Arthur Schopenhauer

• 1. Introduction

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  Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who, in 1820, asked the University of Berlin to schedule his lectures for the very hour when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught. Hegel was the celebrated name of the day. Only five students turned up for Schopenhauer.

  He soon abandoned academic life altogether. He lived from 1788 to 1860, and he argued that the world is driven by a blind and irrational will. Yet this teacher of renunciation kept a sword and loaded pistols near his bed to defend himself from thieves.

  How did a man so attached to his own safety end up praising the giving up of desire? Why did a vast book that sold very poorly in 1818 go on to influence thinkers and artists long after he was gone? And what did a merchant's son find in ancient Indian texts that the German universities of his day could not give him?

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• 2. A Dark Inheritance

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  Arthur Schopenhauer was born on the 22nd of February 1788 in Danzig, on Heiliggeistgasse, to Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and his wife Johanna. Both parents came from wealthy patrician families. They were Protestants but not very devout, and they supported the French Revolution. They counted themselves republicans, cosmopolitans and admirers of Britain.

  In 1793 Danzig became part of Prussia, and Heinrich moved the family to Hamburg, a free city with a republican constitution. His firm kept trading in Danzig. Arthur's only sibling, Adele, was born on the 12th of July 1797.

  That same year Arthur was sent to Le Havre to live with the family of one of his father's business associates, Grégoire de Blésimaire. He stayed two years, learned French, and formed a lifelong friendship with the family's son, Jean Anthime. He began playing the flute as early as 1799.

  In 1803 his parents took him on a tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria and Prussia. Heinrich offered him a choice. Arthur could stay home and prepare for university, or he could travel and continue a merchant's education. He chose the journey, and he later deeply regretted it, because the training was tedious. He also spent twelve weeks at a school in Wimbledon, where strict Anglican piety struck him as shallow. His father meanwhile grew very critical of his results.

  In 1805 Heinrich drowned in a canal near the family home in Hamburg. The death may have been an accident, but his wife and son believed it was suicide. Heinrich had been prone to anxiety and depression, and he had grown so fussy that even Johanna doubted his mental health. Arthur showed a similar moodiness in his youth and often admitted that he had inherited it. Serious mental troubles also appeared elsewhere on his father's side of the family. Even so, he liked his father and spoke of him warmly.

  Heinrich left a substantial inheritance, divided in three among Johanna and the children. Arthur could control his share once he came of age. He invested it cautiously in government bonds, and the yearly interest was more than double a university professor's salary.

  He quit the merchant apprenticeship, with his mother's encouragement, and entered the Ernestine Gymnasium in Gotha. There he enjoyed the company of local nobles and spent heavily, which alarmed his frugal mother. He left after writing a satirical poem about one of the schoolmasters. Arthur said he left of his own accord, but a letter from his mother suggests he was expelled.

  He then spent two years as a merchant, in honor of his dead father. He doubted he could ever become a scholar, since he had trouble with Latin, which an academic career required. Johanna and Adele, meanwhile, moved to Weimar, the center of German literature.

  The parting was cold. Johanna wrote to him that "You are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with." She added that "all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit." She would outlive that letter by 24 years.

  Arthur followed her to Weimar anyway. Her salon there was famous among local intellectuals, and it would give him his first glimpse of the most celebrated writer in Germany.

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• 3. Goethe and the Colour Question

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  At the parties in Johanna's salon, the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe seemed not even to notice the young, unknown student. Arthur went mostly on the evenings when he knew Goethe would attend. Perhaps Johanna had warned the writer about her son's depressive and combative nature. Or perhaps Goethe was on bad terms with Franz Passow, Arthur's language instructor and roommate.

  In 1809 Arthur left Weimar for the University of Göttingen, which was more modern and scientific than the famous University of Jena. He chose medicine, because of his scientific interests. The professor Gottlob Ernst Schulze, author of Aenesidemus, made a strong impression on him and advised him to concentrate on Plato and Immanuel Kant. Around 1810-11 he switched from medicine to philosophy. He never regretted the science, which he considered necessary for a philosopher.

  He arrived at the newly founded University of Berlin for the winter semester of 1811-12. There he heard Johann Gottlieb Fichte and found the lectures tedious and the epistemology disagreeable. He heard the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher too, and his notes on those lectures show him turning against religion and toward atheism.

  In 1813 Prussia joined the war against France, and Schopenhauer fled Berlin, afraid the city would be attacked and that he would be pressed into military service. He settled in the small town of Rudolstadt, hoping no army would march through. There he hiked in the mountains and the Thuringian Forest and wrote his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. He finished it about when the French were defeated at the Battle of Leipzig.

  Back in Weimar, he met his mother's verdict. Johanna had just published a hit travel book about the family's European tour. She found his dissertation incomprehensible and doubted anyone would buy a copy. In a fit of temper, Arthur replied that people would read his work long after her "rubbish" was forgotten.

  The publishing firm Brockhaus later proved him right. Hans Brockhaus recalled that his predecessors had only wanted to please a best-selling author by printing her son's work. He observed that "today nobody remembers Johanna, but her son's works are in steady demand." He kept large portraits of the pair in his Leipzig office to educate new editors.

  Goethe, to whom Arthur had sent the dissertation as a gift, was impressed by the young man's intellect and scientific education. Their meetings and letters were an honor for a philosopher who had at last been noticed by his hero. They talked mostly about Goethe's newly published and only lukewarmly received work on colour theory. In November 1813 Goethe invited him to help with it. Schopenhauer thought colour theory a minor matter, but he agreed out of admiration.

  The work led him to what he counted as his most important discovery in epistemology. Kant had shown that causality is a priori, meaning the mind brings it to experience. Schulze had made it plausible that Kant had not truly answered David Hume's skepticism. Schopenhauer wanted a demonstration.

  His answer started from a thought experiment. A man born blind feels a cube. The sensations in his hand are uniform, and nothing in them resembles a cube. His understanding infers that the resistance has a cause. Then, from the movements of his arms, he builds the cubic shape in space. Without ideas of cause and space already within him, the cube could never arise from those sensations. Hume had held that causality was drawn from experience. Schopenhauer, following Kant, held that perception presupposes it.

  He pressed the point further. The senses supply only raw material, and the intellect turns it into the world as representation. Even ordinary sight depends on unnoticed work, such as merging the images from two eyes and turning the inverted retinal impressions upright.

  The friendship with Goethe cooled. Schopenhauer's theories on colour differed from his teacher's, and his self-confidence and tactless criticism wore on the older man. After 1816 their letters became rare. Schopenhauer admitted that the rejection hurt him badly, yet he kept calling Goethe's colour theory a great introduction to his own.

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• 4. Wisdom From the East

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  In Weimar, a historian of religion named Friedrich Majer opened a door Schopenhauer never closed again. Majer was an orientalist and a disciple of Johann Gottfried Herder. He introduced the young philosopher to Eastern thought.

  Schopenhauer was immediately struck by the Upanishads. He called them "the production of the highest human wisdom" and believed they held superhuman concepts. He ranked them, and the Buddha, alongside Plato and Kant.

  His reading widened to the Bhagavad Gita, to Asiatick Researches from the Asiatic Society, and to a rather amateurish German journal called Asiatisches Magazin. He read the Upanishads in a Latin translation. In his main work and in Parerga and Paralipomena, he praised them and wrote: "It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death."

  His view of Buddhism was just as warm. He never revered a Buddhist text, yet he considered Buddhism the most distinguished religion. His access was limited by a shortage of good literature, and what existed mostly covered Theravada Buddhism. He also insisted that he had formed most of his ideas on his own and noticed the similarities only later.

  This early reading is why he is remembered as one of the first Western philosophers to share and affirm major tenets of Indian philosophy. Those included asceticism, denial of the self, and the idea of the world as appearance.

  By May 1814 his relationship with his mother had fallen to a new low, and he left Weimar for Dresden. There he began the book that would carry these ideas, and it occupied him until 1818.

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• 5. The World as Will

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  "The world is my representation." With that sentence, Schopenhauer opened The World as Will and Representation, and the whole book grows out of it. He saw his philosophy as an extension of Kant's. Everything that exists for knowledge exists as an object for a subject, so the world is dependent on whoever perceives it. Space, time and the structure of cause and effect are contributed by the mind.

  Schopenhauer did not deny that the external world exists. He did praise Kant's separation of appearances from the thing-in-itself. The mind does not simply receive reality, as if it were a blank slate. It takes active part in building what we experience.

  The second book of his work asks what the world is beneath appearances. His answer is will. The thing-in-itself lies outside space and time, so it cannot be many things. Every object in the world is a manifestation of one blind essence striving toward existence and life. Human reason is a secondary development. Our advanced mental powers serve the ends of willing, an illogical and directionless striving that condemns each person to suffering with no final purpose.

  This picture has a hard consequence for free choice. Each human action is an event in the world of appearances. It follows necessarily from motives and from the individual's given character. Albert Einstein later quoted a Schopenhauerian idea: "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will." Only the will as thing-in-itself is free, because it stands beyond the forms of necessity.

  Relief, Schopenhauer said, comes when the will is "tranquillized" by insight. The insight is that individuality is an illusion and that the world in itself is one. A saint grasps this intuitively. Ascetic practices help bring about the will's "self-abolition," a redemptive state free of striving and suffering. To someone who sees through the illusion, an individual happy life in a world of suffering is like a beggar who dreams one night that he is a king.

  From the same insight he drew his ethics. He held that the task of ethics is to investigate moral actions, not to prescribe them. A man who gives much of his income to the poor, because he suffers at the sight of poverty, simply makes less distinction between himself and others than most people do. The egoist sees a gap between two individuals. The altruist feels the suffering of others as his own. Compassion is therefore the basis of morality. For the same reason, he said, a compassionate man cannot hurt animals.

  He also described an eternal justice that rules the world rather than the state. It does not wait on time, as human punishment does. In his words, "Tormenter and tormented are one." The one who inflicts suffering errs in believing he has no share in it, and the victim errs in believing he has no share in the guilt.

  Scholars still argue whether Schopenhauer was an early antinatalist, someone who holds that people have a duty not to bring others into existence. He wrote that everyone asked beforehand would answer "no thank you very much." He also called life "a business that does not cover its costs." But he rejected unconditional moral duties, and he rejected suicide as an answer, because the will can only be abolished through knowledge of the world's essence.

  Saints were rare, however. For ordinary people he described a brief refuge that needed no renunciation.

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• 6. Beauty, Music and Desire

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  A person lost in a painting or a piece of music, Schopenhauer wrote, can no longer separate the perceiver from the perception. In his words, consciousness becomes entirely filled by a single image. This is his temporary escape from the pain of craving. In aesthetic contemplation, one stops noticing individual things and sees eternal Platonic Ideas instead. One becomes a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of cognition." Art grows out of such moments, since it tries to show the essence of the world.

  Music held the top place. Other arts depict Ideas, but music, he held, depicts the will itself. The scholar Daniel Albright summed up his view: "Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself." Schopenhauer considered it a timeless, universal language that anyone anywhere could understand.

  He was equally direct about sex. He wrote that it was astonishing how little philosophers had said about a force that plays so large a part in human life. He named the will to live as a drive in all creatures to stay alive, and it tempts us into reproducing. It takes precedence over reason.

  Love was neither trivial nor accidental to him. He argued that its ultimate aim matters more than all other aims in a person's life, because what is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation. Charles Darwin was pleased enough with this line of thought to include a quotation from Schopenhauer in The Descent of Man. Later writers have also pointed to Freud's ideas of the libido and the unconscious.

  Schopenhauer's own romantic life was far less composed than his theory of it, as the years in Berlin would show.

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• 7. Quarrels, Courtships and Lawsuits

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  In September 1818, with his book awaiting publication, Schopenhauer left Dresden for a year in Italy. He was also escaping an affair with a maid that had led to an unwanted pregnancy. He saw Venice, Bologna, Florence, Naples and Milan, and he wintered in Rome. At the Caffè Greco he got into many quarrels with German tourists. One of them, Johann Friedrich Böhmer, later recalled his insulting remarks and unpleasant character.

  Trouble with money cut the trip short. The banking house of A. L. Muhl in Danzig, which held Johanna's whole savings and a third of Arthur's, was near bankruptcy. The women accepted thirty percent of their money. Arthur took an aggressive stance toward the banker, using his business knowledge, and received his share in full. The affair further soured the three family members' relations.

  Worried about money and the silence around his book, he decided to seek a university post. He chose Berlin. Already at his test lecture in March 1820 he tried to provoke a quarrel with Hegel, whom he called a "clumsy charlatan" and accused of poor knowledge of the natural sciences. Hegel was himself under political suspicion, since many progressive professors had been dismissed after the Carlsbad Decrees. Schopenhauer carefully noted in his application that he took no interest in politics. Hegel still voted to admit him.

  Later attempts to revive his lectures failed, and so did his inquiries about other universities. His resentment found its outlet in a late essay, "On University Philosophy." He also offered publishers translations of Hume into German and Kant into English, and they declined. He studied Spanish to read Calderón, Lope de Vega, Cervantes and especially Baltasar Gracián, but his translation attempts failed as well.

  In August 1821 a quarrel with his Berlin neighbor, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet, ended in a courtroom. He claimed he had only pushed her from his entrance after she refused to leave. She claimed he attacked her so violently that she was paralyzed on her right side. The case dragged on until May 1827, when a court found Schopenhauer guilty. He had to pay her a pension until her death in 1842.

  His love life fared little better. He courted 17-year-old Flora Weiss, who was 22 years younger than he, without success. His unpublished notes criticize monogamy and muse about a four-person arrangement he called "tetragamy." He also had an on-and-off relationship with a dancer at the Berlin Opera, Caroline Richter. In 1831 a cholera epidemic hit Berlin, and he offered to take her with him if she left her young son behind. She refused. He left alone, and in his will he gave her a significant sum but insisted that none of it go to her second son.

  His fury at rejection did not stop in Berlin. In 1839 he sent an essay, "On the Basis of Morality," to the Royal Danish Society of Sciences. He was the only contestant, and the 1840 prize still went unawarded. The Society was appalled that he had insulted several distinguished philosophers, and judged that he had missed the point of the topic. Schopenhauer, who had been sure he would win, was still pouring insults on the Society in a preface written in 1860.

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• 8. Frankfurt and Late Fame

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  After fleeing the cholera, Schopenhauer arrived in Frankfurt in a period of depression and declining health. He later claimed that he had had a prophetic dream urging him to leave Berlin. On arrival he supposedly saw an apparition of his dead father and of his mother, who was still alive. The experience led him to investigate paranormal phenomena. He judged most studies ignorant or fraudulent, but he believed some cases were genuine and explained them as manifestations of the will.

  In July 1832 he moved to Mannheim, and in July 1833 he returned to Frankfurt for the rest of his life. He lived alone, apart from a series of pet poodles named Atman and Butz. His mother died in 1838, and he seemed undisturbed. His sister Adele, with whom he grew closer, kept up their letters until her death in 1849.

  In 1838 he sent his essay "On the Freedom of the Will" to a contest of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences. It won the prize in 1839. His collected ethics essays, The Two Basic Problems of Ethics, still drew little notice. A second edition of his main work, also ignored, followed.

  A small circle of followers began to gather, mostly lawyers and other professionals who studied philosophy privately. He joked that they were his "evangelists" and "apostles." The most active was Julius Frauenstädt, who wrote many articles in his support and helped find a new publisher after Brockhaus refused Parerga and Paralipomena.

  In 1848 Schopenhauer watched violence erupt in Frankfurt after General Hans Adolf Erdmann von Auerswald and Prince Felix Lichnowsky were murdered. Fearing for his property, he welcomed Austrian soldiers who wanted to shoot revolutionaries from his window, and he lent one officer his opera glasses. He rewrote his will to leave much of his estate to a Prussian fund for soldiers disabled while fighting the rebellion, and for the families of those who died. To the Young Hegelians who wanted progress, he answered that misery is natural to humans. Even a utopia, he said, would see people fighting from boredom or starving from overpopulation.

  His politics matched this outlook. He described himself as a supporter of limited government, agreed with Thomas Hobbes on the need for a strong state, and favored a monarch as an impartial figure. He took pride in how little attention he paid to his era's affairs, claiming to mind "not the times but the eternities." He was fiercely opposed to slavery, and he called the slave-holding states of North America a "disgrace to the whole of humanity." But his writings also contain harsh and demeaning claims about women, about the religion of the Jews, and about the supposed primacy of white peoples. They continue to be cited in ways that harm.

  He did leave one more nuanced note on women. In 1859 he sat for a sculpture portrait by the young Prussian sculptor Elisabet Ney, and her wit and independence impressed him. He told Malwida von Meysenbug: "I have not yet spoken my last word about women."

  In 1851 he published Parerga and Paralipomena, a collection of supplementary essays. It was his first widely read book, helped by his disciples' glowing reviews. The most popular essays were those that did not contain his basic philosophical ideas. Academic philosophers admired him as a stylist and cultural critic but did not take his system seriously. In 1856 the University of Leipzig sponsored an essay contest about his philosophy, and the winner, Rudolf Seydel, wrote a very critical piece.

  Fame arrived anyway. His friend Jules Lunteschütz painted the first of four portraits of him, and a wealthy landowner, Carl Ferdinand Wiesike, bought it and built a house to display it. Schopenhauer was flattered and amused, and called it his first chapel. Copies of paintings and photographs of him were sold. Admirers visited the places where he had lived and written, and travelled to Frankfurt's Englischer Hof to watch him dine. They sent gifts and asked for autographs. He still felt isolated, because many of his good friends had died.

  He stayed healthy in old age, which he credited to walking in all weather and getting enough sleep. He read without glasses and had a great appetite, though his hearing was poor and rheumatism troubled him. His notes from these years, among them thoughts on aging, were published after his death as Senilia.

  In the spring of 1860 his health began to fail, with shortness of breath and heart palpitations. In September he developed inflammation of the lungs. The last friend to visit, Wilhelm Gwinner, found him worried that he would not finish his additions to Parerga and Paralipomena, but at peace with dying. Schopenhauer died of pulmonary-respiratory failure on the 21st of September 1860, sitting on his couch at the age of 72. A Lutheran minister conducted the funeral.

  The disciple he had once stopped writing to, Julius Frauenstädt, was named heir to his literary estate and went on to edit the first collected works.

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