Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer a German philosopher (1788-1860), whose pessimistic system, expounded in The World as Will and Representation, held that reality at its deepest level is a blind and striving will which manifests itself in the suffering of all living things, and whose ideas exercised a profound influence upon later philosophy, psychology and art.

Family and Education

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig on 22 February 1788, the son of a wealthy merchant and of a mother who later became a successful novelist and a figure in the literary society of Weimar. His father expected him to follow a career in commerce, and the boy was sent to school in France and to Hamburg for commercial training, a course he disliked and only later escaped. The death of his father, probably by suicide, in 1805 freed him from the business life and enabled him to devote himself to learning and to the study of philosophy.

He studied at the universities of Gottingen and Berlin, attending the lectures of Fichte and other philosophers, and he took his doctorate at Jena in 1813 with a dissertation on the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason. He was a man of austere and difficult temperament, quarrelsome and impatient of the academic world, and his relations with his mother, with whom he had a famous and bitter quarrel, remained permanently estranged, leaving him isolated and dependent upon his own resources of mind and character.

The World as Will and Representation

Schopenhauer's masterwork was published in 1819 under the title The World as Will and Representation. Its central thesis is that the world we perceive is a representation, existing only in relation to a knowing subject and governed by the forms of space, time and causality, and that behind the veil of appearances lies a single reality which he called the will, a blind and insatiable striving that underlies all nature and every living being and that never attains a final and lasting satisfaction.

He held that the will is one and indivisible, and that individual things, including individual persons, are merely its objectifications, so that the apparent separateness of beings is an illusion. This will is never satisfied, since every attainment of a goal is followed by new desire, and the consequence is that all existence is bound up with suffering. Pleasure is only the temporary removal of a pain, and the sum of human life is a balance of trouble and boredom, want and weariness, hope and disappointment.

Art, Compassion and the Will

Schopenhauer held that the will may be temporarily quieted through the contemplation of art. In the disinterested contemplation of beauty, and especially of music, which he regarded as the direct copy of the will itself and the most profound of the arts, the knower becomes for a time a pure subject, free from the demands of desire and from the burden of individuality, and experiences a momentary release from the suffering that belongs to willing and to the restless pursuit of ends. Yet the release is only temporary, for the artist must return to the world of desire, and so he ranked the contemplation of art below the final quieting of the will in the life of the saint.

At the highest level he saw the denial of the will in the ascetic and the saint, who overcome the desires of the natural self and attain a state of resignation and inward peace. This final stage of his philosophy, in which the will is quieted altogether, he described in language that acknowledged its kinship with the teachings of Indian and Christian mysticism, even while he held that its ultimate character could not be expressed in words or grasped by the understanding of the unconverted. It gave his philosophy an austere beauty that has drawn readers who could not accept its premises but were moved by its vision.

Life, Personality and the Ways of the World

In the years after the publication of his masterwork, Schopenhauer lived quietly and without academic position. He lectured briefly at the University of Berlin, where he deliberately scheduled his classes at the same hour as Hegel in the confident expectation of drawing away his students, and he attracted almost no audience and retired from university life after the failure of his lectures, never to hold a chair again and never to abandon his conviction of his own philosophical importance. He lived alone with a succession of pet dogs, took his meals at an inn, and pursued his studies in the morning with undeviating regularity, a routine that suited his independent and unsociable nature.

His later writings, including the essays and aphorisms gathered as Parerga and Paralipomena, treated a wide range of subjects, from the conduct of life to the fear of death, the nature of religion and the education of the young. Though he attacked the arguments of the theological faculty at the University of Berlin in one of these books, he won for himself a reputation as a wise and witty counsellor upon the difficulties of everyday existence and upon the art of living with as little unhappiness as the world allows.

Influence and Legacy

For most of his life Schopenhauer was neglected, and it was only in the 1850s that his work began to attract serious attention, when a favourable review and sympathetic essays by admirers brought him a measure of fame in his last years. He enjoyed the recognition that came to him at last, receiving visitors and correspondents who sought him out, and he died at Frankfurt on 21 September 1860, at the age of seventy-two, of heart failure, having lived to see his name placed beside those of the great philosophers of his country.

His influence upon later thought was extensive. Richard Wagner found in his philosophy of music and of the will a key to his conception of opera, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who began as an admirer, developed much of his own philosophy in critical response to Schopenhauer's pessimism. His account of the unconscious will anticipated the psychology that later investigated the hidden drives of conduct, and his ideas affected the novel, the visual arts and the thought of the early twentieth century. His work thus passed from neglect to a wide and lasting influence, and it made pessimism for the first time a serious philosophical option rather than a mere mood of disappointment or a literary pose.

See also

• The World as Will and Representation
• Pessimism
• Schopenhauer's aesthetics
• Will to live