ETHICS The power of Schopenhauer’s prose, and the enchantment of his metaphors, give the impress of grandeur to his ethical system But it rests on a false metaphysic, and it leads to a self-stultifying conclusion There is no reason to believe that the world is nothing but an illusory idea, or to accept that insatiable will is the ultimate reality From the alternation between desire and satisfaction, Schopenhauer decided that life was a history of suffering and boredom; from the same premiss he might with equal justification have concluded that it was a history of excitement and contentment In order to distinguish the world of will from the world of idea, and to reach a thing-in-itself, he has to persuade each of us that our own individuality is the fundamental reality; in order to persuade us to ascend the path through virtue to asceticism, he must get us to accept that our individuality is nothing but illusion Schopenhauer provides no convincing reason, other than a prejudice in favour of pessimism, why we should adopt the ascetic programme with which he concludes To be sure, the more philanthropic a person is, the more she will identify with the lives of others; but why should she identify only with their sufferings and not also with their joys? St Francis of Assisi mortified his flesh as severely as any Indian mystic, and yet his prayer was that he would replace despair, darkness, and sadness with hope, light, and rejoicing The complete renunciation of the will to which we are called by Schopenhauer appears to be a contradiction in terms; for if the renunciation is voluntary, it is itself an act of the will, and if it is necessary it is not a real renunciation Schopenhauer tries to escape by appealing to the Kantian distinction between a phenomenon that is necessary and a thingin-itself that is free But the will that is free is outside time, while the history of any self-denying saint belongs in the world of phenomena One and the same act of self-denial cannot be both inside and outside time The Moral Ascent in Kierkegaard Kierkegaard’s moral system resembles Schopenhauer’s in several ways Both philosophers take a deeply pessimistic view of the ethical condition of the average human being, and both philosophers hold out a spiritual 233