Happy People as unwitting allies of the Will in Schopenhauer

Our existence has no purpose.

The will has no purpose.

Questions beyond the world, beyond the Will. Cannot be asked.

Some grounded speculation is warranted.

The question of purpose in the will seen through happy people.

Arthur Schopenhauer holds that the world is a miserable place. As a consequence, he claims

that there can be no happy people. On his account, the people that claim to be happy are really only

apparently happy and even if they were truly happy, their existence is explained because they “had to

be left as decoy-birds” (WW 2, 573)1 . The idea that happy people are decoys of some sort is a most

interesting and intriguing claim that was not further developed by Schopenhauer. Crucially, it has not

been fully explored within contemporary Schopenhauer scholarship either. In this paper, I attempt to

remedy this by providing support to the claim that these decoys are needed.

In order to see why these decoys had to be left, it is important to understand that, on

Schopenhauer's account “everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be

frustrated, or recognized as an illusion” (WW 2, 573) and that the “the purpose of our life is not to be

happy” (WW 2, 635). Happiness cannot be achieved because the world-in-itself, what Schopenhauer

calls the will, is nothing but a blind, endless and purposeless striving. This striving is the source of our

suffering. And the only way to end our suffering is by by denying the will, by not striving or wanting. If
1 WW 2 refers to The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2, E.F.J. Payne translation
we do this, if we deny the will, the will then looses. However, it is not in the interest of the will that we

deny it. The will only wants us to will ever more.

This is where his description of happy people as decoys plays an important role. Describing

happy people as decoys is revealing because it suggests deception. Specifically, they deceive us by

hiding the truth – the truth that existence is wretched (at least on Schopenhauer's account). They hide

the misery lurking behind life and they provide hope for the living; hope that happiness in this world is

possible and that suffering is not a necessary condition of existence.

Even though Schopenhauer did not explicitly point out why these decoys had to be left, the

approach I consider is that happy people are needed because they play a key role in perpetuating the

will. They are necessary because if no happy people ever existed and if, as a consequence, human

beings saw only tragedy and sadness in the world, then they would be more easily predisposed to

deny the will. And a will denied is a will defeated. But as long as the will can point to some happy

people, then the attention of humanity can be drawn away from our tragic lives in order to focus,

instead, on the possibility of happiness. The will, then, largely benefits by having these decoys.

Whether the will purposely creates these happy people to act as bait, as distractors (a possible

reading of Schopenhauer, though not without problems) does not require an immediate answer at

this point because my main purpose is to establish that happy people are, at a minimum, unwitting

allies of the will.