
philosopher known for his pessimism
and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal world.
Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation
, claimed that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will
. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled.
Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.
Obit anus, abit onus.
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Compassion is the basis of all morality.
Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.


philosopher known for his pessimism
and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal world.
Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation
, claimed that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will
. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled. Consequently, he considered that a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic
teachings of Vedanta
, Buddhism
and the Church Fathers
of early Christianity
, was the only way to attain liberation.
Schopenhauer's metaphysical
analysis of will, his views on human motivation
and desire, and his aphoristic
writing style influenced many well-known thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche
, Richard Wagner
, Ludwig Wittgenstein
, Erwin Schrödinger
, Albert Einstein
, Sigmund Freud
, Otto Rank
, Carl Gustav Jung, Leo Tolstoy
, Thomas Mann
, and Jorge Luis Borges
.
Life
Arthur Schopenhauer was born in the city of Danzig (Gdańsk), as the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and Johanna Schopenhauer, both descendants of wealthy German Patrician families. When the Kingdom of Prussia
acquired the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
city of Danzig in 1793, Schopenhauer's family moved to Hamburg
. In 1805, Schopenhauer's father may have committed suicide. Shortly thereafter, Schopenhauer's mother Johanna moved to Weimar
, then the centre of German literature
, to pursue her writing career. After one year, Schopenhauer left the family business in Hamburg to join her.
Schopenhauer became a student at the University of Göttingen in 1809. There he studied metaphysics
and psychology
under Gottlob Ernst Schulze
, the author of Aenesidemus
, who advised him to concentrate on Plato
and Immanuel Kant
. In Berlin, from 1811 to 1812, he had attended lectures by the prominent post-Kantian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte
and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher.

(Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung). He would finish it in 1818 and publish it the following year. In Dresden
in 1819, Schopenhauer fathered an illegitimate child who was born and died the same year. In 1820, Schopenhauer became a lecturer at the University of Berlin. He scheduled his lectures to coincide with those of the famous philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whom Schopenhauer described as a "clumsy charlatan". However, only five students turned up to Schopenhauer's lectures, and he dropped out of academia. A late essay, "On University Philosophy", expressed his resentment towards the work conducted in academies.
While in Berlin, Schopenhauer was named as a defendant in an action at law initiated by a woman named Caroline Marquet.
She asked for damages, alleging that Schopenhauer had pushed her. According to Schopenhauer's court testimony, she deliberately annoyed him by raising her voice while standing right outside his door. Marquet alleged that the philosopher had assaulted and battered her after she refused to leave his doorway. Her companion testified that she saw Marquet prostrate outside his apartment. Because Marquet won the lawsuit, Schopenhauer made payments to her for the next twenty years. When she died, he wrote on a copy of her death certificate, Obit anus, abit onus ("The old woman dies, the burden is lifted").
In 1821, he fell in love with nineteen-year old opera singer, Caroline Richter (called Medon), and had a relationship with her for several years. He discarded marriage plans, however, writing, "Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties", and "Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes." When he was forty-three years old, seventeen-year old Flora Weiss recorded rejecting him in her diary.
Schopenhauer had a notably strained relationship with his mother Johanna Schopenhauer. After his father's death, Arthur Schopenhauer endured two long years of drudgery as a merchant, in honor of his dead father. Afterward, his mother retired to Weimar, and Arthur Schopenhauer dedicated himself wholly to studies in the gymnasium of Gotha. After he left it in disgust after seeing one of the masters lampooned, he went to live with his mother. But by that time she had already opened her infamous salon, and Arthur was not compatible with the vain, ceremonious ways of the salon. He was also disgusted by the ease with which Johanna Schopenhauer had forgotten his father's memory. Therefore, he gave university life a shot. There, he wrote his first book, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
. His mother informed him that the book was incomprehensible and it was unlikely that anyone would ever buy a copy. In a fit of temper Arthur Schopenhauer told her that his work would be read long after the rubbish she wrote would have been totally forgotten.
In 1831, a cholera
epidemic broke out in Berlin and Schopenhauer left the city. Schopenhauer settled permanently in Frankfurt
in 1833, where he remained for the next twenty-seven years, living alone except for a succession of pet poodles named Atman
and Butz. The numerous notes that he made during these years, amongst others on aging, were published posthumously under the title Senilia.
Schopenhauer had a robust constitution, but in 1860 his health began to deteriorate. He died of heart failure on 21 September 1860, while sitting on his couch at home. He was 72.
Philosophy of the "Will"
A key focus of Schopenhauer was his investigation of individual motivation. Before Schopenhauer, Hegel had popularized the concept of Zeitgeist, the idea that society consisted of a collective consciousness
which moved in a distinct direction, dictating the actions of its members. Schopenhauer, a reader of both Kant and Hegel, criticized their logical optimism and the belief that individual morality could be determined by society and reason. Schopenhauer believed that humans were motivated by only their own basic desires, or Wille zum Leben (Will to Live), which directed all of mankind. For Schopenhauer, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world. To Schopenhauer, the Will is a metaphysical existence which controls not only the actions of individual, intelligent agents, but ultimately all observable phenomena. Will, for Schopenhauer, is what Kant called the "thing-in-itself
."
Art and aesthetics
For Schopenhauer, human desiring, "willing," and craving cause suffering or pain. A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation (a method comparable to Zapffe's "Sublimation"). Aesthetic contemplation allows one to escape, albeit temporarily, this pain because it stops one perceiving the world as mere presentation. Instead one no longer perceives the world as an object of perception (therefore as subject to the Principle of Sufficient Grounds; time, space and causality) from which one is separated; rather one becomes one with that perception:"one can thus no longer separate the perceiver from the perception" (The World as Will and Presentation, section 34). From this immersion with the world one no longer views oneself as an individual who suffers in the world due to their individual will but one becomes a "subject of cognition" to a perception that is, "Pure, will-less, timeless" (section 34) where the essence, "ideas", of the world are shown. Art is the practical consequence of this brief aesthetic contemplation as it attempts to depict one's immersion with the world, thus tries to depict the essence/pure ideas of the world. Music, for Schopenhauer, was the purest form of art because it was the one that depicted the will itself without it appearing as subject to the Principle of Sufficient Grounds, therefore as an individual object. According to Daniel Albright, "Schopenhauer thought that music
was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself."
Ethics
Schopenhauer's moral theory proposed that of three primary moral incentives, compassion, malice and egoism
, compassion is the major motivator to moral expression. Malice and egoism are corrupt alternatives.
Punishment
According to Schopenhauer, whenever we make a choice, "we assume as necessary that that decision was preceded by something from which it ensued, and which we call the ground or reason, or more accurately the motive, of the resultant action." Choices are not made freely. Our actions are necessary and determined because "every human being, even every animal, after the motive has appeared, must carry out the action which alone is in accordance with his inborn and immutable character." A definite action inevitably results when a particular motive influences a person's given, unchangeable character. If there is no free will, should crimes be punished?The State, Schopenhauer claimed, punishes criminals in order to prevent future crimes. It does so by placing "beside every possible motive for committing a wrong a more powerful motive for leaving it undone, in the inescapable punishment. Accordingly, the criminal code is as complete a register as possible of counter–motives to all criminal actions that can possibly be imagined…."
Should capital punishment be legal? "For safeguarding the lives of citizens," he asserted, "capital punishment is therefore absolutely necessary." "The murderer," wrote Schopenhauer, "who is condemned to death according to the law must, it is true, be now used as a mere means, and with complete right. For public security, which is the principal object of the State, is disturbed by him; indeed it is abolished if the law remains unfulfilled. The murderer, his life, his person, must be the means of fulfilling the law, and thus of re–establishing public security." Schopenhauer disagreed with those who would abolish capital punishment. "Those who would like to abolish it should be given the answer: 'First remove murder from the world, and then capital punishment ought to follow.' "
People, according to Schopenhauer, cannot be improved. They can only be influenced by strong motives that overpower criminal motives. Schopenhauer declared that "real moral reform is not at all possible, but only determent from the deed…."
He claimed that this doctrine was not original with him. Previously, it appeared in the writings of Plato
, Seneca
, Hobbes
, Pufendorf
, and Anselm Feuerbach
. Schopenhauer declared that their teaching was corrupted by subsequent errors and therefore was in need of clarification.
Psychology
Schopenhauer was perhaps even more influential in his treatment of man's psychologythan he was in the realm of philosophy.
Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed by the tribulations of sex, but Schopenhauer addressed it and related concepts forthrightly:
...one ought rather to be surprised that a thing [sex] which plays throughout so important a part in human life has hitherto practically been disregarded by philosophers altogether, and lies before us as raw and untreated material.
He gave a name to a force within man which he felt had invariably precedence over reason: the Will to Live or Will to Life (Wille zum Leben), defined as an inherent drive within human beings, and indeed all creatures, to stay alive and to reproduce.
Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental, but rather understood it to be an immensely powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche
and dramatically shaping the world:
The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.
What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation ...
These ideas foreshadowed the discovery of evolution, Freud's
concepts of the libido
and the unconscious mind
, and evolutionary psychology
in general.
Politics
Schopenhauer's politicswere, for the most part, an echo of his system of ethics (the latter being expressed in Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, available in English as two separate books, On the Basis of Morality and On the Freedom of the Will
). Ethics also occupies about one quarter of his central work, The World as Will and Representation
.
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 government was thus limited, he would "prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of [his] fellow rats" — i.e., by a monarch
, rather than a democrat
. Schopenhauer shared the view of Thomas Hobbes
on the necessity of the state, and of state action, to check the destructive tendencies innate to our species. He also defended the independence of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power, and a monarch as an impartial element able to practice justice (in a practical and everyday sense, not a cosmological one). He declared monarchy as "that which is natural to man" for "intelligence has always under a monarchical government a much better chance against its irreconcilable and ever-present foe, stupidity" and disparaged republicanism as "unnatural as it is unfavourable to the higher intellectual life and the arts and sciences."
Schopenhauer, by his own admission, did not give much thought to politics, and several times he writes proudly 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". He wrote many disparaging remarks about Germany and the Germans. A typical example is, "For a German it is even good to have somewhat lengthy words in his mouth, for he thinks slowly, and they give him time to reflect."
Schopenhauer attributed civilizational primacy to the northern "white races" due to their sensitivity and creativity (except for the Egyptians and Hindus whom he saw as equal):
The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmans, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature and out of it all came their high civilization.
Despite this, he was adamantly against differing treatment of races, was fervently anti-slavery, and supported the abolitionist movement in the United States. He describes the treatment of "[our] innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into [the slave-master's] devilish clutches" as "belonging to the blackest pages of mankind's criminal record".
Schopenhauer additionally maintained a marked metaphysical and political anti-Judaism
. Schopenhauer argued that Christianity constituted a revolt against the materialistic basis of Judaism, exhibiting an Indian-influenced ethics reflecting the Aryan
-Vedic
theme of spiritual "self-conquest." This he saw as opposed to what he held to be the ignorant drive toward earthly utopianism and superficiality of a worldly Jewish spirit:
While all other religions endeavor to explain to the people by symbols the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the struggle with other nations.
Views on women
In Schopenhauer's 1851 essay "Of Women" ("Über die Weiber", full text), he expressed his opposition to what he called "Teutonico-Christian stupidity" on female affairs. He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey", and opposed Schiller'spoem in honor of women, "" ("Dignity of Women"). The essay does give two compliments, however: that "women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than [men] are" and are more sympathetic to the suffering of others. However, the latter was discounted as weakness rather than humanitarian virtue.
Schopenhauer's controversial writings have influenced many, from Friedrich Nietzsche
to nineteenth-century feminists. Schopenhauer's biological
analysis of the difference between the sexes, and their separate roles in the struggle for survival and reproduction, anticipates some of the claims that were later ventured by sociobiologists
and evolutionary psychologists
in the twentieth century.
After the elderly Schopenhauer sat for a sculpture portrait by Elisabet Ney
, he told Richard Wagner's friend Malwida von Meysenbug
, "I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man."
Heredity and eugenics
Schopenhauer believed that a person inherits one's level of intellect through one's mother, and personal character through one's father. Schopenhauer quotes Horace's saying, "From the brave and good are the brave descended" (Odes, iv, 4, 29) and Shakespeare's line from Cymbeline, "Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base" (IV, 2) to reinforce his hereditarian argument. On the question of eugenics, Schopenhauer wrote:With our knowledge of the complete unalterability both of character and of mental faculties, we are led to the view that a real and thorough improvement of the human race might be reached not so much from outside as from within, not so much by theory and instruction as rather by the path of generation. Plato had something of the kind in mind when, in the fifth book of his Republic, he explained his plan for increasing and improving his warrior caste. If we could castrate all scoundrels and stick all stupid geese in a convent, and give men of noble character a whole haremHaremHarem refers to the sphere of women in what is usually a polygynous household and their enclosed quarters which are forbidden to men...
, and procure men, and indeed thorough men, for all girls of intellect and understanding, then a generation would soon arise which would produce a better age than that of PericlesPericlesPericles was a prominent and influential statesman, orator, and general of Athens during the city's Golden Age—specifically, the time between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars...
.
Or more kindly - “The final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life. What it all turns upon is nothing less than the composition of the next generation.… It is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human race to come, which is here at stake.”
In another context, Schopenhauer reiterated his antidemocratic-eugenic thesis: "If you want Utopian plans, I would say: the only solution to the problem is the despotism
of the wise and noble members of a genuine aristocracy, a genuine nobility, achieved by mating
the most magnanimous men with the cleverest and most gifted women. This proposal constitutes my Utopia and my Platonic Republic". Analysts (e.g., Keith Ansell-Pearson) have suggested that Schopenhauer's advocacy of anti-egalitarianism
and eugenics influenced the neo-aristocratic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who initially considered Schopenhauer his mentor.
Animal welfare
As a consequence of his philosophy, Schopenhauer was very concerned about the welfare of animals. For him, all animals, including humans, are phenomenal manifestations of Will. The word "will" designated, for him, force, power, impulse, energy, and desire; it is the closest word we have that can signify both the real essence of all external things and also our own direct, inner experience. Since everything is basically Will, then humans and animals are fundamentally the same and can recognize themselves in each other. For this reason, he claimed that a good person would have sympathy for animals, who are our fellow sufferers.Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he, who is cruel to living creatures, cannot be a good man.
Nothing leads more definitely to a recognition of the identity of the essential nature in animal and human phenomena than a study of zoology and anatomy.
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
In 1841, he praised the establishment, in London, of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and also the Animals' Friends Society in Philadelphia. Schopenhauer even went so far as to protest against the use of the pronoun "it" in reference to animals because it led to the treatment of them as though they were inanimate things. To reinforce his points, Schopenhauer referred to anecdotal reports of the look in the eyes of a monkey who had been shot and also the grief of a baby elephant whose mother had been killed by a hunter.
He was very attached to his succession of pet poodles. Schopenhauer criticized Spinoza's
belief that animals are to be used as a mere means for the satisfaction of humans.
Views on homosexuality and pederasty
Schopenhauer was also one of the first philosophers since the days of Greek philosophyto address the subject of male homosexuality. In the third, expanded edition of The World as Will and Representation (1856), Schopenhauer added an appendix to his chapter on the "Metaphysics of Sexual Love". He also wrote that homosexuality did have the benefit of preventing ill-begotten children. Concerning this, he stated, "... the vice we are considering appears to work directly against the aims and ends of nature, and that in a matter that is all important and of the greatest concern to her, it must in fact serve these very aims, although only indirectly, as a means for preventing greater evils." Shrewdly anticipating the interpretive distortion on the part of the popular mind of his attempted scientific explanation of pederasty as a personal advocacy of a phenomenon Schopenhauer otherwise describes, in terms of spiritual ethics, as an "objectionable aberration", Schopenhauer sarcastically concludes the appendix with the statement that "by expounding these paradoxical ideas, I wanted to grant to the professors of philosophy a small favour, for they are very disconcerted by the ever-increasing publicization of my philosophy which they so carefully concealed. I have done so by giving them the opportunity of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty
."
Indology
Schopenhauer read the Latin translation of the Upanishads which had been translated by French writer Anquetil du Perronfrom the Persian translation of Prince Dara Shikoh
entitled Sirre-Akbar ("The Great Secret"). He was so impressed by their philosophy that he called them "the production of the highest human wisdom", and considered them to contain superhuman conceptions. The Upanishads was a great source of inspiration to Schopenhauer, and writing about them he said:
It is the most satisfying and elevating reading (with the exception of the original text) which is possible in the world; it has been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death.
It is well known that the book Oupnekhat (Upanishad) always lay open on his table, and he invariably studied it before sleeping at night. He called the opening up of Sanskrit literature "the greatest gift of our century", and predicted that the philosophy and knowledge of the Upanishads would become the cherished faith of the West.
Schopenhauer was first introduced to the 1802 Latin Upanishad
translation through Friedrich Majer. They met during the winter of 1813-1814 in Weimar
at the home of Schopenhauer’s mother according to the biographer Sanfranski. Majer was a follower of Herder
, and an early Indologist. Schopenhauer did not begin a serious study of the Indic texts, however, until the summer of 1814. Sansfranski maintains that between 1815 and 1817, Schopenhauer had another important cross-pollination with Indian Thought in Dresden
. This was through his neighbor of two years, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause
. Krause was then a minor and rather unorthodox philosopher who attempted to mix his own ideas with that of ancient Indian wisdom. Krause had also mastered Sanskrit
, unlike Schopenhauer, and the two developed a professional relationship. It was from Krause that Schopenhauer learned meditation
and received the closest thing to expert advice concerning Indian thought.
Most noticeable, in the case of Schopenhauer’s work, was the significance of the Chandogya Upanishad
, whose Mahavakya, Tat Tvam Asi
is mentioned throughout The World as Will and Representation
.
Buddhism
Schopenhauer noted a correspondence between his doctrines and the Four Noble Truthsof Buddhism
. Similarities centered on the principles that life involves suffering, that suffering is caused by desire (tanha
), and that the extinction of desire leads to liberation. Thus three of the four "truths of the Buddha" correspond to Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will. In Buddhism, however, while greed and lust are always unskillful, desire is ethically variable - it can be skillful, unskillful, or neutral.
For Schopenhauer, Will had ontological
primacy over the intellect
; in other words, desire is understood to be prior to thought. Schopenhauer felt this was similar to notions of purushartha or goals of life in Vedanta
Hinduism
.
In Schopenhauer's philosophy, denial of the will is attained by either:
- personal experience of an extremely great suffering that leads to loss of the will to live; or
- knowledge of the essential nature of life in the world through observation of the suffering of other people.
However, Buddhist nirvana
is not equivalent to the condition that Schopenhauer described as denial of the will. Nirvana is not the extinguishing of the person as some Western scholars have thought, but only the "extinguishing" (the literal meaning of nirvana) of the flames of greed, hatred, and delusion that assail a person's character. Occult historian Joscelyn Godwin
(1945- ) stated, "It was Buddhism that inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner
. This Orientalism
reflected the struggle of the German Romantics, in the words of Leon Poliakov
, to free themselves from Judeo-Christian
fetters". In contradistinction to Godwin's claim that Buddhism inspired Schopenhauer, the philosopher himself made the following statement in his discussion of religions:
If I wished to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I should have to concede to Buddhism pre-eminence over the others. In any case, it must be a pleasure to me to see my doctrine in such close agreement with a religion that the majority of men on earth hold as their own, for this numbers far more followers than any other. And this agreement must be yet the more pleasing to me, inasmuch as in my philosophizing I have certainly not been under its influence [emphasis added]. For up till 1818, when my work appeared, there was to be found in Europe only a very few accounts of Buddhism.
Buddhist philosopher Nishitani Keiji
, however, sought to distance Buddhism from Schopenhauer.
While Schopenhauer's philosophy may sound rather mystical in such a summary, his methodology
was resolutely empirical
, rather than speculative or transcendental:
Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.
Also note:
This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.
The argument that Buddhism
affected Schopenhauer’s philosophy more than any other Dharmic faith loses more credence when viewed in light of the fact that Schopenhauer did not begin a serious study of Buddhism until after the publication of The World as Will and Representation
in 1818. Scholars have started to revise earlier views about Schopenhauer's discovery of Buddhism. Proof of early interest and influence appears in Schopenhauer's 1815/16 notes (transcribed and translated by Urs App) about Buddhism. They are included in a recent case study that traces Schopenhauer's interest in Buddhism and documents its influence.
Influences
Schopenhauer said he was influenced by the Upanishads, Immanuel Kantand Plato
. References to Eastern philosophy and religion
appear frequently in Schopenhauer's writing. As noted above, he appreciated the teachings of the Buddha
and even called himself a "Buddhist". He said that his philosophy could not have been conceived before these teachings were available.
Concerning the Upanishads and Vedas
, he writes in The World as Will and Representation:
If the reader has also received the benefit of the Vedas, the access to which by means of the Upanishads is in my eyes the greatest privilege which this still young century (1818) may claim before all previous centuries, if then the reader, I say, has received his initiation in primeval Indian wisdom, and received it with an open heart, he will be prepared in the very best way for hearing what I have to tell him. It will not sound to him strange, as to many others, much less disagreeable; for I might, if it did not sound conceited, contend that every one of the detached statements which constitute the Upanishads, may be deduced as a necessary result from the fundamental thoughts which I have to enunciate, though those deductions themselves are by no means to be found there.
He summarised the influence of the Upanishads thus: "It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death!"
Among Schopenhauer's other influences were: Shakespeare
, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
, John Locke
, Baruch Spinoza
, Matthias Claudius
, George Berkeley
, David Hume
, and René Descartes
.
Criticism of Kant
Schopenhauer accepted Kant's double-aspect of the universe — the phenomenal (world of experience) and the noumenal(the true world, independent of experience). Some commentators suggest that Schopenhauer claimed that the noumenon, or thing-in-itself, was the basis for Schopenhauer's concept of the will
. Other commentators suggest that Schopenhauer considered will
to be only a subset of the "thing-in-itself" class, namely that which we can most directly experience.
Schopenhauer's identification of the Kantian noumenon (i.e., the actually existing entity) with what he termed "will" deserves some explanation. The noumenon was what Kant called the Ding an Sich, the "Thing in Itself", the reality that is the foundation of our sensory
and mental
representations of an external world. In Kantian terms, those sensory and mental representations are mere phenomena. Schopenhauer departed from Kant in his description of the relationship between the phenomenon and the noumenon. According to Kant, things-in-themselves ground the phenomenal representations in our minds; Schopenhauer, on the other hand, believed phenomena and noumena to be two different sides of the same coin. Noumena do not cause phenomena, but rather phenomena are simply the way by which our minds perceive the noumena, according to the Principle of Sufficient Reason
. This is explained more fully in Schopenhauer's doctoral thesis, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
.
Schopenhauer's second major departure from Kant's epistemology concerns the body. Kant's philosophy was formulated as a response to the radical philosophical skepticism
of David Hume, who claimed that causality could not be observed empirically. Schopenhauer begins by arguing that Kant's demarcation between external objects, knowable only as phenomena, and the Thing in Itself of noumenon, contains a significant omission. There is, in fact, one physical object we know more intimately than we know any object of sense perception: our own body.
We know our human bodies
have boundaries and occupy space, the same way other objects known only through our named senses do. Though we seldom think of our body as a physical object, we know even before reflection that it shares some of an object's properties. We understand that a watermelon cannot successfully occupy the same space as an oncoming truck; we know that if we tried to repeat the experiment with our own body, we would obtain similar results – we know this even if we do not understand the physics
involved.
We know that our consciousness inhabits a physical body, similar to other physical objects only known as phenomena. Yet our consciousness is not commensurate with our body. Most of us possess the power of voluntary motion. We usually are not aware of the breathing of our lung
s or the beating of our heart
unless somehow our attention is called to them. Our ability to control either is limited. Our kidney
s command our attention on their schedule rather than one we choose. Few of us have any idea what our liver
is doing right now, though this organ is as needful as lungs, heart, or kidneys. The conscious mind is the servant, not the master, of these and other organs; these organs have an agenda which the conscious mind did not choose, and over which it has limited power.
When Schopenhauer identifies the noumenon with the desires, needs, and impulses in us that we name "will," what he is saying is that we participate in the reality of an otherwise unachievable world outside the mind through will. We cannot prove that our mental picture of an outside world corresponds with a reality by reasoning; through will, we know – without thinking – that the world can stimulate us. We suffer fear, or desire: these states arise involuntarily; they arise prior to reflection; they arise even when the conscious mind would prefer to hold them at bay. The rational mind is, for Schopenhauer, a leaf borne along in a stream of pre-reflective and largely unconscious emotion. That stream is will, and through will, if not through logic, we can participate in the underlying reality beyond mere phenomena. It is for this reason that Schopenhauer identifies the noumenon with what we call our will.
In his criticism of Kant, Schopenhauer claimed that sensation and understanding are separate and distinct abilities. Yet, for Kant, an object is known through each of them. Kant wrote: "… [T]here are two stems of human knowledge ... namely, sensibility and understanding, objects being given by the former [sensibility] and thought by the latter [understanding]." Schopenhauer disagreed. He asserted that mere sense impressions, not objects, are given by sensibility. According to Schopenhauer, objects are intuitively perceived by understanding and are discursively thought by reason (Kant had claimed that (1) the understanding thinks objects through concepts and that (2) reason seeks the unconditioned or ultimate answer to "why?"). Schopenhauer said that Kant's mistake regarding perception resulted in all of the obscurity and difficult confusion that is exhibited in the Transcendental Analytic section of his critique.
Lastly, Schopenhauer departed from Kant in how he interpreted the Platonic ideas. In The World as Will and Representation
Schopenhauer explicitly stated:
...Kant used the word [Idea] wrongly as well as illegitimately, although Plato had already taken possession of it, and used it most appropriately.
Instead Schopenhauer relied upon the Neoplatonist interpretation of the biographer Diogenes Laërtius
from Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
.
In reference to Plato’s Ideas, Schopenhauer quotes Laërtius verbatim in an explanatory footnote.
Diogenes Laërtius (III, 12) Plato ideas in natura velut exemplaria dixit subsistere; cetera his esse similia, ad istarum similitudinem consistencia.
(Plato teaches that the Ideas exist in nature, so to speak, as patterns or prototypes, and that the remainder of things only resemble them, and exist as their copies.)
Criticism of Hegel
Schopenhauer expressed his dislike for the philosophy of his contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegelmany times in his published works. The following quotations are typical:
If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy
PseudophilosophyPseudophilosophy is a term applied to philosophical ideas or systems which are claimed not to meet mainstream academic standards. The term is almost always used pejoratively and is often contentious...
paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.
Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam
Bethlem Royal HospitalThe Bethlem Royal Hospital is a psychiatric hospital located in London, United Kingdom and part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Although no longer based at its original location, it is recognised as the world's first and oldest institution to specialise in mental illnesses....
, I should be no less right.
At first Fichte and Schelling shine as the heroes of this epoch; to be followed by the man who is quite unworthy even of them, and greatly their inferior in point of talent --- I mean the stupid and clumsy charlatan Hegel.
In his Foreword to the first edition of his work Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, Schopenhauer suggested that he had shown Hegel to have fallen prey to the Post hoc ergo propter hoc
fallacy.
Schopenhauer thought that Hegel used deliberately impressive but ultimately vacuous verbiage. He suggested his works were filled with "castles of abstraction" that sounded impressive but ultimately had no content. He also thought that his glorification of church and state were designed for personal advantage and had little to do with the search for philosophical truth
. For instance, the Right Hegelians
interpreted Hegel as viewing the Prussian state of his day as perfect and the goal of all history up until then.
Influence
Schopenhauer has had a massive influence upon later thinkers, though more so in the arts(especially literature
and music
) and psychology
than in philosophy. His popularity peaked in the early twentieth century, especially during the Modernist era, and waned somewhat thereafter. Nevertheless, a number of recent publications have reinterpreted and modernised the study of Schopenhauer. His theory is also being explored by some modern philosophers as a precursor to evolutionary theory and modern evolutionary psychology.
Friedrich Nietzsche
owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading The World as Will and Representation and admitted that he was one of the few philosophers that he respected, dedicating to him his essay Schopenhauer als Erzieher one of his Untimely Meditations
.
Jorge Luis Borges
remarked that the reason he had never attempted to write a systematic account of his world view, despite his penchant for philosophy and metaphysics in particular, was because Schopenhauer had already written it for him.
As a teenager, Ludwig Wittgenstein
had been strongly influenced by Schopenhauer's epistemological idealism. However, after his study of the philosophy of mathematics, he abandoned epistemological idealism for Gottlob Frege
's conceptual realism.
Selected bibliography
- On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient ReasonOn the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient ReasonOn the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason was originally published as a doctoral dissertation in 1813. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer revised this important work and re-published it in 1847....
(Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde), 1813 - On Vision and ColorsOn Vision and ColorsOn Vision and Colors is a treatise by Arthur Schopenhauer that was published in May 1816 when the author was 28 years old. Schopenhauer had extensively discussed with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the poet's Theory of Colours of 1810, in the months around the turn of the years 1813 and 1814,...
(Über das Sehn und die Farben), 1816 ISBN 978-0-85496-988-3 - The World as Will and RepresentationThe World as Will and RepresentationThe World as Will and Representation is the central work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in December 1818, and the second expanded edition in 1844. In 1948, an abridged version was edited by Thomas Mann....
(alternatively translated in English as The World as Will and Idea; original German is Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), 1818/1819, vol 2 1844- Vol. 1 Dover edition 1966, ISBN 978-0-486-21761-1
- Vol. 2 Dover edition 1966, ISBN 978-0-486-21762-8
- Peter Smith Publisher hardcover set 1969, ISBN 978-0-8446-2885-1
- Everyman Paperback combined abridged edition (290 p.) ISBN 978-0-460-87505-9
- On the Will in Nature (Über den Willen in der Natur), 1836 ISBN 978-0-85496-999-9
- On the Freedom of the WillOn the Freedom of the WillOn the Freedom of the Will was an essay presented to the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in 1839 by Arthur Schopenhauer as a response to the academic question that they had posed: "Is it possible to demonstrate human free will from self-consciousness?" It is one of the constituent essays of his...
(Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens), 1839 ISBN 978-0-631-14552-3 - On the Basis of Morality (Über die Grundlage der Moral), 1840
- Parerga und Paralipomena, 1851; English Translation by E. F. J. Payne, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974, 2 Volumes:
- Printings:
- 1974 Hardcover, by ISBN:
- Vol 1 and 2, ISBN 978-0-19-519813-3,
- Vol 1, ISBN [TBD],
- Vol 2, ISBN 978-0-19-824527-8,
- 1974/1980 Paperback, Vol 1, ISBN 978-0-19-824634-3, Vol 2, ISBN 978-0-19-824635-0,
- 2001 Paperback, Vol 1, ISBN 978-0-19-924220-7, Vol 2, ISBN 978-0-19-924221-4
- 1974 Hardcover, by ISBN:
- Essays and Aphorisms, being excerpts from Volume 2 of Parerga und Paralipomena, selected and translated by R J Hollingdale, with Introduction by R J Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 1970, Paperback 1973: ISBN 978-0-14-044227-4 (9780140442274)
- Printings:
- Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, Volume II, Berg Publishers Ltd., ISBN 978-0-85496-539-7
Online
- Illustrated version of the "Art of Being Right" and links to logic and sophisms used by the stratagems.
- The Art Of Controversy (Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten). (bilingual) [The Art of Being Right]
- Studies in Pessimism - audiobook from LibriVoxLibriVoxLibriVox is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers and is probably, since 2007, the world's most prolific audiobook publisher...
. - The World as Will and Idea at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
: - On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason and On the will in nature. Two essays:
- Internet Archive. Translated by Mrs. Karl Hillebrand (1903).
- Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. Reprinted by Cornell University Library Digital Collections
- Facsimile edition of Schopenhauer's manuscripts in SchopenhauerSource
See also
- AntinatalismAntinatalismAntinatalism is a philosophical position that assigns a negative value to birth, standing in opposition to natalism. It has been advanced by figures such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Peter Wessel Zapffe, Heinrich Heine, Emil Cioran, Philipp Mainländer, Philip Larkin, Chris Korda, Matti Häyry, Thomas...
, a position advocated by Schopenhauer that one would be better off not having been born - AsceticismAsceticismAsceticism describes a lifestyle characterized by abstinence from various sorts of worldly pleasures often with the aim of pursuing religious and spiritual goals...
- God in BuddhismGod in BuddhismThe refutation of the notion of a supreme God or a prime mover is seen by many as a key distinction between Buddhism and other religions. In Buddhism the sole aim of spiritual practice is the complete alleviation of stress in samsara, called nirvana...
- Mortal coilMortal coilMortal coil is a poetic term that means the troubles of daily life and the strife and suffering of the world. It is used in the sense of a burden to be carried or abandoned, most famously in the phrase "shuffle[d] off this mortal coil" from Shakespeare's Hamlet...
- NihilismNihilismNihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
- Sir William Jones
- To be, or not to beTo be, or not to be"To be, or not to be" is the opening phrase of a soliloquy from William Shakespeare's play Hamlet , Act III, Scene 1. It is the best-known quotation from the play and probably the most famous in world literature but there is disagreement on its meaning, as there is of the whole speech.- Text :This...
- Wooden ironWooden ironWooden iron is a polemical term often used in philosophical rhetoric to describe the impossibility of an opposing argument. The term is a German proverbial oxymoron, which synthesizes the concept of the "wooden", which is organic, with the concept of "iron" which is inorganic...
Biographies
- Eduard Grisebach, Schopenhauer - Geschichte seines Lebens (Berlin: Hofmann, 1876).
- Helen Zimmern, Arthur Schopenhauer - His Life and His Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, 1876; rev. ed., London: Allen & Unwin, 1932).
- William Wallace, Life of Arthur Schopenhauer (London: Scott, 1890; repr., St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1970).
- Kuno Fischer, Arthur Schopenhauer (Heidelberg: Winter, 1893); revised as Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre (Heidelberg: Winter, 1898).
- O.F.Damm, Arthur Schopenhauer - eine Biographie, (Reclam, 1912)
- Heinrich Hasse, Schopenhauer. (Reinhardt, 1926)
- Walther Schneider, Schopenhauer - Eine Biographie (Vienna: Bermann-Fischer, 1937).
- Thomas MannThomas MannThomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
, Schopenhauer (Bermann-Fischer, 1938) - Arthur Hübscher, Arthur Schopenhauer - Ein Lebensbild (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1938).
- Frederick CoplestonFrederick CoplestonFrederick Charles Copleston, SJ, CBE was a Jesuit priest and historian of philosophy.-Biography:...
, Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher of pessimism (Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1946) - D.W. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1980, 1985)
- Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer und die wilden Jahre der Philosophie - Eine Biographie, hard cover Carl Hanser Verlag, München 1987, ISBN 978-3-446-14490-3, pocket edition Fischer: ISBN 978-3-596-14299-6.
- Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. Ewald Osers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989)
Other books
- App, Urs. Arthur Schopenhauer and China. Sino-Platonic Papers Nr. 200 (April 2010) (PDF, 8.7 Mb PDF, 164 p.). Contains extensive appendixes which include transcriptions and English translations of Schopenhauer's early notes about Buddhism and Indian philosophy.
- Atwell, John. Schopenhauer on the Character of the World, The Metaphysics of Will.
- --------, Schopenhauer, The Human Character.
- Cartwright, David, Schopenhauer: A Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-82598-6
- Copleston, FrederickFrederick CoplestonFrederick Charles Copleston, SJ, CBE was a Jesuit priest and historian of philosophy.-Biography:...
, Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism, 1946 (reprinted London: Search Press, 1975.) - --------, Schopenhauer: A Very Short introduction.
- Janaway, Christopher, 2003. Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-825003-6
- Magee, BryanBryan MageeBryan Edgar Magee is a noted British broadcasting personality, politician, poet, and author, best known as a popularizer of philosophy.-Early life:...
, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Oxford University Press (1988, reprint 1997), ISBN 978-0-19-823722-8 - Mannion, Gerard, "Schopenhauer, Religion and Morality - The Humble Path to Ethics", Ashgate Press, New Critical Thinking in Philosophy Series, 2003, 314pp
- Zimmern, HelenHelen ZimmernHelen Zimmern was a German-British writer and translator.-Biography:Zimmern and her parents emigrated in 1850 to Britain, where her father became a Nottingham lace merchant. She was naturalized upon coming of age. She was the sister of the suffragist Alice Zimmern and a cousin of the political...
, Arthur Schopenhauer, his Life and Philosophy, London, Longman, and Co.LongmanLongman was a publishing company founded in London, England in 1724. It is now an imprint of Pearson Education.-Beginnings:The Longman company was founded by Thomas Longman , the son of Ezekiel Longman , a gentleman of Bristol. Thomas was apprenticed in 1716 to John Osborn, a London bookseller, and...
- 1876
Articles
- Jiménez, Camilo, 2006, "Tagebuch eines Ehrgeizigen: Arthur Schopenhauers Studienjahre in Berlin," Avinus Magazin (in German).
- Mazard, Eisel, 2005, "Schopenhauer and the Empirical Critique of Idealism in the History of Ideas." On Schopenhauer's (debated) place in the history of European philosophy and his relation to his predecessors.
- Moges, Awet, 2006, "Schopenhauer's Philosophy." Galileian Library.
- SangharakshitaSangharakshitaSangharakshita is a Buddhist teacher and writer, and founder of the Triratna Buddhist Community, which was known until 2010 as the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, or FWBO....
, 2004, "Schopenhauer and aesthetic appreciation." - Oxenford's "Iconoclasm in German Philosophy," (See p. 388)
External links
- Works by Schopenhauer in audio format from LibriVoxLibriVoxLibriVox is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers and is probably, since 2007, the world's most prolific audiobook publisher...
- Ross, Kelley L., 1998, "Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)." Two short essays, on Schopenhauer's life and work, and on his dim view of academia.
- Schopenhauersource: Reproductions of Schopenhauer's manuscripts
- Kant's philosophy as rectified by Schopenhauer
- Timeline of German Philosophers
- A Quick Introduction to Schopenhauer