Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher best known for his pessimism. Building on Immanuel Kant, he argued that behind the world we perceive lies a single, blind, endlessly striving force he called the will, and that because life is driven by this will it is made up mostly of desire and suffering. Ignored for most of his career, he became famous only in his last decade, and he went on to influence writers, composers and thinkers from Wagner and Nietzsche to Tolstoy, Freud and Wittgenstein. He was also one of the first Western philosophers to engage seriously with Indian thought.

Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788 in Danzig, today Gdańsk in Poland, into a wealthy merchant family. His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, admired English liberty and chose the name Arthur because it was spelled the same in several languages. When Prussia was about to annex Danzig in 1793, the family moved to the free city of Hamburg. His father intended him for business and in 1803 and 1804 took him on a long tour of Europe, including several months at a boarding school in England.

In 1805 his father died after a fall from a warehouse loft, quite possibly by suicide. His mother, Johanna, moved to Weimar, where she ran a well-known literary salon and became a successful novelist. Arthur kept his promise to work as a merchant's clerk for a time, but in 1807 he gave it up to study. His relationship with his mother was stormy, and after a final quarrel in 1814 they never met again.

Schopenhauer studied at Göttingen from 1809, first medicine and then philosophy, where his teacher advised him to concentrate on Plato and Kant. He moved to Berlin in 1811 and heard the lectures of Fichte, whom he came to scorn. His doctoral thesis, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, accepted by the University of Jena in 1813, analysed the different kinds of explanation we use, such as cause and effect or logical reasons.

In Weimar he got to know Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was working on a theory of colour, and in 1816 he published his own essay On Vision and Colours, which partly disagreed with Goethe and cooled their friendship. In these years he also encountered the Upanishads, the philosophical texts of Hinduism, through a Latin translation, and later studied Buddhism, which he regarded as close to his own views.

Living in Dresden from 1814, he wrote his main work, The World as Will and Representation, published in December 1818 with the date 1819. He was barely thirty and believed he had solved the central problem of philosophy.

The first half of the title follows Kant. The world as we experience it is representation: objects arranged in space, time and causal order by the structure of our own minds. But Kant had said that the thing in itself, what lies behind appearances, can never be known. Schopenhauer disagreed. Each of us, he argued, has one point of access to it from the inside, in our own body, which we experience not only as an object among others but as wanting, striving and acting. That inner reality is will. He concluded that the same will, a single blind urge without purpose or intelligence, underlies everything, appearing as gravity in stones, growth in plants, instinct in animals and conscious desire in people.

From this followed his pessimism. Since will is endless striving, every living thing is caught in a cycle of want. Unsatisfied desire is painful; satisfied desire soon turns to boredom, and new wants arise. Creatures survive by devouring one another, and history shows no real progress. Life, he concluded, is something that on balance would have been better not to have.

He did see ways of escape. In the contemplation of art, a person can briefly forget their own wants and see the world disinterestedly, and he ranked music highest of the arts because he believed it expressed the will itself directly. In ethics, he taught that compassion is the basis of morality: when we feel another's suffering as our own, we glimpse that the separation between individuals is only appearance. The deepest release lies in denying the will altogether through renunciation and asceticism, as practised by saints and holy men of many traditions. Unlike most philosophers of his time, he was openly atheist.

The book sold poorly. In 1820 Schopenhauer began lecturing at the University of Berlin and deliberately scheduled his course at the same hour as Hegel, the most popular philosopher in Germany; almost no students came, and he soon gave up teaching. He came to regard Hegel as a charlatan and spent much of his life denouncing him and the academic establishment. In 1821 he pushed a seamstress, Caroline Marquet, out of the hallway of his lodgings during a quarrel; she sued, claiming injuries, and a court eventually ordered him to pay her an allowance for the rest of her life.

He fled a cholera epidemic in Berlin in 1831, during which Hegel died, and from 1833 lived in Frankfurt am Main, supported by his inheritance, following a strict routine of writing, playing the flute and walking with his poodles. He published On the Will in Nature in 1836, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics in 1841 and a much expanded second edition of his main work in 1844.

Recognition came with Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851, a collection of essays and aphorisms on topics from the wisdom of life to noise, reading and death, written in clear and witty prose. It found a wide readership in a Germany disillusioned after the failed revolutions of 1848. Admirers visited him in Frankfurt, and he enjoyed his late celebrity until his death there on 21 September 1860. His essay on women is notoriously misogynistic.

His influence spread far beyond academic philosophy. Richard Wagner reworked his ideas in Tristan and Isolde. Friedrich Nietzsche began as a disciple before turning against his pessimism, Leo Tolstoy called him the greatest of men, and Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy drew on him. His picture of an unconscious, irrational will driving human behaviour anticipated Sigmund Freud, and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein took ideas from him. Within nineteenth-century philosophy in Germany he stands as the great dissenter from Hegelian optimism, and his openness to Indian philosophy foreshadowed later dialogue between Eastern and Western thought.