Schopenhauer’s pessimism resides in two related claims: that “all life is suffering”, and accordingly that the world and life itself “ought not to be”.
When Schopenhauer says that “all life is suffering”, he does not mean that moments of joy, happiness, pleasure, and enjoyment never happen, but rather that such moments are exceptions, short-lived, and seldom. “All life is suffering” means that suffering, unhappiness, and pain permeate life and the world and that happiness occurs only briefly.
Because “all life is suffering” and because there is no escaping from the inevitability of unhappiness and pain, “existence is…an error or mistake” and “it would be better for us not to be”, that is, our lives and the world “ought not to be”. Life, for Schopenhauer, is thus “a business that does not cover the costs”. Yet this does not mean that life should be ended. (This article, Schopenhauer on Suicide, explains why Schopenhauer refuses suicide)
Schopenhauer’s Pessimism: “All Life Is Suffering“
Schopenhauer offers many arguments for his view that “all life is suffering”. The aim of such arguments is to show that suffering, pain, and unhappiness are inevitable, that suffering pervades existence, and finally that happiness is rare and short-lived. In what follows Schopenhauer’s arguments will be briefly introduced and explained.
The inevitability of Death
In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer says that “life is a constantly prevented dying, an ever-deferred death”. Life is nothing but a postponing of an inevitable death, a deferring of an inescapable destruction and disappearance of one’s life and existence. Life is nothing but a death delayed and prevented.
“At the same time dangers of the most varied kinds threaten [a person] . . . from all sides, and to escape from them calls for constant vigilance. With cautious step and anxious glance around he pursues his path, for a thousand accidents and a thousand enemies lie in wait for him. Thus he went in the savage state, and thus he goes in civilized life; there is no security for him”
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
“There is no security”; the inevitability of death haunts us, constantly threatens and disrupts us, and causes us pain. Schopenhauer speaks of a struggle resulting from our incessant attempts at postponing death and from our attempts at preserving ourselves whilst awaiting and deferring dying, a struggle whose place is our bodies. The struggle and the waiting cause us pain and make us suffer.
The Present Is Always Devoid of Happiness
“Human beings always live in the expectation of better things . . . On the other hand, the present is accepted only for the time being, is set at naught, and looked upon merely as the path to the goal. Thus when at the end of their lives most men look back, they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim; they will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life, precisely that in the expectation of which they lived”
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena
The present always lacks happiness; it escapes us in our waiting for a future that never comes. Life itself evades us in our turning toward a future that will never come, only to discover afterward that what we “allowed to slip by unappreciated” was our complete life itself.
“Happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over a sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow”
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Human Beings Are Evil
“The chief source of the most serious evils affecting man is man himself. . .. He who keeps this . . . clearly in view beholds the world as a hell, surpassing that of Dante, by the fact that one man must be the devil of another”
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
For Schopenhauer, human beings are themselves evil. Human beings are themselves the origin of the unhappiness, suffering, and pain that permeate the world. What human beings do to each other makes the world a hell, even “surpassing that of Dante”.
Human beings, for Schopenhauer, increase the amount of suffering and pain in the world and render existence even more painful because of what they do to each other: “One must be the devil of another”.
The Human Essence Is Willing and Willing Is Suffering
Another argument for the claim that “all life is suffering” is Schopenhauer’s linking together of both willing and the human essence and willing and suffering. Schopenhauer says that willing is that which lies at the heart of the human essence and the essence of everything that exists and then argues that willing is suffering. That is, Schopenhauer places suffering and dissatisfaction into the core of everything that is and into the human essence itself. This means that, for Schopenhauer, to exist is to will, and to will is thus to suffer.
More specifically, for Schopenhauer, not only the human essence, but also the essence of everything that exists is willing. That is, willing names and defines the essence of everything that is, including the human essence. And since “all willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering”, “from dissatisfaction with one’s own state or condition”, dissatisfaction, suffering, and deficiency thus, for Schopenhauer, pervade everything that exists because to be is to will, and to will is to suffer.
Boredom
Another argument for the claim that “all life is suffering” is boredom. For Schopenhauer, the human essence is willing, and willing is suffering, but if willing stops, boredom takes place and renders life unhappy and unbearable.
“The basis of all willing is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom comes over it; in other words, its being and its existence itself becomes an intolerable burden for it. Hence its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents”
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Schopenhauer sees the suffering of boredom as the alternative to the suffering of willing. Boredom is itself another form of suffering and unhappiness: “Anything but an evil to be thought of lightly: ultimately it depicts the countenance of real despair”. In Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer says that people could “die of boredom or else hang themselves”.
For Schopenhauer, boredom has three forms. The first is when the world shows itself to the bored as lifeless, “dead”, colorless, and “dreary”. Nothing is attractive or interesting and everything is indifferent, detached, and distant.
The second form of boredom is when the world shows itself to the bored as valueless, meaningless, and pointless. Schopenhauer says that these feelings of pointlessness, valuelessness, and pointlessness render existence itself burdensome. This burden obliges us, according to Schopenhauer, to constantly attempt to “kill time”. We seek “trivial motives” that “are related to real and natural ones as paper money to silver, for their value is arbitrarily assumed”. Our motives themselves become arbitrary, they are not genuine, since what we really want is nothing but to “kill time”. We are not interested in what we choose to do; we do it only to kill time.
The third form of boredom occurs because there is nothing in the world that can genuinely engage the interest of the bored individual. The third form of boredom is frustration, severe frustration. Schopenhauer says that the bored in this form of boredom undergoes “the pressure of the will”, but because there are no genuine motives and because there is nothing that can genuinely engage the interest of the bored, “inner torment” takes place, resulting from “the pain of longing without any definite object”. “The pressure of the will” obliges the bored to will something, anything, but since there is nothing in the world that shows itself as interesting in this form of boredom, the bored experiences severe frustration, “inner torment”, unhappiness, and pain. That is, the bored suffers.
Happiness Is Negative and Pain Is Positive
Another argument for the view that “all life is suffering” is that “pain is something positive that automatically makes itself known: satisfaction and pleasures are something negative, the mere elimination of the former”. Satisfaction and pleasures are merely “painless” states.
What Schopenhauer means here is that even if we do not experience boredom and even if our periods of willing are brief and thus not painful, pleasures and satisfaction cannot compensate for such brief periods of willing because they have no positive value. That is, happiness is itself unhappiness, or, at least, happiness is nothing but the absence of pain, which cannot be considered genuine happiness. “All satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness is really and essentially always negative only and never positive”.
Schopenhauer says that the feelings of pleasure and satisfaction always fade away quickly. Even if we finally achieve what we really want, our happiness quickly disappears and leaves us empty, feeling neither happy nor satisfied. Happiness is thus never positive. It fades away quickly and leaves us disillusioned. Even if happiness takes place, it is short-lived, temporary, and brief. Happiness can never make up for the suffering, pain, and unhappiness that accompany willing and boredom. This is why, for Schopenhauer, “all life is suffering”.