The Vanity of Existence | A Quiet Reading of Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism

The clearest pessimist in philosophy on suffering, time, death, and the strange consolation of expecting nothing. Studies in Pessimism gathers the darkest and most readable essays of Arthur Schopenhauer, selected from the late miscellany that finally made him famous and translated into English by T. Bailey Saunders. This reading moves through the whole of it in the book's own order. It opens with the great case for pessimism, that suffering is positive and happiness only the absence of pain, and descends through the emptiness of time, the question of suicide, and a strange dialogue in which a frightened man is told what he will be after death. It passes through sharp observations on human nature and three essays that turn the same cold eye on education, on women, and on noise, before closing with a famous parable of porcupines and the long afterlife of a book that refuses every comfort. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.