ABSTRACT

Arthur Schopenhauer approaches the question of life's meaning by asking whether life is worth living in view of the objective worth of reality itself. According to him, ultimate reality or, following Immanuel Kant's terminology, the "thing-in-itself", is nothing more than an aimless, meaningless impulse, and by implication, so is life. Schopenhauer adds that Will as thing-in-itself is "one" beyond the distinction between one and many, that it is beyond the subject-object distinction, and that it is beyond space and time. In Schopenhauer's case, what reality, or Will, comes to know about itself is not that it is developing into a perfectly rational, moral, systematically integrated being. It realizes instead that it is a horrible, morally repugnant being. Schopenhauer also regards the typical motivations for suicide as implicit affirmations of Will, rather than suppressions or denials of it, having in mind cases where people feel hopeless, or where suffering is so severe that death is the only reasonable alternative.