All for Naught

In the 1830s, fleeing a cholera epidemic in Berlin, Schopenhauer writes the following in his notebook: When I was seventeen, without any proper schooling, I was affected by the misery and wretchedness of life, as was the Buddha when in his youth he caught sight of sickness, old age, pain and death [...] the result for me was that this world could not be the work of an all-bountiful, infinitely good being, but rather of a demon who had summoned into existence creatures in order to gloat over the sight of their anguish and agony.1Now, Schopenhauer was no Buddha, but the passage reveals something at the core of his thinking, and that is the dual ori-gin of pessimism. On the one hand, pessimism is conditional, it stems from observation and experience, but also from inclina-tion and predilection — maybe you’re stressed out, maybe you’re feeling under the weather, maybe something somewhere hurts. This conditional pessimism can be found in Pascal, Lichtenberg, the French moralists, and it surfaces in Schopenhauer’s many grumblings concerning humanity, caught as it is in the pedantic, existential metronome of boredom and striving.