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Arthur Schopenhauer was a German 19th century philosopher, who deserves to be remembered today for the insights contained in his great work: "The World as Will and Representation".
亚瑟·叔本华是19世纪的德国哲学家，他的伟大著作《作为意志和表象的世界》中所蕴含的深刻见解值得我们铭记。
Schopenhauer was the first serious Western philosopher to get interested in Buddhism and his thought can best be read as a Western reinterpretation, and response to, the enlightened pessimism found in Buddhist thought.
叔本华是第一位对佛教感兴趣的严肃西方哲学家，他的思想被解读为对佛教思想中开明悲观主义的重新解释和回应。
He wrote in an autobiographical text ...
他在自传中写道……
And like the Buddha, it was Schopenhauer's goal to dissect and then come up with a solution to this suffering.
就像佛陀一样，叔本华的目标是剖析并提出解决这种痛苦的方法。
It's simply the fault of universities that Schopenhauer has always been taught in such a dry academic way that it has stopped him from being widely known, read and followed.
大学教授一直用无聊的学术方式向学生介绍叔本华，因此他并未被广泛认知和追随，他的作品也并未被广泛阅读。
And yet in truth, this is a man who – no less than the Buddha – deserves disciples, schools, art-works and monasteries to put his ideas into practice.
然而事实上，这是一个不亚于佛陀的人，他值得门徒、校园、艺术作品和寺院将他的思想付诸实践。
It's not too late.
现在还不算晚。
Schopenhauer's philosophy starts by giving a name to a primary force within us which he says is more powerful than anything else – our reason, logic or moral sense: and which Schopenhauer terms The Will-to-Life, in German DER WILLE ZUM LEBEN.
叔本华的哲学首先给我们内在的一种主要力量起了一个名字，他说这种力量比其他任何东西都强大——我们的理性、逻辑或道德感：叔本华称之为生存意志。
The Will-to-Life is a constant force which makes us thrust ourselves forward, cling to existence and look always to our own advantage.
生存意志是一种恒久不变的力量，它使我们奋力向前，执着于生存，并总是着眼于自己的优势。
It's blind, dumb and very insistent.
这是盲目愚蠢的，而且非常坚定。
What the Will-to-Life makes us focus on most of all is sex.
生存意志让我们聚焦于性。
From adolescence onwards, this Will thrums within us, turns our heads constantly to erotic scenarios and makes us do very weird things – the most weird of which is fall in love all the time.
从青春期开始，这种意志就会在我们的身体里穿行，我们会经常观看情色场景，这还会导致我们做一些非常奇怪的事情——其中最奇怪的就是一直坠入爱河。
Schopenhauer was very respectful of love, as one might be towards a hurricane or a tiger.
叔本华非常尊重爱情，就像对待飓风或老虎一样。
He deeply resented the disruption caused to intelligent people by infatuations or what we'd call crushes but he refused to conceive of these as either disproportionate or accidental.
他对迷恋给聪明人带来的混乱深感愤慨，但他拒绝将这些视为不成比例的或偶然的。
In his eyes, love is connected to the most important underlying project of the Will-to-Life and hence of all our lives: having children.
在他看来，爱与生存意志中最重要的潜在项目有关，因此也是我们所有生命中最重要的项目：生孩子。
"Why all this noise and fuss about love?" he asked "Why all the urgency, uproar, anguish and exertion?"
“为什么要为爱情而吵吵闹闹？”他问，“为什么这么急迫、喧嚣、痛苦和劳累？”
"Because the ultimate aim of all love-affairs ... is actually more important than all other aims in anyone's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it."
“因为所有恋爱的最终目的……在任何人的生活中，它实际上比所有其他目标都重要；因此，它非常值得每个人都认真地追求它。”
The romantic dominates life because, Schopenhauer wrote: "what is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation, the existence and special constitution of the human race in times to come."
浪漫主义主宰着生活，因为叔本华写道：“它所决定的无非是下一代的构成，人类在未来时代的存在和特殊构成。”
Of course, we rarely think of future children when we are asking someone out on a date.
当然，当我们约某人出去约会时，很少会想到未来的孩子。
But in Schopenhauer's view, this is simply because the intellect remains much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will.
但在叔本华看来，这仅仅是因为智力仍然被排除在自己意志的真正决议和秘密决定之外。
Why should such deception be necessary?
为什么这样的欺骗是必要的？
Because, for Schopenhauer, we would never reliably to reproduce unless we had first – quite literally – lost our minds.
因为，对于叔本华来说，除非我们先失去理智，否则我们永远无法可靠地繁衍后代。
This was a man deeply opposed to the boredom, routine, expense and sheer sacrifice of having children.
这是一个非常反对为了孩子而厌倦、例行公事、花费和纯粹的牺牲。
Furthermore, Schopenhauer argued that most of the time, if our intellect were properly in charge of choosing who we could fall in love with, we would pick very different people to the ones we actually end up with.
此外，叔本华认为，大多数时候，如果我们的智力正确地决定了我们可以爱上谁，我们会选择与我们最终真正爱上的人截然不同的人。
But we're ultimately driven to fall in love, not with anyone we'll just get on with well, but with people whom the Will-to-Life recognises as ideal partners for the project of producing what Schopenhauer bluntly called 'balanced children.'
但我们最终还是要坠入爱河，不是和任何一个我们只会相处得很好的人，而是那些被生存意志认为是创造叔本华直言的“均衡的孩子”的理想伴侣。
All of us are a little bit unbalanced ourselves, he thought we're a bit too masculine, or too feminine, too tall or too short, too rational or too impulsive.
我们自己都有点不均衡，他认为我们可能会太男性化，或者太女性化，太高或者太矮，太理性或者太冲动。
If such imbalances were allowed to persist, or were aggravated in the next generation, the human race would, within a short time, sink into oddity.
如果任由这种不均衡持续下去，或者在下一代加剧，人类将在短时间内陷入怪圈。
The Will-to-Life must, therefore, push us towards people who can, on account of their compensating imbalances, cancel out our own issues – a large nose combined with a button nose promise a perfect nose.
因此，生存意志必须把我们推向这样的人：由于他们的补偿不均衡，他们可以消除我们自己的问题——一个大鼻子加上一个塌鼻子，这就保证了一个完美的鼻子。
He argued that short people often fall in love with tall people, and more feminine men with more assertive and masculine women.
他认为矮个子的人往往会爱上高个子的人，而女人味更强的男人会爱上更自信、更有男子气概的女人。
Unfortunately, this theory of balancing attraction led Schopenhauer to a very bleak conclusion: namely, that a person who is highly suitable for producing a balanced child with is almost never,
不幸的是，这种均衡吸引力的理论使叔本华得出了一个非常悲观的结论：一个非常适合生一个均衡孩子的人几乎永远不会生育，
though we can't realise it at the time because we have been blindfolded by the will-to-life, very suitable for us.
虽然我们当时还没有意识到，因为我们被生存意志蒙住了双眼，这非常适合我们。
"We should not be surprised," he wrote, "by marriages between people who would never have been friends: Love casts itself on people who, apart from sex, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to us."
他写道：“我们不应该对那些永远不会成为朋友的人之间的婚姻感到惊讶：爱把自己强加给那些除了性之外，可恨可鄙、甚至是我们所憎恶的人。”
The Will-to-Life's ability to further its own ends rather than our happiness may, Schopenhauer implied, be sensed with particular clarity in that rather scary, lonely moment just after orgasm.
叔本华暗示，在性高潮后的寂寞时刻，人们可能会特别清楚地感受到，追求生活的能力，去实现自己的目的，而不是我们的幸福。
He wrote: "Directly after copulation the devil's laughter is heard".
他写道：“交媾之后，魔鬼的笑声马上就被听到了。”
Watching the human spectacle, Schopenhauer felt deeply sorry for us.
叔本华看着人类的奇观，为我们深感遗憾。
We are all just like animals – except, because of our greater self-awareness, far more unhappy than animals.
我们都和动物一样——只是，因为我们有更多的自我意识，所以比动物更不快乐。
There are some poignant passages where Schopenhauer discusses the lives of different animals but he dwells especially on the mole "a stunted monstrosity,"
叔本华在一些尖锐的段落中讨论了不同动物的生活，但他特别谈到了鼹鼠是“一个发育不良的怪物”，
his words, "that dwells in damp narrow corridors, rarely sees the light of day and whose offspring look like gelatinous worms but which still does everything in its power to survive and perpetuate itself."
他的话是，“住在潮湿狭窄的走廊里，很少看到阳光，它们的后代看起来像胶状的蠕虫，但它们仍然尽其所能地生存和延续自己。”
We're just like moles, and just as pitiful. We are driven frantically to push ourselves forward, we want to get good jobs to impress prospective partners, we wonder endlessly about finding The One,
我们就像鼹鼠一样可怜。我们疯狂地推动自己前进，我们想找到一份好工作来打动潜在的合作伙伴，我们不停地想找到另一半，
and are eventually briefly seduced by someone just long enough to produce a child, and then have to spend the next 40 years in misery with them to atone for our errors.
最终被一个长得可以和自己一起生孩子的人短暂地引诱，然后不得不在接下来的40年里与他们一起痛苦地度过，以弥补我们的错误。
Schopenhauer was always beautifully and comically gloomy about human nature.
叔本华对人性总是美丽而滑稽的悲观。
"There is only one inborn error," he wrote, "and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.
他写道：“只有一个与生俱来的错误，那就是我们的存在是为了幸福。
So long as we persist in this inborn error ... the world will seem to us full of contradictions.
只要我们坚持这个内在的错误……在我们看来，这个世界将充满矛盾。
For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of being happy.
因为每走一步，无论大事小事，我们都会体会到，世界和生活肯定不是为了幸福而安排的。
That's why the faces of almost all elderly people are deeply etched with disappointment."
这就是为什么几乎所有老年人的脸上都深深刻着失望。”
Schopenhauer offers two solutions to deal with the problems of existence.
叔本华提出了两种解决存在问题的方法。
The first solution is intended for rather rare individuals that he called 'sages'.
第一种解决方案是为他称之为“圣人”的非常罕见的人设计的。
Sages are able, by heroic efforts, to rise above the demands of the Will-to-Life: they see the natural drives within themselves towards selfishness, sex and vanity... and override them.
通过英勇的努力，圣人能够超越生存意志的要求：他们看到自己内在走向自私、性和虚荣的自然动力……并置之不理。
They overcome their desires, live alone, often away from big cities, never marry and can quell their appetites for fame and status.
他们克服自己的欲望，独自生活，经常远离大城市，从不结婚，可以平息他们对名望和地位的欲望。
In Buddhism, Schopenhauer points out, this person is known as a monk.
叔本华指出，在佛教中，这个人叫作和尚。
but he recognizes that only a tiny number of us in any generation will ever go in for such a life.
但他认识到，在任何一代人中，只有极少数人会过上这样的生活。
The second and more easily available and realistic therapy is to spend as long as we can with art and philosophy, whose task is to hold up a mirror to the frenzied efforts and unhappy turmoil created in all of us by the Will-to-Life.
第二种也是更容易获得和现实的治疗方法，那就是尽可能长时间地与艺术、哲学相处，其任务是为我们所有人的疯狂努力和不愉快的混乱树立一面镜子，这些都是由生存意志造成的。
We may not be able to quell the Will-to-Life very often, but in the evenings at the theatre, or on a walk with a book of poetry, we can step back from the day to day and look at life without illusion.
我们可能无法经常平息生存意志，但在晚上的剧院里，或是带着一本诗集散步时，我们可以从日常生活中退一步，毫无幻想地看待生活。
The art Schopenhauer loved best is the opposite of sentimental: Greek tragedies, the aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld and the political theory of Machiavelli.
叔本华最喜爱的艺术是与感伤相反的：希腊悲剧、拉罗什富科格言和马基雅维利的政治理论。
Such works speak frankly about egoism, suffering, selfishness and the horrors of married life and extend a tragic, dignified, melancholy sympathy to the human race.
这些作品坦率地讲述了利己主义、苦难、自私和婚姻生活的恐怖，并向人类表达了一种悲剧性、庄重的、忧郁的同情。
It's fitting that Schopenhauer's own work fitted his description of what philosophy and art should do for us.
叔本华自己的作品符合他对哲学和艺术应该为我们做些什么的描述。
It too is deeply consoling in its morbid bitter pessimism.
它的病态、痛苦和悲观也令人深感安慰。
For example, he tells us ...
例如，他告诉我们……
After spending a lot of time trying, yet failing to be famous,
在花了很多时间尝试却没出名之后，
and trying, yet failing to have a good relationships, towards the end of his life, Schopenhauer did eventually find an audience who adored his writings.
在叔本华生命的最后阶段，他试图建立一种良好的人际关系，最终找到了一位崇拜他作品的读者。
He lived quietly in an apartment in Frankfurt with his dog, a white poodle whom he called Atman after the world soul of the Buddhists but whom the neighbouring children less respectfully referred to as Mrs Schopenhauer.
他和他的狗静静地住在法兰克福的一间公寓里，那是一只白色的贵宾犬，他以佛教徒的世界灵魂来称呼它“阿特马”，但邻家的孩子们却不那么恭敬地称它为“小叔本华”。
Shortly before his death, a sculptor made a famous bust of him.
在他死前不久，一位雕塑家为他做了一尊著名的半身像。
He died in 1860 at the age of 72, having achieved calm and serenity.
他在1860年去世，享年72岁，获得了永远的安宁。
He is a sage for our own times, someone whose bust should be no less widespread and no less revered than that of the Buddha he so loved.
他是我们这个时代的圣人，他的半身像应该像他所爱的佛陀一样广为流传，同样受到尊敬。
