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Schopenhauer on time, death, and our “rebellious” heart (Chapter 5) Philosophy Principles and Problems - Roger Scruton
Schopenhauer reflects that a human being suddenly finds himself existing after an immeasurably long non-existence, lives for a brief span, and then faces an equally immeasurable future in which he will not exist at all. The heart “rebels” against this vision: it feels almost impossible that we should appear for such a short interval between two vast abysses of nothingness. From this, Schopenhauer concludes that our very astonishment hints that time itself must be in some way “ideal”—not simply an independent, external container in which we come and go, but something bound up with our consciousness of the world.
Scruton uses this passage to sharpen his own point about what really troubles us in the thought of death. The problem, he argues, is not primarily the event of dying, or some imagined experience of “being dead.” As Wittgenstein put it (in a remark Scruton endorses), “death is not an event in life but its limit”: we never outlive our own death so as to stand on the far side of it and survey it like any other occurrence. There is, strictly speaking, no first-person standpoint after death.
Yet Schopenhauer shows that even this Wittgensteinian clarity does not remove our anxiety. What disturbs us is finitude itself: the realization that our entire existence is confined to a tiny, vanishing present between an indefinite “before” and an indefinite “after” in which we are not. At any given moment, almost everything that matters to us—our loves, hopes, fears, projects—is either already past and irretrievable or still future and not yet ours. What we actually possess is only an “infinitesimal fragment of the now,” and even that fragment is slipping away as we grasp it.
On Scruton’s reading, Schopenhauer helps us see why death feels intolerable: not because we dimly picture ourselves somewhere “beyond” it, but because the very structure of being in time confronts us with constant loss and eventual non-existence. The thought of death concentrates this condition into a single image: a life that appears briefly in the corridor of time and then disappears, while time itself goes on. Our unease is therefore less about a final event and more about the sense that everything we care about is always, in some degree, already slipping out of reach, so that mortality is inscribed into our experience of the present from the start.