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Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher, often called the "philosopher of pessimism," who was primarily important as the exponent of a metaphysical doctrine of the will in immediate reaction against Hegelian idealism. His writings influenced later existential philosophy and Freudian psychology.
Background
Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Schopenhauer was the son of a wealthy merchant, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, and his wife, Johanna, who later became famous for her novels, essays, and travelogues. In 1793, when Danzig came under Prussian sovereignty, they moved to the free city of Hamburg. Arthur enjoyed a gentlemanly private education. He then attended a private business school, where he became acquainted with the spirit of the Enlightenment and was exposed to a Pietistic attitude sensitive to the plight of man. In 1803 he accompanied his parents for a year on an extensive journey through Belgium, England, France, Switzerland, and Austria.
Education
The sudden death of Schopenhauer's father in April 1805 precipitated a decisive change in his life. His mother and his young sister Adele moved to Weimar, where his mother succeeded in joining the social circle of the poets J.W. von Goethe and Christoph Martin Wieland (often called the German Voltaire). Arthur himself had to remain in Hamburg for more than a year, yet with more freedom to engage in the arts and sciences. In May 1807 he was finally able to leave Hamburg. During the next two years, spent in Gotha and Weimar, he acquired the necessary academic preparation for attendance at a university.
In the fall of 1809, he matriculated as a student of medicine at the University of Göttingen and mainly attended lectures on the natural sciences. As early as his second semester, however, he transferred to the humanities, concentrating first on the study of Plato and Immanuel Kant. From 1811 to 1813 he attended the University of Berlin (where he heard such philosophers as J.G. Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher, with little appreciation); and in Rudolstadt, during the summer of 1813, he finished his dissertation, Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason), which earned him the doctor of philosophy degree from the University of Jena.
The winter 1813-1814 Schopenhauer spent in Weimar, in intimate association with Goethe, with whom he discussed various philosophical topics. In that same winter the Orientalist Friedrich Majer, a disciple of Johann Gottfried Herder, introduced him to the teachings of Indian antiquity - the philosophy of Vedānta and the mysticism of the Vedas (Hindu scriptures). Later, Schopenhauer considered that the Upaniṣads (philosophic Vedas), together with Plato and Kant, constituted the foundation on which he erected his own philosophical system.
In May 1814 he left his beloved Weimar after a quarrel with his mother over her frivolous way of life, of which he disapproved. He then lived in Dresden until 1818, associating occasionally with a group of writers for the Dresdener Abendzeitung ("Dresden Evening Newspaper"). Schopenhauer finished his treatise Über das Sehn und die Farben (1816; "On Vision and Colours"), supporting Goethe against Isaac Newton.
His next three years were dedicated exclusively to the preparation and composition of his main work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819; The World as Will and Idea). The fundamental idea of this work - which is condensed into a short formula in the title itself - is developed in four books composed of two comprehensive series of reflections that include successively the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of nature, aesthetics, and ethics.
The first book begins with Kant. The world is my representation, says Schopenhauer. It is only comprehensible with the aid of the constructs of man’s intellect - space, time, and causality. But these constructs show the world only as appearance, as a multiplicity of things next to and following one another - not as the thing in itself, which Kant considered to be unknowable. The second book advances to a consideration of the essence of the concepts presented. Of all the things in the world, only one is presented to a person in two ways: he knows himself externally as body or as appearance, and he knows himself internally as part of the primary essence of all things, as will. The will is the thing in itself; it is unitary, unfathomable, unchangeable, beyond space and time, without causes and purposes. In the world of appearances, it is reflected in an ascending series of realizations. From the blind impulses in the forces of inorganic nature, through organic nature (plants and animals) to the rationally guided actions of men, an enormous chain of restless desires, agitations, and drives stretch forth - a continual struggle of the higher forms against the lower, an eternally aimless and insatiable striving, inseparably united with misery and misfortune. In the end, however, stands death, the great reproof that the will-to-live receives, posing the question to every single person: Have you had enough?
Whereas the first two books present the will in an affirmative mode, the last two, dealing with aesthetics and ethics, surpass them by pointing to the negation of the will as a possible liberation. Evoking as their leading figures the genius and the saint, who illustrate this negation, these books present the "pessimistic" world view that values nonbeing more highly than being. The arts summon man to a will-less way of viewing things, in which the play of the passions ceases. To the succession of levels achieved by the realizations of the will corresponds a gradation of levels in the arts, from the lowest - the art of building (architecture) - through the art of poetry to the highest of arts - music. But the arts liberate a person only momentarily from the service of the will. A genuine liberation results only from breaking through the bounds of individuality imposed by the ego. Whoever feels acts of compassion, selflessness, and human kindness and feels the suffering of other beings as his own is on the way to the abnegation of the will to life, achieved by the saints of all peoples and times in asceticism. Schopenhauer’s anthropology and sociology do not, in the manner of Hegel, commence with the state or with the community; they focus upon man - patient, suffering man who toils by himself - and show him certain possibilities of standing his ground and of living together with others.
The book marked the summit of Schopenhauer’s thought. In the many years thereafter, no further development of his philosophy occurred, no inner struggles or changes, no critical reorganization of basic thoughts. From then onward, his work consisted merely of more detailed exposition, clarification, and affirmation.
In March 1820, after a lengthy first tour of Italy and a triumphant dispute with Hegel, he qualified to lecture at the University of Berlin. Though he remained a member of the university for 24 semesters, only his first lecture was actually held; for he had scheduled (and continued to schedule) his lectures at the same hour when Hegel lectured to a large and ever-growing audience. Clearly, he could not successfully challenge a persistently advancing philosophy. Even his book received scant attention. For a second time, Schopenhauer went on a year-long trip to Italy, and this was followed by a year of illness in Munich. In May 1825 he made one last attempt in Berlin but in vain. He now occupied himself with secondary works, primarily translations.
During his remaining 28 years, he lived in Frankfurt, which he felt to be free from the threat of cholera, and left the city only for brief interludes. He had finally renounced his career as a university professor and lived henceforth as a recluse, totally absorbed in his studies (especially in the natural sciences) and his writings. His life now took on the shape that posterity first came to know: the measured uniformity of the days; the strict, ascetic lifestyle modeled after Kant; the old-fashioned attire; the tendency to gesticulative soliloquy.
His leisure, though, was not idle. In 1836, after 19 years of "silent indignation," he published his short treatise Über den Willen in der Natur (On the Will in Nature), which skillfully employed the queries and findings of the rapidly expanding natural sciences in support of his theory of the will. The preface for the first time openly expressed his devastating verdict on the "charlatan" Hegel and his clique. He also published essays.
The second edition of The World as Will and Idea (1844) included an additional volume but failed to break what he called "the resistance of a dull world." The little weight that Schopenhauer’s name carried became evident when three publishers rejected his latest work. Finally, a rather obscure Berlin bookseller accepted the manuscript without remuneration. In this book, which brought the beginning of worldwide recognition, Schopenhauer turned to significant topics hitherto not treated individually within the framework of his writings: the work of six years yielded the essays and comments compiled in two volumes under the title Parerga und Paralipomena (1851). The Parerga ("Minor Works") include fragments concerning the history of philosophy; the famous treatise "Über die Universitäts-Philosophie"; the enigmatically profound "Transzendente Spekulation über die anscheinende Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des Einzelnen" ("Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Premeditation in Personal Fate"); the "Versuch über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt" ("Essay on Ghost-seeing and Its Related Aspects") - the first investigation, classification, and critical reflection concerning parapsychology; and the "Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit" ("Aphorisms on Practical Wisdom"), a serene and brilliant account garnered from his long life. The Paralipomena ("Remnants"), or as Schopenhauer called them "separate, yet systematically ordered thoughts on various subjects," included essays on writing and style, on women, on education, on noise and sound, and on numerous other topics.
During the last years of his life, he added the finishing touches to most of his works. Even a third edition of The World as Will and Idea, containing an exultant preface, appeared in 1859 and, in 1860, the second edition of his Ethics. Soon after Schopenhauer’s sudden and painless death, Julius Frauenstädt published new and enlarged editions, with many handwritten additions, of the Parerga and Paralipomena (1862), On the Fourfold Root (1864), the essay On the Will in Nature (1867), the treatise on colors (1870), and finally even a fourth edition of his main work (1873). Later that same year Frauenstädt published the first complete edition of his works in six volumes.
(A classic collection of essays by Arthur Schopenhauer.)
Religion
Arthur Schopenhauer saw religion as "the metaphysics of the people," or as put in The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, religions are: "for the great majority of people who are not capable of thinking but only of believing, and are susceptible not to arguments but only to authority. These systems may, therefore, be described as popular metaphysics."
He thought Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism were, at the core, the same. For him, they all share some truths but present them covered in mythology, stories, fables, and generally convoluted explanations, while philosophy (in particular, his philosophy), explains those truths directly, through reason and arguments.
He had high esteem for Hinduism and Buddhism, and although he spoke good things about Christianity, he always thought of it as inferior to the other two: "despite the great variety of religions on earth, the degree of morality, or rather immorality, shows not the least variety corresponding to it, but rather is in essence roughly the same everywhere. Only we must not confuse crudeness and refinement with morality and immorality. The religion of the Greeks had an extremely slight moral tendency, virtually restricted to the oath, no dogma was taught and no morals publicly preached: but we do not see that as a result of the Greeks, all things considered, were morally worse than the human beings of the Christian centuries. The morals of Christianity are of a much higher kind than those of the other religions that have ever appeared in Europe: but if anyone wished to believe therefore that European morality had improved to just the same extent and now at least excelled among its contemporaries, we would not only be able to convince him quickly that among Mohammedans, Guebres, Hindus and Buddhists at least as much honesty, loyalty, tolerance, gentleness, beneficence, nobility and self-denial is found as among the Christian peoples; but also the long catalog of inhuman cruelties that have accompanied Christianity, in the numerous religious wars, the irresponsible crusades, the extermination of a large part of the native inhabitants of America and the population of that part of the world with negro slaves dragged there out of Africa, without right, or any semblance of right, torn away from their families, their fatherland, their part of the world and condemned to endless convict labor, in the unremitting persecutions of heretics and inquisition courts that cry out to the heavens, in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in the execution of Netherlanders by Alba, etc. etc. - would sooner assure a verdict to the detriment of Christianity. But overall, if we compare the splendid morals that Christianity and more or less every religion preaches, with the practice of its adherents, and imagine what this practice would come to if the worldly arm did not prevent crime, or indeed what we would have to fear if all laws were removed even for just one day, we shall have to confess that the effect of all religions on morality is really very slight."
One of the reasons for his lower opinion of Christianity (or more generally, Abrahamic religions) was the "loophole" its morals have with regards to animals: "This loophole is the cause of animal protection societies being needed in Europe and America, which themselves can be effective only with the help of the law and the police. In Asia, the religions grant animals adequate protection, so there no one thinks of societies of this sort. Meanwhile in Europe too the sense of the rights of animals is awakening more and more, in proportion as the strange conceptions of an animal world come into existence merely for the benefit and amusement of human beings, as a consequence of which they treat animals just as things, are gradually fading and disappearing. For these are the source of the crude and inconsiderate treatment of animals in Europe, and I have shown their origin in the Old Testament in the second volume of Parerga."
Furthermore, he had a very low regard for Islam: "[Speaking about religious doctrines…] If only they are imprinted early enough, they are for man adequate explanations of his existence and supports for his morality. Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book, we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value."
Schopenhauer also mocked how the Church had tried several times to demand that philosophers' conclusions accord with its doctrines: "Why should a religion require the suffrage of a philosophy? Indeed, it has everything on its side - revelation, documents, miracles, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity, and eminence (as is due to the truth), the consent and reverence of all, a thousand temples in which it is preached and practiced, hosts of sworn priests, and, more than all this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at the tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas. With such an abundance of means at its disposal, for it still to desire the assent of wretched philosophers it would have to be more covetous - or still to attend to their contradiction it would have to be more apprehensive - than appears compatible with a good conscience."
Politics
Schopenhauer's politiсal views were, for the most part, a much-diminished echo of his system of ethics. In occasional political comments in his Parerga and Paralipomena and Manuscript Remains, Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government. What was essential, he thought, was that the state should "leave each man free to work out his own salvation," and so long as the government was thus limited, he would "prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of his fellow rats" - i.e., a monarch. Schopenhauer did, however, share the view of Thomas Hobbes on the necessity of the state, and of state violence, to check the destructive tendencies innate to our species. Schopenhauer, by his own admission, did not give much thought to politics, and several times he writes prideful boasts of how little attention he had paid "to political affairs of his day." In a life that spanned several revolutions in French and German government, and a few continent-shaking wars, he did indeed maintain his aloof position of "minding not the times but the eternities."
Views
Arthur Schopenhauer has been dubbed the artist’s philosopher on account of the inspiration his aesthetics has provided to artists of all stripes. He is also known as the philosopher of pessimism, as he articulated a worldview that challenges the value of existence. His elegant and muscular prose earns him a reputation as one of the greatest German stylists. Although he never achieved the fame of such post-Kantian philosophers as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel in his lifetime, his thought informed the work of such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and, most famously, Friedrich Nietzsche. He is also known as the first German philosopher to incorporate Eastern thought into his writings.
Schopenhauer’s thought is iconoclastic for a number of reasons. Although he considered himself Kant’s only true philosophical heir, he argued that the world was essentially irrational. Writing in the era of German Romanticism, he developed an aesthetics that was classicist in its emphasis on the eternal. When German philosophers were entrenched in the universities and immersed in the theological concerns of the time, Schopenhauer was an atheist who stayed outside the academic profession.
Schopenhauer’s lack of recognition during most of his lifetime may have been due to the iconoclasm of his thought, but it was probably also partly due to his irascible and stubborn temperament. The diatribes against Hegel and Fichte peppered throughout his works provide evidence of his state of mind. Regardless of the reason Schopenhauer’s philosophy was overlooked for so long, he fully deserves the prestige he enjoyed altogether too late in his life.
Quotations:
"A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants."
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
"Compassion is the basis of morality."
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
"To live alone is the fate of all great souls."
"Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom."
"Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal."
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
"After your death, you will be what you were before your birth."
"Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become, and the same is true of fame."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Connections
Arthur Schopenhauer had never been married and had no children.