Arthur Schopenhauer: Life as a Meaningless Struggle

Schopenhauer’s general picture of reality regards the will as the fundamental basis of all the phenomena in the universe and he draws out the implications of this for human life. The human organism, like everything else in the world, is characterized by an elemental striving; yet because we are mortal, it is inevitable that all our strivings will in the end come to nothing: "this most perfect manifestation of the will to live, the human organism, with the cunning and complex working of its machinery, must fall to dust and yield up itself and all its strivings to extinction."

The conclusion Schopenhauer draws is that ‘the whole struggle of this will is in its very essence barren and unprofitable’, and hence that "human life must be some kind of mistake".

You can find the text here (3 pages total): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zrr9wggblr6j9ytjbsozo/Schopenhauer-Cottingham-Meaning-of-Life.pdf?rlkey=3fz79ecpgyfgda9w1ugabjzi7&dl=0

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