Cythraul said:
Sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me. What arguments does he offer in support of such ridiculous conclusions?
God I cant remember. But if I must, I will find it online. Its in World as Will and Idea. Im surprised you think this is nonsense oh enlightened Cythraul--the idea is essentially Buddhist. Schopenhauer "borrowed" it from them. Surely you've read the Dhammapadra etc?
Hm, its not easy finding his texts online. Here is a decent summary of his pessimism:
If reality is the blind will to live, and the world is the objectivation of such a blind will, life is painful misery. Schopenhauer makes a broad and acute analysis of all the various branches of existence, only to conclude that life is essentially pain and that it is a mistake to persevere in the will to live. According to him, everywhere in the world everything is desire, because all -- everywhere -- is will. To desire signifies suffering distress on account of the lack of what is desired. If the desire is not satisfied, the distress remains and increases; if it is satisfied, satiety and annoyance follow, and this in turn causes new desires and new distresses.
The will finds thousands of pretexts for perpetuating this unsatisfied hunger of the will to live. These pretexts only perpetuate the misery of life.
One such pretext and deceit is love. The will of the species masks itself under the pleasures of love with the purpose of perpetuating the desire for life in others. In so doing, it satisfies its own will to live.
Another pretext and deceit is egoism, which impels us to increase the pains of others in the hope of gaining some advantage in our own miserable life.
Still another deceit and illusion is progress which, in actuating itself, only makes more acute the sense of distress.
The Sacred Writer, in Schopenhauer's interpretation, says that increasing knowledge is only to increase distress. (Ref. Ecclesiastes 1:14, 18: I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a chase after wind...For in much wisdom there is sorrow and he who stores up knowledge stores up grief.)
The whole world is miserable because of the universal blind will to live. Man can avoid his share of misery by suppressing the will to live.
Schopenhauer's philosophy is the antithesis of that of Hegel. In Hegel, reality and rationality coincide. Struggle and injustice are nullified and are justified in the higher synthesis; and, finally, progress and history entirely justify evil in its extreme manifestations of war and national calamities. In Schopenhauer, on the contrary, reality is blind and therefore essentially irrational and evil. Love, progress, history do not justify and annul misery; they are deceits and illusions behind which the blind, unconscious will masks itself, for this will is never satisfied with living and suffering. The systems of Hegel and Schopenhauer represent different atheistic conceptions of the world and of life.
Before the human being comes onto the scene with its principle of sufficient reason (or principle of individuation) there are no individuals. It is the human being that, in its very effort to know anything, objectifies an appearance for itself that involves the fragmentation of the will and its breakup into a comprehensible set of individuals. The implication of this fragmentation, given the nature of the will, is terrible: the result of the epistemological fragmentation is a world of constant struggle, where each individual thing strives against every other individual thing; the result is a permanent “war of all against all” akin to what Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) characterized as the state of nature.
Kant concludes in the Critique of Pure Reason that we create the laws of nature (CPR, A125); similarly, Schopenhauer concludes in The World as Will and Representation that we create the violent state of nature, for he maintains that the individuation that the human being imposes upon things, is imposed upon a blind striving energy that, once it becomes individuated and objectified, turns against itself, consumes itself, and does violence to itself. His paradigm image is of the bulldog-ant of Australia, which when cut in half, struggles in a battle to the death between its head and tail. Our very quest for scientific and practical knowledge creates a world that feasts upon itself.
Hence derives Schopenhauer's renowned pessimism: he claims that as individuals, we are the unfortunate products of our own epistemological making, and that within the world of appearances that we ourselves structure, we are forever doomed to fight with other individuals, and to want more than we can ever have. On Schopenhauer's view, the world of daily life is essentially violent and frustrating; it is a world that, as long as our consciousness remains at that level where the principle of sufficient reason applies in its fourfold root, will never resolve itself into a condition of greater tranquillity. As he explicitly states, daily life “is suffering” (WWR, Section 56) and to express this, he employs images of frustration taken from classical Greek mythology, such as those of Tantalus and the Danaids, along with the suffering of Ixion on the ever-spinning wheel of fire.
