While an atheist, Schopenhauer didn't entirely dismiss religion. He viewed religions as attempts to satisfy humanity's "need for metaphysics" – a fundamental human desire to understand existence and cope with the suffering of life. He believed that religions conveyed profound, intuitive truths about the nature of reality, but they did so through allegory, myth, and symbolism, rather than through rational philosophical argumentation.
For Schopenhauer, traditional philosophical and scientific reasoning often fell short in grasping the fundamental, underlying nature of reality – what he called the Will. This Will is a blind, irrational, ceaseless striving that underpins everything. He saw religion, particularly certain Eastern traditions like Christianity, as having an intuitive grasp of these deeper truths, even if they expressed them in metaphorical or allegorical terms.
