Happiness lies at the heart of the thought and philosophy of Schopenhauer in its evading, apartness, and unattainability, that is, in its being constantly elsewhere and nowhere, in such a way that its impossibility and constant fleeting define and determine his pessimism. Over against the views and hopes that happiness is attainable and possible, Schopenhauer says that “everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated, or recognized as an illusion”.
The Relation Between Happiness, Time, and Willing
Although in the writings of Schopenhauer, the satisfying of willing is seen as a genuine possibility in the world and often taken as equivalent to happiness, Schopenhauer insists that this satisfying of willing and the instances of happiness resulting from it always differ from our original thinking and imagining of happiness in the sense that there is a difference between what we actually feel when we satisfy a certain willing and our expectations of that feeling. This difference is because of time; that is, the relation between our past, present, and future, and how we relate to, and turn toward, them in thinking, imagining, and hoping.
We are extended between a past and a future and passing through a present in such a way that what appears to us as happiness is also subject to this extending and passing and is therefore never completely present, whole, or full. Schopenhauer says that “happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over a sunny plain.”
We are constantly either turning toward a happier past or thinking toward a different future in our attempts at leaving behind and escaping the present, our present; we are constantly elsewhere in thinking, hoping, remembering, and imaging, either thinking of a happier past or thinking toward a fulfilling future, either attempting to repeat a previous event or awaiting and working toward a still undecided future, without realizing that even in our previous instances of happiness, we were always also elsewhere, also thinking toward and remembering another past and also attempting to escape the heaviness of the present, and without considering that even in the future, we will still be thinking toward and awaiting another future, which means that the present, either a past present or a future present, is constantly seen negatively, as a lack, as an absence, the absence of happiness. Schopenhauer says that “the enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions”.
The relation between willing and time is what places happiness away from us; it is that because of which happiness is constantly elsewhere, either in a distant past or in a still undecided future, in the sense that as soon as that for which we have been waiting happens, a new desire will show itself to us, immediately delivering us over to a new and different willing and transporting us again into either a past in which a previous wish was fulfilled or a future in which the current wish might be fulfilled.
The Present and Unhappiness
The present is thus never present; it is always lacking, turning toward a different present, which is also lacking and therefore turning toward another present; inevitably, repeatedly, and constantly.
Every past present and all future presents lack that because of which happiness, our happiness, might take place. For the fulfilling of any wish contains within itself a new wishing, a different willing, another past or a different future; that is to say, the fulfilling of any wish contains within itself the undoing of the happiness resulting from such fulfillment; every instance of happiness is the root of the disappearance of happiness, which means that total satisfaction is simply impossible, since “every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one”.
Happiness is always temporary, short-lived, fleeting, and thus never complete; it is never permanent or whole; it does not occur in accordance with our willing or wishing. It is thus refusing and a refusal; it evades us and eludes our present, past, and future: “The careless and thoughtless youth imagines that the world exists in order to be enjoyed; that it is the abode of a positive happiness. . . his life is a more or less deliberate pursuit of positive happiness and this, as such, is said to consist of positive pleasures.. . . This hunt for game that does not exist at all leads, as a rule, to very real and positive unhappiness that appears as pain, suffering, sickness, loss, care, poverty, disgrace, and a thousand other miseries. The undeceiving comes too late”.
The belief that happiness will certainly happen as soon as a certain willing is fulfilled is a groundless promise and a sign of unjustified optimism, according to Schopenhauer. This belief is dangerous not only because it is groundless and unjustified, but also because it brings about more unhappiness and pain into the world by misrepresenting happiness and failing to grasp and imagine its unattainability and constant fleeting.
Neither has the world promised us anything, nor does it owe us anything; and this is why nothing should be demanded from the world. We are the ones who carried out all the groundless promising and thought that our optimism would encounter us again in the future to affirm and secure our beliefs and all believing.
Our present present should not thus turn and think toward any past or future presents anymore; it must remain within itself and go through the pain pertaining to it, to every past and all possible futures: “There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy. It is inborn in us, because it coincides with our existence itself, and our whole being is only its paraphrase, indeed our body is its monogram. We are nothing more than the will to life, and the successive satisfaction of all our willing is what we think of through the concept of happiness”. This means that, for Schopenhauer, our own being, how we are and what we are, is what allows us to deceive ourselves, to misrepresent happiness, and, as a result, to bring about more unhappiness in the world.