A business that does not cover its costs

Schopenhauer's pessimism

Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 · 1860Life swings between suffering and boredom.

What it claims

Life is a business that does not cover its costs: nothing we pursue is worth the trouble we take.

Why

To want is to lack, and so to suffer; pleasure is only a brief pause in that suffering, so life costs more than it earns.

The same idea through history

Qohélet (l'Ecclésiaste)250 BCAlready in the Bible: "all is vanity", and knowledge increases pain. Schopenhauer cites Qohelet, sometimes to agree with him, sometimes to contradict him.

Arthur Schopenhauer1844Pessimism built on a theory of willing: desire comes from a lack, satisfaction is only an end of pain.

In short

"A business that does not cover its costs" is an argument by Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, I, §38; Supplements, ch. 46 (1844), 1844) on the question "Does life have a meaning?" (answer: the absurd). Its claim: Life is a business that does not cover its costs: nothing we pursue is worth the trouble we take. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 2 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The World as Will and Representation, I, §38; Supplements, ch. 46 (1844)

Valid with an implicit premise

Schopenhauer does not only say that life is sometimes hard. He says that its very structure is a deficit. To live is to will; to will is to lack something; to lack is to suffer. When we get what we wanted, the suffering stops for a moment, but pleasure is only that stop, and a new lack arrives. He concludes that life is a business that does not cover its costs. This thesis puts Schopenhauer in the camp of the absurd in a wide sense: life has no given meaning that justifies it. But it differs from Camus: Schopenhauer does not ask us to stand up to the absurd, he sees in it a reason to turn away from willing.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where all willing is suffering, satisfaction is brief and negative, and life still covers its costs: it is enough that the balance is not a mere count of sufferings.

Valid with P4. Schopenhauer does not set it as a rule: he thinks everyone's experience confirms it, and he counts pains and pleasures like an accountant. Without P4, one can grant that willing is suffering and pleasure brief, without concluding that life is not worth living: one may judge that a suffering crossed by a few joys is still worth the trouble.

Analogy. A shopkeeper whose every sale is followed by expenses larger than the takings never gets rich, even if each sale pleases him at the moment. Schopenhauer says of life what this shopkeeper would find on opening his books.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Leibniz, Theodicy (before Schopenhauer, who criticises him) 1710 · attacks premise 4

In the life of men there is "incomparably more good than evil", as there are incomparably more houses than prisons. Counting mostly the evils is a fault of historians. If the balance is positive, life covers its costs.

Schopenhauer replies

Schopenhauer, Supplements, ch. 46

Schopenhauer judges that Leibniz's Theodicy has only one merit: having given Voltaire the occasion for Candide. He calls "lame excuse" the idea, often repeated by Leibniz, that evil sometimes brings about good. For him, it is enough to be sincere to recognise the opposite of optimism.

The debate goes on (our summary) The quoted passage answers Leibniz's optimism in general, not the sentence about houses and prisons: Schopenhauer does not quote it. His real answer to this count lies elsewhere: well-being is merely negative (P3), so counting goods against evils is counting absences against presences. Leibniz, for his part, writes elsewhere that it is enough "as far as God is concerned" that there be incomparably more good than evil in the universe, even if mankind had more evil than good (Theodicy §262). See the argument leibniz-meilleur-monde, and schopenhauer-pire-monde for Schopenhauer's answer on the terrain of the problem of evil. The debate remains open: can one add up joys and pains in this way?

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols 1888 · attacks the conclusion

Judgments on the value of life, for or against, can never be true: they are worth only as symptoms. A living man cannot judge life, since he is a party and not a judge. For a philosopher, to see a problem in the value of life is even a lack of wisdom. To say that life does not cover its costs is therefore to express a state of fatigue, not a truth.

no reply

No reply possible: objection raised in 1888, after the author's death (1860).

The debate goes on (our summary) Schopenhauer died in 1860, twenty-eight years earlier: he could not answer. The disagreement is about the status of the balance: for Schopenhauer it is a finding that everyone's experience can check, for Nietzsche a symptom. Nietzsche does not merely refuse: his positive answer is the idea of the eternal return (The Gay Science, §341), where he asks whether one would want to live one's life "once more and innumerable times". A coming argument on this site presents it.