NINETEENTH CENTURY

IDEALIST PHILOSOPHER

(accused of being a

misanthrope ) .

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Introduction

Arthur Schopenhauer was born at Danzig, 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.

Schopenhauer is one of the great original writers of

the nineteenth century, and a unique voice in the

history of thought.

His central concept of the will leads 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 finally

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

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

Early days

Of the first few years of his life we know nothing. 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 to

Swedish Pomerania. Thence they made their way to

Hamburg.

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

France. On its conclusion they left the boy behind them at

Havre with a M. Gregoire, a business friend. Here he

remained two years, and was educated together with M.

Gregoire's son. His father's object was that Arthur should

thoroughly master the French language, an object so

completely realized that when he came back to Hamburg it

was found he had forgotten his native tongue, and was forced

to learn it again like a foreigner. Arthur frequently recalled

these two years spent in France as the happiest of his

boyhood.

In 1809, Schopenhauer studied at the University of

Gottingen, where he matriculated in the medical

faculty. During the first year of his residence he

heard lectures on Constitutional History, Natural

History, Mineralogy, Physics, Botany, and the History

of the Crusades, besides reading at home on all

cognate matters. In the philosophical faculty, he

devoted his attention to Plato and Kant, before

attempting the study of Aristotle and Spinoza.

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.

Disagreements and quarrels led her to dismiss him,

and 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.

Three possible spheres of happiness

Schopenhauer 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…..

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.'

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fundamental reality that eludes understanding

is, as book 2 makes plain, 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.

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.

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.

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. In book 4, Schopenhauer explores

saintliness, which implies denial and permanent

taming of the will. By recognizing that others

experience the same unrelenting strife that the will

creates in oneself, one can develop compassion.