Politics and suffering: notes from Schopenhauer to the justification of domination and democratic impossibility

Abstract

Schopenhauer offers valuable keys to the interpretation of the political through suffering as an essential condition of life. The ontologization of suffering in existence makes politics fulfill only an administrative task of this social unrest. The central idea around this subject is that only one sated in its demands and superimposed on the others, is the one that would give rise to the governability as expressed it the most of the modern political theses that crossed his thought. The democratic impossibility is given by reason of a wild and selfish nature that precedes any communitarian act. In the world political panorama, the ideal of democracy seems impossible and hides domination in spite of the participatory advances. The present paper tries to glimpse in the Schopenhauerian description the dynamics of the suffering will in its relation with politics, to see its actuality and to discover the anthropological and ontological reductions in which it falls when a horizon of negativity and exaggerated human pessimism is postulated.