Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, which characterizes the phenomenal world as the manifestation of a blind and irrational noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism. Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788, in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) on Heiligegeistgasse (present day Św. Ducha 47), the son of Johanna Schopenhauer (née Trosiener; 1766–1838) and Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer (1747–1805), both descendants of wealthy German patrician families. While they came from a Protestant background, neither of them was very religious; both supported the French Revolution, were republicans, cosmopolitans and Anglophiles. When Danzig became part of Prussia in 1793, Heinrich moved to Hamburg —a free city with a republican constitution. His firm continued trading in Danzig where most of their extended families remained. Schopenhauer was educated at home until he was 16, when he was sent to a school in France. He then attended several universities in Germany, studying metaphysics and psychology under Gottlob Ernst Schulze and being influenced by the ideas of Plato and Immanuel Kant. He also attended lectures by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher in Berlin. He obtained his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1813 with a dissertation titled On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Schopenhauer began working on his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, in 1814. He completed it in 1818 and published it the following year. In it, he argued that the world is essentially a representation of an irrational will that strives for satisfaction without any purpose or goal. He claimed that human suffering is caused by the conflict between our will and the limitations imposed by the world. He proposed that the only way to escape this suffering is to renounce our desires and attain a state of detachment or resignation. He also discussed various topics such as aesthetics, ethics, religion, politics, psychology, and science. Schopenhauer hoped that his work would be recognized as a continuation and completion of Kant's philosophy, but he was largely ignored by his contemporaries. He failed to obtain an academic position and lived as a private scholar in various cities in Germany. He had a few disciples, such as Julius Frauenstädt and Philipp Mainländer, but he also made many enemies due to his arrogant and abrasive personality. He was involved in several lawsuits and disputes with his neighbors, publishers, and acquaintances. He never married or had children, but he had a succession of pet poodles that he named Atman (Sanskrit for "self"). He also had a brief affair with a 19-year-old seamstress named Caroline Richter in 1821. Schopenhauer revised his main work in 1844, adding a second volume that contained additional essays and clarifications. He also published several other works, such as On the Will in Nature (1836), On the Basis of Morality (1840), On the Freedom of the Will (1839), On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1847), Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), and Essays and Aphorisms (1851). He gained some fame and recognition in his later years, especially after the revolutions of 1848, when his pessimistic and anti-authoritarian views resonated with the public mood. He was admired by many writers, artists, and thinkers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Jorge Luis Borges. Schopenhauer died of respiratory failure on 21 September 1860, at the age of 72. He was buried at the Frankfurt Main Cemetery in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His tombstone bears the inscription "Arthur Schopenhauer". His estate was inherited by his sister Adele Schopenhauer, who was also a writer and a friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His works have continued to influence philosophy, literature, psychology, and other fields of human culture.