Arthur Schopenhauer · Philosophy
If our innermost being is insatiable will, then to live is to want, to want is to lack, and to lack is to suffer. Schopenhauer argues that suffering is the essence of existence, that satisfaction is merely the brief absence of pain, and that life swings between pain and boredom. This is philosophical pessimism in its most rigorous form.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism is not a mood or a complaint; it is a conclusion forced by his metaphysics. We have learned that our innermost being is will - endless, aimless striving. Now follow the consequence. All willing, Schopenhauer observes, arises from a need, a deficiency, a lack: I will something precisely because I do not yet have it, and the not-having is felt as a want, a tension, a dissatisfaction. But to be in a state of want, of unfulfilled craving, simply is to suffer. Desire is painful in its very nature, because it is the consciousness of a lack. And since we are will through and through, we are always desiring; there is no moment in which the will is not striving after something. Therefore there is no moment genuinely free of this low-grade suffering of wanting.
Worse, the wants are endless. The will is infinite striving with no final object, so satisfying one desire never brings us to rest; it only clears the ground for the next. Schopenhauer compares willing to a thirst we can never permanently slake, to a beggar who is given alms today only to prolong his misery to tomorrow, to a circle we can never escape. Every satisfied wish gives birth to a new one; the basis of all willing is need, deficiency, and so pain. We are, by our very nature as willing beings, condemned to want - and to want is to suffer. This is the foundation, and everything in his pessimism is built on it.
Here Schopenhauer makes one of his most striking and characteristic arguments: that pleasure and satisfaction are negative, while pain and suffering are positive. By this he means that suffering is the real, primary, positively felt thing, whereas pleasure is merely the cessation of a particular pain - the filling of a lack, the removal of a want. Hunger is positively felt; eating is just the removal of hunger. The longing for the beloved is positively felt; its satisfaction is just the silencing of that longing. We do not, he argues, feel our health, our painless limbs, our satisfied state - we notice only the toothache, the wound, the unfulfilled craving. The good things are felt only as the absence of the bad; remove a pain and we feel relief, but the relief fades at once into a blank that the will cannot tolerate.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Schopenhauer derives pessimism from the metaphysics of will: willing springs from lack (suffering), satisfaction is fleeting and negative, boredom fills the gaps, and so life is essentially suffering. Explain the argument from will to suffering.
Leads to The Buddha.
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