Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860

Arthur Schopenhauer was a 19th-century German philosopher best known for his metaphysical pessimism and his theory of the world as will and representation. The World as Will and Representation argues that the underlying reality of all phenomena is a blind, striving will, and that human suffering is an inevitable consequence of this fundamental nature. His thought drew significantly on Indian philosophical sources, particularly the Upanishads and early Buddhism, and proved influential on Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner, Tolstoy, and a wide range of modernist literary figures. He held that art, particularly music, and ascetic renunciation provide the only escape from the suffering inherent in willing. Schopenhauer spent most of his career in academic obscurity before achieving widespread recognition late in life.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was born in Danzig to a wealthy merchant family and spent his early adulthood in cosmopolitan European capitals. His intellectual ambition was set early and explicitly against Hegel: he scheduled his Berlin lectures in 1820 against Hegel's at the University, drew almost no students, and never recovered the academic position. The masterpiece on which his reputation rests, The World as Will and Representation, was first published in 1818 to little attention.

Schopenhauer's philosophy is post-Kantian but radically reconfigured. Like Kant, he distinguishes appearance from thing in itself; unlike Kant, he identifies the thing in itself with blind, irrational will — a striving force whose recognition is the precondition of its denial. Life, on Schopenhauer's account, is essentially suffering produced by ceaseless willing; the highest human achievements are aesthetic detachment, ethical compassion, and ascetic renunciation.

Schopenhauer's recognition came late. The 1851 Parerga and Paralipomena finally found an audience, and by the 1860s he was the most discussed philosopher in Germany. His influence on Nietzsche was decisive — Nietzsche's mature philosophy is in important respects a sustained turning against Schopenhauer — and his impact on Wittgenstein, Mann, Freud, and twentieth-century pessimism remains substantial.