Arthur Schopenhauer

Why does satisfaction never last?

Schopenhauer does not start from a theory here. He starts from something you can check yourself. You want a thing, and the wanting hurts. Then you get it, and the relief is short. Boredom arrives, and boredom breeds the next wanting. His image for this is a pendulum. Life swings back and forth between pain and boredom, and those two, he says, are what it is actually made of. There is no restful point in the middle. Behind the swing he sees the will to live, a blind striving that never settles. He meant it as a diagnosis, not as a mood.

• Every desire follows the same arc. Striving, brief satisfaction, renewed wanting.
• The pendulum swings between pain (unfulfilled desire) and boredom (after fulfillment). No stable middle ground exists.
• Behind this pattern stands the Will-to-live (Wille zum Leben), blind and insatiable striving at work in all beings.

Listen to the story “The Nature of Desire and Suffering”

Why did Schopenhauer put compassion at the centre of ethics?

Schopenhauer thought duty and reason were the wrong place to look for morality. Only three things really move people, he said: self-interest, malice, and compassion. Compassion is the one of the three with moral worth, and he thought it came from an insight rather than an argument. For a moment the barrier that otherwise separates one being from another simply drops. You do not conclude that the other person matters. You feel their suffering as suffering. Everything he calls ethics is built on that single experience.

• Compassion (Mitleid) is the only genuine moral motivation. It arises from metaphysical insight, not rational duty.
• Piercing the veil of Maya reveals others' suffering as metaphysically identical (in inner Will-nature, not empirical traits) to one's own.
• Three motivations drive human action: egoism, malice, and compassion. Only compassion has moral worth.

Listen to the story “Compassion as Ethics”

What did Arthur Schopenhauer teach?

Arthur Schopenhauer taught that one blind force drives everything. He called it the Will. It is the same push that pulls a stone to the ground and keeps a person wanting. Everything you perceive is representation, he said, the world as your mind builds it out of space, time, and cause. You never meet the world itself, only what your knowing makes of it. Behind that picture sits the Will, and it never rests. That is why satisfaction is always shorter than the wanting. One of his own lines has outlived the rest: a man can do what he wills, but cannot will what he wills.

What is the principium individuationis in Schopenhauer?

The principium individuationis is Schopenhauer's name for what makes us look separate. Picture one lamp burning on a riverbank at night. Look at the moving water and you count twenty lights where only one exists. Space and time do that to reality. They take what is one and undivided and break it into the appearance of many separate things. Pierce that appearance, he said, and another person's suffering stops being only theirs.