The Impossibility of Victory: A Consideration of Schopenhauerian Cosmology

I.

One of the main fetishes of contemporary actuality is the possibility of achieving victory. This possibility remains a condition that, in order to be attained, requires overcoming opponents in struggle so that, once victory is concretized, one may continue oneself in an unbreakable state of victory where, in this marble temple of the gods, we would acquire the benefits of a self-made triumph and be admired by our contemporaries, the very ones who were defeated in order to configure our condition. This position, even when the sub-conditions that sustain it are not accepted or are disguised, remains a guiding arrow for most of our lives. The metaphysical assumption underlying this position is that it is indeed possible to consolidate this mode of life that we call “victory” within the cultural and natural structure of the world, that it is possible to reach a place which, throughout the long days of our lives, nothing and no one will transgress.

For Arthur Schopenhauer, however, the world is constituted by an entirely different condition, so adverse to the one that grounds these promises that, as we shall attempt to elucidate, victory, under these terms, remains impossible. It is indeed possible to break life into small victories, but, paradoxically, these are precisely the ones that consume us. In order to clarify this Schopenhauerian position, we shall advance through the following points: (1) the foregrounding of his metaphysics of the Will; (2) the relation between things and beings within this ground; and (3) the proper condition of victory in this philosophy.

II.

Schopenhauerian cosmology conceives the world as the appearance of a single Will, the thing in itself and the essence of the world. This Will would constitute phenomena and beings while remaining, at the same time (and outside of time), completely free from them (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 131)1placeholder, or, in another possible image, it would be the natura naturans and its manifestations the natura naturata (Schmidt, 2021, pp. 28–29).

This Will would be groundless, which would imply that it wills without knowing what it wills, conceiving the dynamics of this cosmology as a constant autophagy. The world would have no foundation insofar as its primitive constitution would not be knowledge, but rather a tendency, an impulse without telos. In beings in general, replicating such a dynamic, there would be a primacy of the will over the intellect, leading them to will incessantly, without any determinate ends or intelligible purpose. The effectiveness of the world could no longer be described as a divine intellect concretizing a certain project, but rather as a multiplicity of beings that will throughout the cycle of their existences.

This core of appearances would permeate all of nature, ranging from animals to plants and other bodies without organs: “even the powerful and irresistible impetus with which the mass of water plunges into the depths” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 137), or the vehemence of electrical poles which, similarly to human desire, strive to reunite, intensifying themselves with each resistance.

For the author, this myriad of appearances that compose the world would be attached to something common, namely matter (Schopenhauer, 2015a, pp. 156–157). And if matter would be that “lion’s mane” to which all fleas cling, it would not be capable of concretizing itself in harmony, but would instead reveal itself as a stage of conflicts. In the author’s own terms, we read that

“crystals disintegrate, mix with other stuffs, vegetation rises from them: new appearance of the will: – and thus one can follow, to infinity, the same permanent matter, and see how now this, now that natural force acquires a right over it and inexorably exercises it in order to break forth and manifest its essence”  (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 158).

One degree of objecthood would dominate another, incorporating its essence by analogy, elevating itself, through such a process, to another, more complex form of objecthood:

“Similarly, the mixture of juices and secretion in animal bodies are an analogue of chemical mixture and separation; and the laws of the latter continue to hold there, albeit subordinated, greatly modified, and dominated by a higher Idea. This is why the existence of chemical forces external to the organism can never by themselves produce these juices” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 168).

Appearances, in conflict, would devour one another, reproducing the autophagy of the great Will, now simulated as supposedly different appearances. The assimilation of more elementary Ideas by more complex ones would occur, for the author, through a relation of domination, and this conflict would result in the formation of a degree of the will “higher and all the more powerful” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 169).

Now, concomitantly, it would be reasonable to think that generalized conflict would postulate that “there is no victory without struggle [kein Sieg ohne Kampf]” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 169, emphasis ours), given that higher objectification would only achieve its unity by conflicting with and dominating lower ones, but these would immediately begin to resist it, since even when temporarily subjected to servitude, “they always strive to be independent and to externalize their essence completely” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 169)2placeholder. Thus, what comes to be devoured would remain latent in resistance until differentiating itself from the unity that dominated it through the perfidious paths of violence. The struggle among appearances would strengthen them, stimulating greater efforts, leading the author to claim that the human organism, as the most complex objecthood of the will, would wage such a lasting struggle of domination against diverse physical and chemical forms which, as more elementary Ideas, “have a prior right to matter” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 170). From this Schopenhauerian perspective, we could think of the human being as a fiction that, through a thousand efforts, has come into being only to then immediately engage in its own decay, this being the result of everything that was compelled to constitute its supposed unity.

This general resistance of physical and chemical elements, dominated by our organism for the sake of its own conservation, would entail being constantly accompanied by discomfort, since the resistance such elements produce within it occurs continuously against its domination, causing slight suffering as they insinuate themselves into its vegetative system: “This is why digestion depresses all animal functions, for it requires the entire vital force to dominate the chemical forces of nature through assimilation” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 170). For the author, every being would be established through one of the modes of relation, namely conflict and domination; it is precisely in this realm of violence, the fruit of the war of all against all (Durante, 2024), where each being would already be that which deteriorates and exhausts it: “Hence, in general, the burden of physical life, the need for sleep, and finally death” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 170). And those that had been dominated, through their incessant resistance, gnaw away at the false unities that encompassed them, reclaiming the matter that was wrested from them by the organism that now lies exhausted by the very effort of domination that feigns unity. The insistence of beings on their own conservation would be, paradoxically, the very effectiveness of their differentiations.3placeholder A being would thus be the remainder of the effort of its domination, for this inner bellicosity against what composes it—not in harmony, but in conflict—would be its dead part, its existential guilt. The being would thus bear the guilt of everything it devoured in order to compose itself (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 170).

However, one might think that, alongside the category of conflict, there lies that of a kind of mutual aid among the beings of the world, for if we are by means of what we devour and what, in the end, will devour us, it is also necessary to think that conflict can arise only from a certain aptitude, and such a need for maturation would require being assisted in order to acquire a broad constitution. That is, a being only participates in the struggle of the world after having become fit to struggle, since beings are not born ready, but rather formed through the direct or indirect aid of other beings. We can thus conceive two fundamental movements of Schopenhauerian metaphysics: being erected and devouring, aiding and incorporating.

Conflict, domination, and the alternation of victory would be the recognition of the essential discord of the Will with itself. Thus, this myriad of beings would always find itself bound to the conditions of certain relations; hence, the human being would need plants, animals, and water in order to nourish itself, just as plants need minerals from the soil, or rivers need rain, etc. Each existence would conserve itself by implying a certain consumption, just as it would allow itself to be consumed, to a certain degree, by other beings (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 179). Such processuality would consolidate pain, anguish, and predation in the world, given that everything would resist in attempting to conserve itself, and this attempt at self-conservation would already be, to some extent, an effective explanation of the conditions upon which it depends: “Every plant tells us about its soil, its climate, and the nature of the ground in which it grew” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 182). The human being, no different, would depend on the beings that surround it. However, its capacity for dissimulation would make the identification of its dependencies, guilts, and productions more arduous. This capacity would be so powerful that it would lead it to proclaim itself autonomous and independent of the rest of the beings of the world, feigning itself outside the codetermination that sustained and nourished it up to the moment when it dared to utter such a lie. Human cunning would seek to flee the fundamental condition of the world: every form of existence would be in dependence and relativity “of all things” (Schopenhauer, 2012, p. 137). This would lead to the conclusion that nothing in the world would be autonomous and imperturbable, but rather dependent, codetermined, and finite. Among all appearances of the Will there would be a reciprocal adaptation and accommodation that would characterize codetermination not only through conflict and domination, but also through a kind of cooperative reciprocity, such that there may be conflict in cooperation just as there may be cooperation in conflict. In sum, between beings and environment there would be a recursive causality, since “each appearance had to adapt to the environment in which it emerged, and this, in turn, had to adapt to that appearance” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 185). Schopenhauerian metaphysics of nature would polarize between adaptation and accommodation on the one hand, and conflict and domination on the other, both dynamics maintaining their conditions of essentiality in relation to the Will (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 187).

In this way, we could indicate that “the Schopenhauerian world” would not be essentially and reductively an expression of domination, but also, primordially, of resistance, in an anti-immobilist movement presupposed in the very volitional condition assumed as the cornerstone of this metaphysical edifice. Insofar as domination feigns a unity that cannot be sustained, it would be this very fundamental resistance to everything that would constantly dynamize it, preventing unities from becoming stagnant, and configuring those phenomena that spontaneously “turn against” themselves, in what the thinker calls the “turning of the will” in the figure of the ascetic, as something truly rare and exceptional.

Amid this dynamic, domination would thus be a farce that declares itself to be true. The primordial resistance of all things in the world would tirelessly gnaw away at these supposed unities; asphalt, without the effort of maintenance, would yield to erosion, with cracks erupting on all sides. If, on the one hand, Schopenhauerian metaphysics begins with the idea of a supposedly linear and certain domination, on the other, this same conception finds itself undermined by the conflict that engendered it and, even more so, by the resistances that, sooner or later, will disintegrate such unity (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 169). Thus, the supposed victory through struggle announced by Schopenhauer, which would bequeath a culpable unity of integrative domination that it exercised, would be the beginning not of a period of calm at the expense of the suffering of other beings, but of a decay, for there would lie, endogenously to such movement, multiple effective resistances, namely everything that it devoured. The supposed victory so loudly proclaimed by domination would be nothing more than an illusion of philosophers and fools, as Faulkner elaborates.4placeholder It would be nothing more than a violent apex that would precipitate the beginning of a new decay: that of the revolt of what it devoured in order to be, a “world in which, therefore, every ravenous animal is the living grave of thousands of others and its own self-preservation is a chain of martyrdoms” (Schopenhauer, 2015b, p. 693). And the perpetual cycle of (dis)integration would return to its tireless dynamic.

We could thus (re)think aspects of Schopenhauerian metaphysics not merely as a “war of all against all” (Durante, 2024), but as a resistance of all against all, given that even that which cooperates exerts, whether it wills it or not, a certain degree of resistance, insofar as it conserves, to some degree, its identity. It would thus be very difficult to conceive his pessimism as immobilist. On the contrary, what these elements inherent to his metaphysics reveal would be a metaphysical and anti-immobilist pessimism, whose cosmology reflects a sphere devoid of pre-established harmonies and divine telos. Each being dominates and is dominated, nourishes and is nourished, integrates and is disintegrated; in short, on all sides it is circumscribed by relations of resistance, both cooperative and conflictual. Schopenhauer’s pessimism seems, rather, to warn us that it would be impossible to escape the “lion’s mane” and its relations, fixing itself, as he points out, in the following terms:

“There is no victory without struggle [kein Sieg ohne Kampf]: for, insofar as the higher Idea or objectification of the will can only enter the scene through the domination of the lower ones, it suffers resistance from these, which, although subjected to servitude, always strive to be independent and to externalize their essence completely” (Schopenhauer, 2015a, p. 169).