When Bad Things Happen to Other People (15 page)

I said that laughter contained a symptom of failing...and [was] prompted by the sight of someone else’s misfortune...This misfortune is almost always a 
mental
 failing. And can you imagine a phenomenon more deplorable than one failing taking delight in another? (p. 138)

For Baudelaire all laughter signifies 
Schadenfreude
. Baudelaire holds that bad though it may be to take pleasure when someone else has misunderstood something or failed to grasp it altogether, it is even worse for the “orthodox mind” to take pleasure in, for example, the sight of a man falling on the ice or in the street.

It is interesting to note that the examples Baudelaire chooses do not involve suffering such as would result from mutilations or rapes, but rather slipping on the ice or coming up with incorrect answers to mathematical problems. The concept of suffering is perplexing and analytically inadequate, and in assessing the moral status of human reactions to it, close attention must be paid to whatever detail is provided to qualify it. A single parenthetical clause of Baudelaire’s is of crucial importance here. Of pain which evokes delight, he claims: “
ce malheur est presque toujours une
 
faiblesse d’esprit
” (p. 530). This clause goes far toward answering such impossibly difficult questions as “What is the dividing line between trivial and important pain?” and “At what point does celebration of suffering become cruelty?” Baudelaire circumvents these questions by expanding upon the logic we find ambiguously expressed by Schopenhauer.

What Baudelaire is trying to do is extend the boundaries of moral condemnation, which would naturally include pleasure in others’ relatively serious (mental) suffering, to pleasure in their relatively minor (mental) suffering as well. In this Baudelaire and Schopenhauer would seem to share a common goal. Baudelaire, however, is clearer in his exposition. It might seem reasonable to conclude with Baudelaire that only a hardened, cruel person could take pleasure from the 
physical
 pain of others: even if it does, it is more difficult to condemn those who take pleasure in the mental failings of others in the same terms.

Because the extent of a person’s contribution to an act has always been a standard touchstone of moral evaluation, the examples upon which each thinker fastens are illuminating. Whereas Baudelaire’s two examples of suffering (slipping on ice, erring in arithmetic) both involve activity, Schopenhauer’s do not. The examples of “permanent evils” which Schopenhauer offers concern for the most part circumstances into which we are born, not episodic failings (having a “bad heart” stands as an obvious exception). The former category of examples excludes the happiness of anticipation, the latter category does not.

Certainly, Schopenhauer abhors the pleasure of anticipation that precedes evil acts; it is curious that his examples of great suffering do not leave room for it. It makes no sense to say that we cannot wait for someone to live a life of poverty or to be born lame. Baudelaire’s more robust exposition captures worrisome designs. Waiting eagerly for another to fall on his face, or setting a trap in order to make him fall on his face, bothers us more than simply noticing with approval that someone has fallen. The question of agency will prove pivotal in the course of isolating
Schadenfreude
as a particular emotional response, for we generally hold people morally responsible for a state of affairs insofar as they have brought about that state of affairs (the implication being that those who happily anticipate some suffering are more likely to contribute to or otherwise encourage suffering).

Schopenhauer’s disregard for distinctions of kind leads him to view suffering as essentially monolithic. Schopenhauer ennobles and sanctifies suffering, all suffering. In 
The World as Will and Representation
 Schopenhauer depicts human existence as early Buddhist literature does: a state of inextinguishable suffering. Like Buddha, Schopenhauer sees in the insatiable will the cause of all suffering. Schopenhauer holds that there is no important difference between various instances of suffering (I, p. 309). We should notice at once that the transient feeling of wounded vanity appears on a par with the spectacle of the brutal murder of someone we care about:

The ceaseless efforts to banish suffering achieve nothing more than a change in its form. This is essentially want, lack, care for the maintenance of life. If, which is very difficult, we have succeeded in removing pain in this form, it at once appears on the scene in a thousand others, varying according to age and circumstance, such as sexual impulse, passionate love, jealousy, envy, hatred, anxiety, ambition, avarice, sickness, and so on. Finally, if it cannot find en-try in any other shape, it comes in the sad, grey garment of weariness, satiety, and boredom, against which many different attempts are made. Even if we ultimately succeed in driving these away, it will hardly be done without letting pain in again in one of the previous forms, and thus starting the dance once more at the beginning. (
WWR
 I, p. 315)

Depressing as all this sounds, it is also quite disappointing to realize that a thinker compelled to pose such distinctly interesting questions could come up with such a dissatisfying answer to them. Without referring to Schopenhauer, Freud (whose admiration for Schopenhauer is well known) remarks in 
Civilization and Its Discontents
: “If we cannot remove all suffering, we can remove some, and we can mitigate some: the experience of many thousands of years has convinced us of that.”4 Schopenhauer’s pessimistic resignation to suffering calls for self-destruction. Although suicide can be taken as a manifestation of frustrated vitality, still it remains that the onset of a desire for self-destruction signifies, or ought to signify, something alarming about that vitality. If to care genuinely about another person is to encourage escape from the unrelenting suffering of the world through self-destruction, then the sort of reverence for suffering Schopenhauer exhorts is deeply problematic. The approval of suicidal fantasies or desires might thinly veil his own desire for self-destruction. Misery loves company, but does it prefer destruction? Schopenhauer’s own avoidance of suicide suggests ambivalence on this point.

Schopenhauer’s view of suffering as monolithic lives on. In his work 
What Evil Means to Us
, C. Fred Alford declares:

Deep down in the mind (or maybe not even so deep down) there is no difference between the desire to squash someone’s hand and the desire to murder millions. Desires like this, primitive, destructive, malicious desires are by their very nature unmodulated. (p. 142)

People who tell nasty jokes, Alford would have us believe, are people on the verge of crimes against humanity. This statement comes in the midst of a book deeply sensitive to human evil. Consider how sharply Alford’s view contrasts with the following passage from Freud’s 
The Future of an
 
Illusion
:

There are countless civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest but who do not deny themselves the satisfaction of their avarice, their aggressive urges or their sexual lusts, and who do not hesitate to injure other people by lies, fraud and calumny, so long as they can remain unpunished for it; and this, no doubt, has always been so through many ages of civilization.5

Alford, like Schopenhauer, has lost all sense of proportion. He also overlooks or implicitly believes that our penal policies have nothing to do with revenge.

Because he views pain as inevitable, Schopenhauer judges distinctions among various sorts of pain as insignificant or wholly irrelevant (the rudimentary distinction between physical and mental pain being an exception). In contrast to Pascal, who claims in the 
Pensées
 that most of the troubles and sufferings of the world can be traced to the inability of people to stay contentedly in their rooms, he tells us tersely that 
suffering
 
results from the gap between what we demand or expect of life and what
 
actually comes to us
 (
WWR
 I, p. 88). Countless psychological self-help books have failed to credit Schopenhauer with this most useful insight.6 He instructs us that if we recognize once and for all our strengths and our weaknesses and resign ourselves to what is for us unattainable, we will escape in the surest way that “
bitterest
 of all human sufferings, dissatisfaction with our own individuality” (
WWR
 I, p. 307, emphasis added). And if we avoid entirely those pursuits at which we do not excel, we can manage to circumvent humiliation, “the 
greatest
 of mental suffering” (
den größten Geistesschmerz
) (
WWR
 I, pp. 305–306, emphasis added). Schopenhauer’s use of the superlative demonstrates that comparisons of suffering do matter, but only to a point. So the ability to make distinctions, pertinent as it is to an analysis of suffering, is not one entirely lacking in Schopenhauer, but rather one not permitted to run laterally.

This blind spot gives rise to other, related problems. One might, with regard to the substance of these last two remarks, immediately object that humiliation ought to appear lower on the pecking order of mental tribulations than, say, bereavement or unrequited love. Given that the very realization of personal limitations or inadequacies produces “the greatest suffering,” one might find confusing Schopenhauer’s subsequent assertion that “more fortunate people” simply do not understand the utter indifference with which people may endure “innumerable permanent evils” (“
un-zählige bleibende Uebel
”) such as “lameness, poverty, humble position, ugliness and unpleasant dwelling place” (I, p. 306).7 (In 
The Metaphysics
 
of Morals
 Kant uses 
Böse
 for moral evil and 
Uebel
 for what might be termed physical evil or “ills.” Schopenhauer follows his lead here.) Apparently the realization of, say, one’s lameness initially gives rise to “the greatest of mental suffering,” but quickly becomes a matter of indifference or boredom. In an age of rapidly advancing medical technologies, this alleged indifference may be a thing of the past. Even if Schopenhauer were correct here, though, lameness simply couldn’t produce what we usually think of as great suffering, for without mitigation or resolution, great suffering will commonly involve longevity (that, together with intensity, is presumably what makes it great). And if it did cause “the greatest suffering,” even among the unenlightened, Schopenhauer would simply be wrong to take the eventual numbness engendered by great pain as evidence of pain’s impotence.

Another related difficulty with his definition of suffering is the absence of an indication of the extent to which we are made by our world. Even a person who mustered the strength to stop willing altogether (and thus to stop suffering) would find Schopenhauer’s formulation useless in a world populated by other people. Consider the suffering of African-Americans living in the United States before the Civil War. An African-American might suffer because of the gap between what he expected of life and what actually came to him. The expectation of freedom and personal safety is not a frivolous one; there is a strongly social dimension to what a person expects. Schopenhauer overlooks the inevitability of suffering that comes from living in society. He does not want to acknowledge that we cause others to suffer, just by living our lives. Pursuing our ambitions and earning our livings makes us compete with others and, often, to diminish their lives.

Despite the defects of Schopenhauer’s account, we must credit him in some part with the theory of 
ressentiment
, an idea commonly attributed to Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s account of the “slave revolt in morality,” the supposed psychological motivation for Jewish and Christian ethics, requires attention to what we are to understand by “slaves.” Throughout 
On the Genealogy of Morals
 Nietzsche describes slaves as poor, impotent, lowly, suffering, deprived, sick, ugly. Nietzsche’s thinking about “slave morality” and their perspective owes something to Schopenhauer’s reflection on unattractive people who live in dismal apartments. Schopenhauer deserves some credit for anticipating attention to “the slave revolt in morality” and the idea of 
ressentiment
.

By focusing narrowly on the disposition of the 
schadenfroh
 person, Schopenhauer fails to see that we can and do react differently to a variety of bad things that may happen to others. Further, his fear of (or reverence for) suffering prevents him from seeing that
Schadenfreude
delivers a modest interruption from suffering. Anyone who sympathizes with Schopenhauer would make a poor comedian: there is no more reason to assume that only moral monsters feel
Schadenfreude
than to infer that only the lazy experience delight at the approach of weekends. The biggest problem with an account of suffering like Schopenhauer’s is that it skews our conceptual grasp of true malignity. We cannot do justice to the profundity of Jewish suffering under National Socialism in Germany if we insist that a slap on the face or life in an unfashionable apartment is on a par with it.

Schopenhauer’s well-known ethics of satisfaction shows through his view of pleasure. Simply put, Schopenhauer holds that pleasure isn’t worth the effort it takes to obtain it.
Schadenfreude
, however, manifests itself as a function of the invisible hand of justice or of just plain luck. The misfortunes of others which make us happy simply happen; we do not orchestrate them. Schopenhauer’s characterization of suffering in 
The World as
 
Will and Representation
 (that which results from the gap between what we demand or expect of life and what actually comes to us) captures the same element of chance that underlies contemporary discussions of moral luck.

Thomas Nagel describes four types of moral luck: luck in the kind of person one is; luck in the problems and situations one faces; luck in how the will is determined by antecedent circumstances; and luck in the way one’s actions and projects turn out.7 The first and third types are often taken to represent the metaphysical problem of freedom and determinism, while the second and fourth have drawn most interest as representing the problem of moral luck proper. Schopenhauer’s account of suffering, in many ways remarkably insightful and useful, anticipates contemporary philosophical discussions of moral luck. These discussions sensitize us to the circumstances of a great deal of human suffering.