If the core of the Exegesis is a blissful recovery of intellectual intuition, of gnosis, then a corresponding Schopenhauerian theme that emerges is that our existence in the phenomenal world is an experience of suffering and pain. Human life is a kind of mistake, a detour on the way to life's goal: death. Indeed, a recurrent feature of the lives of mystics is the experience of dejection and depression, understood as distance from God. Such despair occurs repeatedly in the Exegesis and with greater frequency in the later years, as in [90:69]: "When I believe, I am crazy. When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression."
—Simon Critchley in an Exegesis note
Arthur Schopenhauer at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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