PHIL 1750 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Arthur Schopenhauer, Pessimism, Asceticism
12 Oct 2016
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Suffering is the main part of life. The idea of evil being negative in its character is absurd to him. It has been said that the pleasure in this world outweighs the pain or at any rate there is a balance among the two. The best consolation in misfortune is thinking that someone has it worse than you. Time is always quick unless we are bored. Every feeling of satisfaction is negative in its character. Satisfaction and pleasure is the absence of pain. Therefore the happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering. The material basis of it all is bodily pleasure or bodily pain. The basis is very restricted: it is simply health, food, protection from wet and cold, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct; or else the absence of these things.
