Biography
Arthur Schopenhauer (Danzig, now Gdańsk, Poland, February 22, 1788 – Frankfurt am Main, Germany, September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher whose work developed one of the most influential philosophical expressions of pessimism. Drawing on Immanuel Kant, Plato and Indian philosophical traditions, he placed the concept of the will at the center of his thought and explored the ways in which desire, suffering, art and compassion shape human existence.Schopenhauer was born into a prosperous merchant family. His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, hoped that his son would follow him into commerce and therefore gave him a cosmopolitan education. During his youth Arthur traveled extensively through Europe and spent periods in France and England, acquiring languages and becoming familiar with different cultures. Although his father intended him for a commercial career, Schopenhauer was increasingly drawn to literature, philosophy and intellectual life.
After his father's death in 1805, Schopenhauer eventually abandoned commerce and pursued formal studies. His mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, became a successful writer and established a well-known literary salon in Weimar, attended by some of the leading intellectual figures of the period, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Relations between mother and son, however, became increasingly difficult, and the two eventually became estranged.
In 1809 Schopenhauer entered the University of Göttingen, initially studying medicine before turning to philosophy. He later continued his studies at the University of Berlin, where he encountered the dominant currents of German philosophy. In 1813 he received his doctorate from the University of Jena with a dissertation published as "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason."
Between 1814 and 1818 Schopenhauer lived mainly in Dresden, where he developed the philosophical system that would define his career. The result was his major work, "The World as Will and Representation," first published in 1818. In it he argued that the world as human beings experience it is representation: reality as it appears to a perceiving subject. Behind this world of appearances, he identified a fundamental, irrational and ceaseless striving that he called the Will.
In 1820 Schopenhauer began lecturing at the University of Berlin as a Privatdozent. Confident in the originality of his philosophy, he scheduled his lectures at the same time as those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, then one of the most celebrated philosophers in Germany. Few students attended Schopenhauer's lectures, and his attempt to establish an academic career was unsuccessful. His opposition to Hegel and to the dominant tradition of German Idealism remained strong throughout his life.
During the following years Schopenhauer traveled again in Italy and lived for periods in Munich, Mannheim, Dresden and Berlin. His years in Berlin were also marked by a lengthy legal dispute arising from an altercation with a woman living in the same building. In 1831, as a cholera epidemic approached Berlin, Schopenhauer left the city. Hegel remained there and died during the epidemic later that year.
After a period in Mannheim, Schopenhauer settled permanently in Frankfurt am Main in 1833. There he lived largely apart from academic life and followed a highly regular routine of reading, writing, walking and playing the flute. He continued to follow European affairs closely and was an enthusiastic reader of newspapers, including The Times of London. He lived alone for much of this period and was particularly fond of his poodles.
Schopenhauer continued to develop and defend his philosophical system. In 1836 he published "On the Will in Nature." His essay "On the Freedom of the Will" received a prize from the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in 1839. His writings on freedom and morality were later brought together in "The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics." A substantially expanded second edition of "The World as Will and Representation" appeared in 1844.
For most of his life Schopenhauer received far less recognition than he believed his work deserved. This began to change after the publication of "Parerga and Paralipomena" in 1851, a collection of philosophical essays and reflections written in a more accessible style. During the final decade of his life his reputation grew considerably, and readers across Europe increasingly discovered his work.
At the center of Schopenhauer's philosophy is the idea that human beings are driven by an endless process of willing and desiring. Satisfaction is temporary: once one desire is fulfilled, another takes its place, while frustration produces suffering. For Schopenhauer, this perpetual striving explains much of the dissatisfaction inherent in human existence. His pessimism, however, was not simply the belief that everything is hopeless. He also explored ways in which people might temporarily or more profoundly escape the domination of the will.
Art was one such possibility. In aesthetic contemplation, he argued, people can momentarily free themselves from personal desire and experience the world without pursuing immediate interests. Music occupied a particularly important place in his philosophy because he regarded it as a uniquely direct expression of the underlying structure of reality. He also considered compassion the foundation of genuine morality, since compassion allows an individual to recognize the suffering of others beyond the boundaries of selfish interest.
Schopenhauer was also among the first major Western philosophers to engage seriously with philosophical and religious ideas from India, particularly the Upanishads and traditions associated with Hinduism and Buddhism. These influences strengthened his interest in suffering, the denial of selfish desire and the possibility of liberation from the restless striving of the will.
Arthur Schopenhauer died in Frankfurt on September 21, 1860, at the age of seventy-two. Recognition had come relatively late in his life, but his influence continued to grow after his death. His writings on the will, suffering, art, compassion and the forces underlying human behavior influenced later philosophers, writers, composers and artists and anticipated themes that would become important in modern psychology.
