Success Quote by Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer turns magnanimity into a mirror trick: the supposed moral achievement of regretting an enemy's death is exposed as vanity in formal wear. The line begins with an almost saintly premise - regret for the enemy - then pivots on the knife-edge of "namely", revealing the engine underneath. We don't mourn them because we finally see their humanity; we mourn them because they were useful. An enemy is an audience, a measuring stick, the living proof that the contest mattered and that we won.

The intent is characteristically Schopenhauerian: puncture the flattering stories we tell ourselves about virtue by tracing them back to ego and appetite. His philosophy is obsessed with the will's self-deception, and here he stages a small drama of that deception. "Witnesses to our success" makes the cruelty precise. It suggests that triumph is not complete until it is observed by someone whose opinion we care about or whose defeat we can savor. Without the enemy alive to register the outcome, success loses some of its theatrical charge.

The subtext is darker than simple schadenfreude. It implies that hostility binds people together in a perverse intimacy; your rival helps constitute your identity. Kill the enemy and you risk killing the narrative that made your striving legible. In 19th-century Europe, with status, honor, and reputation functioning as social currency, Schopenhauer's jab lands as social critique: even our loftiest gestures can be motivated by the desire to have our superiority certified, ideally by the very person we outperformed.