Schopenhauer Suicide

According to Schopenhauer, it is crucial to eliminate the innate egotistical, immoral desire of human pleasure, abandoning it entirely. “If this proved impossible, then the individual must yearn for, indeed do all he could to bring about, his own suicide” (Orwin, 154). Tolstoy must have found, in his experience with the works of Schopenhauer, that Schopenhauer’s cynical discussion of happiness (being the opposite of goodness) to be a major potential character flaw for Anna, Konstantin’s foil. Tolstoy’s expressed fear of death is shown through his feat in joining reason with happiness and hope in his writing (154-5).
Orwin tracks the philosophic evolution of Tolstoy and his writings. She details the basic impacts that several Western philosophers