Arthur Schopenhauer Biography and List of Works

German post-Kantian philosopher, who considered true philosophy as an art accessible to only a few intellectuals of the highest order. Schopenhauer believed that Kant's most important insight was that human knowledge depends not only on what the reality is but also on what our bodies - senses, nervous system, brains - can meditate. Schopenhauer's chief work is DIE WELT ALS WILLE UND VORSTELLUNG (The World as Will and Reprsentation, 1818). The Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper once observed that there were more 'good ideas' in Schopenhauer than in any other philosopher except Plato.

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
(from Studies in Pessimism, 1851)

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig (now Gdansk) the son of a rich merchant, who was married to Johanna Troisner, some 20 years younger than her husband. When Schopenhauer was 17, his father placed him in a business school in Hamburg. He was apprenticed to merchants in Danzig (1804) and Hamburg (1805-07), with the expectation that he would take over his father's business. However, after his father's death, Schopenhauer enrolled in a gymnasium in Gotha (1807). In 1809 he entered the University of Göttingen as a student in medicine, and received the degree of doctor of philosophy from the University of Jena in 1813. From 1814 to 1818 he lived in Dresden. At the University of Berlin he attended Johann Fichte's (1762-1814) lectures for two years but came to the conclusion that Fichte was a charlatan. In Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) he states: "Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are in my opinion not philosophers, for they lack the first requirement of a philosopher, namely a seriousness and honesty of enquiry. They are merely sophists who wanted to appear to be, rather than to be, something. They sought not truth but their own interest and advancement in the world."

The World as Will and Representation was born during Schopenhauer's residence in Dresden. It is written in a non-academic style, with an ironic, aristocratic tone. According to Schopenhauer, existence is the expression of an insatiable, pervasive will, generating a terrible world of conflict and suffering, senselessness, and futility. The 'will to live' perpetuates this cosmic spectacle. The goal of one, who sees through the illusions of life, is denial of this powerful will to live. Love serves the reproductive interests of the species and sexual impulse, the most powerful motive in human existence. This dark view of existence is also presented in his essay 'Über den Willen in der Natur' (1836), where the brutality in the natural world is proved by the studies of naturalists. It has been often said, that Sigmund Freud's theories owe much to Schopenhauer's writings of the primal 'will to live' and 'sexual impulse', and his speculation that homosexuality may have a natural developmental purpose anticipates Freud's idea of the 'life-instinct' and the centrality of libido in human life.

After a visit to Italy, Schopenhauer qualified as a private lecturer in the University of Berlin. At the beginning of 1820 Schopenhauer advertised a course of lectures to be given at the same time as George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's (1770-1831) but when Hegel attracted more student the course did not proceed. Schopenhauer's second visit to Italy lasted almost three years, but he returned to Berlin in 1825. An epidemic of cholera, during which Hegel died, drove him to Frankfurt am Main. Here, with the exception of a short stay at Mannheim, he spent the rest of his life.

For Schopenhauer Kant's distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal opened new insights into the foundations of ethics, the nature of art and music, and the true nature of religion - he was explicitly atheist, the first great philosopher of the West to be so. He argued that the noumenal and the phenomenal are the same thing understood in different ways. According to Schopenhauer, the will is the ultimate source of reality, which is essentially irrational. The will in itself is timeless and imperishable. Will manifests itself in two ways: as individual striving, and as Idea. Nature is indifferent to the individual; the species is favoured over the individual. The universe before the evolution of life was nothing but embodiment of will - there is as much will in a pool of water or a dead star as in a human being or human action. The will to exist is not itself this noumenal will but a manifestation of it in the world of phenomena.

"Just as the spraying drops of the roaring waterfall change with lightning rapidly, while the rainbow which they sustain remains immovably at rest, quite untouched by that restless change, so every Idea, i.e. every species of living beings remains entirely untouched by the constant changes of its individuals. But it is the Idea or the species in which the will-to-live is really rooted and manifests itself; therefore the will is really concerned only in the continuation of the species."

There is no hope of things becoming better; life itself is painful, manifested in aimlessness and dissatisfaction. Man must understand that all willing is in vain. In the essay 'Unser Verhalten gegen Andere betreffend' (1851) Schopenhauer states that 'in savage countries they eat another, in civilized they deceive another.' In 'Über die Wiber' (1851) the philospoher reveals his own bitter misogyny, due to the lifelong hostility between himself and his coldly rejecting mother.

Schopenhauer's PARERGA UND PARALIPOMENA became very popular. This collection of essays and aphoristic writings that look beneath the social 'masks', made him a fashionable philosopher, attracting such writers and philosophers as Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Proust, who saw in him a kindred spirit. The Greek terms in the title of the book suggest supplementary writings, matters left over. In these essays on a variety of topics Schopenhauer reveals himself to be a Romantic ironist, who repeatedly reminds humankind of its selfishness, hypocrisy, and malice.

Schopenhauers's reputation among academic philosophers has never been assured, and he has been read more for his aphoristic writings than for his metaphysics. Schopenhauer died from a heart attack in Frankfurt-on-Main on September 21, 1860. He was among the first philosophers to campaign against pseudo-profundity in philosophy, but his attack on Hegel, whom he called "a commonplace, loathsome, repulsive and ignorant charlatan," did not increase his reputation as a serious critic. Schopenhauer's philosophy was the biggest non-musical influence in Richard Wagner's (1813-1883) life. Music is according to Schopenhauer a direct manifestation of the noumenal. It is the voice of the metaphysical will. "When music suitable to any scene, action, event, or environment is played, it seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning," he wrote in The World as Will and Representation. In his taxonomy of the arts, architecture, dealing with natural elements, is the lowest grade of the will's objectification, and drama the highest. Music alone among the arts is non-representational. Schopenhauer's thinking is also seen in the works of Leo Tolstoy and Friedrich Nietzsche, who found a copy of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in a second-hand bookshop and did not close the book until he had finished it.

 "Schopenhauer is quite a crude mind, one might say. I.e. though he has refinement, this suddenly becomes exhausted at a certain level and then he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his comes to an end.
  One could say of Schopenhauer: he never searches his conscience."
(Ludwig Wittgenstein in Culture and Value, transl. by Peter Winch, 1979)

For further reading: Schopenhauer: His Life and Philosophy by Helen Zimmern (1932); Schopenhauer, Philosopher of Pessimism by Fredrick C. Copleston (1946); Schopenhauer by Parrick Gardiner (1963); Schopenhauer, ed. by Michael Fox (1980); Schopenhauer by David W. Hamlyn (1980); The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee (1982); The Philosophy of Schopenhauer in Its Intellectual Context by Arthur Hübscher (1989); Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy by Rudiger Safranski (1989); Schopenhauer by Christopher Janaway (1994) - Note: Schopenhauer's mother moved to Weimar after her husband's death and gained a reputation as a popular novelist.

Other translations:

• SELECTED ESSAYS, 1881
• THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA, 1883-86
• TWO ESSAYS, 1889
• SELECTED ESSAYS OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 1891
• ON THE WILL IN NATURE, 1894
• THE ART OF CONTROVERSY, 1896
• ON HUMAN NATURE, 1897
• ESSAYS, 1897
• COMPLETE ESSAYS, 1942
• SCHOPENHAUER: ESSAYS, 1951
• ON THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL, 1960
• PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, 1994

ÜBER DIE VIERFACHE WURZEL DES SATZES VOM ZUREICHENDEN GRUNDE, (1813)
SELECTED ESSAYS, (1881)