Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) was a German philosopher, best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation. [1] Building on Kant while drawing also on Plato and Indian philosophy, he held that the world known to us is appearance, driven underneath by an insatiable and purposeless will, and drew from this a systematic philosophical pessimism and an ethics of compassion and renunciation. [2]
Early life and education
Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788 in Danzig, now Gdańsk, into a wealthy merchant family. [1] When Prussia annexed the city in 1793 the family moved to Hamburg, and Arthur was educated partly in France and England and travelled widely across Europe as a boy — an unusual cosmopolitan schooling that left him fluent in several languages.
His father intended him for commerce and he was apprenticed to a merchant, but after his father's death in 1805, probably by suicide, he abandoned the trade. He studied at the University of Göttingen, first medicine and then philosophy, and moved to Berlin to hear Fichte and Schleiermacher. In 1813 he completed his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. [3]
The World as Will and Representation
Living in Weimar and then Dresden, Schopenhauer wrote his principal work, published in 1818 and dated 1819. It begins from Kant's distinction between appearance and the thing-in-itself, but identifies the thing-in-itself with will: a single, undirected striving that manifests in gravitation, growth, animal instinct and human desire alike. [2]
Because will is endless craving, he argued, satisfaction is only ever momentary and suffering is the basic condition of existence — the reasoning behind his reputation as the philosopher of pessimism. He proposed two forms of partial release: aesthetic contemplation, especially of music, which he held to express the will directly rather than by representation; and the ascetic denial of the will, informed by his reading of Buddhist and Hindu sources, among the first serious engagements with Indian thought by a European philosopher. [3]
Career and later recognition
His book was almost entirely ignored. In 1820 he took up a lecturing post at the University of Berlin and deliberately scheduled his classes at the same hour as Hegel's, whose philosophy he despised; almost no students attended, and he soon abandoned academic teaching. [1]
He settled in Frankfurt in 1833 and lived there for the rest of his life in solitary routine, writing on colour theory, the will in nature, and ethics. Recognition came only with Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851, a collection of essays and aphorisms whose accessible style, including the widely read "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life," finally made him famous in his last decade. [2] He died in Frankfurt on 21 September 1860.
Influence
Schopenhauer's impact extended well beyond academic philosophy. Nietzsche described reading him as a formative experience before turning against his pessimism; Wagner drew on his theory of music in composing Tristan und Isolde; and Freud acknowledged that his account of unconscious drive anticipated psychoanalytic ideas. [4]
He was read closely by Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Borges, Beckett and Wittgenstein, and his emphasis on non-rational motivation, on the arts as a mode of knowledge and on the moral standing of animals has kept his work in continuous circulation. [3]
