Arthur Schopenhauer was a prominent German philosopher who was the foremost systematic pessimist. He condemned life and viewed it as a sin, arguing that life is full of suffering and that man is a victim of his relentless desires. Schopenhauer believed that the strongest desire was the sex drive, which engulfs people in irrational madness and folly. He asserted that if given the choice, no one would elect to be born due to the suffering inherent in life. However, his philosophy was criticized for being one-sided and neglecting counterarguments, having borrowed too much from Buddhist concepts of achieving salvation through extinguishing all desires.

1. Arthur Schopenhauer

2. Pessimism
• A feeling or belief that bad things will
happen in the future; a feeling or belief
that what you hope for will not happen.

3. Schopenhauer's Background
• Arthur Schopenhauer is the world's
foremost systematic Pessimist; he
condems life like a sin: ''For the greatest
crime of man is that he ever was born,”
and life must be some kind of mistake.”

4. The Ethics of Pessimism
• Man is a victim of a relentless will which
makes living intorelable and dying an
equally repugnant prospect; although man
has the wish to end it all, he is driven to
endure it with all of its concominant
suffering in abject slavery.

5. • “Life it self is a sea, full of rocks and whirpools,
which man avoid with the greatest care and
solicitude, although he knows that even if he
succeeds in getting through with all his efforts
and skills, he yet be doing so comes nearer at
every step to the greatest, the total, inevitable,
and irremediable ship wreck, death. even steers
right upon it; this is the final goal of the laborious
voyage,and worse for him than all the rocks from
which he has escaped... the striving after
existence is what occupies all living things and
maintains them in motion.”

6. The Philosophy of Sex and Love
• “Man is once impetuous and blind striving
of will whose pole or focus lies in genital
organs.”

7. • A man will risk life, death, and
reputation; since the sex drive is a
tremendously potent force,Sex is a
irrational, a madness which engulfs
any person sufficiently unfortunate to
be caught in its folly; like a
directionless tornado, it carries its
victims on its tumultuous way.

8. Philosophy of Suffering
• schopenhauer asserts that all life is
suffering; accordinllu if anyone had any
choice he would not elect to be born;
furthermore, if anyone had the choice,
then he would for any other person to be
bor either offspring issue from the
insurmountable forces of the sex drive
which a person finds himself incapable of
harnessing.

9. • The great majority of person never
live a positve life their lives are
negative they spend time attempting
to escape misery and pain.

10. The Philosophy of Death and
Suicide
• Man's unwillingness to relinguish his hold
on life is basically responsible for his
dread of death;
• Death is like setting of the sun, which is
only apparently swallowed up by the night,
but in the reality, itself the source of all the
light burns without permission

11. Ethical Salvation
• Man's salvation is achieved through
shunning joys, not sorrows repudiating the
will to live.
• Ethical salvation consist in a complete
escape from the will, its annihilation, a
state of Nirvana which renders one
oblivious to its vain striving.

12. • The royal road to salvation is affected
when man “attains to the state of voluntary
renunciation, true indiffirence, and perfect
will-lessness

13. Evaluation of the Philosophy of
Schopenhauer
• Schopenhauer is apparently an extrimist
both attitude and in conclusion arrived at
in philosphy.
• His major error lies in neglecting to furnish
facts which would counterbalance his
onesided position;conseqeuntly, his entire
viewpoint is out of perspective, sex is a
real fact of life, and an important one, it is
granted as true, but there is more to
human existence than sex.

14. • Schopenhauer's philosphy pertaining to
the extinction of desires was borrowed
from the Buddhist whose belief in Nirvana
compelled them to find happiness via the
extinction of all desire; accordin tpo
schopenhauer this was the only potent
and effective method of combatting desire.