Don't Waste Your Time With Foolish Philosophers

You are childish yourself and extremely ridiculous, and so are all philosophers; and when a sedate man like myself lets himself in for a quarter of an hour's talk with such fools, it is merely for the sake of amusement and to while away the time. I have more important matters to look to now; so, adieu!

Ah, how refreshing to get a laugh at the end of a philosophical treatise about Death! Schopenhauer is well aware of how his ideas come across to most people, and isn't above poking fun at himself. 

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Death is a Gain, not a Loss

The will is indifferent to individuality; it has nothing to do with it, although it appears to, because the individual is only directly conscious of will in himself. From this it is to be gathered that the individual carefully guards his own existence; moreover, if this were not so, the preservation of the species would not be assured. From all this it follows that individuality is not a state of perfection but of limitation; so that to be freed from it is not loss but rather gain.

Your Individuality is a limitation! The ultimate gain will come when we die. Why not kill ourselves now? Well, then the preservation of the species wouldn't be assured. I don't think that Schopenhauer is being ridiculous or anything, I guess I'm just not entirely convinced that our death will be "not loss but rather gain." But it's certainly an encouraging thought.

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Your Individuality is an Illusion

When you say, I—I—I want to exist you alone do not say this, but everything, absolutely everything, that has only a vestige of consciousness. Consequently this desire of yours is just that which is not individual but which is common to all without distinction.

Schopenhauer is saying that our individuality is an illusion. It is merely a conscious manifestation of the Universe. Our desire to avoid death is the voice of all the consciousnesses of the universe exclaiming as a whole that they do not wish to perish. And after your individual death, they will still be there, so don't worry ;-)

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After Death: Being without Time

Well then, as we have no idea of time when in a perfectly unconscious state, it is all the same to us when we are dead whether three months or ten thousand years pass away in the world of consciousness. For in the one case, as in the other, we must accept on faith and trust what we are told when we awake. Accordingly it will be all the same to you whether your individuality is restored to you after the lapse of three months or ten thousand years.

Schopenhauer is trying to show us that our true essence, our true inner being, exists in a state apart from time. It is simply unaware of time. It is only our conscious awareness that keeps track of time, and when we sleep, though we are still alive, we lose this ability. Have you ever been in the Flow state when you are immensely enjoying an activity and time seems to "fly"? Or have you ever stopped to think that no matter what time it is, it is always Now? So Schopenhauer applies this to death. He thinks we will still "be", we just won't be aware of time. 

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After Death: All and Nothing

Your being in itself, on the contrary, knows neither time, nor beginning, nor end, nor the limits of a given individuality; hence no individuality can be without it, but it is there in each and all. So that, in the first sense, after death you become nothing; in the second, you are and remain everything. That is why I said that after death you would be all and nothing. It is difficult to give you a more exact answer to your question than this and to be brief at the same time; but here we have undoubtedly another contradiction; this is because your life is in time and your immortality in eternity. 

Don't worry, my first reaction was undoubtedly the same as yours: HUH?! But I think Schopenhauer is trying to make an intelligible point here. He believes that our individuality is simply the transient form of consciousness in the universe. That we are in fact all and everything (isn't that what the religious sages and kids that just had their first acid-trip keep trying to tell us?) but we (the universe) can only experience consciousness through individuality. So when we die, we return back to the All, which Schopenhauer says is a better form of existence anyways.

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