Introducing: Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a great but relatively unknown German philosopher who only emerged with credit from people like Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche or Leo Tolstoy admitting to being strongly influenced by him. Most critics looked down on his works, mostly because they were considered too pessimistic. Maybe the fact that he was the first philosopher to be open about his explicit atheism also played a considerable part.

I first got my hands on a copy of his “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life” from “Parerga and Paralipomena” by pure chance when I was about 16. I could relate to most of his views which made me check out all his other stuff as well, and after studying his system for a while I was very impressed. I’d even go as far as saying it affected my life in some ways.

I plan to give an overview on his main work in four installments and try to arouse some interest for the notions of one of the most fascinating people I have ever come to know.

Hopefully making some sense while I’m at it...

What follows in this first part is just there to give you a little background information about his person and life so you better understand the deeper reasoning in later installments.

PS: There are several English translations of his stuff that vary in a lot of ways, even down to the title itself, so if you’re familiar with his work and notice some discrepancies in the terminology it doesn’t mean one of us must be wrong. I’m aware of some established translations but only use them as I see fit. Who’s to say mine is worse than anyone else’s?

Biography:

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 as the son of a wealthy merchant in Danzig, where he stayed five years until the assimilation of Danzig into the Prussian state made the father relocate to Hamburg, experiencing great financial losses. In 1797, Arthur was sent to one of his father’s  business partners in LeHavre for two years to learn French. From 1799 he attended a private school in Hamburg, where he soon started to feel unchallenged and begged his father to be sent to a better school. His father gave him the choice between a chance to obtain higher education or go on a journey through Europe for several years, since he wanted his son to make a career in business just like him. Young Schopenhauer chose the journey during which he learned English and where the first of his pessimistic perceptions and opinions found their way into his diaries.

Once back in Hamburg Schopenhauer started an apprenticeship as a merchant. That same year his father allegedly had an accident and died. It was never found out whether he died a natural death or whether he had committed suicide. Arthur’s relationship to his mother became worse and worse after this and they parted ways.

In 1807 Schopenhauer decided to go to school again to get further education, starting in Gotha, but soon thereafter settling for Weimar. He finished in only two years and enrolled at the University of Göttingen, where he met philosopher G.F. Schulze who advised him to study the works of Kant and Platon who strongly influenced young Schopenhauer and his thinking.

During a visit in Weimar he met Chr. M. Wieland in whose presence he uttered his famous statement “Life is an awkward matter; I resolved to spend mine thinking about it”.

From 1811 he studied in Berlin for two years but war disturbances drove him away and he moved to Rudolstadt where he composed his dissertion “On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason” (Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde) which earned him the doctor diploma of the University of Jena.

Relocating to Weimar once again Schopenhauer got in touch with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose much contended theory of colors had a big impact on him. Through indiologist and orientologist Friedrich Majer he got into old Indian philosophy, Brahmaism and the Oupnek’hat (a translation of the Upanishads – treaties that deal with Brahma knowledge), significantly affecting his thinking (he later said that he never would have been able to develop his system if it weren’t for Kant, Plato and the Upanishads).

In 1814 he went to Dresden where he finished his essay “On Vision and Colours” (Über das Sehen und die Farben) one year later. From here on and until 1818 he developed his main work “The World as Will and Idea” (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), which first appeared in print in 1819 through Brockhaus Publishing, but turned out to be a big commercial failure.

After a two year long journey through Italy he applied for lectureship at the University of Berlin, where he started to compete with the widely acknowledged philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by intentionally holding his course of lectures “on the entire philosophy or the doctrine of the nature of the world and the human mind“ at the very same times as Hegel held his courses.

After only two years he resigned since his students failed to appear, leaving him holding a deep grudge against academic philosophy in general and Hegel in particular, who was nothing but a charlatan to him.

To him philosophy was an art most of his fellow “great” thinkers didn’t know much about. The disaffirmation of his contemporary philosophers is unrivalled. As he would write later: “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.”

In 1831 he fled from Berlin in fear of cholera and settled for Frankfurt am Main. Ironically that same epidemic would be responsible for Hegel’s death shortly after.

1835 saw the release of his disquisition “On the Will in Nature” (Über den Willen in der Natur), followed by “On Freedom of the Will” (Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens) in 1839 and “On the Basis of Morality” (Über die Grundlage der Moral) in 1840.

In 1844 he completed a second part of his “World as Will and Idea” which was released together with the first part once again by Brockhaus but was still mostly met with opposition. The general ignorance of his work didn’t end until his breakthrough in form of “Parerga und Paralipomena” in 1851, which portrayed his voluntarism and pessimism as so attractive that it could finally put an end to people’s outright rejection.

Schopenhauer died in 1860 in Frankfurt am Main.