Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was the great pessimist of Western philosophy, and its most readable stylist since Hume. He took Immanuel Kant‘s distinction between appearance and the thing-in-itself and gave the thing-in-itself a name: Will — a blind, aimless, insatiable striving that underlies everything from gravity to human desire. Because the Will can never be satisfied, life is essentially suffering, swinging “like a pendulum between pain and boredom”. The only escapes are art, which suspends desire for a moment; compassion, which recognizes that the suffering other is, at bottom, oneself; and the saint’s renunciation of the will altogether — teachings in which he saw the wisdom of the Upanishads and the Buddha confirmed. Ignored for thirty years, he became in his last decade the most famous philosopher in Europe, and shaped Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Freud, Thomas Mann, Hardy, Proust, Borges, Beckett and Wittgenstein.

Life

Danzig, Hamburg, and a merchant’s education

Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788 in Danzig (Gdańsk), into a wealthy merchant family of Dutch descent. His father, Heinrich Floris, a cosmopolitan admirer of Voltaire and England, chose the name Arthur because it was the same in all European languages. When Prussia annexed Danzig in 1793, the family moved to Hamburg rather than live under Prussian rule. His mother, Johanna, was lively, sociable and literary.

His father intended him for commerce. To tempt him away from the classical education he craved, he offered the fifteen-year-old a two-year tour of Europe — on condition that he then become a merchant’s apprentice. Arthur saw England (where he spent months at a boarding school in Wimbledon and came to love English), France, Switzerland and Austria. He was struck by suffering everywhere — the galley slaves at Toulon, chained to their benches for life, haunted him — and later wrote that at seventeen he was “gripped by the misery of life as was the Buddha in his youth when he saw sickness, old age, pain and death”.

He began his apprenticeship. In 1805 his father died, probably a suicide, falling from a warehouse into a canal. Arthur continued in commerce for two years out of loyalty, then his mother freed him: she moved to Weimar, opened a celebrated salon frequented by Goethe, and became a successful novelist. Arthur went back to school, studied Latin and Greek at furious speed, and entered university.

Kant, Plato and the Upanishads

At Göttingen (1809) he studied medicine, then philosophy under the sceptic G. E. Schulze, who advised him to read Plato and Kant before anything else. At Berlin (1811–13) he heard Fichte and was disgusted. His doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), analysed the four kinds of explanation (causes, reasons, mathematical grounds, motives). His mother asked whether it was a book for pharmacists; he answered that it would still be read when hers were in the lumber-room; she retorted that the whole edition of his would still be in the shops.

In Weimar he quarrelled bitterly with his mother — they separated in 1814 and never saw each other again — but met Goethe, who invited him to collaborate on the theory of colours; Schopenhauer wrote On Vision and Colours (1816), which partly disagreed with the master. And in Weimar the orientalist Friedrich Majer introduced him to Indian thought. He read the Upanishads in Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin translation from a Persian version, the Oupnek’hat (1801–02), and found in them, he said, “the consolation of my life, and it will be the consolation of my death”.

The masterpiece no one read

In Dresden, from 1814 to 1818, he wrote The World as Will and Representation. He told his publisher that it was “not a rehash of old ideas, but a highly coherent structure of original thought”. It was published in December 1818 (dated 1819). It sold almost nothing; sixteen years later the publisher pulped most of the edition.

In 1820 he became a lecturer at Berlin, and deliberately scheduled his lectures at the same hour as those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the most famous philosopher in Germany. Five students came; the lectures were cancelled. He despised Hegel for the rest of his life as a “charlatan” writing “the most nonsensical scribbling”.

Other episodes: a lawsuit after he pushed a seamstress, Caroline Marquet, down the stairs for talking outside his door — he was ordered to pay her a quarterly pension for twenty years; on her death certificate he wrote obit anus, abit onus (“the old woman dies, the burden departs”). He had love affairs but never married.

Frankfurt and late fame

In 1831, fleeing a cholera epidemic — which killed Hegel — he settled in Frankfurt am Main, where he lived for the rest of his life in rooms on the river, following a strict routine: writing in the morning, flute-playing (Rossini), lunch at the Englischer Hof, a brisk two-hour walk with his poodle (successively called Atma, Sanskrit for “soul”, and Butz), reading the Times at the library, the theatre or a concert in the evening. He kept a gilded statue of the Buddha in his study.

He published On the Will in Nature (1836), The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (1841, including the prize-winning On the Freedom of the Will and the rejected On the Basis of Morality), and a much-expanded second edition of his masterpiece (1844), adding a second volume of supplements.

Fame came with Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), two volumes of essays and aphorisms — on the wisdom of life, on women, on noise, on reading, on suicide, on religion, on death — written in a lucid, witty, cantankerous style for a general reader. After 1853, when an English review (“Iconoclasm in German Philosophy”, by John Oxenford) made him known, admirers made pilgrimages to Frankfurt. He enjoyed it: “the comedy of my fame”. He died peacefully on 21 September 1860, sitting on his sofa.

The World as Will and Representation

The book has four parts, alternating two standpoints.

Book I: the world as representation

“The world is my representation” (Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung): this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being.

So the book opens. Following Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer argues that the world we know is representation (Vorstellung) — appearance for a subject, structured by the forms of the mind: space, time and causality (which he reduced from Kant’s twelve categories to one). There is no object without a subject. This world of individual things in space and time is governed by the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of individuation (principium individuationis). He compares it to the Indian veil of Māyā — see Māyā.

Book II: the world as will

But what lies behind the representation? Kant said the thing-in-itself is unknowable. Schopenhauer’s key insight: there is one thing we know from two sides — our own body. From outside, it is an object among objects; from inside, we experience it as willing — desire, striving, effort. Every act of will is a movement of the body; the body is the will made visible.

He then generalizes: what we find in ourselves as will is the inner nature of everything. The force that makes the stone fall, the magnet attract, the plant grow toward light, the animal hunt, and the human desire — all are expressions of one Will (see The Will). This Will is not a conscious mind or a personal God; it is blind, aimless striving, without goal or end, the thing-in-itself behind all appearance. Because it is the thing-in-itself, it lies outside space, time and causality, and so is one: the multiplicity of individuals belongs only to appearance.

The world is the Will’s self-objectification at different grades — from gravity through plants and animals to human beings — corresponding to Plato’s Ideas, the eternal forms of species.

The Will’s self-tormenting

Since the Will is one, and each of its manifestations strives against the others, the world is a battleground in which the Will consumes itself: “the Will must live on itself, since nothing exists besides it, and it is a hungry Will.” The ant, the hydra, the bulldog ant that fights its own severed tail — nature is a scene of endless devouring.

Book III: art

There is one temporary escape: aesthetic contemplation. In contemplating a work of art or a beautiful scene, we can for a moment cease to be individuals driven by desire and become a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge”, lost in the object, perceiving the eternal Idea it embodies. “Then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us on that first path of willing, comes to us of its own accord, and all is well with us.”

The arts form a hierarchy according to the grade of Idea they reveal: architecture (gravity and rigidity), landscape gardening, painting, sculpture, poetry, and at the summit tragedy, which shows “the unspeakable pain, the wretchedness and misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness” — and thereby leads us to resignation.

Music stands apart: it does not copy the Ideas but is “a copy of the Will itself” — the inner movement of all things, in sound. “Music is the melody to which the world is the text.” This idea profoundly influenced Wagner, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and later composers.

Genius is the capacity to remain in pure contemplation — “the most complete objectivity”.

Book IV: ethics — affirmation and denial of the will

The final book turns to life. Its verdict is the most famous pessimism in Western thought.

Life is suffering

All willing springs from lack — need, deficiency, pain. Satisfaction is brief and merely negative (the removal of pain); then comes a new desire, or boredom. “Life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and boredom.” Happiness is only the temporary absence of suffering. Every biography is a history of suffering.

If we were to conduct the most hardened and callous optimist through hospitals, infirmaries, operating theatres, through prisons, torture-chambers and slave-hovels, over battlefields and to places of execution… he too would in the end see what kind of world this meilleur des mondes possibles is.

Against Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz‘s “best of all possible worlds”, he argued this is “the worst of all possible worlds” — if it were even a little worse, it could not continue to exist at all.

Character and freedom

The will is free as thing-in-itself, but each individual’s character is fixed and unalterable; actions follow necessarily from character and motives. “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” His essay On the Freedom of the Will won a prize from the Royal Norwegian Society in 1839.

Compassion

How can there be morality, if each individual is a fragment of an insatiable Will in conflict with all others? Through compassion (Mitleid). In compassion, I feel another’s suffering as my own, as if the boundary between us vanished. And that, metaphysically, is true: the distinction between individuals belongs only to appearance; in itself, the Will is one. The compassionate person sees through the veil of Māyā and recognizes in the other’s suffering their own being — the Upanishadic tat tvam asi, “that thou art” (see Tat Tvam Asi — Salt in Water). Compassion is the sole foundation of morality: justice (not harming others) and loving-kindness (helping them). In On the Basis of Morality, he attacked Kant’s ethics of duty as theology in disguise. He extended compassion explicitly to animals, condemning their mistreatment and the Christian (and Kantian) view that we owe them nothing directly.

Denial of the will

The highest stage is not merely compassion but the denial of the will-to-live (Verneinung des Willens zum Leben): seeing through the whole of existence as suffering, the saint turns away from willing altogether — through chastity, voluntary poverty, fasting, humility — until the will is quieted. This is the “salvation” taught, Schopenhauer said, by Christian mystics (Meister Eckhart, Madame Guyon), by the Hindu ascetics, and by the Buddha. What remains is what, from the standpoint of the will, looks like nothing — Buddhist nirvāṇa:

We freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours, with all its suns and galaxies, is — nothing.

Suicide

Is suicide, then, the answer? No: the suicide wills life — he only rejects the conditions it has offered him; he affirms the will in the very act. Only renunciation, not destruction, of the individual frees one from the will.

Schopenhauer and the East

Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought. He believed his philosophy and the Upanishads and Buddhism coincided: the world as Māyā; the oneness behind individuality (tat tvam asi); suffering as the nature of existence; liberation through extinction of craving. He wrote that the Upanishads were “the most rewarding and elevating reading which is possible in the world” and predicted that Indian wisdom would transform Europe as the Renaissance’s recovery of Greek had. Modern scholars note his misunderstandings (he read the Upanishads as pessimist, which they are not), but his role as a bridge was immense. See Gautama Buddha and Ādi Śaṅkara.

Reception and influence

Nietzsche

The young Friedrich Nietzsche found The World as Will and Representation in a Leipzig bookshop in 1865 and read it “as if it had been written for me”. The Birth of Tragedy is built on Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of Will and music. Nietzsche’s whole later philosophy is a reversal of his teacher: where Schopenhauer said deny the will, Nietzsche said affirm it — the will to power, eternal recurrence, amor fati.

Wagner and music

Richard Wagner read the book in 1854 and called it “a gift from heaven”; Tristan und Isolde, with its longing for night and dissolution, is soaked in it. Brahms, Mahler and Schoenberg admired him.

Literature

Tolstoy called him “the greatest genius among men”; Turgenev, Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks, where Thomas Buddenbrook reads him before dying), Thomas Hardy, Proust, Conrad, Strindberg, Borges (“I believe that if the riddle of the universe can be stated in words, these words would be in his work”), Beckett.

Freud and psychology

His account of the will as an unconscious drive behind consciousness, of sexuality as “the focus of the will”, and of repression (the will’s refusal to let unwelcome ideas into consciousness) anticipated psychoanalysis; Freud acknowledged the resemblance, while claiming to have reached his ideas independently.

Philosophy

Wittgenstein read him in his youth and the Tractatus bears his marks (the metaphysical subject as the limit of the world). Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School admired his pessimism as a protest against suffering. Contemporary pessimists and antinatalists (David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been, 2006) are his heirs.

Critics

• Inconsistency: if the Will is the thing-in-itself, beyond knowledge, how can we know it is Will? Schopenhauer conceded that our knowledge of it is still a form of representation, only the most immediate.
• Hypocrisy: he preached renunciation and lived comfortably on inherited wealth, ate well, and lusted.
• Misogyny: his essay “On Women” is notoriously contemptuous.
• Nietzsche’s critique: pessimism is a symptom of exhausted life, a “will to nothingness”.
• Optimists reply that the absence of pain can be a positive good and that happiness is more than relief.

Key terms

Representation (Vorstellung)

The world as it appears to a subject, shaped by space, time and causality.

Will (Wille)

The thing-in-itself — blind, aimless, insatiable striving, one behind all appearances.

Principium individuationis

The principle of individuation — space and time, which make the one Will appear as many individuals.

Veil of Māyā

The illusion of separateness between individuals.

Will-less subject of knowledge

The state of pure aesthetic contemplation.

Using Schopenhauer in conversation

• On desire and happiness: life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom — the hedonic treadmill.
• On free will: “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
• On genius: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
• On music: music is a copy of the Will itself.