Schopenhauer and the Sea Turtles

An Indonesian sea turtle and a 19th century German philosopher

As everyone knows, Schopenhauer thought the world a manifestation not of God, but of will. And by will he meant a blind impulse or force which is not only not divine in origin, but might best be characterised as demonic.

And life? Well, life too, according to Schopenhauer, is a manifestation of a hungry will, concerned only with its own continuation. Thus, we witness innumerable species and individual organisms caught up in an endless feeding frenzy in order to survive and reproduce others of their kind. 

In order to convey the pointless horror of this scenario, Schopenhauer famously tells the tale of an explorer in Indonesia who comes across an immense area littered with bones. At first, he thought it an ancient battlefield, but soon realised that what he had discovered were, in fact, the skeletons of large sea turtles that had come ashore in order to lay their eggs.

Unfortunately, in so doing the turtles frequently fall prey to wild dogs "which combine their efforts to tip them onto their backs, tear off the lower carapace and the small scales on their bellies, and devour them alive".

Not that the dogs get to enjoy their meal in peace for very long: for often a tiger will be attracted to the scene and will then prey on them in turn. This scene, an incessant struggle full of prolonged suffering and violence, repeatedly played out across millennia, will only end, says Schopenhauer, when "the crust of the planet again bursts open".

It is not only absurd, it is atrocious. And yet it is this way that the will - expressed as a will to life - objectifies itself.

As Michel Houellebecq amusingly suggests, this passage from The World as Will and Representation should be dedicated to those animal lovers and ecologists who imagine that the earth would be some kind of paradise if only mankind were to stop interfering or vanish altogether.

See:

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, ed. and trans Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway, (Cambridge University Press, 2010). The lines quoted are found in Vol. 2, Ch. 28.

Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2020), Ch. 3, pp. 32-33. For Houellebecq, Schopenhauer's passage on the turtles is "one of those that can provoke a stupefaction, a final coming to awareness, like a lightning crystallization of the scattered feelings left in us by the experience of life ..." 
 

Notes

Without even addressing Schopenhauer's metaphysical philosophy, he was wrong on at least one point in the above. For whilst wild dogs may still feed on sea turtles, there are no longer any tigers on Java to worry about; they became extinct in the 1970s. It didn't require the end of the world, therefore, to break this feeding cycle, simply an expansion of rice-growing humanity: the population increasing from 28 million at the beginning of the 20th century, to 85 million by 1975. Ancient forest, meanwhile, which still covered a quarter of the island in the 1930s, had by this date shrunk to just 8% and existed only in small patches, unsuitable to sustain a tiger population. 

Portrait of Schopenhauer by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl (c.1815).