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 has a devastating consequence for any hope of a happy life understood as a sum of positive pleasures. If pleasure is merely the negation of a pain, then it can never outweigh suffering or build up into a positive surplus of happiness; at best it returns us, briefly, to zero. The most we can achieve is the temporary absence of pain - and even that is unstable. Schopenhauer drives the point home with a grim test: compare the pleasure of the predator eating with the agony of the prey being eaten, and ask whether the books could ever balance. The suffering of the world, he insists, is not redeemed by its pleasures, because pleasure is too thin a thing - a mere shadow cast by the removal of pain - to do the redeeming. The ledger of existence is written in red.
We can now see the full shape of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, and why it is so much more rigorous and unsettling than ordinary gloom. Most pessimism is a report on bad luck - this life has gone badly, the world is in a sorry state. Schopenhauer’s is structural: it claims that suffering is not a contingent misfortune that might be fixed by better arrangements, but the essence of existence itself, because existence is will and will is lack. No improvement in circumstances can cure it, because the disease is being a willing creature at all. Get everything you want and the will turns the satisfaction to boredom; fail to get it and you suffer the pain of frustration; the pendulum swings on regardless. Optimism - the view that this is the best of possible worlds, or that progress will redeem the suffering - he regards not merely as false but as ‘a wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind’.
And yet - this is essential to understanding him rightly - Schopenhauer’s pessimism is not nihilism or a counsel of despair, and it is certainly not, he insists, a justification for suicide (which he rejects, as we will see, because it affirms the will even in destroying the body). It is the diagnosis that makes his proposed cures intelligible. If life as willing is suffering, then salvation must lie in some quieting of the will - and Schopenhauer points to several routes: the temporary escape of aesthetic contemplation, where the will falls silent before beauty (the next lesson); the moral escape of compassion, where the barrier between self and other dissolves; and the ultimate escape of the denial of the will, the path of the saint and ascetic who turns the will against itself and attains a peace ‘higher than all reason’. The pessimism is the darkness against which these lights are seen. To understand why Schopenhauer thinks art and compassion and renunciation matter so profoundly, one must first feel the full weight of the suffering they are meant to relieve.
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.
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