The Existentialist Basis of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism

Abstract

This essay argues that phenomenologically, Schopenhauer had an “existentialist” orientation towards the spatio-temporal world that informs his pessimism and that renders it more convincing. This existentialist orientation can be seen in the appreciation of perceptual detail that he prescribes in his aesthetics, his emphasis upon direct experience in his theory of concept formation, his highlighting of the here-and-now in his conception of time, and his conception of enlightenment as the removal of the illusions that desire generates. This kind of existentialist orientation helps explain why he believed that unsatisfied desires generate frustration and why he asserted consequently that “life is suffering”—a claim that appears to be exaggerated at first sight, and open to easy criticism. Overlooking this existentialist orientation explains why some of the criticisms of Schopenhauer’s pessimism appear to be so plausible. In conjunction with Schopenhauer’s well-known position that the essence of the world is a non-rational impulse that he calls “will,” his existentialist attitude towards the spatio-temporal world locates him historically as a more significant predecessor to twentieth-century existentialist thought than has been appreciated.