Porcupine Dilemma

Arthur Schopenhauer

Human society is no fun. Solitude is worse. Philosopher Schopenhauer called that situation the ‘Porcupine Dilemma’.

Imagine some porcupines struggling to stay warm on a cold winter night. The closer you get to each other, the warmer it is. How close can porcupines get to each other? Their quills protect them from external harms. Societal harms, shall we call them? The same quills prevent them from coming closer and sharing the body warmth.

That is what Schopenhauer called the porcupine dilemma. You need others to survive. But others can hurt you. They will, in all probability.

When I read about this dilemma in an essay on Schopenhauer by Eric Weiner, two thoughts hit my brain simultaneously. One, how do porcupines mate? They don’t pollinate, obviously. Two, how close did Schopenhauer get to other people?

The pollination dilemma of porcupines was solved easily as far as I was concerned. I learnt that the female of the species went an extra mile to make the process as less pricky as possible for her male. It’s quite risky to have sex if you are a porcupine, I learnt.

Schopenhauer never married. But he had a lot of sex. He was not the kind of a man for whom even a porcupinish woman would go an extra mile in spite of his (rather uncharacteristic) assertion that “the sexual organs are the true centre of the world.”

Schopenhauer’s dilemma was that he wanted to love many people but he actually hated the entire human species. He loved dogs. Each one of his dogs was named Atman. Why didn’t he name them Brahman? I wonder. He loved the Upanishads and other Hindu scriptures. Soon he learnt about Buddhism and fell in love with the Buddha too. They called him “the Buddha of Frankfurt.” And they discovered a statuette of the Buddha in his study after his death.

The Buddha of Frankfurt had a bad childhood. Ah, that’s where it all went wrong, you see. His mother was not interested in maternity as much as social recognition. She aspired to be a social luminary and the child Arthur was a nuisance in her social gatherings. She didn’t want to play with a doll anymore, she said referring to her son. She resented the boy. “A very bad mother,” Arthur Schopenhauer described her later.

His father wasn’t any better. He didn’t think much of the boy. He thought that even his handwriting was too bad for a businessman which was what he was and wanted his son to become. And the posture too. “Your mother expects, as I do,” the father wrote to his son once, “that you will not be reminded to walk upright like other well-raised people,” The love that was attached to the signature at the end of that letter was the typical parental knife for Arthur who naturally became a philosopher instead of a merchant.

Philosophers are sad people at heart. They want to love people and end up loving dogs named Atman or something as exotic as that. Then they will tell us that we are living in the worst possible world. That’s just what Schopenhauer said. That was his dilemma in a world of porcupines that claimed to have evolved from apes.

He wanted to love but didn’t just know how to do it. He had just the wrong parents, I should say. Poor guy. All philosophy begins in the womb, in fact. All dilemmas begin there. The limits of your vision are set there. And consequently the limits of your world, Schopenhauer said a few years after he was ejected from the womb.

An after thought: My ebook, Coping with Suffering, has a more serious chapter on Schopenhauer.