More charitably, apart from any reading of his metaphysics, I guess one could see in this passage the recognition of a common humanity in a community of suffering, a kind of ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’ thought.

I agree with the last comment. In this passage I find everything I love and hate in Schopenhauer, whose metaphysics I would caricature (but I hope my caricature is of something there) thus: 1) reality, Being, the world is necessarily human constructions of reality, and our constructions (re-presentations) necessarily cannot reach their objects; we are cut off from any knowledge or true understanding of Being; 2) with one exception: we know our acts of willing directly; they are least are not constructed, no matter how constructed the objects are to which are will is directed; 3) thus, ultimate reality is will; the objects of will are phenomena; 4) the will expresses itself only in the self-assertion of the individual existent in the battle to survive, to expand, to increase its power (the range of willing); 5) there is no other meaning or purpose to existence; 6) knowing this is sublime, a negative sublime, a kind of disgust or horror; 7) the point is to escape this prison of the will – art allows temporary escape, especially music; above all, pity, compassion negates the will; 8) pity and compassion can ultimately only be for the self, the only reality any of us can know, the only reality any of our acts can be directed to; 9) thus when we pity the suffering of others, we negate our own will, we become objects of our own pity.
This weird conclusion follows only if it is true that our compassion reveals nothing about its object – another human being, an animal, or whatever. But other human beings, in Schopenhauer’s system, can be nothing other than constructs, re-presentations – they are never fully real. But to love another human being, without sentimentality or false pathos, is just a response to something deeply real – no less that response to the beauty of a sunrise is a response to something real in nature and not just a construction of nature, though of course it can be that, too, and often is (a travel brochure enticing paying tourists to the beach with a picture of a sunrise). To me the problem with so many philosophers, metaphysicians like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – they take a common perversion, mistake the perversion for some a priori truth about whatever they are writing about, and then draw metaphysical conclusions about the reality of nature or humanity. I still love this passage though! Thanks for sharing.

Very kind of you. Thank you, and for the great question.

I will take a stab at it. (Listened to a lecture by Raimond Gaita that stimulated this reply.) Recall Socrates’ conversation with Polus in Plato’s Gorgias. Polus, a student of the reputable Sophist and teacher of rhetoric, Gorgias, is incredulous that Socrates believes that precisely the evil-doer is most miserable and pitiable who does not get punished and indeed in his or her own mind sees themselves as ‘happy’ precisely because they got what they wanted by placing themselves beyond good and evil. Polus cites as his example a Macedonian tyrant, Archelaus, who is in the (for Polus) enviable position of having absolute power to fulfill his desires without fear of punishment or opposition. He came to that power by betrayal and murder, and maintains it with fear and violence. Polus more or less assumes that if any of us were free of the fear of punishment, then ‘moral’ restraints would lose their force (be revealed as mere social constructs to protect us from the ill-will of others, perhaps ingrained as taboos) and our true ‘nature’ would be revealed – an infantile self that lusts for precisely the license to fulfill every desire and wish, sexual and otherwise (a very Freudian picture). He asserts everyone secretly admires men like Archelaus whether or not they are too ashamed to admit it in public or even acknowledge it to themselves. Thus he can only understand Socrates’ view that evil-doers are the most miserable and pitiable people of all, even more so when they appear to others to be wonderful human beings and do not get punished.

Why does Socrates think this? Because such people are in truth base and wretched, however they appear to others or to themselves. It is a contradiction to be base, wicked, and truly happy. This is obviously a different conception of ‘happiness’ than Polus’ understanding of it as the power to get all you want according to your ‘nature.’ He finds it absurd that anyone could think Archelaus would be happy suffering the punishment for his crimes rather than having all his wishes fulfilled and being admired by the masses; indeed, for Polus it would be extremely terrible for him to be punished, since the penalty would be death. The idea of being better off with pain and death being inflicted on him in punishment than being admired and free to pursue his every whim makes no sense to him precisely because he can only see morality as a pragmatic restraint on human nature, which is revealed in all its truth precisely when someone has absolute power. Remorse, then, or bad conscience could only be understood by Polus as regret at getting caught or limited in one’s ‘pursuit of happiness.’ He prides himself on having the courage to openly acknowledge this, which he thinks everyone believes in their hearts – basically agreeing with Voldemort from the Harry Potter stories that ‘there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.’ He assumes that suffering pain is bad, and experiencing pleasure is good; the evil-doer who can fulfill his desires with impunity experiences pleasure; the victim suffers pain and damage – therefore, the evil-doer is in a more enviable position than the victim. If the evil-doer must be punished (meaning suffer pain), then to that extent he is not ‘happy’ or enviable – and more or less enviable than the victim depending on who suffers the most pain.

Now imagine a woman who as a teen was sexually victimized by the predatory teacher who ought to have cared for her and helped her to the extent to was able, a teacher that for all appearances was a wonderful pedagogue, husband, and father, respected and even loved by all who knew him. It is understandable want him to suffer more than she did; that would define ‘justice’, and ‘punishment.’ Given that her life probably can never be whole again, one might wish for drastic punishments – burning the son-of-a-bitch at the stake, for example. That may appeal to one’s righteous anger. What Plato’s Socrates in a sense discovers in the Gorgias is a whole other dimension than pain and pleasure, and the weighing and balancing of each. The grounds for pitying the wretchedness of the evil-doer is not the pain he suffers (or should suffer): “to do evil is worse than to suffer it through an excess of evil (Gorgias, 475c).” The distinctive evil of what the predatory teacher did to his victim cannot be understood in categories of pain, pleasure, reward, retribution – or any social category. The teacher has become evil, has revealed himself to be evil, the kind of man who would abuse a sacred trust and exploit a most vulnerable adolescent girl to live out some perverse sexual fantasy. This is so whether or not anyone knows it, including himself (people are experts at self-deception) – and not just according to some social norm in place to make social life possible or some taboo from deep in our prehistory.

And for Socrates there is only one help – just punishment, which includes recognizing the truth of the degraded person he has become: I say ‘degraded’ because such a man has in a way separated himself from humanity, has shown that he is willing to prey on humanity to fulfill some perverted infantile desires. Or as another great teacher said: the truth will set you free. Of course, it is a terribly painful truth; but not all pain is evil. The pain of pulling a tooth is necessary to relieve an underlying, permanent source of suffering –though that metaphor doesn’t quite capture what I am after here. As Socrates puts it: only justice will remove the evil from the man’s soul. And by implication: the worst thing that could happen to him would be not removing the evil, which would then completely take him over and cut him off from any source of good, of salvation. I could try to describe with other words what this evil involves – perverting his true nature by destroying his capacity truly to love, to be just, and so on. It could be described in different ways, but no explanation does any more than say with different words (more abstract, i.e. farther away from the evil done) what we mean when we say the man has become evil. If he ever really came to understand what he did and what he had become he would suffer remorse and seek penance: ‘Oh my God, what have I done.’

Now the understandable reaction to the teacher – anger, the wish for payback, he should suffer! – also reveals itself to be on the same plane as the evil doer himself. The horror and fear that he ‘lives happily ever after’ and escapes punishment turns out to make sense only if one assumes that the good is the happy and the happy is the pleasure of fulfilled desires (uninformed by any higher standard) and evil is unhappiness and unhappiness is pain. The outrageous injustice is the belief that the evil-doer made himself happy at the cost of making another, one we love, unhappy. Thus we want to balance the scales in her favor. The problem for ‘us’ is that we in effect become complicit in the same evil attitude. By judging things according to this scale, we give it legitimacy, and somehow mask the distinctiveness of the evil involved. The evil-doer who gets paid back, with interest, might rightly think our vindictiveness expresses the resentment of the weak; or a secret wish to do what he dared; or that the desire for revenge shows that deep in our hearts we do not believe in the reality of good and evil, but only pleasures and pains. In a way, it is a nihilistic response. Wendell Berry wrote a little poem on Dante’s Inferno: “If you imagine/ others are there,/ you are there yourself.”

Something else altogether is going on. The "distinctive terribleness" (Gaita) of what it means for that predatory man to do that to that vulnerable girl is not reducible to or explainable solely by the pain or corrupt pleasure involved – if that were the case, then it would be no different from, say, him accidentally doing something that damaged her (e.g. through his inattention during an excursion she was badly injured and disabled for life). That a person would suffer over that is also intelligible, but it is a very different kind of thing than evil done to the vulnerable girl by that teacher. In addition to the damage, or rather part of the emotional damage is that he did evil to her: he abused his position of trust and authority and exploited her vulnerability to slake a base lust, and thereby transformed himself into a wicked, base human being. That his wife at home, his daughter, the pupils at that school still all believe he is the most wonderful man in the world just deepened the shamefulness and wickedness of what he did and who he has become. Even if nobody knows it, he at some level knows it.

Can he ever really go back to the person he was before the crime? He can rationalize, he can concoct an ideology like Voldemort’s, he can construct some kind of sentimental love story, it was meant to be, or society’s prejudices as made us into star-crossed lovers, or our souls were joined in another life – whatever it takes to hide. Perhaps he can even train himself to believe whatever lie he tells himself and in a corrupt sense ‘live happily ever after.’ I think Plato and Jesus would both think: that would be the worst possible thing that could happen to any human being; a human being thus reaches the bottom of wretchedness; he is defined by the crime; he has truly lost his soul; the voice of God in him has been silenced forever; he is cut of from reality, unhinged from what supports us – that, and not some form of pain inflicted by someone else on him, be it through God or man, is the last circle of Hell. It is life situations like this that give force to Plato’s insight (and presumably Socrates’) that evil essentially involves ignorance – a willful ignorance, a not wanting or caring about truth.

I think any conception of morality as ‘flourishing’ or ‘happiness’ –not matter how inclusive and expansive – could only imagine punishment good for the soul if it contributed to the telos of ‘flourishing.’ It seems odd to think of Archelaus or the sexual predator as ‘flourishing’ should they grasp in a moment of clarity the terribleness of what they have done and who they have become.