“The world is a mirror in which the will becomes aware of itself”----- Arthur Schopenhauer
The idea that makes Arthur Schopenhauer well known in philosophy is a simple but a very subversive idea: all the things we can touch, feel and smell in this world, and even the whole phenomenal world is simply the reflections from funhouse Mirrors, we were born into this funhouse, we take the images on those funhouse mirrors around us as “the reality”, but behind this reality there is another reality, and this deep reality is “the will”, it is the only thing that lies at the other side of the funhouse mirrors, yet we can never see it directly.
And this “will” is blind, insatiable, and malignant. Its sole purpose is to strive, but it does not know what and why it is striving for, it simply strive, shouts “more!” “more!” ;it will manifest itself in the form of individuality: a human being strive to live , to earn more, and to consume more because she is forced by the “will” to strive and live and consume. it is the root of all evil.
Schopenhauer also said that the best symbol for “the will” is sex, the nature of sex and especially sex drive best represents the blind, insatiable and malignant nature of “the will”:
To illustrate this he once wrote that there is a type of moth existing that when it was in a pupa a complete reproduction organ is given by nature, but nature forgot one thing: a mouth! Therefore it starves to death after it has laid its tiny eggs.
The big turtles in the deep ocean of south pacific strive to swim to the beach and lay down its eggs during the storm, and thousands of them were smashed by the huge tides but they keep swimming to the beach any way.
Here is a documentary I found that can be seen as evidence for Schopenhauer’s idea, it is about the monarch butterfly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvvTq30St6Q
If we exam the human conditions and the life journey of a human being with clear eyes, we can realize after all, we are just some another monarch butterflies.
After all, does “the will” exist? Is it the root of all evil? If this is so, what can we do about it? If it does not exist, how to explain the moth, the big turtles, monarch butterfly and ultimately human actions?