ETHICS becomes a burden of boredom ‘Thus life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and ennui’ (WWI 312) Walking is only constantly prevented falling; the life of our body is only ever-postponed death; the life of our mind is constantly deferred boredom Want of food is the scourge of the working class, want of entertainment that of the world of fashion All happiness is really and essentially negative, never positive The only sure way to escape the tyranny of the will is by complete renunciation What the will wills is always life; so if we are to renounce the will we must renounce the will to live This sounds like a recommendation to suicide; but in fact Schopenhauer condemned suicide as a false way of escape from the miseries of the world Suicide could only be inspired by an overestimate of the individual life; it was motivated by concealed will to live Renunciation is renunciation of the self, and moral progress consists in the reduction of egoism, that is to say, the tendency of the individual to make itself the centre of the world and to sacrifice everything else to its own existence and well-being All bad persons are egoists: they assert their own will to live, and deny the presence of that will in others, damaging, and perhaps destroying, the existence of others if they get in their way There are people who are not only bad, but really wicked; they go beyond egoism, taking delight in the sufferings of others not just as a means to their own ends, but as an end in itself Schopenhauer names Nero and Robespierre as examples of this level of cruelty A common or garden bad person, however, while regarding his own person as separated by a great gulf from others, nonetheless retains a dim awareness that his own will is just the phenomenal appearance of the single will to live that is active in all He dimly sees that he is himself this whole will, and consequently he is not only the inflicter but the endurer of pain, a pain from which he is separated only by the illusive dream of space and time This awareness finds its expression in remorse Remorse in the bad man is the counterpart of resignation, which is the mark of the good man Between the bad man and the good man, there is an intermediate character: the just man Unlike the bad man, the just man does not see individuality as being an absolute wall of partition between himself and others Other persons, for him, are not mere masks, whose nature is quite different from his own He is willing to recognize the will to live in others 231