Who is schopenhauer

Upon his death, Arthur, his sister Adele, and his mother were each left a sizable inheritance. He was an extraordinary pupil: he mastered Greek and Latin while there, but was dismissed from the school for lampooning a teacher.

In the meantime his mother, who was by all accounts not happy in the marriage, used her newfound freedom to move to Weimar and become engaged in the social and intellectual life of the city. She met with great success there, both as a writer and as a hostess, and her salon became the center of the intellectual life of the city with such luminaries as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Schlegel brothers Karl Wilhelm Friedrich and August Wilhelm , and Christoph Martin Wieland regularly in attendance.

At the same time, Johanna and Arthur never got along well: she found him morose and overly critical and he regarded her as a superficial social climber. The tensions between them reached its peak when Arthur was 30 years old, at which time she requested that he never contact her again.

Schultz insisted that Schopenhauer begin his study of philosophy by reading the works of Immanuel Kant and Plato , the two thinkers who became the most influential philosophers in the development of his own mature thought. Schopenhauer also began a study of the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling , of whose thought he became deeply critical. Schopenhauer transferred to Berlin University in for the purpose of attending the lectures of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who at the time was considered the most exciting and important German philosopher of his day.

Schopenhauer became disillusioned with both thinkers, and with university intellectual life in general, which he regarded as unnecessarily abstruse, removed from genuine philosophical concerns, and compromised by theological agendas.

There Schopenhauer wrote his doctoral dissertation, The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason , in which he provided a systematic investigation of the principle of sufficient reason. He regarded his project as a response to Kant who, in delineating the categories, neglected to attend to the forms that ground them.

The following year Schopenhauer settled in Dresden, hoping that the quiet bucolic surroundings and rich intellectual resources found there would foster the development of his philosophical system. Schopenhauer also began an intense study of Baruch Spinoza , whose notion of natura naturans , a notion that characterized nature as self-activity, became key to the formulation of his account of the will in his mature system. During his time in Dresden, he wrote On Vision and Colors , the product of his collaboration with Goethe.

He published his major work that expounded this system, The World as Will and Representation , in December of with a publication date of In , Schopenhauer was awarded permission to lecture at the University of Berlin.

He deliberately, and impudently, scheduled his lectures during the same hour as those of G. Hegel, who was the most distinguished member of the faculty. Although he remained on the list of lecturers for many years in Berlin, no one showed any further interest in attending his lectures, which only fueled his contempt for academic philosophy.

Not only did he suffer from the lack of recognition that his groundbreaking philosophy received, but he also suffered from a variety illnesses. He attempted to make a career as a translator from French and English prose, but these attempts also met with little interest from the outside world. During this time Schopenhauer also lost a lawsuit to the seamstress Caroline Luise Marguet that began in and was settled five years later. Marguet accused Schopenhauer of beating and kicking her when she refused to leave the antechamber to his apartment.

As a result of the suit, Schopenhauer had to pay her 60 thalers annually for the rest of her life. In , Schopenhauer fled Berlin because of a cholera epidemic an epidemic that later took the life of Hegel and settled in Frankfurt am Main, where he remained for the rest of his life. In Frankfurt, he again became productive, publishing a number of works that expounded various points in his philosophical system. He published On the Will in Nature in , which explained how new developments in the physical sciences served as confirmation of his theory of the will.

In , he received public recognition for the first time, a prize awarded by the Norwegian Academy, on his essay , On the Freedom of the Human Will. In he submitted an essay entitled On the Basis of Morality to the Danish Academy, but was awarded no prize even though his essay was the only submission.

In , he published both essays under the title, The Fundamental Problems of Morality , and included an introduction that was little more than a scathing indictment of Danish Academy for failing to recognize the value of his insights.

Schopenhauer was able to publish an enlarged second edition to his major work in , which more than doubled the size of the original edition. The new expanded edition earned Schopenhauer no more acclaim than the original work.

He published a work of popular philosophical essays and aphorisms aimed at the general public in under the title, Parerga and Paralipomena Secondary Works and Belated Observations.

The review excited an interest in German readers, and Schopenhauer became famous virtually overnight. Schopenhauer spent the rest of his life reveling in his hard won and belated fame, and died in Perhaps most surprising for the first time reader of Schopenhauer familiar with the writings of other German idealists would be the clarity and elegance of his prose.

Schopenhauer was an avid reader of the great stylists in England and France, and he tried to emulate their style in his own writings. Schopenhauer often charged more abstruse writers such as Fichte and Hegel with deliberate obfuscation, describing the latter as a scribbler of nonsense in his second edition of The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Even his dissertation, which he wrote before he recognized the role of the will in metaphysics, was incorporated into his mature system. For this reason, his thought has been arranged thematically rather than chronologically below. In addition, he accepts the results of the Transcendental Aesthetic, which demonstrate the truth of transcendental idealism.

Like Kant, Schopenhauer argues that the phenomenal world is a representation, i. At the same time, Schopenhauer simplifies the activity of the Kantian cognitive apparatus by holding that all cognitive activity occurs according to the principle of sufficient reason, that is, that nothing is without a reason for being.

The principle of sufficient reason of becoming, which regards empirical objects, provides an explanation in terms of causal necessity: any material state presupposes a prior state from which it regularly follows. The principle of sufficient reason of knowing, which regards concepts or judgments, provides an explanation in terms of logical necessity: if a judgment is to be true, it must have a sufficient ground.

Regarding the third branch of the principle, that of space and time, the ground for being is mathematical: space and time are so constituted that all their parts mutually determine one another. Finally, for the principle regarding willing, we require as a ground a motive, which is an inner cause for that which it was done. Every action presupposes a motive from which it follows by necessity.

Schopenhauer argues that prior philosophers, including Kant, have failed to recognize that the first manifestation and second manifestations are distinct, and subsequently tend to conflate logical grounds and causes. Thus Schopenhauer was confident that his dissertation not only would provide an invaluable corrective to prior accounts of the principle of sufficient reason, but would also allow every brand of explanation to acquire greater certainty and precision.

For Kant, the understanding always operates by means of concepts and judgments, and the faculties of understanding and reason are distinctly human at least regarding those animate creatures with which we are familiar. Schopenhauer, however, asserts that the understanding is not conceptual and is a faculty that both animals and humans possess. Schopenhauer incorporates his account of the principle of sufficient reason into the metaphysical system of his chief work, The World as Will and Representation.

As we have seen, Schopenhauer, like Kant, holds that representations are always constituted by the forms of our cognition. However, Schopenhauer points out that there is an inner nature to phenomena that eludes the principle of sufficient reason. For example, etiology the science of physical causes describes the manner in which causality operates according to the principle of sufficient reason, but it cannot explain the natural forces that underlie and determine physical causality.

At the same time, there is one aspect of the world that is not given to us merely as representation, and that is our own bodies. We are aware of our bodies as objects in space and time, as a representation among other representations, but we also experience our bodies in quite a different way, as the felt experiences of our own intentional bodily motions that is, kinesthesis. Since we have insight into what we ourselves are aside from representation, we can extend this insight to every other representation as well.

Thus, Schopenhauer concludes, the innermost nature [ Innerste ], the underlying force, of every representation and also of the world as a whole is the will, and every representation is an objectification of the will. In short, the will is the thing in itself.

Separate from the other traditional arts, he maintains that music is the most metaphysical art and is on a subjective, feeling-centered parallel with the Platonic Ideas themselves. Just as the Platonic Ideas contain the patterns for the types of objects in the daily world, music formally duplicates the basic structure of the world: the bass notes are analogous to inorganic nature, the harmonies are analogous to the animal world, and the melodies are analogous to the human world.

The sounding of the bass note produces more subtle sonic structures in its overtones; similarly, inanimate nature produces animate life. His view might seem extravagant upon first hearing, but it rests on the thought that if one is to discern the truth of the world, it might be advantageous to apprehend the world, not exclusively in scientific, mechanical and causal terms, but rather in aesthetic, analogical, expressive and metaphorical terms that require a sense of taste for their discernment.

If the form of the world is best reflected in the form of music, then the most philosophical sensibility will be a musical sensibility. With respect to the theme of achieving more peaceful and transcendent states of mind, Schopenhauer believes that music achieves this by embodying the abstract forms of feelings, or feelings abstracted from their particular everyday circumstances.

By expressing emotion in this detached way, music allows us to apprehend the nature of the world without the frustration involved in daily life, and hence, in a mode of aesthetic awareness akin to the tranquil philosophical contemplation of the world.

This deficiency motivates a shift from musical, or aesthetic, awareness to moral awareness. As many medieval Christians once assumed, Schopenhauer believed that we should minimize our fleshly desires, since moral awareness arises through an attitude that transcends our bodily individuality. Indeed, he states explicitly that his views on morality are entirely in the spirit of Christianity, as well as being consistent with the doctrines and ethical precepts of the sacred books of India WWR , Section Among the precepts he respects are those prescribing that one treat others as kindly as one treats oneself, that one refrain from violence and take measures to reduce suffering in the world, that one avoid egoism and thoughts directed towards revenge, and that one cultivate a strong sense of compassion.

Such precepts are not unique to Christianity; Schopenhauer believes that they constitute most religiously-grounded moral views. Far from being immoralistic, his moral theory is written in the same vein as those of Immanuel Kant — and John Stuart Mill — , that advocate principles that are in general accord with Christian precepts. Within the moral realm, this quest for transcendence leads him to maintain that once we recognize each human as being merely an instance and aspect of the single act of Will that is humanity itself, we will appreciate that the difference between the tormentor and the tormented is illusory, and that in fact, the very same eye of humanity looks out from each and every person.

According to the true nature of things, each person has all the sufferings of the world as his or her own, for the same inner human nature ultimately bears all of the pain and all of the guilt. Thus, with the consciousness of humanity in mind, a moral consciousness would realize that it has upon and within itself, the sins of the whole world WWR , Sections 63 and Not only, then, does the specific application of the principle of sufficient reason fragment the world into a set of individuals dispersed through space and time for the purposes of attaining scientific knowledge, this rationalistic principle generates the illusion that when one person does wrong to another, that these two people are essentially separate and private individuals.

Just as the fragmentation of the world into individuals is necessary to apply the relationship of causality, where A causes B and where A and B are conceived to be two independent objects, this same cognitive fragmentation leads us to conceive of the relationships between people on a model where some person P acts upon person Q , where P and Q are conceived as two independent individuals.

The conditions for scientific knowledge thus have a negative moral impact, because they lead us to regard each other as individuals separate and alien to one another. By compassionately recognizing at a more universal level that the inner nature of another person is of the same metaphysical substance as oneself, one arrives at a moral outlook with a more concrete philosophical awareness.

It is to feel directly the life of another person in an almost magical way; it is to enter into the life of humanity imaginatively, such as to coincide with all others as much as one possibly can. It is to imagine equally, and in full force, what it is like to be both a cruel tormentor and a tormented victim, and to locate both opposing experiences and characters within a single, universal consciousness that is the consciousness of humanity itself. Just as music embodies the emotional tensions within the world in an abstracted and distanced manner, and thus affords a measure of tranquillity by presenting a softened, sonic image of the daily world of perpetual conflict, a measure of tranquillity also attends moral consciousness.

Negatively considered, moral consciousness delivers us from the unquenchable thirst that is individuated human life, along with the unremitting oscillation between pain and boredom. One becomes like the steadfast tree, whose generations of leaves fall away with each passing season, as does generation after generation of people Homer, Iliad , Book VI.

This fatalistic realization is a source of comfort and tranquillity for Schopenhauer, for upon becoming aware that nothing can be done to alter the course of events, he finds that the struggle to change the world quickly loses its force see also WWR , Section Schopenhauer denies the common conception that being free entails that, for any situation in which we acted, we could always have acted differently.

He augments this denial, however, with the claim that each of us is free in a more basic sense. Just as individual trees and individual flowers are the multifarious expressions of the Platonic Ideas of tree and flower, each of our individual actions is the spatio-temporal manifestation of our respective innate or intelligible character.

Character development thus involves expanding the knowledge of our innate individual tendencies, and a primary effect of this knowledge and self-realization is greater peace of mind WWR , Section Moreover, since our intelligible character is both subjective and universal, its status coordinates with that of music, the highest art.

According to Schopenhauer, aesthetic perception offers only a short-lived transcendence from the daily world. Neither is moral awareness the ultimate state of mind, despite its comparative tranquillity in contrast to the daily world of violence.

Schopenhauer believes that a person who experiences the truth of human nature from a moral perspective — who appreciates how spatial and temporal forms of knowledge generate a constant passing away, continual suffering, vain striving and inner tension — will be so repulsed by the human condition and by the pointlessly striving Will of which it is a manifestation, that he or she will lose the desire to affirm the objectified human situation in any of its manifestations. The result is an attitude of denial towards our will-to-live that Schopenhauer identifies with an ascetic attitude of renunciation, resignation, and will-lessness, but also with composure and tranquillity.

Moral consciousness and virtue thus give way to the voluntary poverty and chastity of the ascetic. Before we can enter the transcendent consciousness of heavenly tranquillity, we must pass through the fires of hell and experience a dark night of the soul, as our universal self battles our individuated and physical self, as pure knowledge opposes animalistic will, and as freedom struggles against nature.

One can maintain superficially that no contradiction is involved in the act of willing to deny the will-to-live, because one is not saying that Will is somehow destroying itself, but only saying that a more universal manifestation of Will is overpowering a less universal manifestation, namely, the natural, individuated, physically-embodied aspect.

Within this opposition, it does remain that Will as a whole is set against itself according to the very model Schopenhauer is trying to transcend, namely, the model wherein one manifestation of Will fights against another manifestation, like the divided bulldog ant.

This in itself may not be a problem, but the location of the tormented and self-crucifying ascetic consciousness at the penultimate level of enlightenment is paradoxical, owing to its high degree of inner ferocity. Even though this ferocity occurs at a reflective and introspective level, we have before us a spiritualized life-and-death struggle within the ascetic consciousness.

It is a struggle against the close-to-unavoidable tendency to apply the principle of sufficient reason for the purpose of attaining practical knowledge — an application that for Schopenhauer has the repulsive side-effect of creating the illusion, or nightmare, of a world permeated with endless conflict.

When the ascetic transcends human nature, the ascetic resolves the problem of evil: by removing the individuated and individuating human consciousness from the scene, the entire spatio-temporal situation within which daily violence occurs is removed.

In a way, then, the ascetic consciousness can be said symbolically to return Adam and Eve to Paradise, for it is the very quest for knowledge i. This amounts to a self-overcoming at the universal level, where not only physical desires are overcome, but where humanly-inherent epistemological dispositions are overcome as well.

At the end of the first volume of The World as Will and Representation , Schopenhauer intimates that the ascetic experiences an inscrutable mystical state of consciousness that looks like nothing at all from the standpoint of ordinary, day-to-day, individuated and objectifying consciousness.

This advocacy of mystical experience creates a puzzle: if everything is Will without qualification, then it is unclear where to locate the will-less mystical state of mind. It cannot be the latter, because individuated consciousness is the everyday consciousness of desire, frustration and suffering.

Neither can it be located at the level of Will as it is in itself, because the Will is a blind striving, without knowledge, and without satisfaction. So in terms of its degree of generality, the mystical state of mind seems to be located at a level of universality comparable to that of Will as thing-in-itself.

Since he characterizes it as not being a manifestation of Will, however, it appears to be keyed into another dimension altogether, in total disconnection from Will as the thing-in-itself. In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation , he addresses the above complication, and qualifies his claim that the thing-in-itself is Will. He concludes that mystical experience is only a relative nothingness, that is, when it is considered from the standpoint of the daily world, but that it is not an absolute nothingness, as would be the case if the thing-in-itself were Will in an unconditional sense, and not merely Will to us.

In light of this, Schopenhauer sometimes expresses the view that the thing-in-itself is multidimensional, and although the thing-in-itself is not wholly identical to the world as Will, it nonetheless includes as its manifestations, the world as Will and the world as representation.

From a scholarly standpoint, it implies that interpretations of Schopenhauer that portray him as a Kantian who believes that knowledge of the thing-in-itself is impossible, do not fit with what Schopenhauer himself believed. It also implies that interpretations that portray him as a traditional metaphysician who claims that the thing-in-itself is straightforwardly, wholly and unconditionally Will, also stand in need of qualification.

As mentioned above, we can see this fundamental reliance upon the subject-object distinction reflected in the very title of his book, The World as Will and Representation , that can be read as, in effect, The World as Subjectively and Objectively Apprehended. It can be understood alternatively as an expression of the human perspective on the world, that, as an embodied individual, we typically cannot avoid.

His view also allows for the possibility of absolute knowledge by means of mystical experience. Schopenhauer also implicitly challenges the hegemony of science and other literalistic modes of expression, substituting in their place, more musical and literary styles of understanding. His recognition — at least with respect to a perspective we typically cannot avoid — that the universe appears to be a fundamentally irrational place, was also appealing to 20 th century thinkers who understood instinctual forces as irrational, and yet guiding, forces underlying human behavior.

Schopenhauer then expanded on what this Will actually was, deriving his arguments from the main traditions of Western Philosophy , but arriving at a kind of Voluntarism almost entirely consistent with the Hindu Vedanta traditions in the Upanishads , which he knew well. He believed that the "will-to-life" the force driving man to remain alive and to reproduce was the inner content and the driving force of the world, and that Will and desire were ontologically prior to thought and the intellect and even to being.

He saw even falling in love as just an unconscious element of this drive to reproduce, and enumerated some rather suspect to modern tastes laws of attraction e. He argued that the pursuit of happiness and the production of children are two radically separate ideas that love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one in the interests of the propagation of the species. In partial defense of love , though, he reasoned that only a force as strong as love could force us into this role, and that we actually have no choice but to fall in love, as biology is stronger than reason.

He held that this wild and powerful drive to survive and reproduce is essentially what causes suffering and pain in the world, and that the only way to escape the suffering inherent in a world of Will was through art. He concluded that discursive thought such as philosophy and Logic could neither touch nor transcend the nature of desire or Will, and he certainly considered philosophy and Logic as less important than art, loving kindness and certain forms of religious discipline.

In Schopenhauer's Aesthetics , the aesthetic viewpoint is more objective than the scientific viewpoint precisely because it separates the intellect from the Will in the form of art. He held that the body is merely an extension of the Will, while art is a spontaneous act or pre-determined idea which the artist has in mind before any attempts at creation, and therefore cannot be linked to either the body or the intellect. Unlike science, then, art effectively goes beyond the realm of sufficient reason.

Schopenhauer's idea of genius was an artist so fixed on his art that he neglected the "business of life" which, for Schopenhauer, meant only the domination of the evil and painful Will.

His identification of three primary moral incentives was a central aspect of his mission: compassion the genuine motivator to moral expression , and malice and egoism the corruptors of moral incentives. He saw love as in the Ancient Greek concept of "agape" , rather than erotic love as an immensely powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world. Several of his ideas show the influence of Buddhism and its Four Noble Truths.

By his own admission, he did not give much thought to politics , but in general he was in favor of limited government , which would leave men free to work out their own salvation.

He also subscribed to the Contractarianism of Thomas Hobbes , and deemed the state and state violence necessary to check the destructive tendencies innate to our species. He had a distinctly hierarchical conception of the races , attributing civilizational primacy to the northern white races due to what he saw as their sensitivity and creativity.

Having said that, he was also adamantly against differing treatment of races, and was fervently anti-slavery. Schopenhauer influenced Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and inspired our guest, prominent psychiatrist Irv Yalom, to write the novel The Schopenhauer Cure. What truths, metaphysical or psychological, can we wrest from Schopenhauer's gloomy vision? Schopenhauer was part of the school known as German idealism, following Kant and Hegel. One of his main themes was that the world was idea, that is, it is a mental phenomenon that everyone shares.

Schopenhauer thought we could know the nature of reality, the will, because we are part of it. He was greatly influenced by Indian religion and philosophy. He thought the will was exemplified in cycles of boredom and desire. Even so, he played the flute everyday after dinner. How was Schopenhauer's pessimism related to his philosophical views?

Yalom tells us that Schopenhauer was a negative person throughout his life. Does the world being an illusion entail that life is suffering? Either way, the idea that the world is a mere illusion is unsettling. Yalom points out several similarities between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: both embraced the inevitability of death, neither had religious beliefs, both closely examined life.

Ken poses the question: suppose we take Schopenhauer's advice seriously and try to quell all our desires? If the first humans overcame all their desires, then the species would have ended.