Categorical Pessimism In John Schopenhauer

“The world is my representation” (Schopenhauer 1); Schopenhauer contends that at even the universe’s crux, it is not a rational place, but merely a chaotic abyss made into what one makes of it. Having recognized the errors of his philosophical mentors, Plato and Kant, Schopenhauer developed an ascetic approach to mending the errors ingrained in us through the human condition, which preaches that in a world full of pain and suffering, human beings must combat natural desires to attain tranquility and a disposition warranting widespread magnanimity. Although regarded as a categorical pessimist, Schopenhauer endorsed methods, implementing artistic, moral and ascetic systems of cognizance, to appease the fundamentally painful and tenuous circumstances of human life. (Wicks)

Although Schopenhauer rejects traditional German Idealism in its metaphysical elevation of self-consciousness as being too intellectualistic, he

It relativizes to the human condition, Schopenhauer 's prominent view that the world is Will. This entails that his stance on diurnal life as a brutal and violent world — a world produced by the solicitation of the principle of sufficient reason, is founded on a human-conditioned awareness, explicitly, the direct, double-knowledge of one 's body as both subject and object. So along these lines, Schopenhauer 's pessimistic concept of the world can itself be seen to be substantiated upon the subject-object distinction, i.e., the general root of the principle of sufficient reason. As mentioned above, we can see this fundamental dependence upon the subject-object discrepancy exposed in even the title of his book, The World as Will and Representation, which can be interpreted as, consequently, The World as Subjectively and Objectively