Estado Sentido

Mark Vernon, How to be an Agnostic:

«Or take a philosopher like Schonpenhauer. He is famous for his pessimism and explicitly said that philosophy cannot change lives. He thought human beings were the tragic slaves of their base wills. People may make great efforts to aspire to the higher things that their 'excess intellect' glimpses above them; but will 'will out'. Love, for example, is always brutalised by the animal will for coitus. The result, some of his interpreters say, is suffering and labour and radical unhappiness. This though is not quite fair. Every day Schopenhauer read from the Upanishads. They confirmed for him a rather different ethic: if the world is determined by will, then the goal of life should be to see through that relentless volition. He interpreted nirvana as the end of wilfulness which, because it is never fully possible in this life, would be like a transition to nothingness. In other words, philosophy for Schopenhauer was like the Buddhist teaching that the value of life lies in not wanting it - and that required the cultivation of an attitude to life, not just thought about it. Even for Schopenhauer, and almost in spite of himself, philosophy elicits a kind of spirituality.»