Life is Pain and Boredom - Schopenhauer (From: Why Does Man Exist? by Arthur John Bell 1890)
Perhaps the most pessimistic of pessimists is Schopenhauer. In his work "The World as Will and Idea," page 402, he writes:—
"We saw that the inner being of unconscious nature is a constant striving without an end and without rest. And this appears to us much more distinctly when we consider the nature of brutes and man. Willing and striving is its whole being; which may be very well compared to an unquenchable thirst. But the basis of all willing is need, deficiency, and this pain; consequently the nature of brutes and man is subject to pain, originally and through its very being. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of desire because it is at once deprived of them by a too easy satisfaction, a terrible void and boredom comes over it—i.e., its being and existence itself becomes an unbearable burden to it. Thus its life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and boredom. This has also had to express itself very oddly in this way: after man had transferred all torments to hell, there then remained nothing over for heaven but boredom."
Page 411.—"All satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is always really and essentially only negative, and never positive. It is not an original gratification coming to us of itself, but must always be the satisfaction of a wish. The wish—i.e., some want—is the condition which precedes every pleasure. But with the satisfaction, the wish, and therefore the pleasure, cease. Thus the satisfaction or the pleasing can never be more than the deliverance from a pain, from a want"
Page 415.—"The life of every individual is . . . always a tragedy. The never-satisfied wishes, the frustrated efforts, the hopes unmercifully crushed by fate, the unfortunate errors of the whole life, with the increasing suffering and death at the end, are always a tragedy."
Page 418.—"Every biography is the history of suffering, for every life is, as a rule, a continual series of great and small misfortunes. According to this, the brevity of life, which is so constantly lamented, may be the best quality it possesses. If we should bring clearly to a man's sight the terrible sufferings and miseries to which his life is exposed, he would be seized with horror; and if we were to conduct the confirmed 'optimist' through the hospitals, infirmaries, and surgical operating-rooms, through the prisons, torture-chambers, and slave-kennels, over battlefields and places of execution,—if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it hides from the glance of cold curiosity, and, finally, allow him to glance into the starving dungeon of Ugolino—he, too, would understand at last the nature of this best of possible worlds. For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it. And when, on the other hand, he came to the task of describing heaven and its delights, he had an insurmountable difficulty before him, for our world affords no materials at all for this."
Page 403.—"Man ... is the most necessitous of beings: he is through and through concrete willing and needing; he is a concretion of a thousand necessities. With these he stands upon the earth left to himself, uncertain about everything except his own need and misery. Consequently the care for the maintenance of that existence under exacting demands—which are renewed every day—occupies, as a rule, the whole of human life. At the same time he is threatened from all sides by the most different kinds of dangers, from which it requires constant watchfulness to escape. With cautious steps and casting anxious glances round him, he pursues his path, for a thousand accidents and a thousand enemies lie in wait for him. Thus he went while yet a savage, thus he goes in civilised life; there is no security for him.
"The life of the great majority is only a constant struggle for this existence itself, with the certainty of losing it at last. But what enables them to endure this wearisome battle is not so much the love of life as the fear of death, which yet stands in the background as inevitable, and may come upon them at any moment. Life itself is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools, which man avoids with the greatest care and solicitude, although he knows that, even if he succeeds in getting through with all his efforts and skill, he yet by doing so comes nearer and nearer at every step to the greatest, the most inevitable and irremediable shipwreck—death. This is the final goal of the laborious voyage, and worse for him than all the rocks from which he has escaped."
Page 404.—"Thus, between desiring and attaining all human life flows on throughout. The wish is in its nature pain; the attainment soon begets satiety; the end was only apparent; the wish, the need, presents itself under a new form; when it does not, then follows desolateness, emptiness, ennui (boredom), against which the conflict is just as painful as against want."
Thus the essence of the pessimistic idea is that—
Evil is of the very essence of existence.
Life is necessarily and hopelessly wretched.
To live is to desire.
To desire is to want.
To want is to suffer.
Wretchedness always outweighs felicity.
Nothing is worth the trouble it costs us.
To the "Pantheist" who believes that God is all, and that all is God, the views just set forth imply simply a universal misfortune, arising out of the nature of the Pan-Theos, which cannot help acting as it does. To the "Panist." who does not believe in any God whatsoever; who believes that the matter and force of the universe have eternally existed; the past history and present state of things could not possibly be otherwise than what they have been, are, and will be. But to the Theist—to the believer in an Infinite Creator, to the believer in God—no such solution of the problem of life is open. Unless it can be shown that pessimism is inconsistent with a right reading and a right interpretation of the phenomena of existence, the consideration of the universal misery of life leads to a state of blank despair, and a frightful feeling of resentment against its cause. If we are to accept the doctrine that life and misery are synonymous terms; that the essential nature of the sum of existence is such as to shut out all hope that the universal pain, which seems to be the necessary concomitant of all consciousness, can ever, even in the smallest degree, be alleviated; but that, on the contrary, the higher is the development the higher is the suffering, what is left but despair? what is left to us but to "curse God and die"?
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