Schopenhauer's pessimism (and my presentation)

Today's seminar began with a nice presentation on Schopenhauer's pessimism (not explictly presented in The Fourfold Root). The student did a great job of bringing out Schopenhauer's beautifully valid arguments to the conclusion that life is awful, suffering is endless. They were (1) the argument from lack of satisfaction and (2) the argument from boredom. I wont reconstruct them here, but the basic thought is that permenant satisfaction is impossible, because our desires are either insatiable, or, once achieved, prone to satiation, so quickly leaving us intolerably bored. Ergo, our existence is a permenant oscillation between unsatisfaction and boredom, which are both themselves a form of pain. True happiness - a state of permenant pleasure, according to Schopenhauer - is, accordingly, unattainable.

Well, many in the class were surpressing laughter during the presentation; somehow it all just seemed a little absurd. I actually find this reaction more interesting than the arguments themselves. In a different mood, I might not have been able to laugh so easily. In the past, I've surely entertained so-called 'pesssimistic' thoughts - but I never really tried to rationalise them in this way. Actually, that's not entirely true... but I didn't attempt to develop a systematic philosophical worldview on the basis of them.

I'm reminded of something Paul Davies (lecturer at Sussex) once suggested to me: that sound arguments are not in themselves sufficent to affect our views on anything of profound importance. If we're facing a serious question like the one at stake here, our views, he suggested, wont be particularly amenable to rational argumentation.

I'll be thinking about this much more during this year. For now, I'll end this journal entry by reporting that I'm fairly happy with how my own presentation went today. It was really the first time I've presented a paper in that way. I've added the audio recording to my Tuesday post; I'm looking forward to listening to it through, to see how I might improve my approach in time for the Nietzsche presentation next week.