The extent of individuality which exists in a species
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 4:55 am
Essentially, the pessimism of a Schopenhauer and after him a of salvation as preached by the Semitic religions, as what they saw as a wishful thinking in view of the hopelessness of man's ever resolving the paradox of existence (as expressed between the irrational will of every organism to live and the irrational nature of existence as a whole).
For Schopenhauer, the solution lay in the East,-whose religions, Buddhism especially, preached the abnegation of the human will, a refusal to play nature's game. By denying the will the food of ambition which it needs to thrive, we free ourselves from the compulsions which are the source of the irrationality which lies at the origin of life itself. The phone number list major break with Christianity is not so much in the pessimism of this philosophy nor even in the rejection of the existence of an individual after-life, as in the insistence on the unity of all living things within life, that life is the expression of one will made manifest and that this will is not in the least concerned with the individual in time and space.
Individual life, including human life, from this perspective cannot be sacred, since all life reflects the divine will, since ultimately life is the divine will. The world is in Schopenhauer's words, "a mirror of the Will" (Die Welt, Spiegel des Willens). A mark of the extent of the objectivisation of its will. In human beings compared to other animals the will has become extremely objectified.
For Schopenhauer, the solution lay in the East,-whose religions, Buddhism especially, preached the abnegation of the human will, a refusal to play nature's game. By denying the will the food of ambition which it needs to thrive, we free ourselves from the compulsions which are the source of the irrationality which lies at the origin of life itself. The phone number list major break with Christianity is not so much in the pessimism of this philosophy nor even in the rejection of the existence of an individual after-life, as in the insistence on the unity of all living things within life, that life is the expression of one will made manifest and that this will is not in the least concerned with the individual in time and space.
Individual life, including human life, from this perspective cannot be sacred, since all life reflects the divine will, since ultimately life is the divine will. The world is in Schopenhauer's words, "a mirror of the Will" (Die Welt, Spiegel des Willens). A mark of the extent of the objectivisation of its will. In human beings compared to other animals the will has become extremely objectified.