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INTRODUCTION

Truly enough to say that contentment in ones life has been always an essential component in making happiness realized its actual existence. Basically, it entails an absolute gratification of an individual being in the appreciation of the nearby existing realities in life. Since the time began, everyone has been searching for it, yearning for it, to secure for themselves a life worthy of living. Fortunately, to some extent, some has found it. While, on the other hand, some has remained longing for it for the rest of their lives. Nowadays, it is considerably apparent how the individual person understands the authentic meaning of contentment and how they procure means to obtain it. At present, people consider contentment identical with excessive wealth, supreme authority, sensual gratification, excellent beauty, distinguished social status, great achievements and victories, societal monopoly and the like even detrimental to his fellow citizens and worse, even at the risk of ones life. Contentment has been a vital reality, a potent and sufficient reason to perform a deliberate action as such. However, despite of all these realities, one may perhaps wonder: Does contentment really exist? In connection with abovementioned statement, Arthur Schopenhauer, a highly regarded pessimistic contemporary philosopher, developed his own synthesis

concerning the fundamental truth that explicitly explains all lifes natural phenomena. He became interested and constructed the concept of the Will, an immaterial, absolute and eternal reality.1 He claimed that the Will is an irrational force and incessantly subduing an individual person, thus, leading him in an endless torment. Contentment never exists and mans existence constantly remained caught in throng of his endless desires. For that reason, he resolutely formulated the idea that the world is an evil reality and birth is mans greatest mistake.2 In the end, he recommended that man must aim at freedom from pain rather than seeking after happiness; man could endure patiently this horrible reality about the world.

Cf. Niel Jasper V. Coroza, Schopenhauer: The Doctrine of the Primacy of the Particular Will of Man (AB Classical Philosophy Baby-Thesis, Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Seminary, 2009), 1. Cf. William Sahakian, and Mabel Sahakian, Realms of Philosophy (Massachusetts: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1970), 114.
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