Chapter 4 - Position, or a Man’s Place in the Estimation of Others

Section 1 - Reputation

By a peculiar weakness of human nature, people generally think too much about the opinion which others form of them; although the slightest reflection will show that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not in itself essential to happiness. Therefore it is hard to understand why everybody feels so very pleased when he sees that other people have a good opinion of him, or say anything flattering to his vanity. It is advisable, from our point of view, to set limits to this weakness, and duly to consider and rightly to estimate the relative value of advantages, and thus temper, as far as possible, this great susceptibility to other people’s opinion. Otherwise, a man is the slave of what other people are pleased to think.

Chapter 2 - Personality, or What a Man is

We have already seen, in general, that what a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has, or how he is regarded by others. In every kind of enjoyment, for instance, the pleasure depends principally upon the man himself.

Introduction

In these pages I shall speak of The Wisdom of Life in the common meaning of the term, as the art, namely, of ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest possible amount of pleasure and success; an art the theory of which may be called Eudaemonology, for it teaches us how to lead a happy existence.

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-live, and the successive satisfaction of all our willing is what we think of through the concept of happiness. So long as we persist in this inborn error, and indeed even become confirmed in it through optimistic dogmas, the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things as in small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of containing a happy existence. Everything in life is certainly calculated to bring us back from that original error, and to convince us that the purpose of our existence is not to be happy. Indeed, if life is considered more closely and impartially, it presents itself rather as specially intended to show us that we are not to feel happy in it, since by its whole nature it bears the character of something for which we have lost the taste, which must disgust us, and from which we have to come back, as from an error, so that our heart may be cured of the passion for enjoying and indeed for living, and may be turned away from the world. In this sense, it would accordingly be more correct to put the purpose of life in our woe than in our welfare. The peculiar effect of the tragedy rests ultimately on the fact that it shakes that inborn error, since it furnishes a vivid illustration of the frustration of human effort and of the vanity of this whole existence in a great and striking example, and thereby reveals life’s deepest meaning; for this reason, tragedy is recognized as the sublimest form of poetry.

Man has his existence and being either with his will, in other words, with his consent, or without it; in the latter case such an existence, embittered by inevitable sufferings of many kinds, would be a flagrant injustice. The ancients tried in vain to prove that virtue brings happiness, which is denied in experience. What was really at the root of the attempt of those philosophers was the assumed justice of the case; he who was without guilt ought to be free from suffering, and hence happy. But the serious and profound solution of the problem is to be found in the Christian doctrine that works do not justify.