Soren Kierkegaard

tempted to prove that the innermost essence of existence is a blind, ungov-
ernable will-to-life, or instinct, which governs a human being to a much
greater extent than he or she is conscious of. The individual’s will springs
from an all-encompassing will-to-life that wants to continue life at all costs
and is prodigal with individuals in order to preserve the species. The intel-
lect is the slave of the will; of course, it can provide the will with themes
to use at its own convenience, when things must be rationalized after the
fact, but the intellect itself has no influence on the decisions of the will.
Thus, in its relation to the intellect, the will is like the strong blind man
who bears the sighted cripple on his shoulders. The more developed an
individual’s intellect, the more filled with suffering existence becomes; and
geniuses therefore are disharmonious creatures. Because the impression of
the wretchedness of the world emanates from the will and is not caused by
any remediable defect in the external world, the important thing is to pacify
the will-to-life, and according to Schopenhauer this can only be done by
devoting oneself—totally unselfishly and without any desire whatever—to
aesthetic enjoyment, to asceticism, and to moral self-sacrifice. Schopen-
hauer embraced that portion of Buddhism that has as its specific goal libera-
tion from all desires, and theOupnekhat, the Persian version of the Upani-
shads, became his Bible. “The fact that wewillat all is our misfortune: It has
nothing to do withwhatwe will.... We continually believe that the things
we will can put an end to our willing, while we can only do that ourselves,
by ceasing to will.” If the knowing self can liberate itself from the willing
self and devote itself to viewing the objectwithoutdesiring it, then the self
looks upon pure objectifications of the will, the ideas, and will find peace.
“Curiously enough, I am called S. A. So we have a inverse relation to
each other,” wrote Kierkegaard, who had to limit himself to the initials
of “Søren Aabye” in order to demonstrate his inverse relation to Arthur
Schopenhauer. He went on to explain that Schopenhauer is a “significant
author,...anddespite total disagreement, I have been surprised to find an
author who affects me so much.” He must also have found it curious and
almost disturbing to discover a philosopher who was just as anti-Hegelian,
anti-historical, anti-academic, and misogynistic as himself. And they even
resembled one another in biographical details: Like Kierkegaard, Schopen-
hauer was the son of a well-to-do merchant who had married a woman
almost twenty years his junior, and who upon his death had left a fortune
that enabled the son to carry on a long career in philosophy, leaving him—
inalmostKierkegaardianfashion—inadebtofthankfulnesstohislatefather.
There was no Regine in Schopenhauer’s love life, which was limited to a
liaison in Venice and an affair in Dresden that resulted in a daughter who,
however, had died when only a couple of months old. Schopenhauer re-