Schopenhauer: Happiness Lies in Our Sensibility

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, a contemporary of Flaubert, took up Goethe’s idea and went even further: he was convinced that our nature predisposes us to be happy or unhappy. For him, it is our sensibility (these days, we would say our genes) that determines our aptitude for happiness or unhappiness. The first condition for being happy seems to be … having a happy temperament! A cheerfulness of character, he says, will “determine our capacity for sufferings and joys.”² Plato had already drawn a distinction between grouchy (duskolos) temperaments, who don’t rejoice when they meet with favorable events and are annoyed by unfavorable events, and cheerful (eukolos) temperaments who rejoice at favorable events and are not annoyed by unfavorable events. These days, we would say that there are “glass half-empty” and “glass half-full” people.

“Our happiness depends on what we are, on our individuality, while in general we take account only of our fate and what we have,” continues Schopenhauer. And he adds, with that sardonic humor so characteristic of him: “Fate can improve, and frugality does not require much from a person: but an idiot remains an idiot and a country bumpkin remains a country bumpkin for all eternity, even if they were surrounded by houris in paradise.”³ The only thing we can do is learn to know ourselves so as to lead lives that are as attuned to our natures as possible. But, for Schopenhauer, we cannot change: an angry person will continue to fly into a rage, a fearful person will always be a coward, an anxious person forever anxious, an optimist an optimist, just as a sickly person will always be sickly and a force of nature always a force of nature, and so on. Schopenhauer distinguishes between:

For most people, the two last points seem the most important: it is often thought that happiness depends mainly on what we possess and on the importance we have in the eyes of others. This is not the case, says Schopenhauer: permanent dissatisfaction, competition, rivalry, vicissitudes, the vagaries of fate and so on will soon have ruined our happiness if it is based solely on what we have and what we seem. For him, happiness resides fundamentally in what we are, in our being, in our inner contentment, the result of what we feel, understand and wish for: “What someone possesses for himself, what accompanies him in solitude and that nobody can give to him or take from him, is much more essential than all that he possesses and all that he is in the eyes of others.”⁴

I share this vision, but only partly. Experience does show that happiness is intimately bound up with our sensibility, our character and our personality. Certain individuals are much more inclined than are others to be happy: because they have good health, because they are optimistic and cheerful by nature, because they spontaneously look on the bright side of life, because they have a well-balanced emotional make-up, and so on. I also support the claim that it is our intimate disposition that makes us happy or unhappy much more than do our possessions or our successes. What has enabled me to be happier through the years is not so much social or material success—even if this has helped—as the inner work that has enabled me to improve, to bind the wounds of the past, to transform or move beyond beliefs that made me unhappy, but also to grant myself the right to find complete fulfillment in my personal and social life, a right that for a long time I would not give myself. But it is here that I part company with Schopenhauer. While he is right to emphasize that happiness stems essentially from sensibility and personality, he greatly underestimates the way we can, by working on ourselves, shape our own sensibilities, making them more able to flourish, and thereby manage to realize our deepest aspirations.

In fact, in Schopenhauer there is a curious contradiction: he postulates a quasi-genetic determinism and at the same time proposes rules of life to make us happier! Probably because he was pretty unhappy throughout his life, Schopenhauer hopes in wisdom more than he believes in it. He was sickly from childhood onwards and was profoundly affected by the suicide of his father when he himself was seventeen; all his life he would suffer intensely from severe frustrations in his emotional life. The first was an unrequited love for an actress, which came as a violent disappointment to him. During the writing of his masterpiece The World as Will and Representation, he had a liaison with a chambermaid who gave birth to a stillborn child. Then he had to abandon plans to marry a woman who had fallen seriously ill. Later, he fell in love with a singer who could not bring her pregnancy to term. After this, he gave up any plans to marry. But his professional life gave him no more joy. In spite of all the hopes he had placed in his book, it attracted no interest and sank without trace for over thirty years. His university career was also a source of cruel disappointment to him: his classes were regularly cancelled … as nobody turned up. Sick at heart, he was forced to give up teaching. This helps us understand his pessimistic vision of life even if we don’t necessarily share it.

I have had the opposite experience and found that one can, through psychological and spiritual exercises, change the way one looks at oneself and the world. So, like Schopenhauer, I think that happiness and unhappiness are in us, and that even “given the same environment, everyone lives in a different world.”⁵ But, unlike him, I am convinced that we can change our inner lives.

Thousands of sociological studies of happiness have been published over the past thirty years or so, especially in the United States. Their conclusions are no different from those we have just mentioned. They can be summarized as follows:

Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, who runs the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, states that approximately 50 percent of our aptitude for happiness seems to come from the sensibility of the individual (genetic factors) and 10 percent from our surroundings and external conditions, while 40 percent stems from personal efforts.