation.

What a Man Is

What a man is ultimately depends on his own consciousness. Therefore, attempts to alter the material conditions of life, e.g., through legal means, so-called “safe spaces”, etc., will have limited effect. Schopenhauer explains why:

Everyone is confine to his consciousness as he is within his own skin and only in this does he really live; thus he cannot be helped very much from without.

People living in the same environment and political system may still have radically different understandings. Despite being in the identical material situation, people live in worlds of their own. Schopenhauer explains why:

A man is directly concerned only with his own conceptions, feelings, and voluntary movements; things outside influence him only insofar as they give rise to these. The world in which each lives depends first on his interpretation thereof and therefore proves to be different to different men. Accordingly, it will result in

• being poor, shall, and superficial,
• or rich, interesting and full of meaning.

For example, while many envy another man the interesting events that have happened to him in his life, they should rather envy this gift of interpretation which endowed those events with the significance they have when he describes them.

What a man is contributes to his happiness more than what he has or what he represents. Hence, we will focus on that essay, which can be found in Volume 1 of Parerga and Paralipomena.

Aside from cases of serious misfortune, how we interpret and feel about the events of our life is more important to our inner well being and happiness than the events themselves. That is why misfortunates that originate from outside us are more easily bearable than those we have created ourselves. That is why people berate themselves for their errors. Schopenhauer tells us why: we feel that our luck can change, but it is much more difficult to change one’s nature.

Therefore, subjective blessings should be pursued more readily than objective ones. Schopenhauer has his own list:

• Noble character
• Gifted mind
• Happy temperament
• Cheerful spirits
• Well-conditioned and sound body

Cheerfulness

Although Schopenhauer has a reputation for being the “philosopher of pessimism”, in his personal life he valued being merry and cheerful. Obviously, they are their own reward. Curiously, people tend to be suspicious of cheerfulness and look for a reason for it. Health is an important factor. He recommends the avoidance of:

• excesses and irregularities
• violent and disagreeable emotions
• prolonged mental strain

Of course, movement and regular exercise contribute to health.

Pain and Boredom

Pain and boredom are the enemies of happiness:

• Lack and privation produce pain
• Security and affluence give rise to boredom

Inner vacuity and emptiness, which Schopenhauer claims to be able to see in the faces of the masses, crave events in the external world to fill up their minds. He describes the process:

This vacuity is the real source of boredom and always craves for external excitement in order to set the mind and spirits in motion through something …. The emptiness of their inner life, the dullness of their consciousness, the poorness of their minds drive them to the company of others which consists of men like themselves. They then pursue pastime and entertainment in common which they seek first in sensual pleasures, in amusements of every kind, and finally in excess and dissipation.

Solitude

The greater our inner wealth, the less room there is for boredom. While inner vacuity results in “the craze for society, diversion, amusement, and luxury of every kind”, inner wealth is different.

The clever and intelligent man will first of all look for painlessness, freedom from molestation, quietness, and leisure and consequently for a tranquil and modest life which is as undisturbed as possible. Accordingly, after some acquaintance with human beings so called, he will choose seclusion and, if of greater intellect, even solitude. For the more a man has within himself, the less does he need form without and also the less other people can be to him. Therefore eminence of intellect leads to unsociability.

The Three Physiological Fundamental Forces

By these, Schopenhauer means eros, thumos, and nous. In the primal state, their originary use was in the struggle against lack and privation. When that problem is solved for the most part, the forces are underutilized and require stimulation. Depending on his dominant centre, a man will pursue different pleasures.

• Eros. The pleasures of the power of reproduction: eating, drinking, digesting, resting, and sleeping.
• Thumos. The pleasures of irascibility: walking, jumping, wrestling, dancing, fencing, riding, hunting, athletic games, and even war.
• Nous. The pleasures of sensibility: observing, thinking, feeling, writing, poetry, improving the mind, playing music, learning, reading, meditating, inventing, philosophizing, etc.

Sensibility, i.e., the ability to respond to intellectual and aesthetic sensations, ranks the human being higher than the animals, which are restricted to the two inferior forces. Schopenhauer describes the two types like this:

The life of the masses is passed in dullness since all their thoughts and desires are directed entirely to the petty interests of personal welfare and thus to wretchedness and misery in all its forms.

On the other hand:

The existence of the man who is endowed with outstanding intellectual powers is rich in ideas and full of life and meaning. Worthy and interesting objects occupy him as soon as he is permitted to devote himself to them, and he bears within himself a source of the noblest pleasures. Stimulation from without comes to hm from the works of nature and the contemplation of human affairs and then from the many and varied achievements of the most highly gifted of all ages and lands; only such a man is really capable of thoroughly enjoying those things for he alone can fully understand and feel them. Accordingly, for him those highly gifted men have actually lived; to him they have really appealed; whereas the rest as casual hearers only half-understand something or other.

The Two Lives

Such a man lives two lives: a personal life and an intellectual life. The latter is his real life and the former is merely a means. The intellectual life obtains cohesion, wholeness, and perfection, “becoming ever more complete like a slowly maturing work of art.”

The centre of gravity of such a man is entirely within himself. Schopenhauer makes this rather strange point:

Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves. Therefore, the former makes us universally popular, the latter unpopular.

Pain and Melancholy

Up to this point, we have been emphasizing the positive aspect of the intellectual life. However, it can be a mixed blessing. That is because, in his words:

Great intellectual gifts may produce a very much enhanced sensitiveness to pain in every form. Further, the passionate temperament that conditions such gifts, and at the same time the greater vividness and completeness of all images and conceptions inseparable therefrom, produce an incomparably greater intensity of the emotions that are thereby stirred.

Since there are more painful emotions than pleasant ones, the former can be aroused more readily. For example, I know a great souled being who sometimes sees too deeply and too far ahead, beyond what she can handle, resulting in sadness.

Others have perhaps noted this ambiguity. For example, Aristotle can assert, on the one hand:

The philosophical life is the happiest.

Yet, he also wrote:

All those who distinguished themselves whether in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts, appear to be melancholy.

Sophocles has also contradicted himself in the same way:

• To be intelligent is the main part of happiness. (Antigone)
• The most agreeable life consists in a lack of intelligence (Ajax)

Even the Bible leaves us in ambiguity:

• The life of a fool is worse than death! (Sirach 12:12)
• In much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1:18)

Love and Will

Although Schopenhauer’s essay focuses on the physical and intellectual aspects of happiness, a brief mention can be made about the moral and aesthetic life, as they relate to happiness. Thinking is self-limiting, and true Wisdom lies in a realm beyond thought. If Wisdom is the feminine element, then Love is the masculine element that resolves contradictions. The intellectual is content, like Epicurus in his garden, to remain alone in his solitary contemplations. Love, on the other hand, draws him back out of himself to another, albeit on a higher level than the sociability of the dullards described by Schopenhauer.

On the level of cataphatic theology, or thinking, one can meditate on the Unmoved Mover. However, in Love, one learns to be the Unmoved Mover. In the second appendix to the Yoga of Power, Julius Evola, quotes Dante:

I am as the centre of a circle, to which the parts of the circumference stand in equal relation.

In other words, Love is characterized by centrality, transcendence, stability, and immutability. Love, whether in the form of an actual woman or, if you prefer, as a metaphor for the feminine part of a man, brings a huge risk to the philosopher. The wholeness which he thought he had achieved turns out to be missing an essential element, viz., transcendence.

If he can raise himself to the point of centrality, stability, and immutability, he reaches a level of being that transcends mere thinking and finds his True Will, i.e., not motivated by worldly concerns, nor even in the service of thought.