Anonymous
01/28/26(Wed)18:32:50 No.12756325

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Anonymous 01/28/26(Wed)18:32:50 No.12756325

>Life swings like a pendulum between suffering and boredom.

Schopenhauer's pendulum quote captures the heart of his pessimistic philosophy, which centers on what he called the "Will" - a blind, insatiable force that drives all existence
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For Schopenhauer, the Will is the fundamental reality underlying everything. It's not conscious or rational, but an endless striving, a constant wanting without purpose. Every living being, including humans, is a manifestation of this Will, which means we're condemned to perpetual desire.

Here's the cycle he saw: When we desire something, we suffer because we lack it - that's the "suffering" side of the pendulum. We work, we strive, we yearn. But when we finally achieve what we want, the satisfaction is fleeting. The desire evaporates, and we're left with nothing to pursue - that's the "boredom" side. We feel empty and restless. This boredom then generates new desires, swinging us back to suffering, and the cycle repeats endlessly.

What Schopenhauer was really saying is that human existence is fundamentally characterized by struggle. We can't win. Happiness, for him, wasn't a positive state we achieve but merely the temporary absence of struggle. Lasting contentment is impossible because the Will within us never stops demanding more.

He saw this as universal and inescapable - it's the very structure of existence itself. The only temporary reprieves he recognized were aesthetic contemplation (where we lose ourselves in art or beauty and briefly forget our willing) and asceticism (actively denying the Will through renunciation). But these were just pauses, not permanent solutions.

Pretty bleak, but he argued he was simply being honest about the human condition.