GERMAN IDEALIST

PHILOSOPHER

(1788-1860)

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Introduction

Arthur Schopenhauer was born at Danzig (Gdansk),

on the 22nd of February, 1788, in a merchant family.

He preferred a scholarly and academic career.

Although he was born in England and had some

education there, he spent most of his adult life in

Frankfurt am Main; he died in 1860.

His work was recognized later after 1890s.

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• Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the great original

writers of the nineteenth century.

• His central concept of the will lead him to regard

human beings as striving irrationally and suffering

in a world that has no purpose;

• a condition redeemed by the elevation of aesthetic

consciousness and

• overcome by the will’s self-denial and a mystical

vision of the self as one with the world as a whole.

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Early days

• His infancy was contemporaneous with the French

Revolution, a political event in which his parents took

the liveliest interest, and which naturally aroused all

his father's keen republicanism.

When he was five years old, his parents changed to

Swedish Pomerania. Thence they made their way to

Hamburg. He had great affection for his father.

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• In Arthur's ninth year, his parents undertook a journey

through France.

• They left the boy behind them at Havre with a M. Gregoire, a

business friend. Here he remained two years, and was

educated.

• Arthur thoroughly mastered the French language, that when

he came back to Hamburg it was found he had forgotten his

native tongue, and was forced to learn it again.

• Arthur frequently recalled these two years spent in France

as the happiest of his boyhood.

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• In 1809, Schopenhauer studied at the University

of Gottingen.

• During the first year, he heard lectures on

Constitutional History, Natural History, Mineralogy,

Physics, Botany, and the History of the Crusades.

• In the philosophical faculty, he devoted his

attention to Plato and Kant, before attempting the

study of Aristotle and Spinoza. There was some

British influence on his work too.

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• After receiving his doctorate, Schopenhauer

returned to Weimar to live in his mother’s house,

but the two could not agree.

• She found him moody, surly, and sarcastic; he

found her vain and shallow.

• He left to establish his residence in Dresden in

1814, there to begin his major philosophical work.

For the remaining twenty-four years of Johanna

Schopenhauer’s life, mother and son did not meet.

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Three possible spheres of happiness he admitted;

dividing all possessions into what a man is, that

which he has, and that which he represents.

‘Philosophy is an alpine road, and the precipitous

path which leads to it is strewn with stones and

thorns. The higher you climb, the lonelier, the more

desolate grows the way; but he who treads it must

know no fear; he must leave everything behind him;

he will at last have to cut his own path through the

ice.

His road will often bring him to the edge of a chasm,

whence he can look into the green valley

beneath…..

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Giddiness will draw him down, but he must resist

and hold himself back. In return, the world will soon

lie far beneath him ; its deserts and bogs will

disappear from view; its irregularities grow

indistinguishable; its discords cannot pierce so

high; its roundness becomes discernible.

The climber stands amid clear fresh air, and can

behold the sun when all beneath is still shrouded in

the blackness of night.' 9

Schopenhauer spent his vacations at Weimar and

made one excursion into the Harz Mountains. In

1811 he quitted Göttingen for the University of

Berlin, where he once more pursued a varied

course of studies with eager energy. That first

winter he attended Fichte's lectures on Philosophy.

Schopenhauer's writing style was from the first

clear, classical, and exact ; a circumstance he

attributed in a great degree to his early training.

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Misanthrope or an amiable man?

Schopenhauer was at heart an amiable man, forced to

put on an exterior armour of gruffness as protection

from those who should have been his warmest friends,

and proved his most irritating, disdainful enemies.

Two letters reveal Schopenhauer in an amiable and

social light; the pleasing scenery of Thuringia had

exercised some charm even over this morose spirit.

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‘I leave everything else, and follow my idea’

Genius must be egotistic in a certain sense; it must place self-culture in the chief position; this very egotism is an element inalienable from its due development.

Schopenhauer was a harsh uncompromising temperament; yet he too felt he had his mission towards the world, and he must fulfill it after his bent.

His patriotism was limited to the German language, whose powerful beauties he appreciated so keenly.

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First book

In 1813 he wrote his first work, ‘On the Fourfold

Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason’, a thesis

which gained for him the degree of doctor of

philosophy of Jena University, and in which he

expounded his epistemology based on the Kantian

doctrine of the ideality of space, time, and the

categories.

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Life’s work

In Dresden, after completing a brief treatise on the

nature of color, Schopenhauer was ready to begin

serious preparation of his greatest philosophical work,

‘The World as Will and Idea.’

Its three books, with an appendix on Kantian

philosophy, include the conceptual ideas that

Schopenhauer developed and elaborated throughout

his career as an independent philosopher.

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Everything capable of being regarded by us as an

object, i.e.., the entire compass of our ideas. These

are respectively: Four Classes,

1. Phenomena, or the objects of sensuous perception ;

2. Reason, or the objects of rational perception ;

3. Being, under the categories of space and time ; and

4. the Will.

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Schopenhauer developed his pessimistic system

as a follower of Immanuel Kant. In The World as

Will and Idea, he identifies the will as the Kantian

thing-in-itself that comprehends the external world

through the mental constructs of time, space, and

causality. As Schopenhauer understood it, will

comprises intellect, personality, and the potential

for growth and development.

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Although powerful, WILL is not free but is

controlled by causation like all else that exists.

Confronting a meaningless existence and a

godless universe, Schopenhauer concluded that

ethical behavior requires withdrawal from the

pleasures of life in favor of contemplation. The

individual must tame the will so that it becomes

less insistent on its egoistic desires, which lead

only to further desires.

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Where others are concerned, the proper attitude is

compassion, since they too suffer an identical fate.

The truth of Christianity, according to Schopenhauer,

lies in its early emphasis on renunciation of the world

and an ascetic life.

He failed to clarify how this asceticism could be

achieved in the absence of freedom.

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His work includes a suggestion, because human

actions are explicable through motives, he equates

motive with cause.

Thus, causation may be rooted in intellectual

concepts.

As the individual recognizes the futility of existence,

he or she can become compassionate toward

others and accept the futility of desire.

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Book 1 explains the world, everything that the mind

perceives, as representation, a mental construct of

the subject.

Through perception, reasoning, and reflection and

by placing external reality within the mental

categories of time, space, and causality, one

understands how the world operates. Yet one never

understands reality as it exists, for the subjective

remains an essential element of all perception.

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Book 2 makes plain, the fundamental reality that

eludes understanding is, the will, that Kantian thing-

in-itself. Will exists in everything—as a life force and

much more. In plants, it drives growth, change, and

reproduction. In animals, it includes all of these as

well as sensation, instinct, and limited intelligence.

Only in humans does the will become self-

conscious, through reflection and analysis, though

the will is by no means free in the usual sense.

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• Every action is determined by motives—to Schopenhauer

another name for causes—that predetermine one’s

choices.

• Thus, one may will to choose but not will to will.

• With its conscious and unconscious drives, will presses

each person toward egoistic individualism; yet demands of

the will, far from bringing peace, well-being, and

gratification, lead only to additional struggle and exertion.

• Hence, unhappiness in life inevitably exceeds happiness.

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Book3: As a respite from the imperious demands of

the will, people find solace in the beauty that exists

in nature and art, and the awakening of the

aesthetic sense serves to tame the will by leading it

toward disinterested contemplation.

To enter a room and discover a table filled with

food is to anticipate involvement, consumption, and

interaction with others.

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Fourth Book of The World as Will and Idea takes us

back to the world as will, considered now with

respect to its ‘affirmation and negation’, or at any

rate the affirmation and negation of the ‘will to life’

that Schopenhauer finds to be the essence of each

individual. This final part – by far the longest and, in

Schopenhauer’s words, the ‘most serious’ – is

concerned with ethics, in both a narrower and

broader sense.

• In book 4, Schopenhauer explores saintliness, which

implies denial and permanent taming of the will.

• To look at a painting of the same scene invites simply

reflection and appreciation, removing any practical

considerations from the will, thereby suspending its

feverish activity.

• Yet the solace afforded by beauty is only temporary.

• By recognizing that others experience the same

unrelenting strife that the will creates in oneself, one can

develop compassion.

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Calling on mystical ideas from diverse cultural traditions,

Schopenhauer argues that only such a radical transformation,

occasioned by a deep and rare knowledge of the ubiquity of

suffering and the illusoriness of the individual, can restore any

value to our existence. The world in itself, outside of the

forms of space and time that govern the world as

representation for us, cannot be separated into individuals.

The truly wise human being would comprehend this and

would cease to be attached to the strivings of the particular

individual manifestation of will he or she is.

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In a survey of German philosophy in 1877 Wilhelm

Wundt called Schopenhauer ‘the born leader of

Non- Academic Philosophy in Germany’, saying

that ‘the chief attraction of Schopenhauer’s

philosophy [has been] simply his Pessimism’, in

which [he has] completely . . . fallen in with the

current of his time’. The initial fame of his popular

writings in Parerga and Paralipomena paved the

way for Schopenhauer’s other works