Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), then a free city with close ties to the Polish crown. His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, was a prosperous merchant of Dutch descent; his mother, Johanna Trosiener, later became one of the most widely read German novelists of her generation ^[1]. When Prussia annexed Danzig in 1793, the family relocated to the free city of Hamburg rather than live under Prussian rule, a decision that reflected Heinrich's republican convictions ^[2].

Heinrich intended his son for a commercial career and gave him an unusually cosmopolitan education. The boy spent two years, from 1797 to 1799, living with a business associate's family in Le Havre, where he became fluent in French. In 1803 his parents offered him a bargain: he could accompany them on an extended tour of Europe if he agreed afterward to enter a merchant apprenticeship. The journey took the family through Holland, England, France, Switzerland, and Austria, and included several months at a boarding school in Wimbledon, an experience the young Schopenhauer remembered with distaste ^[1].

In April 1805 Heinrich Floris was found dead in the canal behind the family warehouse in Hamburg. Suicide was widely suspected, though never proven. The death freed Arthur, after two more unhappy years in a counting house, from his promise. Johanna moved to Weimar, established a literary salon frequented by Goethe, and eventually released her son from commerce, telling him to pursue the scholarly life he wanted ^[2]. He never forgot what he saw as her coldness during this period, and their relationship remained strained for the rest of her life.

Schopenhauer made up his lost schooling quickly. After intensive preparation in Gotha and Weimar, he enrolled at the University of Göttingen in 1809, initially in medicine, before turning to philosophy under the skeptic Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who advised him to concentrate on Plato and Kant ^[3]. Those two thinkers remained the poles of his philosophy. In 1811 he moved to Berlin to hear Fichte and Schleiermacher lecture, and left unimpressed by both.

His doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, was accepted by the University of Jena in 1813. Goethe read it with approval and drew the young philosopher into his own studies of color perception; the collaboration produced Schopenhauer's short treatise On Vision and Colours (1816) and ended, as most of Schopenhauer's collaborations did, in mutual irritation ^[1].

A second, quieter influence arrived in Weimar during the winter of 1813 to 1814, when the orientalist Friedrich Majer introduced him to the Upanishads in a Latin translation from Persian. Schopenhauer read from that volume for the rest of his life and later called it his consolation. His willingness to treat Hindu and Buddhist texts as serious philosophy, rather than exotic curiosities, set him apart from nearly every European contemporary ^[4]. Between 1814 and 1818, working in Dresden, he composed the book that contained, as he saw it, a single thought unfolded from every side: The World as Will and Representation, published by Brockhaus at the end of 1818 with an 1819 title page ^[3].

The World as Will and Representation is the center of any Arthur Schopenhauer biography. Starting from Kant's distinction between appearances and the thing in itself, Schopenhauer argued that the inner nature of reality is accessible to us in one place only: our own bodies, which we know from within as will, a blind, aimless striving. The entire world of objects, he claimed, is the appearance of this one will, which manifests as gravity in a stone, growth in a plant, and desire in a human being ^[3]. Because willing arises from lack, and satisfaction is brief before new wants appear, existence oscillates between pain and boredom. This diagnosis made him the most systematic philosophical pessimist in the Western canon ^[1].

The book's later sections sketch two escapes. Aesthetic experience, above all music, which Schopenhauer regarded as a direct copy of the will itself, offers temporary release from desire; his theory of music shaped Richard Wagner profoundly and helps explain the philosopher's classification, in modern catalogues, as a musicologist as well as a metaphysician ^[5]. Permanent release comes only through asceticism, the denial of the will to live, a path he found described in Christian mysticism, the Upanishads, and Buddhist teaching ^[4].

Among Arthur Schopenhauer achievements his ethics deserves separate mention. In the prize essay On the Basis of Morality (1840) he located the foundation of ethics not in Kantian duty or divine command but in compassion (Mitleid), the felt identity of one suffering being with another. He extended moral concern to animals at a time when most philosophers denied they had any standing, a position that later animal welfare advocates cited with gratitude ^[6]. His 1839 essay On the Freedom of the Will, which won a Norwegian academy's prize, argued that a person can do what they will but cannot will what they will, a formulation Einstein liked to quote ^[3].

Schopenhauer never married. In Dresden in 1819 a servant, Caroline Richter, involved with him in Berlin years later, does not exhaust the record: he acknowledged fathering an illegitimate daughter in 1819 who died in infancy, and he carried on a long, intermittent relationship with Richter, a chorus singer, during his Berlin years ^[2]. Marriage, he wrote, would have interfered with the one task he believed he was born for.

His combativeness was notorious. In 1821 he pushed a seamstress, Caroline Marquet, away from his door during a quarrel; she sued, claiming injury, and after years of litigation he was ordered to pay her a quarterly pension until her death in 1842 ^[1]. His relations with his mother collapsed entirely after 1814; they never met again, though they resumed a thin correspondence late in her life. With his sister Adele he remained in distant but real contact.

Daily life in his later decades followed a strict pattern that biographers have documented in detail: writing in the morning, flute practice (he loved Rossini), lunch at the Englischer Hof, a long walk with a succession of poodles he named Atma and Butz, and reading The Times of London at the library ^[2]. The routine, ironic in a philosopher of resignation, kept him healthy and productive into old age.

Recognition came very slowly, and Schopenhauer's academic career failed outright. Appointed an unsalaried lecturer at the University of Berlin in 1820, he scheduled his course at the same hour as Hegel's lectures, confident that students would choose truth over what he called charlatanry. Almost no one came, and he soon abandoned teaching, nursing a lifelong hatred of Hegel and of university philosophy in general ^[3]. When cholera struck Berlin in 1831, the epidemic that killed Hegel, Schopenhauer fled south and in 1833 settled permanently in Frankfurt am Main, living on the fortune his father had left ^[1].

The Frankfurt decades were productive. He issued On the Will in Nature (1836), the two ethics essays, and in 1844 a greatly expanded second edition of The World as Will and Representation, whose new second volume doubled the work's size. Sales remained dismal; Brockhaus complained of unsold stock ^[3].

The turn came in 1851 with Parerga and Paralipomena, two volumes of essays and aphorisms on topics from noise and women to authorship and the art of living. Accessible and sharply written, the collection found the audience his systematic work never had. An 1853 article by John Oxenford in the Westminster Review, titled Iconoclasm in German Philosophy, introduced him to English readers and rebounded into Germany, where his fame grew rapidly ^[1]. Admirers made pilgrimages to Frankfurt; universities began teaching his system; a third edition of his main work appeared in 1859. Schopenhauer died peacefully at home on September 21, 1860, at age 72, and was buried in Frankfurt under a plain slab bearing only his name ^[2].

Few philosophers ignored in their prime have cast a longer shadow. Friedrich Nietzsche discovered The World as Will and Representation in a Leipzig bookshop in 1865 and built his early philosophy in dialogue with it before turning against its pessimism; his essay Schopenhauer as Educator records the debt ^[3]. Wagner sent Schopenhauer the libretto of the Ring cycle in homage, and Tristan und Isolde is saturated with Schopenhauerian metaphysics of desire and renunciation ^[5]. Freud acknowledged that the philosopher's account of the will anticipated central features of the unconscious, and Wittgenstein absorbed him early. Writers from Tolstoy and Turgenev to Thomas Mann, Proust, Borges, and Beckett read him closely ^[1].

Among basic Arthur Schopenhauer facts worth remembering: he was the first major Western philosopher to build Indian thought into his system, an early and forceful voice for the moral status of animals, and a stylist whose clear, aggressive German broke with the dense idiom of his idealist rivals. His essay collections remain in print in many languages, and his prize essay on free will still anchors undergraduate debates about determinism ^[4].

Scholarship on him is active. The Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft, founded in Frankfurt in 1911, publishes a yearbook devoted to his work, and modern critical editions and English translations from Cambridge University Press have renewed academic attention in the twenty-first century ^[6]. For readers who ask what suffering means and whether desire can ever be quieted, his answer, bleak but bracing, has never gone out of date.