Early modern Europe · 1788–1860
Arthur Schopenhauer
German pessimist who saw a blind will behind all things
Behind the world as representation lies one blind, insatiable striving — the will — that makes life swing between pain and boredom. Relief comes through art, compassion and the denial of the will, ideas he found echoed in Indian thought.
Life and thought
Arthur Schopenhauer was the son of a wealthy Danzig merchant and of the novelist Johanna Schopenhauer. After his father’s death he abandoned a business career, studied at Göttingen and Berlin, where Fichte was among his teachers, and published The World as Will and Representation at the end of 1818, aged thirty. His attempt to teach in Berlin failed when he scheduled his lectures at the same hour as Hegel’s. Living on his inheritance in Frankfurt, he was largely ignored until a collection of essays, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), made him famous in his last decade.
Schopenhauer accepted Kant’s division between appearance and thing in itself, but claimed we know the thing in itself from within: in our own bodies we experience it as will — blind, endless striving. The whole world is this one will, appearing as countless things that struggle against each other. Because desire is never satisfied for long, life swings between pain and boredom. Relief comes through art, above all music, through compassion, which recognises the same suffering in others, and through ascetic denial of the will — ideas he found echoed in Buddhism and the Upanishads. Nietzsche, Wagner and Freud read him closely.
Works
Shaped by
1724–1804Immanuel KantKönigsberg professor whose critical philosophy redrew modern thoughtc. 428–348 BCEPlatoSocrates’ student, founder of the Academy, master of the dialoguec. 480–400 BCE (debated; an older dating is c. 563–483 BCE)The Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama)He saw his doctrine of the will and its denial echoed in Buddhism and the Upanishads, which he read in translation.Shaped
1844–1900Friedrich NietzscheNietzsche found Schopenhauer’s main work in a Leipzig bookshop in 1865 and was overwhelmed by it.1895–1973Max HorkheimerDirector of the Frankfurt Institute who defined critical theory1889–1951Ludwig WittgensteinViennese-born Cambridge philosopher who overturned his own first philosophyArgued against
1770–1831Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelHe scheduled his Berlin lectures at the same hour as Hegel’s and called him a charlatan.1762–1814Johann Gottlieb FichteHe attended Fichte’s lectures in Berlin and came away contemptuous.Meanwhile, in other traditions
1768–1834Friedrich SchleiermacherBerlin theologian and translator of Plato, father of modern hermeneutics1813–1855Søren KierkegaardDanish Christian thinker of the anxious, choosing individual1818–1883Karl MarxGerman philosopher, economist and revolutionary in London exile1820–1895Friedrich EngelsManufacturer’s son who co-founded Marxism with Marx1833–1911Wilhelm DiltheyGerman historian of ideas who defended the human sciences1839–1914Charles Sanders PeirceLogician and scientist who founded pragmatism and semioticsOn the record
Schopenhauer scheduled his Berlin lectures at the same hour as Hegel’s.
In March 1820 Schopenhauer, newly licensed to teach in Berlin, scheduled his class at the same time as Hegel’s popular lectures; few students came. He had studied in Berlin in 1811–13, where his lecturers included Fichte.
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Arthur Schopenhauer”