Arthur Schopenhauer

German philosopher

• Born: February 22, 1788
• Birthplace: Danzig, Prussia (now Gdańsk, Poland)
• Died: September 21, 1860
• Place of death: Frankfurt am Main (now in Germany)

As a philosopher in the tradition of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed a pessimistic system of philosophy based upon the primacy of will. He modified Kant’s terminology and categories to accord primacy to will, regarding it as the inscrutable thing-in-itself.

Early Life

Arthur Schopenhauer (SHOH-pehn-HOW-er) was born in Danzig, a German city that was under the nominal control of Poland. His father, Heinrich, was an affluent merchant of Dutch aristocratic lineage, cosmopolitan in outlook and republican in politics. After Danzig lost its freedom to Prussia in 1793, he moved his family and business to Hamburg. Schopenhauer’s mother, Johanna, also of Dutch descent, later became a successful romantic novelist.

Because Heinrich Schopenhauer planned a mercantile career for his son, Arthur’s education emphasized modern languages, which came easily to him. At the age of nine, he was sent to Le Havre to learn French, the first of six foreign languages he mastered. In return for agreeing to enter a merchant firm as an apprentice, his father rewarded him with an extended tour—lasting nearly a year and a half—of England, Scotland, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, an experience that strengthened his own cosmopolitan perspective and further developed his facility with languages.

As an apprentice and later a clerk, Schopenhauer found the work tedious and boring, and after the death of his father by drowning, presumed a suicide, in 1805, he altered his life’s goals. With an inheritance adequate to assure independence and with encouragement from his mother, he entered grammar school at Gotha and then studied under tutors in Weimar, mastering Latin and Greek. At the age of twenty-one, he enrolled as a medical student in the University of Göttingen, changing to philosophy in his second year. His first influential teacher, G. E. Schulze, advised him to concentrate on Plato and Kant—the two thinkers who would exert the strongest impact on his philosophy.

In 1811, Schopenhauer attended lectures at the University of Berlin by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher; scathing responses in his notes set the tone of his lifelong contempt for German academic philosophy. When revolution against Napoleonic rule flared in Berlin, Schopenhauer fled to the village of Rudolstadt, where he wrote his dissertation for a doctorate from the University of Jena. In Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichende Grunde (1813; On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason , 1889), he explores types of causation—physical, logical, mathematical, and moral.

After receiving his doctorate, Schopenhauer returned to Weimar to live in his mother’s house, but the two could not agree. She found him moody, surly, and sarcastic; he found her vain and shallow. Disagreements and quarrels led her to dismiss him, and he left to establish his residence in Dresden in 1814, there to begin his major philosophical work. For the remaining twenty-four years of Johanna Schopenhauer’s life, mother and son did not meet.

Life’s Work

In Dresden, after completing a brief treatise on the nature of color, Schopenhauer was ready to begin serious preparation of his greatest philosophical work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819; The World as Will and Idea , 1883-1886). Its four books, with an appendix on Kantian philosophy, include the conceptual ideas that Schopenhauer developed and elaborated throughout his career as an independent philosopher. Book I explains the world, everything that the mind perceives, as representation, a mental construct of the subject. Through perception, reasoning, and reflection and by placing external reality within the mental categories of time, space, and causality, one understands how the world operates. However, one never understands reality as it exists, for the subjective remains an essential element of all perception.

The fundamental reality that eludes understanding is, as book 2 makes plain, the will, that Kantian thing-in-itself. Understood in its broadest sense, will exists in everything—as a life force and much more. In plants, it drives growth, change, and reproduction. In animals, it includes all of these as well as sensation, instinct, and limited intelligence. Only in human beings does the will become self-conscious, through reflection and analysis, though the will is by no means free in the usual sense. Every action is determined by motives—to Schopenhauer another name for causes—that predetermine one’s choices. Thus, one may will to choose but not will to will. With its conscious and unconscious drives, will presses each person toward egoistic individualism; yet demands of the will, far from bringing peace, well-being, and gratification, lead only to additional struggle and exertion. As a consequence, unhappiness in life inevitably exceeds happiness.

As a respite from the imperious demands of the will, human beings find solace in the beauty that exists in nature and art, and the awakening of the aesthetic sense serves to tame the will by leading it toward disinterested contemplation. To enter a room and discover a table filled with food is to anticipate involvement, consumption, and interaction with others. To look at a painting of the same scene invites simply reflection and appreciation, removing any practical considerations from the will, thereby suspending its feverish activity.

However, the solace afforded by beauty is only temporary; in book 4, Schopenhauer explores saintliness, which implies denial and permanent taming of the will. By recognizing that others experience the same unrelenting strife that the will brings to himself, a person can develop compassion. Through the power of reflection, one can recognize one’s own motives and, through studying motives, become aware of those previously unknown and unacknowledged. Thus, while he cannot achieve freedom of choice, human beings may acquire a negative capability of rejecting and taming the will. Renunciation, denial of the will, represents for Schopenhauer the path to Nirvana. The best attainable life is that followed by the Hindu sanyasas and the ascetic saints of early Christendom.

After publishing his magnum opus, Schopenhauer left for a vacation in Italy, confident that his work would be recognized as a true account of the philosophy foreshadowed by Kant and accepted as a solution to all outstanding problems of philosophy. Instead, the work was ignored both by the reading public and by academic philosophers. From Dresden, he moved to Berlin, where he expected to become a university professor. Appointed to lecture on philosophy at the university, he selected a schedule that competed with lectures by G. W. F. Hegel, then at the height of his popularity, whose optimistic system was the antithesis of Schopenhauer’s. Unable to attract students, Schopenhauer spent more than a decade in reading and desultory wandering, though with Berlin as his primary residence. In 1833, he settled in Frankfurt, where he remained for the final years of his life.

There his life assumed a measure of regularity and simplicity. His modest wants were easily met on his inherited income. Although he gave serious consideration to marriage more than once during his lifetime, he rejected the idea, choosing casual relationships instead. He lived in a boardinghouse, took regular walks for exercise, and dined in company at the Englische Hof Hotel. His day began with work in the morning, followed by a brief diversion through playing the flute. In the afternoons, he stopped by the public library for reading and study; an omnivorous reader, he was widely knowledgeable in the arts and sciences and, like his father, read the London Times almost every day of his adult life. He was short of stature, with a thick neck—characteristics, he thought, of genius. His portraits show penetrating blue eyes; a lined, intelligent face; a prominent, forceful nose; and, in old age, two curled locks of white hair on either side of a bald head.

Schopenhauer produced a series of minor works as further elaboration of his system—an attack on academic philosophy, Über den Willen in der Natur (1836; On the Will in Nature , 1888), and Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (1841; The Basis of Morality , 1903). After issuing a much-expanded second edition of his major work in 1844, he completed two volumes of essays and miscellaneous writings on a wide variety of subjects, Parerga und Paralipomena (1851; Parerga and Paralipomena , 1974). With its graceful if sometimes barbed style and its combination of brilliant insights and freely indulged speculation, it expanded the philosopher’s reading public.

During his final decade, Schopenhauer experienced the fame and adulation he had long anticipated. A third edition of The World as Will and Idea appeared in 1859, this time owing to popular demand. His work was widely discussed and became the subject of university lectures throughout Europe. He began to attract followers, some drawn more by his lucid, jargon-free prose than by his ideas, and on his birthdays tributes poured in from admirers. Shortly before his death, he began to experience recurring chest pains; on the morning of September 21, 1860, he sat down to breakfast at his usual time. An hour later, his doctor, stopping by to check on him, found him still seated in the chair, dead.

Significance

A philosopher in the tradition of Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer modified Kantian terms and categories to accord primacy to will, regarding it as the inscrutable thing-in-itself. Far from an optimistic view, his alteration implies a largely blind force striving for individual advancement and doomed to frustration and defeat. Confronted with this pessimistic reality, the reflective person seeks to tame the will through asceticism. In the Upanishads, his favorite bedtime reading, Schopenhauer discovered that Eastern religious thinkers had anticipated important ideas of his system, and he himself helped popularize Hindu and Buddhist thought in Europe.

Schopenhauer’s successors have generally accepted portions of his system while rejecting others, and his influence has been almost as varied as his system. Friedrich Nietzsche followed him in granting primacy to the will but envisioned will as a constructive force for progress. Eduard von Hartmann attempted a synthesis of Schopenhauer and Hegel in his Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869; Philosophy of the Unconscious , 1931). Scholars have discovered a profound debt to Schopenhauer in Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als-Ob (1911; The Philosophy of “As If,” 1924); Ludwig Wittgenstein was influenced by Schopenhauer as well. Sigmund Freud acknowledged that, in large measure, his theory of the unconscious was anticipated by the philosopher.

Because Schopenhauer gives aesthetics a prominent and honorable place in his system, it is not surprising to discover that he has influenced artistic creation significantly. Richard Wagner enthusiastically embraced Schopenhauer’s speculations on music, in part because he accorded music first place among the arts. Writers such as Leo Tolstoy in Russia; Thomas Mann in Germany; Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust in France; and Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and W. Somerset Maugham in Great Britain are, in varying degrees, indebted to Schopenhauer for their world view and for their pessimistic depiction of human life and character. One should note, however, that the enthusiasm for blind will at the base of twentieth century fascism is a perversion of Schopenhauer’s thought. Passages in Schopenhauer that reflect racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny, attitudes undeniably present in his work, should be placed within the context of his overall pessimism concerning human nature.

Bibliography

Copleston, Frederick. Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher of Pessimism. London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1947. Examines Schopenhauer’s system in the light of Roman Catholicism and religious thought. Calls attention to inconsistencies and contradictions but at the same time provides insightful summary and analysis of Schopenhauer’s major ideas.

Fox, Michael, ed. Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement. Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1980. A collection of essays by distinguished scholars. The book is divided into three sections: general articles, giving overviews of Schopenhauer, articles dealing with basic philosophical issues, and comparative studies that relate Schopenhauer’s ideas to other philosophers and explore intellectual debts.

Gardiner, Patrick. Schopenhauer. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963. A general but penetrating analysis of Schopenhauer’s life and philosophy. Gardiner offers a balanced assessment of the philosopher’s strengths and weaknesses, clarifying the intellectual debt to Kant but providing only brief consideration of Schopenhauer’s influence on others.

Hamlyn, D. W. Schopenhauer. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. A general survey of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Clarifies his terms, explains his epistemology, and offers extensive analysis of his philosophical debt to Kant.

Janaway, Christopher. Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A concise overview of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system, concentrating on the original aspects of his thought. One in a series of books designed to provide user-friendly introductions to philosophy.

Magee, Bryan. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. A scholarly introduction to Schopenhauer’s philosophical system. Explores the effects of his early life on his system and places his ideas in their philosophical tradition. Numerous appendixes trace his influence on others.

Mannion, Gerard. Schopenhauer, Religion, and Morality: The Humble Path to Ethics. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003. Examines Schopenhauer’s ideas, focusing on his moral philosophy and the relationship of his philosophy to theology and religion. Mannion concludes that Schopenhauer was not a nihilist or atheist who rejected religion, but a philosopher who reinterpreted religious ideas.

Wallace, William. Life of Arthur Schopenhauer. London: Walter Scott, 1890. A comprehensive overview of Schopenhauer’s life, philosophical system, and influence. Biographical information draws heavily upon previous studies in German and offers an illuminating account of his daily life.