Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 - 21 September 1860, and pronounced: “Showpenhower”) was a Dutch-German (Polish-born, German-raised) philosopher best known for his 1818 masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, sometimes translated as The World as Will and Idea, and expanded in 1844), which incorporated elements of the Vedas and Upanishads from Eastern Philosophy along with Western influences. Therein, Schopenhauer further developed ideas from Plato, Immanuel Kant, and others into an ascetic, some say pessimistic, outlook based, as Kant's was, on the Self as the foundation of Truth about the World, with Spirit and “noumenal” entities or concepts as Representations of the Will. All of the German Idealists had deep and profound reactions in their readings (and misreadings) of Kant, and Schopenhauer's aesthetic and romanticist version of Kant's Transcendental Idealism has been especially attractive for those in Art, Music, and Literature seeking tranquility from a world of strife. Schopenhauer's storied life shows his focus on himself, which influenced his Philosophy. Thus, his famous and powerful phrase, “the world is my representation” [emphasis added], often moves readers who are new to his work or to Philosophy, even though this basic idea was already a part of “Continental Rationalism”, Kant, and German Idealism. As Schopenhauer acknowledged from René Descartes and George Berkeley, though failing to give Kant equal credit, Schopenhauer stated plainly at the beginning of his famous work: ”...all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, representation [...] All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is representation.”

Life and Works

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788 in Danzig, then part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, now present-day Gdańsk Poland, son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and his wife Johanna (née Trosiener), both descendants of wealthy Dutch-German families. While they both came from Protestant backgrounds, they were not very religious, supported the French Revolution, and were German republicans (ie. liberals), cosmopolitans, and Anglophiles. When Danzig became part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1793, Heinrich moved to Hamburg, a free city with a republican constitution. His firm continued trading in Danzig, where most of their extended families remained. Adele Schopenhauer, Arthur's only sibling (1797-1849) was born on 12 July in 1797, and that year, Arthur was sent to Le Havre to live with the family of his father's business associate, Grégoire de Blésimaire. During his two-year stay, he learned to speak French and fostered a life-long friendship with Jean Anthime Grégoire de Blésimaire, and as early as 1799 played the flute.

In 1803 Schopenhauer accompanied his parents on a European tour of The Netherlands, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Prussia. Viewed as primarily a pleasure tour, his father used the opportunity to visit business associates abroad, as Schopenhauer learned the languages and cultures. Presented with a choice to either stay at home to begin preparations for university, or travel with them to further his merchant education, Schopenhauer chose to travel, through merchant training turned out to be very tedious. He spent twelve weeks of the tour attending school in Wimbledon, London, where he was confused by strict and intellectual Anglicans whom he described as shallow.

Tensions with Academia

In 1805 Heinrich drowned in a canal near their home in Hamburg. Although it was possible his death was accidental, the family believed it was suicide, as Heinrich was prone to anxiety and depression, each becoming more pronounced later in his life. Schopenhauer showed similar moodiness during his youth and often acknowledged that he inherited it from his father. Despite his loss, Schopenhauer liked his father, who had left the family with a significant inheritance split in three among Johanna and the children. When Schopenhauer reached the age of maturity he invested his portion conservatively in government bonds, earning annual interest which was more than double the salary of a university professor. Although he spent two years as a merchant in Hamburg in honor of his father, he quit the apprenticeship, and with encouragement from his mother, dedicated himself to studies at the Ernestine Gymnasium, Gotha, in Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. While there, he also enjoyed a social life among the local nobility, and spent large amounts of money, which deeply concerned his frugal mother. He left the Gymnasium after writing a satirical poem about one of the schoolmasters, though it is not clear if he was expelled or left voluntarily. During this time, he had doubts about being able to start a new life as a scholar, as much of his prior education was as a practical merchant.

His mother had moved away with his sister Adele to Weimar, which was then at the center of German Literature, enjoying a social life among writers and artists, and in the years to follow had written 24 volumes of novels, essays, travelogues, and criticism, becoming quite well-known for a time. Schopenhauer and his mother were not on good terms, though, and in one letter, she wrote: “You are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people.”^[1] Schopenhauer moved to Weimar as well, but did not live with his mother. Their relationship deteriorated even further as he accused his mother of being financially irresponsible, flirtatious and seeking to remarry, which he considered an insult to his father's memory. His mother in turn, while professing her love to him, criticized him sharply for being moody, tactless, and argumentative, and urged him to improve his behavior so that he would not alienate people.

Schopenhauer did concentrate on his studies, and also enjoyed the social life of balls, parties, and theater. By that time his mother's famous salon was well established among local intellectuals and dignitaries, the most celebrated of them being Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Schopenhauer attended her parties when he knew Goethe would be there, though they did not get on well. Schopenhauer was also captivated by Karoline Jagemann, whom he found beautiful and who was the mistress of Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and he wrote to her his only known love poem. Despite his later celebration of asceticism and negative views of sexuality, Schopenhauer enjoyed sexual affairs, usually with women of lower social status, such as servants, actresses, and sometimes prostitutes. In a letter to his friend Anthime, he claimed such affairs continued even in his mature age, and claimed he had two daughters (born in 1819 and 1836 out of wedlock), both of whom died in infancy, although in their youthful correspondence, Schopenhauer and Anthime were somewhat boastful and competitive about their sexual exploits.

In 1809, Schopenhauer left Weimar to become a student at the Georg August University of Göttingen instead of the then more famous University of Jena, as Göttingen was known as more modern and scientifically oriented, with less attention given to Theology. Law or Medicine were usual choices for young men of Schopenhauer's status who also needed a career and income, so he chose Medicine due to his scientific interests. He spent considerable time studying, but also continued his flute playing and social life. Among his notable professors he studied Metaphysics, Logic, and Psychology under Gottlob Ernst Schulze, author of Aenesidemus, who made a strong impression and advised him to concentrate on Plato and Immanuel Kant. Subsequently, Schopenhauer decided to switch from Medicine to Philosophy around 1810-11 and so he left Göttingen, because the university did not have a strong Philosophy program. Schopenhauer said his medicinal and scientific studies were necessary for a philosopher.

Now at the newly founded University of Berlin for the Winter semester of 1811-12, Schopenhauer's mother had begun her literary career, publishing her first book in 1810, a biography of her friend Karl Ludwig Fernow, which was a critical success. He attended lectures by the prominent Post-Kantian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, but quickly found many points of disagreement with Fichte's Epistemology, also finding Fichte's lectures tedious and hard to understand. He later mentioned Fichte only in critical, negative terms, seeing his Philosophy as a lower-quality version of Kant's which was only useful to him because Fichte's poor arguments unintentionally highlighted some failings of Kantianism, as he saw them. Schopenhauer also attended lectures by the famous Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom he also quickly came to dislike, with his notes and comments on Schleiermacher's lectures showing strong criticism of Religious Studies as he moved toward Atheism. Schopenhauer mainly learned through self-directed reading, and besides Plato, Kant, and Fichte, he also read the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Jakob Friedrich Fries, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Francis Bacon, John Locke, and current scientific literature. He attended Philology courses by August Böckh and Friedrich August Wolf and continued his naturalistic interests with related courses.

Independent Philosopher

Schopenhauer left Berlin in a rush in 1813, fearing that the city could be attacked and that he could be pressed into military service as Prussia had just joined the war against France. He returned to Weimar but left after less than a month, disgusted as his mother was now living with her supposed lover, Georg Friedrich Konrad Ludwig Müller von Gerstenbergk, a civil servant twelve years younger than she, and he considered the relationship an act of infidelity to his father's memory. He settled for a while in Rudolstadt, and spent that time in solitude, hiking in the mountains and Thuringian Forest, writing his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. He completed the dissertation at about the same time as the French Army was defeated at the Battle of Leipzig.

Schopenhauer accepted his mother's invitation to visit her in Weimar, where she tried to convince him her relationship with Gerstenbergk was platonic, that she had no intention of remarrying, but Schopenhauer remained suspicious and often came in conflict with Gerstenbergk because he considered him untalented, pretentious, and nationalistic as opposed to republican. His mother had just published her second book, Reminiscences of a Journey in the Years 1803, 1804, and 1805, a description of their family tour of Europe, which also quickly became a hit. She found her son's dissertation incomprehensible, and said it was unlikely that anyone would ever buy a copy. In a fit of temper, Schopenhauer told her that people would read his work long after the “rubbish” she wrote was totally forgotten.^[2]^[3] In fact, although her publisher considered her novels of dubious quality, the F.A. Brockhaus AG publishing firm held her in high esteem because her works consistently sold well. Hans Brockhaus later claimed that his predecessors “saw nothing in [Arthur Schopenhauer's] manuscript, but wanted to please one of our best-selling authors by publishing her son's work. We published more and more of her son Arthur's work and today nobody remembers Johanna, but her son's works are in steady demand and contribute to Brockhaus' reputation.”^[4] Hans kept large portraits of the pair in his office in Leipzig for the edification of his new editors.

Also contrary to his mother's prediction, Schopenhauer's dissertation made an impression on Goethe, to whom he had sent a copy as a gift. Although it is doubtful that Goethe agreed with Schopenhauer's philosophical positions, he was impressed by his intellect and extensive scientific education. Their subsequent meetings and correspondence were a great honor to the young philosopher, who was finally acknowledged by his intellectual hero. The two mostly discussed Goethe's newly published (and somewhat lukewarmly received) work on Colour Theory. Schopenhauer soon started writing his own treatise on the subject, On Vision and Colors, which in many points differed from his teacher's. Although they remained polite towards each other, their growing theoretical disagreements, and especially Schopenhauer's extreme self-confidence and tactless criticisms, soon made Goethe become distant again, and after 1816 their correspondence became less frequent. Schopenhauer later admitted that he was greatly hurt by this rejection, but he continued to praise Goethe, and considered his Color Theory a great introduction to his own.

Another important experience during this stay in Weimar was Schopenhauer's acquaintance with Friedrich Majer^[5], a religious historian orientalist, a disciple of Johann Gottfried Herder, who introduced Schopenhauer to Eastern Philosophy. Schopenhauer was immediately impressed by the Upanishads, calling them “the production of the highest human wisdom”, believing they contained superhuman concepts, putting them on a par with Plato and Kant. Schopenhauer continued his studies by reading the Bhagavad Gita, an amateur German journal Asiatisches Magazin, and Asiatick Researches by the Asiatic Society, though his studies on Hindu and Buddhist texts were constrained by the lack of adequate literature, mainly restricted to Theravada Buddhism, but he read a Latin translation and later praised the Upanishads in his work.

In May 1814, Schopenhauer left Weimar and moved to Dresden, continued his philosophical studies, enjoyed the cultural life, socialized with intellectuals and engaged in sexual affairs. His friends in Dresden were Johann Gottlob von Quandt, Friedrich Laun, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, and Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl, a young painter who created a romanticized portrait of Schopenhauer [as seen at the top of this page], which, as they usually do, minimized unattractive physical features. His criticisms of local artists occasionally caused public quarrels when he ran into them in public, but Schopenhauer's main occupation during his stay in Dresden was his seminal philosophical masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, which he started in 1814 and finished in March 1818, with the the first volume being published by December 1818 (Note, in the original German, the title is Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, and vorstellung carries an active and key sense of producing an idea, thus we will use representation rather than idea). The manuscript was recommended to Schopenhauer's mother's publisher, Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, by Baron Ferdinand von Biedenfeld, also an acquaintance of Schopenhauer's mother. Although Brockhaus accepted the manuscript, Schopenhauer made a poor impression due to his quarrelsome and fussy attitude.

In September 1818, while waiting for his book to be published, Schopenhauer escaped an affair with a maid and left Dresden for a year-long vacation in Italy, visiting Venice, Bologna, Florence, Naples, and Milan, travelling alone or accompanied by mostly English tourists he met. He spent the winter months in Rome, where he engaged in numerous quarrels with German tourists in the Antico Caffè Greco, but also enjoyed Art, Architecture, and Ancient ruins, attending plays and operas, while continuing philosophical contemplation. One of his love affairs must have became serious, as for a while he contemplated marriage to a rich Italian noblewoman.^[6] Schopenhauer corresponded regularly with his sister Adele and became close to her as her relationship with their mother had also deteriorated. Adele informed him about financial troubles as the banking house of A. L. Muhl in Danzig, into which their mother invested hers and Adele's whole savings and Schopenhauer a third of his, was near bankruptcy. Schopenhauer offered to share his assets, but his mother refused and became enraged by the insulting comments. Their mother and Adele only managed to receive thirty percent of their savings back, while Schopenhauer, using his business knowledge and an aggressive stance towards the banker, eventually received his part of the investment in full. Not surprisingly, this situation worsened the relationships among all three.

By 1820, disturbed by the financial risks and the lack of response to his book, Schopenhauer decided to take an academic position which would provided him with income and an opportunity to promote his views. He contacted friends at universities in Heidelberg, Göttingen, and Berlin, and found Humboldt University of Berlin most attractive, which is where two years earlier G.W.F. Hegel had taken the position left vacant after the passing of Fichte. Schopenhauer actually scheduled his lectures to coincide with those of the much more famous philosopher Hegel, whom Schopenhauer described as a “clumsy charlatan” ^[7] and a pseudophilosopher (not entirely without cause, it should be noted). Schopenhauer was especially appalled by Hegel's seemingly poor knowledge of Natural Science, and he tried to engage him in a quarrel at his test lecture in March 1820. Hegel was also facing political suspicions at the time, when many progressive professors were dismissed following the Carlsbad Decrees, while Schopenhauer carefully mentioned in his application that he had no interest in politics. Despite their differences and the bold request to schedule lectures at the same time as his own, Hegel still voted to accept Schopenhauer at the university. In the context of Hegel's inexplicable star fame, only five students turned up to Schopenhauer's lectures, and he subsequently dropped out of academia. A late essay, “On University Philosophy”, among other references and passages, expressed his resentment toward the kind of work conducted in academies.

Depression and Declining Health

Schopenhauer then resumed extensive travels for three years, visiting Leipzig, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Schaffhausen, Vevey, Milan, and spent eight months in Florence. Before he left, though, he had an incident with a Berlin neighbor, 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. The details of the August 1821 incident are unclear, but he claimed he had just pushed her from his entrance after she had rudely refused to leave, and then she had purposely fallen to the ground so that she could sue him. To the contrary, she claimed he had attacked her so violently she had become paralyzed on her right side and unable to work. The court case lasted until May 1827, when a court found Schopenhauer guilty and forced him to pay her an annual pension until her death in 1842.

Nevertheless, Schopenhauer enjoyed Italy, where he studied Art and socialized with Italian and English nobles. It would be his last visit there, leaving for Munich and staying there for a year, mostly recuperating from various health problems, some of them possibly caused by venereal diseases (the treatment his doctor used suggested syphilis). He contacted publishers, offering to translate Hume into German and Kant into English, but his proposals were declined. Returning to Berlin, he began to study Spanish so he could read some of his favorite authors in their original language. He liked Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, and especially Baltasar Gracián. He also made failed attempts to publish his translations of their works. Schopenhauer even make a few attempts to revive his lectures, again scheduling them at the same time as Hegel's, but that also failed, as did his inquiries about relocating to other universities.

During those Berlin years, Schopenhauer occasionally mentioned his desire to marry and have a family. For a while he was unsuccessfully courting 17-year-old Flora Weiss, who was 22 years younger than himself at the time. His unpublished writings then show that he was already very critical of monogamy but did not advocate polygyny, instead musing about a polyamorous relationship he called “tetragamy”. He had an on-and-off relationship with a young dancer, Caroline Richter (she also used the surname Medon after one of her ex-lovers). They had met when he was 33 and she was 19 and working at the Berlin Opera. She had already had numerous lovers and a son out of wedlock, and later gave birth to another son, this time to an unnamed foreign diplomat (she soon had another pregnancy but the child was stillborn). As Schopenhauer was preparing to escape from Berlin in 1831 due to a cholera epidemic, he offered to take her with him on the condition that she leave her young son behind. She refused and so he went alone. In his will, he later left her a significant sum of money, but insisted that it should not be spent in any way on her second son.

In his last year in Berlin that time, Schopenhauer claimed to have a prophetic dream which urged him to escape from the city. As he arrived in his new home in Frankfurt, he claimed to have another supernatural experience, an apparition of his dead father, and his mother who was still alive. These experiences led him to spend some time investigating paranormal phenomena and magic. Though he was critical of the available studies, saying they were mostly ignorant or fraudulent, he did believe that there were authentic cases of such phenomena, and he tried to explain them through his Metaphysics as manifestations of the Will.

Nonetheless, Schopenhauer experienced a period of depression and declining health. He renewed his correspondence with his mother, and she seemed concerned that he might commit suicide like his father had, as they thought. By now, his mother Johanna and sister Adele were living very modestly. Johanna's writings did not bring her much income any longer, and her popularity was waning. Their correspondence remained reserved, and Schopenhauer at least seemed undisturbed by his mother's death in 1838, while his relationship with his sister grew closer, corresponding with her until she died in 1849.

Meanwhile, Schopenhauer lived alone except for a succession of pet poodle dogs named Atman and Butz. In 1836, he had published On the Will in Nature, and in 1838, he sent his essay “On the Freedom of the Will” to the contest of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, winning the prize in 1839. He sent another essay, “On the Basis of Morality”, to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1839, but did not win the 1840 prize despite being the only contestant. The Society had been appalled that several distinguished contemporary philosophers were mentioned in a very offensive manner, and claimed that the essay missed the point of the set topic, while the arguments were inadequate. Schopenhauer, who had been very confident that he would win, was enraged by this rejection. He published both essays as The Two Basic Problems of Ethics, and the first edition, published September 1840 but with an 1841 date, again failed to draw attention to his Philosophy. In the preface to the second edition (1860) he was still pouring insults on the Royal Danish Society. By 1842, after some negotiations, he managed to convince his publisher, Brockhaus, to print the second updated edition of The World as Will and Representation. That book was again mostly ignored and the few reviews it received were mixed or negative.

Late Recognition

Eventually, Schopenhauer began to attract followers, mostly outside academia, among practical professionals. Several were lawyers who pursued private philosophical studies. He jokingly referred to them as “evangelists” and “apostles”, and one of the most active early followers was Julius Frauenstädt, who wrote numerous articles promoting Schopenhauer's Philosophy. He was also instrumental in finding another publisher after Brockhaus declined to publish Parerga and Paralipomena, as Brockhaus believed it would be another failure. Though Schopenhauer later stopped corresponding with him, claiming that he did not adhere closely enough to his ideas, Frauenstädt continued to promote Schopenhauer's work, and they renewed their communication in 1859 as Schopenhauer named him heir for his literary estate. Frauenstädt also became the editor of the first collected works of Schopenhauer.

In 1848, Schopenhauer witnessed the German Revolutions of 1848-1849 and became worried for his own safety and property. Even earlier in life he had had such worries and kept a sword and loaded pistols near his bed to defend himself from thieves. He gave a friendly welcome to Austrian soldiers who wanted to shoot revolutionaries from his window, and as they were leaving he gave one of the officers his opera glasses to help him monitor rebels. Schopenhauer even modified his will, leaving a large part of his property to a Prussian fund that helped soldiers who became invalids while fighting rebellion in 1848, or the families of soldiers who died in battle. As the “Young Hegelians” were advocating change and progress, Schopenhauer instead said misery is natural for humans, that even if some utopian society were established, people would still fight each other out of boredom, or they would starve to death due to overpopulation.

In 1851, Schopenhauer published Parerga and Paralipomena, which contains essays supplementary to his main work. It was his first successful, widely read book, partly due to the work of his disciples who wrote praising reviews. Many academic philosophers considered him a great stylist and cultural critic but did not take his Philosophy seriously. His early critics liked to point out similarities of his ideas to those of Fichte and Schelling, or to claim there were numerous contradictions in his Philosophy. Both criticisms enraged Schopenhauer, though he was becoming less interested in intellectual fights, encouraging his disciples to engage. His private notes and correspondences show he acknowledged some of the criticisms regarding contradictions, inconsistencies, and vagueness in his Philosophy, but claimed that he was not concerned about harmony and agreement in his propositions, that some of his ideas should not be taken literally, but instead as metaphors.

Nevertheless, academic philosophers were also starting to notice Schopenhauer's work, and in 1856, University of Leipzig sponsored an essay contest about Schopenhauer's Philosophy, which was won by Rudolf Seydel's very critical essay. Schopenhauer's friend Jules Lunteschütz made the first of his four portraits of him, which Schopenhauer did not particularly like, but which were soon sold to a wealthy landowner, Carl Ferdinand Wiesike, who built a house to display them. Schopenhauer seemed flattered and amused by this, and would claim that it was his first chapel. As his fame increased, copies of paintings and photographs of him were being sold and admirers were visiting the places where he had lived and written his works. People visited Frankfurt's Englischer Hof to observe him dining. Admirers gave him gifts and asked for autographs. He complained that he still felt isolated due to his not very social nature and the fact that many of his good friends had already died from old age.

Schopenhauer remained healthy in his own old age, which he attributed to regular walks no matter the weather and to always getting enough sleep. He had a great appetite and could read without glasses, but his hearing had been declining since his youth and he developed problems with rheumatism. He remained active and lucid, continuing his reading, writing, and correspondence, and the numerous notes he made during these years, amongst others on aging, were published posthumously under the title Senilia.

In the spring of 1860, Schopenhauer's health began to more sharply decline, and he experienced shortness of breath and heart palpitations. In September he suffered inflammation of the lungs, and although he was starting to recover, he remained very weak. The last friend to visit him was Wilhelm Gwinner, and according to him, Schopenhauer was concerned that he would not be able to finish his planned additions to Parerga and Paralipomena, but he had been at peace with dying. He then died of pulmonary-respiratory failure^[8] on 21 September 1860 while sitting at home on his couch. He was 72 years old, and his funeral was conducted by a Lutheran minister.^[9]^[10]

Philosophy

Already a lengthy article due to Schopenhauer's storied life, let us focus below only on the metaphysical parts of Schopenhauer's Philosophy which were tied to Kant and mainly a part of his masterwork. Schopenhauer was certainly a man of letters and essays, with many opinions on many topics, though not all of them were consistent, as he acknowledged.

The World as Representation

Schopenhauer saw his Philosophy as a rival to Kant's, taking the results of Kant's theoretical and epistemological investigations leading to Transcendental Idealism as starting point for his own. Kant had argued the World is a complex of appearances whose existence and connection occur only in our mental representations.^[11] Schopenhauer did not deny the external world existed and was known empirically, yet he followed Kant in claiming that our knowledge and experience of the world is always in some sense dependent on us.^[12] For Schopenhauer in particular, the spatiotemporal form and causal structure of the external world are contributed to our experiences of it by the mind as it renders perceptions.^[13] Schopenhauer reiterates this in the first sentence of his main work: “The world is my representation (Die welt ist meine vorstellung)”. Everything that there is for cognition (the entire world) exists simply as an object in relation to a subject - a representation to a subject. Everything that belongs to the world is, therefore, subject-dependent.

Kant had argued we perceive Reality as something spatial and temporal, not because we directly perceive something inherently spatial and temporal, but because that is how our minds operate in actively perceiving something. Therefore, understanding objects in Space and Time is how we represent our experience. For Schopenhauer, Kant's greatest service lay in the differentiation between these phenomena and actual noumena, or the thing-in-itself, because between everything and us there is always a perceiving mind. In other words, Kant's primary achievement was to demonstrate that the mind, with sensory support, actively participates in constructing Reality. Thus, Schopenhauer believed Kant had shown the everyday world of experience, and indeed the entire material World related to Space and Time, is merely appearance or phenomena, entirely distinct from the thing-in-itself.'^[14]

The World as Will

So far, Schopenhauer had appropriated Kant's thesis, but with a Philosophy of Will, he inverts it. The advanced cognitive abilities of human beings, Schopenhauer argued, serve the ends of willing - an illogical, directionless, ceaseless striving which condemns the human individual to a life of suffering. Understanding the World as Will leads to ethical concerns which Schopenhauer explored in the Fourth Book of The World as Will and Representation and again in his two prize essays on Ethics, On the Freedom of the Will and On the Basis of Morality. Individual human actions are not free, Schopenhauer argued, because they are events in the World of Appearance and thus are subject to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. A person's actions are a necessary consequence of motives and the given character of the individual human. Necessity extends to the actions of human beings just as it does to every other appearance, and thus we cannot speak of Freedom of individual willing. Albert Einstein quoted the Schopenhauerian idea that “a man can do as he will, but not will as he will.”^[15] Yet the will as thing in-itself is free, as it exists beyond the realm of representation and thus is not constrained by any of the forms of necessity that are part of the principle of sufficient reason.

Kant's conception of Freedom was just the opposite, in that we are free in so far as we have the ability to discern and actively construct our worlds. According to Schopenhauer, though, salvation from our miserable existence can only come through the Will being “tranquillized” by the metaphysical insight that reveals individuality to merely be an illusion. The saint or 'great soul' intuitively “recognizes the whole, comprehends its essence, and finds that it is constantly passing away, caught up in vain strivings, inner conflict, and perpetual suffering”.^[16] The negation of the Will, in other words, stems from the insight that the World in-itself (free from the forms of Space and Time) is One. Ascetic and aesthetic practices, Schopenhauer remarks, are used to aid the Will's “self-abolition”, which brings about a blissful, redemptive “will-less” state of emptiness that is free from striving or suffering. The Eastern influence here is easy to see, and makes Schopenhauer's Philosophy distinct from Kant's, at least on the point of the World as Will.

Theory of Perception

Schopenhauer's work with Goethe regarding his Theory of Colours and related investigations led him to seek an important discovery in Epistemology, which was in finding a demonstration for the a priori nature of Causality. Kant openly admitted that it was Hume's skeptical assault on Causality that motivated the critical investigations in Critique of Pure Reason and he gave an elaborate proof to show that Causality is a priori. After Gottlob Ernst Schulze had made it plausible to some that Kant may have not disproven Hume's skepticism, it was up to those loyal to Kant's project to prove this important matter.

The seeming difference between the approaches of Kant and Schopenhauer on this, however, has to do with a subtle misreading of Kant by Schopenhauer and others. Had Kant simply declared that the empirical content of perception is “given” to us from outside, an expression with which Schopenhauer often expressed his dissatisfaction^[17], the difference would be clear. However this is not exactly what Kant stated. For Kant, it is the occasion of our objects of perception which come to us empirically, that is for example, that we are walking in a forest rather than on a beach, but our active perception creates the experience wholesale.

Thus, Schopenhauer and others were occupied with the questions of how get the empirical content of perception, and how is it possible to comprehend subjective sensations if the objective perception of things lie “outside” of us?^[18] Kant clearly addressed such questions in his incorporation of Locke's Empiricism with Leibniz's Rationalism, and unfortunately, Schopenhauer simply misread Kant, and much of what he says regarding a Theory of Perception is a rephrasing, though not an appropriation, of Kant's prior work^[19], the proof of which is contained in the discussion above regarding the World as Representation.

Intellectual Interests

Schopenhauer had a wide range of interests, from Science and Opera to Occultism and Literature. In his student years, Schopenhauer went more often to lectures in the sciences than Philosophy. He kept a strong interest as his personal library contained near to 200 books of scientific literature at his death, and his works refer to scientific titles not found in his library. Many evenings were spent with Theatre, Opera, and Ballet, and Schopenhauer especially liked the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gioachino Rossini, and Vincenzo Bellini.^[20]

Schopenhauer considered Music the highest Art, and played the flute during his whole life. He knew German, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Latin, and Greek, and was an avid reader of Poetry. He particularly revered Goethe, Petrarch, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and William Shakespeare. In Philosophy, his most important influences were Kant, Plato, and the Upanishads. “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.”^[21]

Selected Bibliography

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde), 1813 (revised and enlarged: 1847)
On Vision and Colours (Ueber das Sehn und die Farben), 1816 ISBN 978-0-85496-988-3 (revised and enlarged: 1854)
Theory of Colours (Theoria colorum physiologica), 1830
The World as Will and Representation (alternatively translated as The World as Will and Idea; original German is Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung): vol. 1, 1818-1819, vol. 2, 1844 Världen som vilja och föreställning (2nd edition: 1844, 3rd edition: 1859)

Vol. 1 Dover edition 1966, ISBN 978-0-486-21761-1
Vol. 2 Dover edition 1966, ISBN 978-0-486-21762-8
Peter Smith Publisher hardcover set 1969, ISBN 978-0-8446-2885-1
Everyman Paperback combined abridged edition (290 pp.) ISBN 978-0-460-87505-9
The Longman Library of Primary Sources in Philosophy, vol. 1, 2008; vol. 2, 2010. Title translated as The World as Will and Presentation, rather than Representation.

The Art of Being Right (Eristische Dialektik: Die Kunst, Recht zu Behalten), 1831
On the Will in Nature (Ueber den Willen in der Natur), 1836 ISBN 978-0-85496-999-9 (revised and enlarged: 1854)
On the Freedom of the Will (Ueber die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens), 1838 ISBN 978-0-631-14552-3
On the Basis of Morality (Ueber die Grundlage der Moral), 1839
Book, Schopenhauer, Arthur, Arthur Schopenhauer, Cartwright, David E., Erdmann, Edward E., The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2010, London, 9780199297221. 1841 (revised and enlarged: 1860) Contains On the Freedom of the Will and On the Basis of Morality.
Book, Schopenhauer, Arthur, Arthur Schopenhauer, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, behandelt in zwei akademischen Preisschriften, Johann Christian Hermannsche Buchandlung, September 1840, Stated date: 1841., Frankfurt am Main, German, 2024-04-15, archive.org/details/diebeidengrundpr00scho/. from Internet Archive. Contains Preisschrift über die Freiheit des Willens and Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral.
Parerga and Paralipomena (2 vols., 1851) - Reprint: (Oxford: Clarendon Press) (2 vols., 1974) (English translation by E. F. J. Payne)

Printings:

1974 Hardcover, by ISBN

1974-1980 Paperback, Vol. 1, ISBN 978-0-19-824634-3, Vol. 2, ISBN 978-0-19-824635-0,
2001 Paperback, Vol. 1, ISBN 978-0-19-924220-7, Vol. 2, ISBN 978-0-19-924221-4

Essays and Aphorisms, being excerpts from Volume 2 of Parerga und Paralipomena, selected and translated by R. J. Hollingdale, with Introduction by R J Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 1970, Paperback 1973: ISBN 978-0-14-044227-4

An Enquiry concerning Ghost-seeing, and what is connected therewith (Versuch über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhangt), 1851
Manuscript Remains, (6 Volumes), Volume 2 published by Berg Publishers Ltd., ISBN 978-0-85496-539-7

Scholarship by M.R.M. Parrott

Synthetic A Priori: Philosophical Interviews
Interviews, Discussion

©1998-1999 M.R.M. Parrott
First Published: 99,00,02,08,11

Published by rimric press
0-9662635-6-1 | 978-0-9662635-6-5
232 Pages, Paperback & eBook, 2025

2025 Edition Extras: Both Prefaces, Notes on the Text and Cover Art

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The Pure Critique of Reason: Kant and Subjectivity
Philosophical Monograph

©1998-1999 M.R.M. Parrott
First Published: Oct 2002

Published by rimric press
0-9662635-5-3 | 978-0-9662635-5-8
148 Pages, Paperback & eBook, 2025

2025 Edition Extras: Afterword, Notes on the Text

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The Empiricism of Subjectivity: Deleuze and Consciousness
Philosophical Monograph

©1996-1997 M.R.M. Parrott
First Published: Oct 2002

Published by rimric press
0-9662635-3-7 | 978-0-9662635-3-4
128 Pages, Paperback & eBook, 2025

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The Ethos of Modernity: Foucault and Enlightenment
Philosophical Monograph

©1995-1996 M.R.M. Parrott
First Published: May 96/Oct 02

Published by rimric press
0-9662635-2-9 | 978-0-9662635-2-7
160 Pages, Paperback & eBook, 2025

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References

Book, Wallace, W., 2003, Life of Arthur Schopenhauer, Honolulu, University Press of the Pacific, 59, 978-1-4102-0641-1.
Web, courseweb.stthomas.edu/paschons/language_http/essays/Schopenhauer.html, Schopenhauer: A Pessimist in the Optimistic Month of May, Germanic American Institute, 12 March 2010, web.archive.org/web/20100611051923/http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/paschons/language_http/essays/schopenhauer.html, 11 June 2010.
Web, archive.org/stream/selectedessaysof033377mbp/selectedessaysof033377mbp_djvu.txt, Full text of “Selected Essays Of Schopenhauer”, 12 March 2010.
, Fredriksson, Einar H., The Dutch Publishing Scene: Elsevier and North-Holland, 61-76, A Century of Science Publishing: A Collection of Essays, books.google.com/books?id=mwWrRYyck6AC&pg=PA61, Fredriksson, Einar H., 0, 978-4-274-90424-0, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2001.
Journal, Willson, A. Leslie, Friedrich Majer: Romantic Indologist, 1961, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 3, 1, 40-49, 40753707, 0040-4691.
Safranski, Rüdiger (1991) Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy. Harvard University Press. p. 244.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Author's preface to “On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of sufficient reason”, p.1.
Dale Jacquette, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Routledge, 2015: “Biographical sketch”..
Schopenhauer: his life and philosophy by H. Zimmern - 1932 - G. Allen & Unwin..
Book, Lewis, Peter, books.google.com/books?id=6TBXX9KVtzsC&dq=%22Arthur+Schopenhauer%22+%22lutheran%22&pg=PA167, Arthur Schopenhauer, 2013, 15 February 2013, Reaktion Books, 978-1-78023-069-6.
Book, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant, Immanuel, § 52c, Paul Carus.
See the quotation of Schopenhauer in book, University of Chicago Press, 978-0-226-78665-0, Storm, Jason Josephson, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, Chicago, 2021, 36-37, books.google.com/books?id=pEQ6EAAAQBAJ.
Web, Schopenhauer, Arthur, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature: Two Essays (revised edition), gutenberg.org/cache/epub/50966/pg50966-images.html#Pg031, gutenberg.org, Project Gutenberg, p.65, 27 September 2024, 3 December 2024, web.archive.org/web/20241203105520/https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/50966/pg50966-images.html#Pg031, live.
Book, Young, Julian, 2005, taylorfrancis.com/books/9781134328833, Schopenhauer, Routledge, 978-1-134-32883-3, 1, 4-25, en, 10.4324/9780203022108.
Einstein, Albert (1935). The World as I See It, p. 14. Snowball Publishing. ISBN 1-4948-7706-6..
The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, §68.
Book, The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1. Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy, But the whole teaching of Kant contains really nothing more about this than the oft-repeated meaningless expression: 'The empirical element in perception is given from without.' ... always through the same meaningless metaphorical expression: 'The empirical perception is given us.'.
Book, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer, Arthur, § 21, For sensation is and remains a process within the organism and is limited, as such, to the region within the skin; it cannot therefore contain any thing which lies beyond that region, or, in other words, anything that is outside us [...] It is only when the Understanding begins to apply its sole form, the causal law, that a powerful transformation takes place, by which subjective sensation becomes objective perception..
Parrott, M.R.M. The Pure Critique of Reason”. 1999. Regarding the “Transcendental Aesthetic” in the Critique of Pure Reason'', “All we will ever know about an object, is the appearance we experience of it, the appearance which we alone construct! To stand from twenty yards and view the tree before us, is only to represent to ourselves the ideas of 'tree-ness' and 'distance' from 'us', all through the forms of our Intuition. What is striking our eyes are only those photons which are bounced and refracted from the atomic systems, if you will. What we represent as a collection of leaves, bark and air, is merely a subjectively separated quantum field of energies. The only part of this field which comes into our brain are those waves which are produced within the optic nerve, produced as a response to the photons which strike the retina. So, the question about whether there is really a tree out there or not, is almost a moot one, since we are never in a position to 'connect' to such an object, even if it is there, and any experience of it is generated by the various modes of awareness.”.
Book, Carnegy, Patrick, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, 51.
Book, Schopenhauer, Arthur, The world as will and idea, 22 April 2019, Classic Wisdom Reprint, 978-1-950330-23-2, 1229105608.

Citations and Sources

Albright, Daniel (2004) Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-01267-4
Beiser, Frederick C., Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Book, Benatar, David, 2006, David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, Better Never to Have Been, Oxford University Press, 978-0199296422.
Book, Cartwright, David E., 2010, Schopenhauer: A Biography, Cambridge University Press, 978-0-521-82598-6.
Book, Clarke, John James, 1997, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought, books.google.com/books?id=8YOGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA67, Abingdon-on-Thames, Routledge, 978-0-415-13376-0.
Hannan, Barbara, The Riddle of the World: A Reconsideration of Schopenhauer's Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Journal, Janaway, Christopher, 2025, Schopenhauer and anti-natalism, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1-25, 10.1080/09608788.2025.2589084, free.
IEP, Lemanski, Jens, 13 January 2023, schopenhauer-logic-and-dialectic, Arthur Schopenhauer: Logic and Dialectic.
Magee, Bryan, Confessions of a Philosopher, Random House, 1997, ISBN 978-0-375-50028-2. Chapters 20, 21.
Thomas Mann, editor, The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer, Longmans Green & Co., 1939
Parrott, M.R.M., books on Kant and other philosophers, including “The Ethos of Modernity” (1996), “The Empiricism of Subjectivity” (1997), “The Pure Critique of Reason” (1999), “Synthetic A Priori” (1999)
Book, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 2015, Parerga and Paralipomena: Volume 2: Short Philosophical Essays, Arthur Schopenhauer, Janaway, Christopher, Caro, Adrian Del, 1851, Parerga and Paralipomena, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 978-1108436526.
Book, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 2018, The World as Will and Representation, 1844, 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 10.1017/9780511843112, 978-0-521-87034-4, Welchman, Alistair, Janaway, Christopher, Norman, Judith, Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation.
Safranski, Rüdiger (1990) Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-79275-3; orig. German Schopenhauer und Die wilden Jahre der Philosophie, Carl Hanser Verlag (1987)
Encyclopedia, Wicks, Robert, plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/schopenhauer/, Arthur Schopenhauer, Zalta, Edward N., Edward N. Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2019, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University.

External Links

The Art of Controversy (Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten) www.coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/" title="web.archive.org/web/20021215085620/www.coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/" target="new">web.archive.org/web/20021215085620/www.coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/. (bilingual) [The Art of Being Right]
Studies in Pessimism - audiobook from LibriVox
The World as Will and Representation at the Internet Archive:

“On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason” and “On the will in nature”. Two essays:

Internet Archive. Translated by Mrs. Karl Hillebrand (1903).
Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. Reprinted by Cornell University Library Digital Collections

www.schopenhauersource.org/type_list.php?type=manuscript" title="web.archive.org/web/20081029052257/www.schopenhauersource.org/type_list.php?type=manuscript" target="new">Facsimile edition of Schopenhauer's manuscripts in www.schopenhauersource.org/" title="web.archive.org/web/20150424113720/www.schopenhauersource.org/" target="new">SchopenhauerSource
ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/complete.html" title="web.archive.org/web/20080304165547/ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/complete.html" target="new">Essays of Schopenhauer
Kant's philosophy as rectified by Schopenhauer
www.weple.org/timeline.htmlids=14631,12007,12598,700,10671,9518,37304,95184,&title=8%20German%20Philosophers" title="web.archive.org/web/20110421040017/www.weple.org/timeline.htmlids=14631,12007,12598,700,10671,9518,37304,95184,&title=8%20German%20Philosophers" target="new">Timeline of German Philosophers
A Quick Introduction to Schopenhauer
Ross, Kelley L., 1998, “Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)”. Two short essays, on Schopenhauer's life and work, and on his dim view of academia.

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