Arthur Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer believed the universe was driven by a blind, purposeless will. Humans are expressions of this will. Happiness is the temporary cessation of suffering, not a positive state. Comedy, for Schopenhauer, reveals the gap between expectation and reality.
The World as Will and Representation
Schopenhauer's central work (1818) argues that reality is fundamentally irrational — driven by a blind will to exist that has no purpose beyond its own continuation. This philosophical pessimism is one of the intellectual ancestors of absurdism: if the universe is purposeless, then human search for meaning is structurally doomed.
Theory of comedy
Schopenhauer developed an influential theory of comedy: laughter results from the sudden perception of incongruity between a concept and the reality it represents. When expectations collapse against the actual, we laugh. This anticipates superiority theory and incongruity theory, and it explains why the Archive's books are funny: a novel-shaped object that contains only one word collapses every novelistic expectation simultaneously.
Influence on Beckett
Samuel Beckett read Schopenhauer carefully. The waiting, the futility, the characters who cannot stop existing and cannot find a reason to continue — this is Schopenhauerian pessimism translated into dramatic form. Beckett acknowledged the connection; Schopenhauer is the philosophical backstory of absurdist drama.
Frequently asked questions
Was Schopenhauer an absurdist?
Schopenhauer predates absurdism, but his pessimistic metaphysics — a purposeless universe, suffering as the default — anticipates the tradition. He influenced Beckett directly.
What is Schopenhauer's theory of humor?
Schopenhauer argued that laughter results from the sudden perception of incongruity — when a concept collapses against an incompatible reality.