The Socrates Express

5. How to Listen like Schopenhauer

2:32 p.m. On board Deutsche Bahn, Train No. 151, en route from Hamburg to Frankfurt.

Trains make human noises. Locomotives snort and whistle and, occasionally, belch. The railway cars whine and squeak and protest.

Deutsche Bahn, German Rail, muffles these sounds. There is no need for a Quiet Car. It is a given. Everything about my train whispers discretion. Not only the hushed atmosphere but the wood panel lining the cars, the coffee served in real mugs, not Styrofoam.

I sip my coffee, and survey the understated German countryside. A train heading in the opposite direction passes, its whistle piercing the silence. The sound increases in pitch as the train approaches, then decreases as it passes. Or does it?

The whistle hasn’t really changed pitch. It is an auditory illusion known as the Doppler effect. The motion of the train has conspired with my susceptible brain to make it sound as if the whistle’s pitch had changed. I had misperceived reality.

What if all of life is like this? What if the world is an illusion? Some 2,400 years ago Plato posed just such a question. In “The Allegory of the Cave,” he asks us to imagine prisoners chained inside a cave, facing a stone wall. They have been inside the cave from birth and are unable to move and therefore cannot see each other or even themselves. All they can see are shadows cast on the wall. They’re unaware that they’re looking at shadows. The shadows are the only reality they know.

Philosophy, Plato suggests, enables us to escape the world of shadows and discover its source: the light. We don’t always see the light. Sometimes we hear it.

I wake to an unexpected quiet. Tired from the long train ride, I’m tempted to remain under the covers, Marcus-style. Somehow I muster the willpower to extract myself and head to breakfast. Afterward, I walk, like Rousseau, mindful of each step, only to discover Frankfurt’s streets empty on this, a weekday. I promptly retreat to the hotel and ask questions, like Socrates.

“Where is everyone?”

“A national holiday,” replies the concierge. “Didn’t you know?”

I can hear Thoreau scolding me. Look. Observe. See the world with the eye of a child and the mind of a sage. Open your eyes, man!

I need to regroup. My intended destination, the Schopenhauer Archives, is closed, but surely other establishments are open.

Apparently not. Europeans take holidays seriously. I pass shuttered shops and cafés and must have walked a mile before finding an open coffee shop, an outlier. A good one, too, judging by the beans procured from exotic locales and the serious, artisanal expressions of the baristas.

I order the Sumatran pour-over, which is prepared with an attention to detail usually reserved for neurosurgery and weddings. When I ask for milk, the barista purses his lips and suggests—discreetly, of course—that adding milk to this exquisitely roasted, naturally nonacidic, perfectly balanced Beverage of the Gods would constitute an affront to all that is good and beautiful in the world.

Of course, I say. Wouldn’t dream of it.

I wait until he leaves, presumably to educate another customer, before pouring a splash of milk. I find a table outside and read the first page of Arthur Schopenhauer’s collected essays.

Darkness arrives, and looks like it will be staying awhile. Pessimism infuses each page, every word, much like the hint of chocolate infusing my coffee, only more bitter. Schopenhauer makes no attempt to conceal his glumness. It’s right there in the essay titles: “On the Suffering of the World” and “On Suicide,” for instance.

Don’t blame philosophy for his pessimism. His gloomy outlook manifested at a young age, long before he read Plato or Descartes. At the age of seventeen, while touring Europe with his parents, he concluded, “This world could not be the work of an all-good being, but rather that of a devil who had summoned into existence creatures, in order to gloat over the sight of their agony.” A few years later, embarking on his philosophy career, he writes to a friend: “Life is a wretched business. I have decided to spend it trying to understand it.”

Schopenhauer’s pessimism didn’t temper with age. If anything, it grew, congealing into a black hole of despair. “Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse—until at last the worst of all arrives,” he writes. All of us are careening headlong toward a “total, inevitable, irremediable shipwreck.” I put the book down and sigh. It’s going to be a long day. I order another cup of Sumatran and soldier on.

We are living in the “worst of all possible worlds,” the philosopher of pessimism informs me. Any worse, and it wouldn’t exist. Which wouldn’t be so bad. “Life is happiest when we perceive it least,” he writes.

I pause for air, and light. There is none. I swear I can feel Schopenhauer’s dark shadow hovering over me. I focus my eyes and see an older woman wearing baggy, wrinkled pants and missing more teeth than she has. She is clearly homeless, or nearly so. She gestures to the other chair at my table and says something in German. Whatever she says does not contain any of the four German words I know. Thinking on my feet, I conclude she has asked to borrow the chair. “Ja, bitte,” I say, deploying—with aplomb, I might add—two of my four German words.

Making assumptions in your native tongue is ill-advised. Making assumptions in a foreign language you do not speak is just stupid. She did not ask to borrow the chair. She has asked if she can sit in the chair and speak with me, speak at me. For a long time. She talks and talks, and I nod and nod, tossing out the occasional “ja, ja.”

It’s a one-sided conversation. I pick up dribs (no drabs). She is an oma, or grandmother (my third German word). The rest is static.

I’m hoping she’ll exhaust herself but she’s not even slowing down. What would Socrates do? He would converse, of course, but how?

A waiter brings her a coffee—clearly, on the house. She expresses gratitude effusively. Gratitude is a universal language, one expressed with the eyes, the entire body, more than with words.

Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, didn’t dismiss the possibility of gratitude—and compassion. We experience the world as separateness but, Schopenhauer believed, echoing Eastern mystics, this perception is an illusion. The world is one. When we help another person, we help ourselves. We feel the pain of others the way we feel the pain in our finger. Not as something foreign, but as part of us.

My visitor is still talking, even as she drinks her coffee. I decide to listen. I can’t understand, but I can listen.

Listening mattered to Schopenhauer. Listening to music, that “universal language of the heart,” as he called it. Other kinds of listening, too. Listening to your intuition, above the din and noise of the world. Listening to other voices, speaking foreign tongues, for you never know where wisdom lurks. And, yes, listening to those who suffer. Despite his misanthropy and chronic grumpiness, Schopenhauer valued compassion, even if he demonstrated it more to animals than to his fellow humans.

Listening is an act of compassion, of love. When we lend an ear, we lend a heart, too. Good listening, like good seeing, is a skill, and like all skills, it can be learned.

The woman seems to appreciate my attentiveness, judging by the smile fanning across her toothless mouth. Eventually she gets up to leave. We say good-bye, tschüss. German word number four.

Schopenhauer wasn’t the first, or last, pessimistic philosopher, but he was in a league of his own. What distinguishes Schopenhauer is not his broodiness but the philosophical edifice, the metaphysics of misery, he constructed to explain it. There have been many pessimistic philosophers, but only one true philosopher of pessimism.

It’s all laid out in his opus, The World as Will and Representation, a title only a philosopher could love. Completed while still in his twenties, it was, he said, “the product of a single thought.” That thought required 1,156 pages to explicate. I cut Arthur some slack. It is a very big thought. The opening sentence is a doozy: “The world is my idea.”

This is not, for once, Schopenhauer’s arrogance speaking. It’s his philosophy. He’s not suggesting he is author of the world but, rather, that we all construct reality in our minds. His world is his idea, and your world yours.

Schopenhauer was an Idealist. In the philosophical sense, an Idealist is not someone with high ideals. It is someone who believes that everything we experience is a mental representation of the world, not the world itself. Physical objects only exist when we perceive them. The world is my idea.

I realize this concept sounds odd, possibly delusional, but it is not so far-fetched, I think. Nigel Warburton, a contemporary philosopher, uses the analogy of a giant movie hall, with everyone in separate screening rooms, watching the same film. “We cannot leave because there is nothing outside,” he says. “The films are our reality. When no one is watching the screen, the projector light is switched off but the films keep running through the projector.”

Idealists don’t believe only our minds exist (that is known as solipsism). The world exists, they say, but as a mental construct, and only when we perceive it. To use a different analogy, think of your refrigerator light. Whenever you open the door, it’s on. You might conclude that it is always on, but that would be a mistake. You don’t know what happens when the door closes. Likewise, we don’t know what exists beyond our mind’s capacities of perception.

Every day, as we go about our lives, we experience this mentally constructed, or phenomenal, world. It is real—the way the surface of a lake is real. But just as the glassy surface isn’t the whole lake, the phenomenal world represents only a fraction of reality. It fails to account for the depths.

Those depths, Idealists like Immanuel Kant believe, lie beyond sensory perception, but are every bit as real as the unseen lake bed. More real, in fact, than the fleeting sensory phenomena we typically experience. Philosophers have given this unseen reality various names. Kant called it the noumenon. Plato called it the world of Ideal Forms. For Indian philosophers, it is Brahman. Different names but the same idea: a plane of existence that remains unknown to us as we rush to work, binge-watch Netflix, and, in general, go about our business in the world of shadows.

Schopenhauer subscribed to this world-beyond-this-world notion but added his own intriguing and, naturally, dark twist. Schopenhauer, unlike Kant, believed the noumenon was a single, unified entity, and one we can access, albeit indirectly. It suffuses all humans and animals, and even inanimate objects. It is purposeless and striving, and it is unrelentingly, unapologetically evil.

Schopenhauer called this force the “Will.” It’s an unfortunate name, I think. By Will, Schopenhauer doesn’t mean willpower, but, rather, a kind of force or energy. Something like gravity, only not as benign. He writes:

Its desires are unlimited, its claims inexhaustible, and every desire gives birth to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its craving, set a final goal to its demands, and fill the bottomless pit of its heart.

Two observations. One, the Will sounds an awful lot like my college girlfriend. Two, those shafts of light are looking more remote.

Will is endless striving. Will is desire without satisfaction. The preview but never the movie. Sex but never climax. Will is what makes you order a third Scotch when two was enough. Will is that grinding sound in your head that, while occasionally muffled, is never silenced, even after the fourth Scotch.

It gets worse. The Will is destined to harm itself. “At bottom,” says Schopenhauer, “the Will must live on itself, since nothing exists besides it, and it is a hungry will.” When a lion sinks its teeth into a gazelle it is sinking its teeth into its own hide.

One day, Schopenhauer, an amateur zoologist, caught wind of a newly discovered genus of ant discovered in Australia. Myrmecia, or the Australian bulldog ant, has a much-deserved reputation for viciousness. It grips its prey in its powerful jaws, then repeatedly stings it with a deadly venom. When the bulldog ant is cut in two, its biting head engages in a fierce battle with its stinging tail. “The battle may last a half hour until they die or are taken away by other ants,” notes Schopenhauer.

It is not malice or masochism that compels the ant to devour itself, but the Will. The ant is no more capable of resisting the Will, Schopenhauer thought, than the coffee mug in my hand right now is capable of resisting gravity should I release my grip. Like the bulldog ant, we are author and reader of our own cruelty, victim and perpetrator, fated to consume ourselves, slowly, after suffering for a long time.

Don’t despair, says the philosopher of gloom. We can escape the black hole that is the Will by “shaking off the world.” There are two ways to do so. Option one: lead an ascetic life, fasting for days at a time, meditating for hours, and remaining celibate. I skip ahead to option two: art. That’s better. Art is not only pleasurable, he says. It is liberating. It offers a reprieve from the ceaseless striving and suffering that is the Will.

The arts accomplish this feat by, in effect, catapulting us free of ourselves. When creating, or appreciating, a work of art, we lose the sense of separateness that Schopenhauer, as well as the Buddha, says lies at the root of all suffering. Art, says Schopenhauer, “takes away the mist.” The illusion of individuality dissolves and “thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception.”

This merging of subject and object happens, says Schopenhauer, without the aid of reason, or curators. Aesthetic delight needn’t occur at an art museum or concert hall. It can happen anywhere. Walking down a familiar street, you see something—a mundane object like a mailbox, a fire hydrant, objects you’ve seen many times before. This time, though, you see it differently, as philosopher Bryan Magee explains: “It is as if time had stopped, and only the object existed, standing before us unencumbered by connections with anything else—just simply there, wholly and peculiarly itself, and weirdly, singularly thingy.”

During these aesthetic moments, we aren’t distressed but neither are we happy. Such distinctions—happy, sad—vanish. We have shaken off the world, and with it such false dichotomies. We become a mirror to the object of art, what Schopenhauer calls the “clear eye of the world.”

There’s a catch, naturally. This aesthetic moment is fragile, fleeting. The instant we become aware of it, the Will reenters our consciousness and “the magic is at end.”

Schopenhauer received little recognition during his lifetime and, even in death, can’t get any respect. There is no Schopenhauer museum. The philosopher’s worldly possessions are housed at a local university, out of sight. I emailed the curator and explained my interest in Frankfurt’s forgotten son.

A few days later, I receive a reply from one Stephen Roeper. He is courteous and cheerful and, I get the distinct impression, more than a little surprised. Not many visitors come calling on Arthur these days.

The next morning, appropriately rainy and dreary, I walk the few blocks to the university. I step into a drab, utilitarian building—and promptly get lost. I approach a young woman behind the counter.

“Schopenhauer?” I say—or, rather, ask, as if the name itself constitutes a metaphysical question. She nods grimly. The mere mention of the philosopher of pessimism has soured her mood, or so I imagine. It’s difficult to distinguish a sullen German from a happy German. There are, I’m sure, subtle changes in facial muscles and ocular motion, but these lie beyond the ken of an outsider like me.

I push a buzzer, and a few seconds later, a slight, pleasant, and shy man materializes. Stephen Roeper is mustached with a receding hairline, clear blue eyes, and a rosy complexion that reminds me of a tipsy cherub.

We step into a large room. It smells of old books and disinfectant. As we walk, Schopenhauer looks down at us from the walls. On every square inch is a portrait, and one or two photographs, of Schopenhauer in different stages of life, from a boyish fifteen-year-old in Hamburg to the septuagenarian sage of Frankfurt.

For a man who boldly declared “the world is my idea,” Arthur Schopenhauer felt oddly ill at ease in it. Like Rousseau, he thought of himself as homeless, even when at home. A philosophical untouchable, he was living proof that the only fate worse than being criticized is being ignored. For most of his life, his books went unread, his ideas unloved. He failed to win a Danish philosophy prize even as the sole entrant. Only in the last few years of his life did he achieve a modicum of recognition.

In one of the many ironies that was his life, Schopenhauer, whose philosophical ideas would influence Freud, had a very Freudian childhood. Mother issues explain a lot. Johanna Schopenhauer had high aspirations—literary and social—and raising a young child didn’t factor in those plans. She soon tired of “playing with my new doll,” as she put it, and spent the rest of Arthur’s childhood alternately ignoring and resenting him. “A very bad mother,” Schopenhauer later wrote.

Schopenhauer’s father, a successful merchant, wasn’t much better. In one letter, he urges his son to improve his handwriting by capitalizing properly and curtailing those fancy flourishes. In another, it’s young Arthur’s posture that draws his father’s ire. “Your mother expects, as I do, that you will not need to be reminded to walk upright like other well-raised people,” he wrote, adding, with a twist of the parental knife, “and she sends her love.”

The elder Schopenhauer groomed his son to take over the family business. He even chose the name “Arthur” because it sounded international. Arthur’s social skills, though, were lacking, much to his father’s frustration. “I wish you learned to make yourself agreeable to people,” he sniffed in one letter.

Arthur never did learn. He alienated nearly everyone he encountered. He could be charming when he wanted, but he rarely wanted. He remained a bachelor throughout his life and, with the exception of a brief friendship with Goethe, had no real companions—other than his beloved poodle, named Atman, the Sanskrit word for soul. Schopenhauer displayed a warmth toward Atman he never could muster for people. “You, sir,” he affectionately chided the poodle whenever he misbehaved.

Schopenhauer enlists another animal—the porcupine—to explain human relations. Imagine a group of porcupines huddled on a cold winter’s day. They stand close to one another, absorbing their neighbor’s body heat, lest they freeze to death. Should they stand too close, though, they’re pricked by a needle. “Tossed between two evils,” says Schopenhauer, the animals approach and retreat, again and again, until they discover “the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another.”

The Porcupine’s Dilemma, as it’s now known, is our dilemma, too. We need others to survive, but others can hurt us. Relationships demand constant course corrections, and even the most skilled navigators get pricked now and then.

Stephen Roeper reaches into a large rectangular box and retrieves a rusting fork and spoon. Schopenhauer carried them, as well as a drinking cup, whenever he dined out. He didn’t trust restaurant hygiene, nor much of anything else. He avoided barbers, fearful they’d cut his throat. He suffered from anxiety and occasional panic attacks.

Stephen reaches into another box and retrieves a cylindrical object. An ivory flute. A gift from the elder Schopenhauer to his son. I pick it up. It possesses a pleasing weightiness, a solidity, as well as that vaguely creepy quality that adheres to the possessions of the dead. Touching it feels like an intrusion, a violation. I can almost hear grumpy Schopenhauer snapping at me. Get your grubby paws off my flute!

The flute was Schopenhauer’s companion throughout his adult life, in bad times and worse. Every day, just before noon, he sat down and played con amore, with love. Schopenhauer liked Mozart but adored Rossini, and would roll his eyes heavenward whenever the Italian composer’s name was uttered. He had all of Rossini’s music arranged for the flute.

Schopenhauer’s joyous flute playing prompted his admirer-turned-critic Friedrich Nietzsche to question his pessimism. How could someone who played the flute every day, and with so much joy, so much love, be a pessimist? Schopenhauer didn’t see the contradiction. The world is indeed suffering, a colossal mistake, but there are reprieves. Slivers of joy.

No sliver is more joyous than art. Art—good art—is not an expression of emotion, Schopenhauer believed. The artist is not conveying a sentiment but, rather, a form of knowledge. A window into the true nature of reality. It is a knowledge beyond “mere concepts,” and therefore beyond words.

Good art also transcends the passions. Anything that increases desire increases suffering. Anything that reduces desire—reduces willing, as Schopenhauer puts it—alleviates suffering. When we behold a work of art, we are not craving anything. This is why pornography is not art. It is the exact opposite of art. Pornography’s sole purpose is to stir desire. If it fails to do so, it’s considered a failure. Art aims for something higher. If the only reaction we have to a still-life of a bowl of cherries is hunger, the artist has missed the mark.

Schopenhauer devised a hierarchy of aesthetics. Architecture occupies the bottom rung, while theater (tragedy, in particular, of course) the top. Music does not appear on the ladder. It is its own category.

The other arts speak of mere shadows, says Schopenhauer. Music speaks of the essence, the thing-in-itself, and so “expresses the innermost nature of all life and existence.” An image of heaven, even a secularized version, may or may not include paintings and statues. We take it as granted that there will be music.

While language is man-made, music exists independent of human thought, like gravity or thunderstorms. If a trumpet blares in a forest and there is no one to hear it, it still blares. Music, Schopenhauer once said, would exist even if the world did not.

Music is personal in a way the other arts are not. You may not have a favorite painting, but you probably have a favorite song. My thirteen-year-old daughter is experimenting with different musical genres, discovering what she likes and what she doesn’t. She isn’t forming her “musical identity.” She is forming her identity. Period. The music we choose to listen to says more about us than the clothes we wear or the cars we drive or the wine we drink.

Music reaches us when nothing else can. A ray of light in the darkness. William Styron, in his memoir on depression, Darkness Visible, describes how he was contemplating suicide when he heard a soaring passage from Brahms. “The sound, which like all music—indeed, like all pleasure—I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through the rooms, the festivals, the love and work.”

Music is therapy. Listening to music speeds cognitive recovery after a stroke, several studies have found. Patients in minimally conscious, or even vegetative states, showed healthier brain activity when listening to a favorite song.

I recognize the benefits of music intellectually, but can’t seem to make the leap to a more intimate knowledge. I suffer from a kind of musical apathy. As a teenager, I never collected albums or compiled mixtapes. I attended concerts rarely, only when coerced by friends. To this day, entire genres of music remain foreign to me. I am not opposed to music. If played, I enjoy it, though not as much as I enjoy a good Scotch or a good bag. This lack of musical appreciation has always struck me as odd, given my love of sound and the spoken word.

There’s an old joke we like to tell at NPR.

“Why is radio better than television?”

“Because the pictures are better.”

There is something primal about oral storytelling. We humans have been listening to stories far longer than we’ve been reading them. Sound matters. The written word excels at conveying information, the spoken word at conveying meaning. The written word is inert. The spoken word is alive, and intimate. To hear someone speak is to know them. This explains the popularity of NPR, podcasts, and audio books. It also explains why my mother insists on phone calls, not emails, each Monday.

Working for NPR as a foreign correspondent, I learned to appreciate the rich and varied texture of sound. The singsong call of a Delhi street hawker, the cacophony of a Tokyo pachinko parlor. What intrigued me most, though, was the sound of the spoken word. The human voice is nature’s greatest lie detector, and I soon learned to gauge a speaker’s sincerity within seconds. Politicians are the least sincere not only because of their gutless vocabulary but also their tone of voice. Cautious and falsetto. Even a child can recognize the voice of someone selling something. Especially a child.

Why can’t I translate this intuitive feel for sound to the world of music? Perhaps I don’t know enough about music, or perhaps the limited knowledge I do possess is tripping me up, preventing me from hearing this universal language of the heart.

My friend John Lister is an aficionado of both classical music and German philosophy. Plus, he lives in Baghdad, where he works for a relief agency. For security reasons, John is confined to his hotel for days at a time. John has a lot of time on his hands. The perfect correspondent.

I fire up my laptop and ask John if his knowledge of music enhances his enjoyment or interferes with it. How can I learn to appreciate music? I hit send.

A few hours later, a lengthy reply lands in my inbox. I scan John’s email, which runs to several pages, and am silently grateful for both his erudition and the surplus time he has on his hands.

“So these are all tough questions,” writes John, then proceeds to tackle them as if they weren’t tough at all. Knowledge of music, he says, enhances your enjoyment of it. “It may give you specific insights into the music that you might not otherwise have and it might prevent you from becoming so captivated by the tonal beauty that you see music as only an aesthetic experience.”

Music doesn’t have a single home. It “hovers between two worlds.” (I can practically hear Schopenhauer murmuring his assent.) Different types of music, John continues, require different kinds of listening. Wagner is easy. “The music is sensuous to the point of being like a drug rush.” Beethoven and Mahler and Brahms are trickier. “You feel that you are trying to understand what another person is trying to communicate directly to you. Wagner talks to you about something. Beethoven, Mahler, and Brahms talk to you. That is the difference.”

There’s another, more practical, reason to know something about musical structure, John explains. It disciplines the ear. You know what to listen for, so the mind is less likely to wander.

Schopenhauer thought a lot about the wandering mind. We view the world in a calculating, mercenary way, he said. The Amsterdam stockbroker intent on closing a deal is oblivious to the world around him; the chess player does not see the elegant Chinese chess pieces; the general doesn’t see the beautiful landscape as he makes his battle plan.

We must have a different, less transactional, relationship with music. We must experience it from a disinterested perspective. Disinterested but not uninterested. There is a difference. To be uninterested in a piece of music is to be apathetic toward it. To be disinterested is to harbor no expectations, make no demands of the music, yet remain open to the possibility of aesthetic delight. A Buddhist would say we are not attached to the music but nor are we detached from it. A Christian mystic would say we maintain a “holy indifference” toward it. The idea is the same. True listening demands we postpone judgment. When we listen like this, hearing without judging, says Schopenhauer, we “feel positively happy.”

I read that and am stunned. This is the first time I’ve seen Schopenhauer use the word “happy.” A glint of light.

Music is not what I think it is, Schopenhauer tells me. It does not convey emotion. It conveys the essence, the container, of emotions without the content. When we listen to music, we perceive not a particular sadness or a particular joy but sadness itself and joy itself—“the extracted quintessence of these feelings,” says Schopenhauer. Sadness by itself isn’t painful. It is sadness about something that hurts. This is why we enjoy watching a tearjerker or listening to a Leonard Cohen song. Less invested in the drama, we experience the emotion itself, unmoored, and can appreciate the beauty in sadness.

For Schopenhauer, slow melodies are the most beautifully sad. “A convulsive wail,” he calls them. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is a good example. I listen to it whenever I’m feeling sad. It is not an act of self-indulgence, a wallowing in my misery, but, I think, something more noble. The music matches my mood, validates it, yet also enables me to distance myself from the source of my sadness. I can taste sadness without swallowing it, or being swallowed by it. I can savor the bitterness.

Schopenhauer, I suspect, invited misfortune to validate his pessimism. A tributary of masochism runs through his life. In Berlin, during a brief stint as a professor, he insisted on scheduling his lectures at the same time as his bête noire, Friedrich Hegel, that “repulsive and dull charlatan and unparalleled scribbler of nonsense.” Hegel was a philosophy rock star, Schopenhauer an unknown. Predictably, Schopenhauer attracted fewer than five students. He would never teach again.

Schopenhauer would be surprised—outraged, really—to see his worldly possessions housed in an institution. He despised academia, with its rigid rules and “petticoat philosophers.” He preferred the life of a feral philosopher and, thanks to his father’s inheritance, could afford to lead one. No need to grind lenses at an optician’s shop like Spinoza, or teach undergrads like Kant.

I share Schopenhauer’s melancholy but not his pessimism. There’s a fundamental problem with his glumness: it presupposes perfect knowledge, something we humans are incapable of possessing. We may suspect we are living in the “worst of all possible worlds,” but do we know for sure? Pessimism requires a certainty I lack, and for that I am grateful.

Consider the parable of the Chinese farmer. One day, the farmer’s horse ran away. That evening, the neighbors stopped by to offer their sympathies.

“So sorry to hear your horse ran away,” they said. “That’s too bad.”

“Maybe,” the farmer said. “Maybe not.”

The next day the horse returned, bringing seven wild horses with it. “Oh, isn’t that lucky,” said the neighbors. “Now you have eight horses. What a great turn of events.”

“Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.”

The next day the farmer’s son was training one of these horses when he was thrown and broke his leg. “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” said the neighbors.

“Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.”

The following day, conscription officers came to the village to recruit young men for the army, but they rejected the farmer’s son because he had a broken leg. And all the neighbors said, “Isn’t that great!”

“Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.”

We lead telephoto lives in a wide-angle world. We never see the big picture. The only sane response is, like the Chinese farmer, to adopt a philosophy of maybe-ism.

Good philosophers are good listeners. They listen to many voices, no matter how strange, for you never know where wisdom might be hiding. Arthur Schopenhauer found it concealed in an ancient, alien text.

The year was 1813. Still on speaking terms with his mother, Schopenhauer joined one of her regular salons. Among the attendees was a scholar named Friedrich Majer. His specialty, new and suspect at the time, was Eastern philosophy. He showed Schopenhauer an obscure magazine, the Asiatic, and told him of an Indian text called the Upanishads. Schopenhauer was instantly fascinated.

Today we take it for granted that Eastern philosophies and religions are a source of great wisdom, as any visit to a bookstore attests, but that was not the case in Schopenhauer’s time. Buddhism and Hinduism were virtually unknown in the West. It would be another three decades before a copy of the Bhagavad Gita made it to Thoreau’s cabin at Walden. Academics knew little about Eastern philosophy, and denigrated what they did know. All the literature of India and Arabia, the British politician Thomas Macaulay infamously said, “equaled a single shelf of a good European library.”

Schopenhauer was different. He devoured these teachings, mesmerized by their “superhuman conceptions.” He was hungry. Every evening, without fail, he read several passages of the Upanishads. It was, he said, “the most profitable and sublime reading that is possible in the world; it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death.”

Later, he’d study Buddhism, declaring it the greatest of all religions. He kept a statue of the Buddha in his Frankfurt study. Some biographers call Schopenhauer “the Buddha of Frankfurt,” but he was no monk. While he developed a deep and, at the time, rare understanding of Buddhism, he did not practice what he knew. He did not meditate. He did not renounce worldly pleasures. He enjoyed gourmet cuisine and expensive clothes and remained sexually active throughout his life, once remarking that “the sexual organs are the true center of the world.”

Western philosophy, some say, is myopic, blind to the wisdom of others. A rigidly exclusive club of dead white, and only white, men. There’s some truth to this charge, but look more closely at the fabric of Western philosophy and you see Eastern threads running throughout. As far back as Epicurus’s time, in 350 BC, East and West were conversing, even if they didn’t always listen to one another. Centuries later, the conversation resumed. Not only Thoreau and Schopenhauer, but others, too. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and William James were intimately familiar with the wisdom of India and China. This wisdom seeped into their philosophy.

I’m warming to Schopenhauer. The prince of darkness, the philosopher of pessimism, is a master stylist, a joy to read. His writing is crisp and lively, almost poetic. He is the most readable of the German philosophers (admittedly, a low bar, but Schopenhauer clears it easily). No philosopher, says Schopenhauer scholar Bryan Magee, is “more with you, almost tangibly and audibly present when you read them.”

True, he was a wounded soul, perhaps more than most, but that is a difference of degree, not kind. We all have a little Schopenhauer inside us. We’re all wounded. Only the size and shape of the wounds differ.

Schopenhauer is not an easy man to like—“a nasty piece of work,” says one biographer—but he is an easy man to admire. A lover of art and music, he developed one of philosophy’s most profound, and beautiful, theories of aesthetics, and influenced generations of artists and writers. Tolstoy and Wagner kept portraits of the philosopher in their studies. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges learned German so he could read Schopenhauer in the original. Comedians love Schopenhauer, confirming suspicions about the darkness that lurks behind humor.

While other philosophers attempted to explain the world out there, Schopenhauer was more concerned with our inner world. We can’t know the world if we don’t know ourselves. This fact strikes me as incredibly obvious. Why do so many philosophers—otherwise intelligent folk—miss it? Partly, I think, it’s because it’s easier to examine the external. We’re like the proverbial drunk looking for his keys in a lighted alleyway.

“Did you lose them here?” asks a passerby.

“No. I lost them over there,” he says, pointing to a dark parking lot.

“Then why are you looking here?”

“This is where the light is.”

Not Schopenhauer. He searched where it is darkest. You might disagree with his gloomy outlook or bleak metaphysics, but you can’t ding him for half measures. He is all in. A heroic philosopher.

Every fetish suggests an equal and opposite revulsion, and every passion a complementary annoyance. And so it was with Schopenhauer. His intense love of music begot a corresponding loathing of noise.

“Knocking, hammering and banging have been throughout my life a daily torment to me,” he writes in his essay “On Din and Noise.” He especially disliked the “sudden sharp crack” of a whip against the side of a horse, a sound “which paralyzes the brain, tears and rends the threat of reflection, and murders all thoughts.” I wonder if Schopenhauer, lover of animals, was feeling the horse’s pain.

At night, he jumped at the slightest noise and reached for the loaded pistol he always kept at his bedside. In Frankfurt, he wrote to the theater manager, urging him to do something about the racket: control the crowd, install cushioning on the doors and hinged seats, anything. “The Muses and the audience will be grateful to you for improving matters,” he wrote.

For Schopenhauer, noise was more than an annoyance. It was a barometer of character. One’s tolerance for noise, he believed, is inversely proportional to his intelligence. “Therefore, when I hear dogs barking unchecked for hours in the courtyard of a house, I know what to think of the inhabitants.”

I’m with Schopenhauer. My train of thought is rickety, easily derailed. Even the sound of a ticking clock can upend my concentration. My wife’s hair dryer, an evil little fucker called the Bio Ionic PowerLight, has been known to sabotage an entire day. And don’t get me started on leaf blowers.

Recent research reveals the insidious effect noise pollution has on our physical and mental well-being. According to one study published in the Southern Medical Journal, noise pollution can lead to “anxiety, stress, nervousness, nausea, headache, emotional instability, argumentativeness, sexual impotence, changes in mood, increase in social conflicts, neurosis, hysteria, and psychosis.” Another study found that the roar of planes taking off and landing causes our blood pressure to spike, heartbeat to race, and stress hormones to release—even while sound asleep.

Schopenhauer would find confirmation but little pleasure in these studies, for they fail to account for another, more insidious type of noise: mental. Mental noise does more than disturb. It masks. In a noisy environment, we lose the signal, and our way. Some 150 years before email, the cluttered inbox worried Schopenhauer.

In his essay “On Authorship,” the philosopher foreshadows the mind-numbing clamor that is social media, where the sound of the true is drowned out by the noise of the new. “No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.”

We make this mistake every time we click mindlessly, like a lab rat pulling a lever, hoping for a reward. What form this reward will take we don’t know, but that is beside the point. Like Schopenhauer’s hungry readers, we confuse the new with the good, the novel with the valuable.

I am guilty of this. I’m constantly checking and rechecking my digital vital signs. While writing this paragraph, I have checked my email (nothing), opened my Facebook page (Pauline’s birthday, must remember to send her a note), placed a bid for a nice leather backpack on eBay, checked my email again (still nothing), ordered a disturbingly large quantity of coffee, upped my bid for that backpack, and checked my email again (still nothing).

The encyclopedia was the Internet in Schopenhauer’s day, and nearly as seductive. Why puzzle over a problem when the solution is readily available in a book? Because, answers Schopenhauer, “it’s a hundred times more valuable if you have arrived at it by thinking for yourself.” Too often, he said, people jump to the book rather than stay with their thoughts. “You should read only when your own thoughts dry up.”

Substitute “click” for “read” and you have our predicament. We confuse data with information, information with knowledge, and knowledge with wisdom. This tendency worried Schopenhauer. Everywhere he saw people scrambling for information, mistaking it for insight. “It does not occur to them,” he wrote, “that information is merely a means toward insight and possesses little or no value in itself.” I’d go a step further. This excess of data—noise, really—has negative value and diminishes the possibility of insight. Distracted by the noise, we don’t hear the music.

I’m walking back to my hotel, having left Stephen Roeper and the sad Schopenhauer Archives to fend for themselves in this, “the worst of all possible worlds.”

Strolling along Frankfurt’s leafy boulevards, the air soft and pliant, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s a pleasant evening, the sort Schopenhauer favored for his afternoon constitutionals. I listen to the street sounds, garbled Teutonic resonances, and to my own inner voice. I’m alarmed to discover that it, too, is muddled. Schopenhauer was right. Fill your head with the ideas of others and they’ll displace your own. I make a mental note to evict these uninvited voices.

Back in my room, I decide, out of boredom or reflex (or some perverse combination), to log on. I’m clicking away, mindlessly, when it dawns on me: the Internet is Schopenhauer’s Will made manifest in the digital age. Like the Will, the Internet is omnipresent, and purposeless. It is always striving, never sated. It devours everything, including our most precious resource: time. It offers the illusion of happiness but delivers only suffering. As with the Will, the Internet offers two ways to escape its clutch: the path of the ascetic and that of the aesthete. Meditation or music.

I choose music. Rossini, naturally. I pour a hot bath and a Scotch. Taking a swig of the single malt, I close my eyes, and listen. I follow the melody the way the Dalai Lama must follow the news, disinterested but not uninterested. Attentive yet not reactive. I let the music wash over me, as warm and soothing as the bathwater. Sound without words. Emotion without content. Signal without noise.

This, I realize, is what Schopenhauer saw in music: not a respite from the world but an immersion in another, richer one.