Joseph Parker

Albert Camus claimed that the only philosophical problem that mattered was suicide. All other worldly concerns and philosophical quandaries come second to the burning question: Why should I not kill myself tomorrow? A lover of Schopenhauer may take this one step further and ask: Is existence preferable to non-existence? That is, given our experience of the world, would it not have been better for us, on the whole, to have never been born in the first place? In this essay, I argue that existence is preferable to non-existence because certain aspects of life make life worthwhile. First, I explore aesthetic experience as a possible aspect of life that would make existence worthwhile. However, because aesthetic experiences are too fleeting, I reject them. Instead, I propose love as a more robust aspect of life that makes existence worthwhile, and, after rejecting Schopenhauerian objections to my idea, I conclude that existence is preferable to non-existence.