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(b Danzig, 22 Feb 1788; d Frankfurt, 21 Sept 1860). German philosopher. His view, expressed in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818), that music directly articulates ultimate reality had a profound influence on Wagner, notably in the drama, verbal imagery and role of the music in Tristan und Isolde.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), whose pessimistic philosophy was widely known in the late 19th century in Europe and the United States, held that ultimate reality wasnothing but senseless striving or will, having no divine origin and no historical end.
Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig on Feb. 22, 1788. His father, a successful Dutch businessman, had a taste for urbane living, travel, and bourgeois culture, while his mother aspired to the more exotic culture of writers and nonconformists. When Schopenhauer was 5, Danzig, formerly a free mercantile city, was annexed by Poland. As a consequence, his family moved to Hamburg, Germany, in search of a more congenial setting for his father's business. In 1797 Schopenhauer was sent to stay with a family in France, returning to Hamburg after 2 years to enter a private school. Later he became interested in literature, earning the disapproval of his father, who nonetheless gave him the choice of pursuing serious literary studies or traveling with the family for 2 years. Schopenhauer chose to travel.
His voyages over, Schopenhauer took a job as a clerk in a Hamburg merchant's office. That year, 1805, his father died, apparently a suicide. The mercantile world held only drudgery for young Schopenhauer, whose ambitions and desires were both unfocused and frustrated. Feeling constrained by a promise to his father, Schopenhauer remained at work until 1807, when he joyfully resigned in order to study Greek and Latin in a school at Gotha. Having enraged an unsympathetic instructor, he transferred to a school in Weimar, where his mother had already established herself as mistress of a literary salon frequented by Goethe and other notables. But Schopenhauer had earlier quarreled with his mother, whom he thought too free with her ideas and her favors. He therefore resided with his mentor, the philologist Franz Passow, who paid his tuition. Schopenhauer's studies went well, and in 1809, on acquiring a handsome legacy, he enrolled at the University of Göttingen. He studied mostly the sciences and medicine but eventually turned to philosophy.
Philosophical Studies
Schopenhauer's new passion for philosophy led him to the University of Berlin, where he hoped to cull the wisdom of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, then the foremost philosopher in Germany. He was disappointed in Fichte but remained at the university until 1813, when Prussia mobilized to expel the French after Napoleon's defeat. Seeing the dangers of staying in Berlin and having no heart for nationalistic fervor, Schopenhauer sought refuge in Rudolstadt. There he completed his doctoral dissertation, which he submitted successfully to the University of Jena. He published the dissertation at his own expense and then returned to Weimar. He met Goethe, who seemed sympathetic to his thinking. One fruit of their conversations was Schopenhauer's brief study Ü ber das Sehn und die Farben (1816; On Vision and Colors).
The World as Will and Idea
Schopenhauer's unhappy relations with his mother finally terminated in open hostility, and he moved to Dresden. By this time the central and simple idea of his philosophy had taken hold in his mind. The principal source of this idea was his own experience and moods, but the expression of it owed much to the philosophies of Plato and Immanuel Kant and the mystical literature of India. He foresaw that his reflections would eventually lift him above the absurd stresses and conflicts of his life, and he thought that ultimately his writings would usher in a new era not only in philosophy but also in human history. Whereas former philosophies had been parceled into schools and special problems, his own, as he envisaged it, would be a single, simple fabric. The simplest expression of this potent idea is probably the very title of the book he wrote at Dresden, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea). The world is necessarily present to a subject that perceives it; thus the world is "idea" or "representation." Yet the world is not created or constructed by the subject or the mind; its own nature is will, or blind striving. "My body and my will are one," and in the final analysis one person's will is indistinguishable from every other form of willing.
The book was printed by a reluctant publisher in 1818 and failed to gain a public. Nevertheless, with two books to his credit, Schopenhauer was given a lectureship in philosophy at the University of Berlin. At that time G. W. F. Hegel was the center of attention, and Schopenhauer decided to compete with him by lecturing at the same hour. But he addressed an empty room, and shortly his academic career was over.
Other Writings
In 1831 cholera was epidemic in Berlin, and Schopenhauer fled to Frankfurt, where he stayed for the rest of his life. In 1836 he published a study of contemporary science, Ü ber den Willen in der Natur (On the Will in Nature), showing that his philosophy was consistent with the sciences. In 1839 he won a prize from the Norwegian Scientific Society for an essay on freedom of the will. To this essay he added another, publishing them in 1841 as Die Beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics). During these years he revised and augmented the text of The World as Will and Idea, which was republished in 1844 with 50 new chapters. In 1847 he republished his dissertation, Ü ber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason). By now he was attracting some notice, but the fame he had predicted for himself was still only a dream.
Schopenhauer's style of life in his Frankfurt years has always both fascinated and puzzled his admirers. Though he wrote about the ultimate value of negating the will, he displayed unusual willfulness; though he extolled tranquility, he was always energetic; though he wrote savage diatribes against women, he could not forgo female company.
Parerga und Paralipomena
At last, in 1851, Schopenhauer published the book that brought him fame and followers. Titled Parerga undParalipomena, it was a collection of highly polished, insightful essays and aphorisms. Its style was probably the chief reason for the book's immediate success. Yet the ideas were important too, particularly the notion that will was primary over intellect. The pessimism that follows from such a notion was already in vogue, and Schopenhauer became its voice. Another reason for his fame was surely his appeal to the inner experience of moods and feelings, in contrast to the more traditional appeals to history, reason, authority, and objective evidence. His philosophy takes its source in "the selfsame unchangeable being which is before us." Life is all suffering, he said, but it can be reflected upon, and then it will be seen to be "nothing." Schopenhauer died on Sept. 21, 1860. By then he had countless followers, and he was idolized as a kind of savior.
Further Reading
Schopenhauer's own writings are readily available in translation. Particularly noteworthy is a selection of the essays and aphorisms from Parerga and Paralipomena, edited and translated by R. J. Hollingdale (1970), which includes an introduction containing biographical information. Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (1963), is a study of the philosopher's life and works. Schopenhauer's life is presented in detail in Helen Zimmern, Arthur Schopenhauer: His Life and Philosophy (1876), and in William Wallace, Life of Schopenhauer (1890). A more critical assessment of Schopenhauer's work is in Frederick Copleston, Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism (1946).
Additional Sources
Safranski, Reudiger, Schopenhauer and the wild years of philosophy, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Janaway, Christopher, Schopenhauer, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Simmel, Georg, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
For more information on Arthur Schopenhauer, visit Britannica.com.
Schopenhauer, Arthur (Danzig, 1788-1860, Frankfurt/Main), the radical philosopher of pessimism, who described himself as the only worthy successor to Kant, assimilated all the negative trends of a disillusioned age. Like Voltaire, he mocked at the optimism of Leibniz, writing in a highly readable style, which enabled him to draw a Dantesque vision of suffering, demonstrating ‘welcher Art dieser meilleur des mondes possibles ist’. He had other rare gifts which made him conscious, when speaking about the few men endowed with genius, that he was one of them. This explains his reference to the average product of the human species as ‘Fabrikware der Natur’. He became known as a misanthropist (Menschenverächter), and as such is second only to Nietzsche. Schopenhauer was a highly complex individualist. His personal background counted with him more than with most philosophers and encouraged a stubbornly introspective nature. He had a wealthy and cultured father, whose financial acumen led him, as bank director, to spend much time abroad, including a few months in England, which Schopenhauer used with such profit that he read The Times daily for the rest of his life. In 1805 his father committed suicide. His mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, moved to Weimar. After studying science and philosophy at Göttingen and Berlin universities, Schopenhauer graduated in 1813 at Jena with his dissertation Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde. A brief experience of the Wars of Liberation (see Napoleonic Wars) left him still more disillusioned with human nature. His mother, of whose social excesses Schopenhauer already disapproved, provoked a final rift, which contributed to his lifelong dislike of women.
Contact with Goethe, and in particular the reading of Goethe's Farbenlehre, stimulated Schopenhauer's treatise Über das Sehen und die Farben (1816), which he wrote in Dresden before he produced his principal work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819). Years later it was followed by Über den Willen der Natur (1836), which was extended by further variants appearing in 1841 as Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, containing two tracts, Über die Freiheit des Willens and Über das Fundament der Moral. Meanwhile he had qualified to lecture in Berlin (1820), where he hoped, by the force of his contrasting convictions, to deprive Hegel of his followers, an attempt which failed. He compensated himself by a ten-year stay in Italy before returning to Dresden and Berlin, which he left in haste for Frankfurt at the onset of the cholera epidemic which caused Hegel's death (1831). Thus he survived a great rival, but lived unnoticed and lonely, until the mid-century brought him recognition. His Parerga und Paralipomena of 1851 proved particularly popular, and contained the well-known Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit. In the early Frankfurt period his considerable artistic and linguistic talents enabled him to translate, from the Spanish, a work of his favourite writer, Balthasar Gracian's Hand-Orakel und Kunst der Weltklugheit. It was published posthumously.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung does not present a comprehensive philosophical system, but a view of life inspired by Kant and other unacknowledged influences, among them Fichte and Schelling, as well as by personal frustration. The work opens with the statement that the world is ‘meine Vorstellung’, Vorstellung being primarily conceived as sense perception. In defining the world (in analogy to Kant's thing-in-itself, Ding-an-sich) as Will (‘als Wille’), he challenges the concept of the individual free will as found in Schiller's adaptation of Kant, but sees it as a blind will, which makes man slave to his nature, his emotions, and sexual drives; in stressing their superior function over the human intellect he anticipates the psychology of the subconscious. The will is the master, the intellect the servant. In another analogy Schopenhauer illustrates the will as the blind man who carries everything, including the intellect, the lame man, on his shoulders. He conceives the will as an absolute and irrational concept asserting itself independently of time and space over and above inorganic and organic phenomena; it includes everything ‘was das Sein an sich jedes Dinges in der Welt und der alleinige Kern jeder Erscheinung ist’. Schopenhauer views happiness as an illusion and concedes that the most one can expect is boredom. The will thus constantly deceives and tricks humanity. Schopenhauer sees the most effective relief in art. But art can afford only temporary solace. The one fully effective means of coming to terms with life and the nothingness beyond death is to be found in the comprehension of the will. Schopenhauer was not the first to introduce Indian religious thought into German philosophy and literature, but he was the strongest advocate of the Buddhist principle of negation by contemplation. Self-denial and ascetic withdrawal effect the dissolution and extinction of the individual will, which in return instils into the mind a sense of perfect peace and serene happiness (Nirvāna). In German fiction H. Hesse's Siddhartha offers a concise example. Schopenhauer was convinced that humanity will go on exploiting life and accepting suffering until death puts an end to the painful process of living.
The appeal of Schopenhauer's work was mainly to sensitive, intelligent human beings seeking some explanation of the evil in life. Its considerable influence since the latter part of the 19th c. is particularly evident in the work of R. Wagner and Th. Mann. Schopenhauer's accent on Indian thought, moreover, harmonized with the advance of German Oriental studies. Perhaps the widest appeal emanated from his thesis that life was suffering and that the only consolation lay in compassion (Mitleid). But the subjective and introspective element prevails, reflected in a singularly lonely man who was at one neither with himself nor with the world. He bequeathed what material wealth he had to the relief of suffering.
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860) German philosopher. Born in Danzig of a rich, anglophile, and cosmopolitan family, Schopenhauer was educated in both France and Britain, and was fluent in European and classical languages. Initially intended for a career in business, Schopenhauer could only enter university after the death of his father. He joined the university of Göttingen in 1809 to study medicine but transferred his affections to philosophy, and in 1811 studied for a time in Berlin, where he conceived a profound dislike of Fichte and Schleiermacher. He received his doctorate for the work that became Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (1813, trs. as the Four-fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, 1888). The roots are causality or becoming, knowing, being, and acting. It is said that his mother, with whom his relations were dreadful, commented that a book entitled The Fourfold Root was presumably intended for apothecaries. His major work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818, trs. as The World as Will and Idea, 1886) was not an initial success, but gained him an assistant's position in Berlin. Here Schopenhauer famously lectured at the same times as Hegel, whom he regarded as a sophist and charlatan, but who was then at the height of his fame. Failing to dislodge Hegel, Schopenhauer ceased lecturing and finally retired to private life in 1831. He lived in Frankfurt, published various works, but only became widely known with his two volumes of aphorisms, Parerga und Paralipomena (roughly: comments and omissions) of 1851. In spite of his famous pessimism, Schopenhauer himself lived a moderately selfish and not altogether reclusive life, and seems to have indulged his share of the passions: he dined well at the Englischer Hof, had affairs, was reputed a brilliant and witty conversationalist, and read The Times of London every day. He was of a highly nervous and volatile disposition, and had to pay a quarterly allowance to an elderly seamstress whom he permanently injured by throwing downstairs (and on whose death certificate, which released him from the obligation, he wrote the remark ‘obit anus, abit onus’ (the old woman is dead, the burden departs). He finally achieved considerable fame in the last decade of his life.
Schopenhauer took from Kant the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, but unlike the majority of Kant's followers he clung on to the ‘thing in itself’, and, following one strand in Kant, identified it with will. The will thus stands outside space and time, and all reason and knowledge is subject to it. Only in aesthetic contemplation do we escape it. Schopenhauer notoriously allies this doctrine with an extreme pessimism, for conforming to the dictates of the will leads to nothing but illusion and suffering. Admiring the Upanishads and Buddhist philosophy of resignation, Schopenhauer extols a kind of extinction as the ultimate goal of the good life; indeed it is not entirely clear why literal suicide is not the best way out. Thus Nietzsche (Ecce Homo, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, Sec. 2) says that (along with Plato and Christianity) he requires no refutuation: the properly active Dionysian figure can just scent the decomposition.
Although Schopenhauer's attitude to the world has influenced many writers, his glamorization of despair has usually seemed somewhat forced. However, his understanding of the ways in which the mind is subservient to the life of the organism, and the way in which drives and desires become suppressed and distorted, mark a major anticipation of psychoanalytic doctrine perhaps of evolutionary psychology. He was one of the few philosophers whom Wittgenstein read and admired.
Bibliography
See biography by D. W. Hamlyn (1985); P. Gardiner, Schopenhauer (1963); B. Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1988); E. von der Luft, ed., Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of His 200th Birthday (1988).
Quotes:
"The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for."
"There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome --to be got over."
"In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods."
"After your death you will be what you were before your birth."
"Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth; every fresh morning a little youth; every going to rest and sleep a little dearth."
"The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped."
See more famous quotes by
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Western Philosophy 19th century philosophy |
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Arthur Schopenhauer
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Arthur Schopenhauer |
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September 21 1860 (aged 72) (Frankfurt-am-Main) |
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Metaphysics, aesthetics, phenomenology, morality, psychology |
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Samuel Beckett, Henri Bergson, Jorge Luis Borges, Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, Albert Einstein, Mihai Eminescu, Freud, Eduard von Hartmann, Hesse, Horkheimer, Jung, Suzanne Langer, Mann, Nietzsche, Popper, Gilbert Ryle, Tolstoy, Hans Vaihinger, Vivekananda, Maupassant, Proust, Wagner, Wittgenstein, Houellebecq, Schrödinger |
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Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher who believed that the will to live is the fundamental reality and that this will, being a constant striving, is insatiable and ultimately yields only suffering.
Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in Danzig (Gdańsk), Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and Johanna Schopenhauer, who were both descendants of wealthy German middle class mercantile families in the city located on the Baltic Sea. In 1793, when Danzig was annexed by Prussia, Schopenhauer's family moved to another mercantile harbour city, Hamburg, where in 1805, Schopenhauer's father died. (Some speculate he committed suicide.[citation needed]) Johanna, who was an author, moved to Weimar, then the centre of German literature, with Goethe and others. Because of a promise to pursue a business career, Schopenhauer remained in Hamburg. His disgust with this career, however, drove him away to join his mother in Weimar after only a year. He never got along with his mother; when the writer Goethe, who was a friend of Johanna Schopenhauer, told her that he thought her son was destined for great things, Johanna objected: she had never heard there could be two geniuses in a single family.
Schopenhauer became a student at the University of Göttingen in 1809. There he studied metaphysics and psychology under Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who advised him to concentrate on Plato and Kant. In Berlin, from 1811 to 1812, he had attended lectures by the prominent post-Kantian philosopher J. G. Fichte and the theologian Schleiermacher. Schopenhauer objected to Schleiermacher's assertion that the purpose of philosophy is to gain knowledge of God[1]. He also reacted against the Fichte's extreme idealism. Fichte claimed that the observing subject or Ego causes observed objects, whereas Schopenhauer contended that subject and object always exist together in a necessary correlation[2]. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Jena in absentia. In 1819 in Dresden his illegitimate child was born and died the same year [1][2]. In 1820, Schopenhauer became a lecturer at the University of Berlin; it was there that his opposition to G. W. F. Hegel began. Schopenhauer scheduled his own lectures to coincide with Hegel's, in an attempt to demolish student support of Hegel's philosophy. However, only five students turned up to Schopenhauer's lectures, and he dropped out of academia. He never taught at a university again. A late essay On University Philosophy expressed his resentment towards university philosophy.
In 1831, a cholera epidemic broke out in Berlin and both Hegel and Schopenhauer fled; but Hegel returned prematurely, caught the infection, and died a few days later. Schopenhauer moved south, and settled permanently in Frankfurt in 1833. There he remained for the next twenty-seven years, living alone except for a succession of pet poodles named Atma and Butz.
While in Berlin, Schopenhauer was named as a defendant in an action at law initiated by a woman named Caroline Marquet.[3] She asked for damages, alleging that Schopenhauer had pushed her. Knowing that he was a man of some means and that he disliked noise, she deliberately annoyed him by raising her voice while standing right outside his door. Marquet alleged that the philosopher had assaulted and battered her after she refused to leave his doorway. Her companion testified that she saw Marquet prostrate outside of his apartment. Because Marquet won the lawsuit, he made payments to her for the next twenty years.[4] When she died, he wrote, "Obit anus, abit onus" (The old woman dies, the burden is lifted).
Schopenhauer had a robust constitution, but in 1860 his health began to deteriorate. He died of heart failure on September 21 of that year at the age of 72.
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Schopenhauer called himself a Kantian, but hurled invective at several other contemporary German philosophers who had been influenced by Kant. These included Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling. He formulated a pessimistic philosophy that gained importance and support after the failure of the German and Austrian revolutions of 1848.
Schopenhauer's starting point was Kant's division of the universe into the phenomenal and the noumenal. Schopenhauer extended Kant's ideas to, in his opinion, gain greater understanding of the noumenal. For instance, he suggested that noumenal reality was singular because multiplicity was part of phenomenal experience. Some commentators suggest that Schopenhauer claimed that the noumenon was the same as that in us which we call Will. Other commentators, like Bryan Magee, suggest that he considered will to be the most immediate manifestation of the noumenon that we can experience.[citation needed]
A key aspect of Schopenhauer's thought is the investigation of what makes man less than reasonable. This force he calls "Wille zum Leben" or Will (lit. will-to-life), by which he means the forces driving man, to remain alive and to reproduce, a drive intertwined with desire. This Will is the inner content and the driving force of the world. For Schopenhauer, Will had ontological primacy over the intellect; in other words, desire is understood to be prior to thought, and, in a parallel sense, Will is said to be prior to being. These ideas have strong parallels to the notion of purushartha or goals of life in Vedanta Hindu / Buddhist thought, and Schopenhauer drew attention to these similarities.
In attempting to solve or alleviate the fundamental problems of life, Schopenhauer was a rare philosopher who considered philosophy and logic less important (or less effective) than art, certain charitable practices ("loving kindness", in his terms), and certain forms of religious discipline. Schopenhauer concluded that discursive thought (such as philosophy and logic) could neither touch nor transcend the nature of desire — i.e., Will. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer proposed that humans living in the realm of objects are living in the realm of desire, and thus are eternally tormented by that desire. The role of desire in Schopenhauer is similar to the role of Kāma, sensual gratification, which is treated as one of the goals of life relating to the second stage of life in the Hindu tradition.
For Schopenhauer, the aesthetic viewpoint is more objective than the scientific viewpoint precisely because it separates the intellect from the will in the form of art. The ability to view nature aesthetically is a telltale sign of a genius. An important metaphysical distinction that Schopenhauer makes involves the notion of the will versus art. In a sense, Schopenhauer claimed that the body is an extension of the will, while art is a spontaneous act which cannot be linked to either the body or the intellect. The intellect for Schopenhauer allows man to suffer because it brings the suffering or pain of the world into a more vivid consciousness. Logically speaking then, the more intellectually-inclined person suffers most.
Aesthetic contemplation for Schopenhauer translates into an immediate objectification of the will. He employs a
Platonic allegory to demonstrate that all existence is
ultimately futile since it can be fundamentally characterized by a want of satisfaction that
can never be attained. This want is otherwise known as happiness. Schopenhauer's
metaphysics is said by many to be essentially marked by an all-encompassing pessimism. This pessimism serves as a stark contrast to Schopenhauer's Romantic contemporaries in 19th century Germany. His contemporaries, who
include Hegel and Schelling, tended to employ a wide-ranging
Other notable ideas pertaining to Schopenhauer's metaphysics entail the notion of how art is conceived. Schopenhauer argued that art was a spontaneous, pre-determined idea which the artist has in mind before even attempting to create. Art, therefore, placed man above science and ultimately nature since it effectively goes beyond the realm of sufficient reason. Science, for Schopenhauer, shall be relegated to the boundaries of reason and, thus, the genius is precluded from entering its territory. Moreover, philosophy is not necessarily a pursuit of wisdom but, rather, it can be viewed as a means for interpreting the personal experiences of one's own life. Schopenhauer maintained that desire produces suffering and, thus, one ought to be wary of the torturous effects of hedonism.
This wild and powerful drive to reproduce, however, caused suffering or pain in the world. For Schopenhauer, one way to escape the suffering inherent in a world of Will was through art.
Through art, Schopenhauer thought, the thinking subject could be jarred out of their limited, individual perspective to feel a sense of the universal directly—the "universal" in question, of course, was the will. The contest of personal desire with a world that was, by nature, inimical to its satisfaction is inevitably tragical; therefore, the highest place in art was given to tragedy. Music was also given a special status in Schopenhauer's aesthetics as it did not rely upon the medium of representation to communicate a sense of the universal.
Schopenhauer believed the function of art to be a meditation on the unity of human nature, and an attempt to either demonstrate or directly communicate to the audience a certain existential angst for which most forms of entertainment—including bad art—only provided a distraction. A wide range of authors (from Thomas Hardy to Woody Allen) and artists have been influenced by this system of aesthetics, and in the 20th century this area of Schopenhauer's work garnered more attention and praise than any other.
According to Daniel Albright (2004: p39, n34), "Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself."
Schopenhauer's philosophy is similar to Buddhism in many ways. Buddhism teaches what it calls the Four Noble Truths:
Schopenhauer's philosophy asserts the first three of Buddhism's four truths in that it associates will with desire, appetite, and craving. However, instead of the fourth truth, Schopenhauer describes a twofold path. Denial of the will is attained by either:
Buddhist Nirvana is equivalent to the condition that Schopenhauer described as denial of the will. Occult historian[citation needed] Joscelyn Godwin stated, "It was Buddhism that inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner. This Orientalism reflected the struggle of the German Romantics, in the words of Leon Poliakov, to free themselves from Judeo-Christian fetters" (Arktos, p. 38). In opposition to Joscelyn Godwin's claim that Buddhism inspired Schopenhauer, the philosopher himself made the following statement in his discussion of religions[6]:
If I wished to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I should have to concede to Buddhism pre-eminence over the others. In any case, it must be a pleasure to me to see my doctrine in such close agreement with a religion that the majority of men on earth hold as their own, for this numbers far more followers than any other. And this agreement must be yet the more pleasing to me, inasmuch as in my philosophizing I have certainly not been under its influence (emphasis added). For up till 1818, when my work appeared, there was to be found in Europe only a very few accounts of Buddhism, - .
– ’’The World as Will and Representation’’, Vol. 2, Ch. 17
Buddhist philosopher Nishitani Keiji however sought to distance Buddhism from Schopenhauer.[citation needed]
While Schopenhauer's philosophy may sound rather mystical in such a summary, his methodology was resolutely empirical, rather than speculative or transcendental:
Philosophy... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.
– Parerga & Paralipomena, vol. i, pg. 106., trans. E.F.J. Payne
Also note:
This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.
– World as Will and Representation, vol. i, pg. 273, trans. E.F.J. Payne
Schopenhauer's moral theory proposed that of three primary moral incentives, compassion (Mitleid) was the genuine motivator to moral expression. He ruled the other two, malice and egoism, corrupt as moral incentives. The identification of compassion as the true moral incentive was a central aspect of Schopenhauer's mission, and associated his thoughts firmly with eastern thought.
Schopenhauer was perhaps even more influential in his treatment of man's psychology than he was in the realm of philosophy.
Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed by the tribulations of love, but Schopenhauer addressed it and related concepts forthrightly:
He gave a name to a force within man which he felt had invariably precedence over reason: the Will to Live (Wille zum Leben), defined as an inherent drive within human beings, and indeed all creatures, to stay alive and to reproduce.
Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental, but rather understood it to be an immensely powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world:
These ideas foreshadowed and laid the groundwork for Darwin's theory of evolution and Freud's concepts of the libido and the unconscious mind.[citation needed]
Schopenhauer's politics were, for the most part, a much diminished echo of his system of ethics (the latter being expressed in Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, available in English as two separate books, On the Basis of Morality and On the Freedom of the Will; ethics also occupies about one quarter of his central work, The World as Will and Representation). In occasional political comments in his Parerga and Paralipomena and Manuscript Remains, Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government. What was essential, he thought, was that the state should "leave each man free to work out his own salvation", and so long as government was thus limited, he would "prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of [his] fellow rats" — i.e., a monarch. Schopenhauer did, however, share the view of Thomas Hobbes on the necessity of the state, and of state violence, to check the destructive tendencies innate to our species. Schopenhauer, by his own admission, did not give much thought to politics, and several times he writes prideful boasts of how little attention he had paid "to political affairs of [his] day". In a life that spanned several revolutions in French and German government, and a few continent-shaking wars, he did indeed maintain his aloof position of "minding not the times but the eternities". He wrote many disparaging remarks about Germany and the Germans. A typical example is "For a German it is even good to have somewhat lengthy words in his mouth, for he thinks slowly, and they give him time to reflect." (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2, Ch. 12)
Schopenhauer possessed a distinctly hierarchical conception of the human races, attributing civilizational primacy to the northern "white races" due to their sensitivity and creativity:
Schopenhauer additionally maintained a marked metaphysical and political anti-Judaism. Schopenhauer argued that Christianity constituted a revolt against the materialistic basis of Judaism, exhibiting an Indian-influenced ethics reflecting the Aryan-Vedic theme of spiritual "self-conquest" as opposed to the ignorant drive toward earthly utopianism of the superficially this-worldly Jewish spirit:
As noted scholar Bernard Lazare commented in his work Antisemitism: Its History and Causes: "Schopenhauer had professed...the antisemitism consisting in combating the optimism of the Jewish religion, an optimism which Schopenhauer found low and degrading, and with which he contrasted Greek and Hindu religious conceptions." (cf. Maria Groener, "Schopenhauer und die Juden" (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, n.d., about 1920); Micha Brumlik (1991), "Das Judentum in der Philosophie Schopenhauers", in Marcel Marcus, et al. (eds), "Israel und Kirche heute").
Antisemitism scholar Paul Lawrence Rose states: "Nietzsche observed that 'Wagner's hatred of the Jews is Schopenhauerian', and indeed one of the Schopenhauerian elements that Wagner drew on was the concept of an 'Aryan Christianity' (adumbrated by Fichte)...
On Schopenhauer's anti-Semitism (which invokes the mythology of Ahasverus), see H.W. Brann, Schopenhauer und das Judentum (Bonn, 1975); A. Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans: From the Enlightenment to Imperial Germany (Philadelphia, 1979), pp. 321-327; N. Rotensreich, Jews and German Philosophy (New York, 1974), pp. 179-200. R. Hollinrake, Nietzsche, Wagner and the Philosophy of Pessimism (London, 1982), pp. 59, 129ff., appreciates the significance of Schopenhauer's anti-Semitism both for his general philosophy and for its influence on Wagner..." (from Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner, Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 372-373).
Before delving into Schopenhauer's famously misogynistic perspective on women, one should digest an important quotation, spoken to Richard Wagner's friend Malwida von Meysenbug, "I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man."[7]
Schopenhauer is famous for his essay "On Women" (Über die Weiber), in which he expressed his opposition to what he called "Teutonico-Christian stupidity" on female affairs. He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey", and opposed Schiller's poem in honor of women, Würde der Frauen. The essay does give two compliments however: that "women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than [men] are" and are more sympathetic to the suffering of others. However, the latter was discounted as weakness rather than humanitarian virtue.
In 1821 he fell in love with 19-year old opera singer Caroline Richter, called Medon, and had a relationship with her for several years. However he discarded marriage plans: "Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties", or even more drastic: "Marrying means, to grasp blindfold into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes." At the age of 43 in 1831, he again took interest in a younger woman, the 17-year old Flora Weiss, who rejected her older adorer. (ref: The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter pgs. 42-43)
The ultra-intolerant view of women contrasts with Schopenhauer's generally liberal views on other social issues: he was strongly against taboos on issues like suicide and homosexuality, and condemned the treatment of African slaves. This polemic on female nature has since been fiercely attacked as misogynistic. However, he did not hold a universally negative opinion of women; one should note that Schopenhauer had a very high opinion of Madame de Guyon, whose writings and biography he highly recommended.
In any case, the controversial writing has influenced many, from Nietzsche to 19th century feminists. While Schopenhauer's hostility to women may tell us more about his biography than about philosophy, his biological analysis of the difference between the sexes, and their separate roles in the struggle for survival and reproduction, anticipates some of the claims that were later ventured by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists in the twentieth century.[citation needed]
Schopenhauer would be classified nowadays as a hereditarian and eugenicist.‹The template Weasel-inline is being considered for deletion.› [weasel words] Schopenhauer believed that a person inherited level of intellect through one's mother and personal character through one's father. Schopenhauer quotes Horace's saying, "From the brave and good are the brave descended" (Odes, iv, 4, 29) and Shakespeare's line from Cymbeline, "Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base" (IV, 2) to reinforce his hereditarian argument (Payne, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, p. 519). On the question of eugenics, Schopenhauer wrote:
With our knowledge of the complete unalterability both of character and of mental faculties, we are led to the view that a real and thorough improvement of the human race might be reached not so much from outside as from within, not so much by theory and instruction as rather by the path of generation. Plato had something of the kind in mind when, in the fifth book of his Republic, he explained his plan for increasing and improving his warrior caste. If we could castrate all scoundrels and stick all stupid geese in a convent, and give men of noble character a whole harem, and procure men, and indeed thorough men, for all girls of intellect and understanding, then a generation would soon arise which would produce a better age than that of Pericles"
—Schopenhauer, ibid., p. 527
Schopenhauer was also one of the first philosophers since the days of Greek philosophy to address the subject of male homosexuality. In the third, expanded edition of The World as Will and Representation (1856), Schopenhauer added an appendix to his chapter on the "Metaphysics of Sexual Love". He wrote that only those who were too old or too young to reproduce strong, healthy children would resort to pederasty (Schopenhauer considered pederasty to be in itself a vice). He also wrote that homosexuality did have the benefit of preventing ill-begotten children. Concerning this he stated "...the vice we are considering appears to work directly against the aims and ends of nature, and that in a matter that is all important and of the greatest concern to her, it must in fact serve these very aims, although only indirectly, as a means for preventing greater evils." [8] Shrewdly anticipating the interpretive distortion on the part of the popular mind of his attempted scientific explanation of pederasty as a personal advocacy of a phenomenon Schopenhauer otherwise describes, in terms of spiritual ethics, as an "objectionable aberration", Schopenhauer sarcastically concludes the appendix with the statement that "by expounding these paradoxical ideas, I wanted to grant to the professors of philosophy a small favour, for they are very disconcerted by the ever-increasing publicization of my philosophy which they so carefully concealed. I have done so by giving them the opportunity of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty" (ibid., p. 567).
Schopenhauer said he was influenced by the Upanishads, Immanuel Kant, and Plato. References to Eastern philosophy and religion appear frequently in Schopenhauer's writing. As noted above, he appreciated the teachings of the Buddha and even called himself a Buddhaist[9] He said that his philosophy could not have been conceived before these teachings were available.
Concerning the Upanishads and Vedas, he writes in The World as Will and Representation:
If the reader has also received the benefit of the Vedas, the access to which by means of the Upanishads is in my eyes the greatest privilege which this still young century (1818) may claim before all previous centuries, if then the reader, I say, has received his initiation in primeval Indian wisdom, and received it with an open heart, he will be prepared in the very best way for hearing what I have to tell him. It will not sound to him strange, as to many others, much less disagreeable; for I might, if it did not sound conceited, contend that every one of the detached statements which constitute the Upanishads, may be deduced as a necessary result from the fundamental thoughts which I have to enunciate, though those deductions themselves are by no means to be found there.[10]
He summarised the influence of the Upanishads thusly: 'It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death!
Other influences were: Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Matthias Claudius, George Berkeley, David Hume, René Descartes.[citation needed]
Schopenhauer expressed his dislike for the philosophy of his contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel many times in his published works. The following quotation is typical:
If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.
– Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, pp 15-16
In his "Foreword to the first edition" of his work Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, Schopenhauer suggested that he had shown Hegel to have fallen prey to the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Schopenhauer thought that Hegel used deliberately impressive but ultimately vacuous verbiage. He suggested his works were filled with "castles of abstraction"[citation needed] that sounded impressive but ultimately contained no verifiable content. He also thought that his glorification of church and state were designed for personal advantage and had little to do with the search for philosophical truth.[citation needed] For instance, the Right Hegelians interpreted Hegel as viewing the Prussian state of his day as perfect and the goal of all history up until then.[citation needed] So, although Schopenhauer may have appeared vain and overly vociferous in his constant attacks on Hegel, they were not necessarily devoid of merit.
Schopenhauer's identification of the Kantian noumenon (i.e., the actually existing entity) with what he termed Will deserves some explanation. The noumenon was what Kant called the Ding an Sich, the "Thing in Itself", the reality that is the foundation of our sensory and mental representations of an external world. In Kantian terms, those sensory and mental representations are mere phenomena. Schopenhauer departed from Kant in his description of the relationship between the phenomenon and the noumenon. According to Kant, things-in-themselves ground the phenomenal representations in our minds. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, believed phenomena and noumena to be two different sides of the same coin. Noumena do not cause phenomena, but rather phenomena are simply the way by which our minds perceive the noumena, according to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. This is explained more fully in Schopenhauer's doctoral thesis, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
Schopenhauer's second major departure from Kant's epistemology concerns the body. Kant's philosophy was formulated as a response to the radical philosophical skepticism of David Hume, who claimed that causality could not be observed empirically. Schopenhauer begins by arguing that Kant's demarcation between external objects, knowable only as phenomena, and the Thing in Itself of noumenon, contains a significant omission. There is, in fact, one physical object we know more intimately than we know any object of sense perception. It is our own body.
We know our human bodies have boundaries and occupy space, the same way other objects known only through our named senses do. Though we seldom think of our bodies as physical objects, we know even before reflection that it shares some of their properties. We understand that a watermelon cannot successfully occupy the same space as an oncoming truck. We know that if we tried to repeat the experiment with our own bodies, we would obtain similar results. We know this even if we do not understand the physics involved.
We know that our consciousness inhabits a physical body, similar to other physical objects only known as phenomena. Yet our consciousness is not commensurate with our body. Most of us possess the power of voluntary motion. We usually are not aware of the breathing of our lungs or the beating of our hearts unless somehow our attention is called to them. Our ability to control either is limited. Our kidneys command our attention on their schedule rather than one we choose. Few of us have any idea what our livers are doing right now, though this organ is as needful as lungs, heart, or kidneys. The conscious mind is the servant, not the master, of these and other organs. These organs have an agenda which the conscious mind did not choose, and over which it has limited power.
When Schopenhauer identifies the noumenon with the desires, needs, and impulses in us that we name "Will," what he is saying is that we participate in the reality of an otherwise unachievable world outside the mind through will. We cannot prove that our mental picture of an outside world corresponds with a reality by reasoning. Through will, we know—without thinking—that the world can stimulate us. We suffer fear, or desire. These states arise involuntarily. They arise prior to reflection. They arise even when the conscious mind would prefer to hold them at bay. The rational mind is for Schopenhauer a leaf borne along in a stream of pre-reflective and largely unconscious emotion. That stream is will, and through will, if not through logic, we can participate in the underlying reality that lies beyond mere phenomena. It is for this reason that Schopenhauer identifies the noumenon with what we call our will.
See also:
Schopenhauer is thought to have influenced the following intellectual figures and schools of thought: Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Charles Darwin, Theodule Ribot, Ferdinand Tönnies, Eugene O'Neill, Max Horkheimer, C. G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, George Gissing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Karl Popper, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Wilhelm Busch, Dylan Thomas, Leo Tolstoy, Emil Cioran, Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, Joseph Campbell, Eduard von Hartmann, Phenomenalism, and Recursionism.[citation needed]
In the book Straw Dogs, John Gray upheld Schopenhauer as one of the few philosophers who has dedicated himself to studying Eastern philosophy as well as Western philosophy. The book argues against free will, and states
