Death determines and forms the thinking and philosophy of Schopenhauer. For death and dying necessarily and inevitably belong in any thinking toward life and therefore in Schopenhauer’s thinking of the will to life. For Schopenhauer, death is that toward which all life is constantly heading. To exist is to be oriented toward death.
Death stands at the end of life and is the purpose and meaning of existing. It cannot be challenged, evaded, or defeated. It always awaits within life and suddenly takes over. Awaiting within life, death pervades life and marks it as constant dying. By eventually taking over all life, death is that which remains in spite of life. For Schopenhauer, death negates life and eventually brings an end to the will to life. Yet it is what saves us from suffering. It is the end of the pain and sorrow determining and grounding existence. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer says:
At bottom, optimism is the unwarranted self-praise of the real author of the world, namely of the will-to-live which complacently mirrors itself in its work. Accordingly optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man’s happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence; whereas it is far more correct to regard work, privation, misery, and suffering, crowned by death, as the aim and object of our life (as is done by Brahmanism and Buddhism, and also by genuine Christianity), since it is these that lead to the denial of the will-to-live.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Neither can we escape suffering, nor can we alter or stop our constant heading toward death. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of time renders dying our present and death our past and future. Any present now is insofar as it is heading toward its absence in becoming a past now. No now is here/now in full. Every now is here insofar as it is heading elsewhere, toward its disappearance. Every now is now only in its escaping us, toward the past, our past. This means that we are constantly dying.
Real existence is only in the present, whose unimpeded flight into the past is a constant transition into death, a constant dying. For his past life,. . . from the testimony regarding his will that is impressed in it, is entirely finished and done with, dead, and no longer anything. Therefore, as a matter of reason, it must be indifferent to him whether the contents of that past were pains or pleasures. But the present in his hands is constantly becoming the past; the future is quite uncertain and always short. Thus his existence, even considered from the formal side alone, is a continual rushing of the present into the dead past, a constant dying. And if we look at it also from the physical side, it is evident that, just as we know our walking to be only a constantly prevented falling, so is the life of our body only a constantly prevented dying, an ever-deferred death.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
For Schopenhauer, the past is where death dwells. It is where death is, where the no-longer holds sway. Life is constantly en route, toward death and a dead past in such a way that to live is to be constantly subject to death and therefore dying. That every now is on the way to its absence in the past discloses existence, in its entirety, as merely a constant journeying toward its own absence, toward non-existence. Existence is constantly heading toward its own absence in the same way every present now immediately becomes a past now as soon as we catch sight of it as something present.
But this constant dying is also a postponement of the final death, when the whole of life becomes a past life, when life itself becomes no longer. Schopenhauer places life and the whole existence within death and dying. One is constantly dying and postponing death, and this means that one is living.
To exist is to constantly undergo dying and death. Death is constantly postponed and experienced in life. Death is that toward which life is constantly heading, and life itself is a fleeting escape from death, which means that life lacks value and positivity. It is oriented toward death and constantly empties itself of itself so that it becomes its own past. Death is the only meaning that is. Death is the only meaning of life. It is the end of all suffering. Death is and is happening; constantly and forever.