Death is one of the paths through which the whole thinking-philosophizing of Schopenhauer could be approached. Schopenhauer constructs a philosophical system around and upon what he calls the “will-to-live” and thus implies death and assumes its force.
Death places itself over against the “will-to-live”; it leans toward and acknowledges its relation and nearness to the “will-to-live”. The thinking of death arises from out of the “will-to-live”. Schopenhauer says that his whole philosophy and his “whole work is the unfolding of a single thought”. This single thought is the “will-to-live”.
Death and “will-to-live” are linked together; they dwell in a relatedness holding them together near to each other. The will is an attempt at evading and escaping death, yet death appears and shows itself only when there is will and life.
Death and philosophy
In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer says that death leads to philosophizing. Death delivers philosophers into philosophizing. It is in the dwelling of death in life that philosophy appears and is made possible. “Death is the real inspiring genius or muse of philosophy and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as a “practice of death”. Indeed without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing”
Death delivers into philosophizing because it makes apparent how vulnerable and fragile human existence is. Philosophy remains a wonder, but not only about the nature of things. Philosophy is also a wonder about the fragility pervading our existence.
Schopenhauer repeats and thus confirms Socrates’s linking together of philosophy and death. For Socrates, philosophy is nothing but a thinking of death, a thinking toward and into death, and the accepting of death leads to and delivers into a truly philosophical life. That is, death is that around which philosophy must revolve.
Schopenhauer’s philosophical system confirms, and extends itself into, this linking together of death with philosophy. Perhaps the whole thinking-philosophizing of Schopenhauer is governed by death and its force. Most of Schopenhauer’s writings and concepts imply death and arise from out of the force that death brings into existence, and not only both the “will-to-live” and its denial.
The relation into which Schopenhauer brings death and philosophizing together implies that existential thinking must begin from and include within itself death. This means that if death leads to philosophizing, then philosophy must think the implications of death. Existential thinking-philosophizing, for Schopenhauer, remains incomplete if it ignores death, if it ignores what is supposed to be its origin, or what shapes its detours and makes it possible.
For more articles on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, read Schopenhauer on Suffering: “All life is suffering”.