Relation to oneself· Existence
Renunciation
Axis: The meaning of life — How should we respond to the enigma of life's meaning?
Since no meaning is given and nothing truly replaces it, the torment comes from the demand itself. Faced with the enigma, the lucid response is renunciation: to detach the will, to stop asking of life what it does not contain, and to find in this withdrawal a peace without illusion.
Philosophers 1
Schopenhauerexplicit
The world offers no end to realize: the is aimless and history accomplishes nothing. The only way out is soteriological: that the will, recognizing itself in the universal spectacle of suffering, turn against itself and deny itself, through the voluntary whose model the saints and mystics of every tradition provide. This final 'nothing' is not despair but deliverance, which Schopenhauer likens, in a personal and now contested reading of the Indian traditions, to the Buddhist .
The World as Will and Representation, §71
Argument
- The torment comes not from life lacking meaning, but from our demanding of it a meaning and a happiness it does not contain: it is insatiable willing that suffers, never satisfied.
- For the pursuit produces only an endless swing between lack and boredom: scarcely is one desire satisfied than another is born, and satisfaction is but a respite before the next torment.
- True peace is therefore gained not by satisfying one more desire, but by quieting the will itself: ceasing to demand of existence what it cannot give, and letting that thirst, which otherwise is reborn without end, come undone.
Therefore So, faced with the enigma, the lucid response is neither to decipher a meaning, nor to create one, nor to revolt, but to renounce: not to extinguish this or that desire, but to loosen the grip of the will itself, for a peace without illusion.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- Renunciation promises peace by extinguishing desire, which it holds to be the source of torment.
- But a desire extinguished is a life extinguished: with no impulse toward anything, no more love, work, project; there remains only the absence of suffering, all but indistinguishable from the absence of life.
- The cure thus heals the patient by removing him: by wanting nothing more so as to suffer no more, one has not solved the enigma of meaning, one has stopped posing it, for want of a living being to carry it.
Therefore So renunciation does not solve the enigma, it dissolves it by dissolving the one who poses it: it remains to be seen whether a life is better without pain, or fully lived.
See the page- Descriptive Thought experimentSisyphus and his rock
When our thirst for meaning meets the silence of the world, where can an answer lie: in an end that surpasses us, in the meaning we give ourselves, or in the lucid revolt of a life with no answer?
an existence