Arthur Schopenhauer
PessimistModernGerman
Behind every striving thing — leaf, stone, human — he found one thing: blind, directionless will, knowing neither rest nor satisfaction.
Schopenhauer did not think the world was rational or purposive or moving toward anything good. Behind everything — the leaf, the stone, the striving of animals and humans — he found one thing: will. Blind, directionless will, knowing neither rest nor satisfaction, endlessly reproducing itself in the suffering of every creature. He read Kant, absorbed the Upanishads, and built a philosophy of remarkable internal consistency and devastating conclusion: life as suffering, desire as its source, with only three narrow exits — aesthetic contemplation, moral compassion, and the ascetic denial of will. He was the first major Western philosopher to take Indian thought seriously as philosophy, and the first to make music the highest art, since music alone expresses the will directly rather than representing the world. Nietzsche read him at twenty-one and never fully recovered.
Places
Ideas
Words
“The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.”
“Compassion is the basis of morality.”
Works
Life & Moments
Lectures to empty halls alongside Hegel
In 1820, Schopenhauer deliberately scheduled his Berlin lectures opposite Hegel's — a challenge that ended in humiliation. Hegel's lecture hall was packed; Schopenhauer's was empty. He never taught in a university again. The defeat sharpened the contempt for academic philosophy that permeates all his later writing.
Settles permanently in Frankfurt
Fleeing the cholera epidemic that killed Hegel, Schopenhauer moved to Frankfurt in 1831 and stayed for the rest of his life. He kept a routine of study, long walks, and dinner at the Englischer Hof, accompanied by a succession of poodles named Atman. He called the city the finest place to live in Germany.
Late fame with Parerga and Paralipomena
Published in 1851, when Schopenhauer was 63, Parerga and Paralipomena was his first work to find readers. The aphoristic second volume circulated widely, bringing the philosopher sudden celebrity after decades of obscurity. He died nine years later, finally famous, still in Frankfurt, still with a poodle.
Influence
Influenced by
- Immanuel Kant
Schopenhauer called himself the only true heir to Kant, keeping the distinction between phenomena and the thing-in-itself while denying that reason could know the latter. He replaced it with will — blind, directionless, and prior to thought.
Influenced
- Friedrich Nietzsche
At twenty, Nietzsche read Schopenhauer and recognized a mirror for his own temperament. He spent the next decade moving away: replacing pessimism with affirmation, will-to-denial with will-to-power.
