Derrick Peng’s Reviews > The Essential Schopenhauer > Status Update

Natural suffering, along with man-made suffering (ex. Negro slavery) disproves the “best of all worlds” theodicy. If life were so great, death would not need be gatekept with fearful emotions; death is presented as a positive, not negative evil. Optimism is cope, an artifact of the will to live. The fine-tuning argument surprisingly proves if the world were any worse, it couldn’t exist. Hence the worst possible

Our lives are defined by striving toward something better, and we are never satisfied. Once we get what we want, it comes not as sustained joy but relief, and then everything we do manage to build up becomes a greater burden until we die and lose everything. We feel loss more deeply than gain, and most happiness is only recognized in the absence of suffering; hence why entertaining stories must have conflict.

Ch. 2 Schopenhauer offers a proto-Darwinian interpretation of the Will to Life, which exists in self-preservation but even more strongly in the urge to have sex and reproduce the next generation. He sees the taboo nature of sexual acts as an expression of cognitive dissonance between Western natalist culture and the underlying recognition that childbirth perpetuates the sufferings of life and death upon a new person.