r/schopenhauer

Some time back, i was in a gore website where a kid had murdered his parents. One of the comments quoted schopenhauer saying, "Evil is what is positive. It makes it's existence known." I was quite troubled by this view of evil. Saying it is something "positive" would seem absurd to many people. With this quote and with how schopenhauer had already been presented, I avoided him. That was until one day I came across a post about him on YouTube. Turns out what I had thought of him was wrong and his philosophy then didn't quite seem so "absurd" but rather comforting to me. I was fascinated by it.

It is easy to lose yourself in nature and good art but we spend most of our lives away from both of these experiences, rather we spend most of our life in mundane environments doing mundane activities, is aesthetic contemplation possible in a bland room while doing a bland activity? Or is it only possible temporarily when we are in nature or experiencing an artform, is there no permanent way of relief from the will, a method you can immerse yourself in 24/7 which is capable of giving the same relief which is found in aesthetic contemplation?

The closest thing I have found to this is buddhist vipassana meditation, but it would take a lot of practice to stay in a meditative state all day in every moment.

What other methods do you guys know?

The pessimistic tradition has a recurring motif: the exit. Schopenhauer's negation of the will. Mainlander's will-to-death. Von Hartmann's collective self-extinction. Each of these thinkers, in his own way, reached for the same solution - a final cessation, a passage into non-being. Suffering is the problem; non-being is the answer.

I want to suggest that this answer is less a conclusion than a habit. And like many habits of thought, it deserves critical scrutiny.

The concept of non-being is not derived from experience. We have never encountered nothing. No one has. Every moment of consciousness, by definition, is a moment of something. What we call "nothing" is always a concept generated by a mind that is already something - an abstraction built by subtracting everything from the current moment and imagining what remains. The problem is that nothing remains. And yet we treat this act of subtraction as if it refers to a real state that could, in principle, obtain.

This is exactly the kind of move that critical theory should examine: a concept that presents itself as a description of reality, but is in fact a reification of a cognitive operation.

Pessimism smuggles in a metaphysical comfort. The idea that suffering can be escaped through non-being relies on the assumption that non-being is a genuine possibility. But what if it isn't? What if "nothing" is not a state that can obtain, but merely the limit of our imagination - a thought we can think, but which corresponds to nothing real?

Modern physics, for what it's worth, is not helpful here. The quantum vacuum is not empty. Absolute emptiness appears to be physically incoherent. This isn't a proof, but it's a suggestive alignment: our most rigorous description of reality finds no room for the concept that pessimism has treated as its ultimate fallback.

Why this matters for pessimism. If non-being is not a real possibility, then the central promise of the pessimistic tradition, the idea that suffering can be ended, is called into question. Not because the suffering isn't real. It is. But because the exit may be a fiction, a conceptual escape hatch built into a system that has no actual exit.

This leaves us in an uncomfortable position. The pessimists of the past at least had the consolation of an ending. If we take non-being off the table, we are left with suffering that has no guaranteed terminus. Death becomes not a liberation, but a temporary interruption in a chain of experiences that, given the structure of reality, may have no final stop.

What I'm proposing. I'm not arguing that this is definitely the case. I'm arguing that critical thought should examine non-being with the same suspicion it brings to other unexamined concepts — progress, the self, the subject. What interests does this concept serve? What comfort does it provide? And what happens to our thinking if we refuse to grant it?

I explore this line of thought in my book Perpetual Sorrow, which is available for free at fracture-of-being.com. I'd be interested to hear whether this community finds the deconstruction of non-being a productive direction.

What music do you think is good for escaping the tyranny of the will in modern times? I want some recommendations

Hitler quotes Schopenhauer in one of his 1922 speeches:

"That can be achieved by the man who can lie most artfully, most infamously; and in the last resort he is not the German, he is, in Schopenhauer's words, 'the great master in the art of lying' - the Jew."

Anyone knows where he is quoting from?

What am I supposed to be doing here?

Making a lot of money? Developing a skill? Consuming a ton of media?

I know people will say there is no purpose, and I have to figure it out for myself. But I’m trying. I really really am.

Would love your thoughts on this video :)

Eso es el post, no es en forma de pregunta sino de afirmación, los leo y según los comentarios voy a desarrollar si hace falta. Buen domingo

CPR will be a long tedious read, and probably i won't able to read alongside with schopenhauer. Althought prolegomena is just relatively less dense than CPR, it won't trouble me so much. i have meagre familliarities with kant's ideas. I feel certain that reading kant is not so necessary and we have this "tradition" in philosophy enthusiasm that we can read whichever philosopher we are interested in and do not need to worry about reading a predecessor philosospher, but i also feel certain that not reading kant will build passive tendency to misinterpret and have a irrelevant view on his metaphysics not acknowledging that some of his ideas are references to kant's metaphysics. any guides please?

He creado esta comunidad porque en Reddit no tenemos ningún foro de discusión de temática pesimista. Sin embargo, somos muchos los interesados, y podemos compartir opiniones, discutir ideas, libros, obras de arte o descubrirnos autores menos conocidos que Cioran o Schopenhauer.