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This might seem a dishonest and cynical exercise. Schopenhauer thinks the need for such argumentative strategies is a grim and inevitable fact of life unless we live in a cloud-cuckoo-land in which people can be won round by sweet reasonableness. Sometimes he suggests that you might be best just not bothering to argue with most people at all. Silence is winning too.
Schopenhauer takes a gloomy view of human nature and life, rather similar to that of Hobbes’ ‘nasty, brutish and short’ one. Whereas Hobbes doesn’t delve too deeply into why people are like this, Schopenhauer connects this unsavoury nature to the underlying nature of reality. It might seem as though we live in a world ordered by the principles of physics and policed by the laws of morality, but this is just an appearance brought about by the way we have to see the world given the way our minds impose a particular order on things. This intelligible order is just a carapace rationalising what’s really there: pure Will, whose essence is simply a striving for existence. And we’re strapped to this mass of pointless striving, restlessly driven, as individual pimple-wills on the face of the world-Will, life the futile attempt to satisfy our desires. When we’re not striving we soon (after a momentary glimmer of a sense of achievement) become bored, and off we go again. Thus whether our desires are satisfied or not, we suffer. One might sum up our dismal existence as: striving, boredom, striving, boredom … death.
People in arguments won’t be led by reason, but by vanity and the stubborn urge to win, despite reason. So you’d better be prepared to counter this, not with reason, but with dirty tricks.
Out of this doesn’t come the gloomy book you might expect, but rather a caustically witty one. Some of the headings speak for themselves: ‘Make your opponent angry’; ‘Make him exaggerate’; ‘Bewilder your opponent’; and my favourite, ‘This is beyond me’ (I’m sure you’re a clever fellow, but I’m afraid you’ve simply lost me now). Making up your mind as to what people are really like will decide whether you need this book or not.
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