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Thanks for sharing this! Likely this is a pretty basic primer for anyone who has read Schopenhauer, but as someone who has not - it was an enjoyable and concise read. The idea that humans alone enjoy this special liberty of self-reflection and thus the ability to suppress our desires to relieve ourselves from suffering is interesting and in historically good company. The solution's implementation seems a little flat, but maybe there's only so much you can go into in a little blog post.

One thought that comes to mind is that the author states Schopenhauer finds this system of self-consumption to be sort of depressing, repugnant, and saddening. If an animal (basically a being driven and defined by Will) kills another animal, then arguably the only thing that was lost is another being of Will. So why should this suffering be regrettable, if the being that suffered was effectively just a manifestation of this thing we don't like anyway?

I also find it profoundly sad personally, but wonder what he (or you!) might say in response to this question. Maybe it's only a problem because it affects humans who have the ability to see outside of the law of Will? Maybe many beings have this capacity to varying extent?

Even if you don't find the endless cycle of suffering to be problematic, I guess it would not necessarily detract from the potential benefits of stepping out of this cycle.

BIG EGO hates this trick that Humanists have been using for years!

The whole concept of 'resisting desire' always bothered me because when you think it through 'resisting to desire' is just 'desiring to not desire.'

My desires are what makes me human, it's what makes life fun, interesting, and gives me something to live for. As long as my desires don't hurt someone else I don't see anything wrong with them.

If you want to 'reduce suffering' we need to teach ourselves how 'not to care so much' if our desires don't come true. For instance, thjat girl we were totally crushing on didn't like us back. So now we suffer, but we can 'suffer through it' by realizing that there are plenty of other girls out there that may even be better or more suited for us as individuals; plenty more fish in the see and all that.

This notion of desire being 'a problem' really isn't a problem, it's what makes life interesting in my view.

If everything extends from Will, in Schopenhauer's view, then 'denial of the will' is itself a willful act. Which is fine, I mean, matter acts upon matter in the same way. I think a better term of description though is not the act of denial of will, but instead, the refinement and harmonization of Will. It would seem that what Will ought to strive for is a discernment that depends on the level of consciousness that's been achieved. In other words, we are at a level where we ought to strive towards reducing suffering, as we humans define it. We ought to refine our own desires so that they are more harmonious with each other.

It is incredibly how perfectly Schopenhauer aligns with the goals and views expressed in the sutras and Upanishads, though of course his Will is more dire than the wheel of karma, which however in contrast seems to be less compassionate to suffering. I’ve always felt that Schopenhauer contends with the experience of life as it is at a much more basic and universal level than his contemporaries and arrives at very similar conclusions to the wizened sages of ancient times.

Greetings fellow sufferers

Too complex for lazy westerners. Buddhists do it better: there is no self, the world is an illusion, existential suffering is waste of time. The end

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This seems to have a whole lot of thoughts that go from point A to point C without any B putting them together. And makes a few just straight up faulty analogies...

The entire point about evolution is based on a foundation of not seeming to understand how evolution works. Fish didn't will legs on themselves. Carnivorous plants didn't will the ability to trap flies on themselves. The author is attributing desire and action to raw happenstance on that front...

Then as things relate to people they make a fairly massive leap between "people have a will to live and have things they want" and "this IA inherently combative/violent/etc, and they always want to do so at someone else's expense"... And the part about optimism being a moral outrage just seems like someone being petty and wanting the rest if the world to be as miserable as they are.

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Sounds like he would support veganism today tbh

Something like… people want to be happy, but cannot be happy if always wanting?

But to resist any desire is to embrace desire? Seems kinda goofy to me

>but it remains intriguing to look at a beautiful rose and wonder what forces, or perhaps intelligence, led its stem to be studded with protective thorns that say to the observer, “keep your distance.”

But we already know what force "led its stem to be studded with protective thorns" That force is evolution by natural selection. At some point a mutation led to roses with very minor thorns but those thorns gave the mutated rose a slightly better change to reproduce so eventually the mutation spread through all roses. Then another mutation happened to make them longer and/or sharper until we got modern roses.

>chemical or physiological considerations coupled with mere chance

This is a common misconception about evolution by natural selection. Dawkins talks about this in his book Climbing Mount Improbable. It's not "mere chance". It's "mere chance" (aka randomness) coupled with natural selection that selects adaptations that increase Reproductive Success (RS). But that last part is essential and it is an error to just say "mere chance" results in anything.

>It is nonetheless difficult to set aside the possibility that the fish transformed its fins into legs because it somehow wanted to get out of the water,

The only reason it is difficult to set aside the idea that the fish "wanted" to get out of the water is ignorance of Biology and the fact that people have a tendency to see agency even when there isn't any. That actually is also a result of evolution. If a hunter gatherer hears rustling in the forest the cost of thinking it might be a predator when it is just the wind is far less than the cost (again in terms of RS) of thinking it is the wind when it is actually a predator.

>Schopenhauer offered a number of images to represent the cannibalistic reality of life,

Schopenhauer didn't have the benefit of Neo-Darwinism. In the early days of Darwinism when he lived the thought was that "nature red in tooth and claw" was all that drove natural selection. We know better now. Cooperation and synergy are just as important, especially for social animals such as primates. And synergy doesn't happen just within conspecifics but across species as well. Robert Trivers in his seminal paper on Reciprocal Altruism had several examples such as little cleaner fish that swim into the mouths of much bigger fish (that could easily eat the small fish) but the larger fish let the cleaner fish act as their dentists, cleaning out the little bits of food in their mouths. When the big fish suddenly has to move (e.g., because an even bigger fish like a shark is around) it could quickly shut its jaw and get a little meal but instead it signals to the little fish (via a change in coloring) that cleaning time is over and it's time to get out ASAP which they do.

>Upon realizing that we are all made of Will, a sense of deep guilt about our very constitution follows.

What does it even mean to say we "are all made of Will"? And whatever it means assuming for the sake of argument that it is true why should that make us feel guilty if that's the way nature made us? One of the amazing things about humans is we can override our genetic predispositions (if that weren't the case there would be no market for contraceptives) so assuming we "are all made of will" (again whatever that means) we can change that if we want to.

Also, I don't agree at all that individualism is completely bad. I think it's clearly wrong to take it to extremes the way people like Ayn Rand do but that doesn't mean that individualism is completely wrong. People make scientific discoveries, beautiful art and music even do altruistic acts at least partly because they are driven by a desire to express their individuality. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. At least I find no compelling argument in this article that supports such a conclusion. Just statements that it is true with no real justification.

I do think that there are good ideas in Buddhism. I try to meditate every day and I've found meditation helps me with impulse control, anger management, substance abuse and in general to do a better job of understanding what I really want rather than being driven by short term gratification. But ultimately the reason I do that are at least partly selfish, because I want to lead a better life and part of that better life includes doing research, publishing papers, and getting recognition for my work which to me is an example of how individualism can be a good thing.

I am glad others are reading Schopenhauer. In my view he is unfairly brushed over in the historiography, so to speak, of philosophy. He is pushed into the margins in favour of Hegel and the idealists, when he has merit both as an ethicist and as a post-Kantian metaphysician. Though I disagree with many of Schopenhauer's answers, especially those given by his ethics, he at least seizes upon the right problems.

It is quite impossible to justify how little Schopenhauer is read in the Anglosphere, especially considering the degree to which Nietzsche makes use of Schopenhauer. Without a close reading of Schopenhauer, the reader will miss the salience of many aphorisms which respond to specific passages e.g, in World as Will and Representation. Perhaps most importantly with regards to the impact of Schopenhauer on the history of philosophy, Nietzsche's conception of will to power is fundamentally impossible to understand unless one also understands Schopenhauer's will to live.

Finally, it must also be said that Schopenhauer was probably the most influential German philosopher in the late 19th century to 1918. Even 'non-philosophers' such as Erwin Schrödinger were well acquainted with the former's system, and the influence of Schopenhauer on practical sciences, in this case physics, though obscure and hard to quantify, has likely been great.

"resist desires" really that's like a very common knowledge to be anything of an insightful philosophy lols

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