Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [15]
We have long since recognized that striving . . . where it manifests itself most distinctly in the light of the fullest consciousness, is called will. We call its hindrance through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal, suffering; its attainment of the goal . . . satisfaction . . . all striving springs from want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction with one’s own state or condition, and is therefore suffering so long as it is not satisfied. No satisfaction, however, is lasting . . .
it is always merely the starting point of a fresh striving. . . . Thus that there is no ultimate aim of striving means that there is no measure or end of suffering.2
As we continually see in Seuss, as the characters strive, they will succeed at times, but these successes are short lived. They are often the beginning of a new crisis or problem that must be met with a fresh striving. And all of these small victories are temporary, leading time and again to new failures or perhaps further small victories, thus marking life as a perpetual striving punctuated with short-lived satisfaction. Or as Schopenhauer so poetically puts it: “Life swings like a pendulum to and from between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.”3 Schopenhauer is bleak, he sees only death as the end to all of our long, painful journey. “Life itself is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools that man avoids with the greatest caution and care, although he knows that, even when he succeeds with all his efforts and ingenuity in struggling through, at every step he comes nearer to the greatest, and total, the inevitable and irredeemable shipwreck, indeed even steers right into it, namely death.”4 So thank goodness you’re only old once.
Schopenhauer would’ve made a lousy children’s author. We wouldn’t want to read such assessments of life to our children, unless we wanted to drive them to heroin or suicide. So Seuss, without denying that life is speckled with failures, finds answers to these problems; that is, a way to value life positively in the face of the inevitable and unavoidable pain that marks so much of it. How can Seuss do this? How can he look at and acknowledge all the pain and suffering that accompanies so much of life and smile through it, offering sunshine and roses at the end of the day?
What Would You Do, If Your Kids Asked You?
There are several responses we tend to give to deal with the problem of suffering. Three frequently offered responses find expression in Seuss’s work. In Oh, the Places You’ll Go! we’re told that despite all the bumps and slumps we will succeed. All the pain and suffering of our lives is redeemed because it leads eventually to success. In the end we’ll come out on top. Really? In the end aren’t we all dead, just as Schopenhauer iterated above? Won’t avoiding all the whirlpools and Hakken-Kraks merely delay the inevitable? And even if success is possible, ought we to offer such a promising future to all children? When our children lament their suffering, should we promise success as if their lives will turn out all right in the end? Don’t we know better? Haven’t we lived long enough to know most lives don’t end well; they merely dissolve into obscurity after years of disappointments? Maybe such a naïve optimism and hollow promise is delusional, a lie we tell our kids so they can cope until they realize what