(1788-1860)

Arthur Schopenhauer was born February 22, 1788 in Danzig, Prussia (now Gdansk in Poland). His father was a successful businessman, and his mother a novelist. Young Arthur was moved around Europe quite a bit, which allowed him to become fluent in several languages, and to develop a deep love of nature.

In 1805, his father died, and he tried a business career. He lived with his mother for a while in Weimar, and she introduced him to Goethe. He went on to study medicine at the University of Göttingen and philosophy at the University of Berlin, and ultimately received his doctorate from the University of Jena in 1813. Later, he worked with Goethe on Goethe's studies on color.

In 1819, he published his greatest work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea).

To Schopenhauer, the phenomenal world is basically an illusion.  The true reality, Kant's "thing-in-itself," he refers to as Will.  Will, perhaps an odd term to us today, is more like the Tao in Chinese philosophy:  It is out of the Will that everything derives.  But it has more the qualities of a force, and pushes or drives what we perceive as the phenomenal world.

Will is, you could say, the inner nature of all things.  So, if you want to understand something's -- or someone's -- inner nature, you need only look within yourself.  So the Will also drives us, through our instincts.  This concept would influence a young Sigmund Freud a generation later.

Schopenhauer, profoundly influenced by his reading of Buddhist literature, saw life as essentially painful.  We are forced by our natures, our instincts, to live, to breed, to suffer, and to die.  Schopenhauer is often described as "the great pessimist!"

For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it....

If you imagine... the sum total of distress, pain, and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course, you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on the earth as on the moon....

To our amazement we suddenly exist, after having for countless millennia not existed; in a short while we will again not exist, also for countless millennia.  That cannot be right, says the heart.

The question, of course, is how does one get past this suffering?  One way he recommends is esthetic salvation -- seeing the beauty in something, or someone.  When we do this, we are actually looking at the universal or essence behind the scene, which moves us in turn towards the universal subject within ourselves.  This quiets the will that forces us into the phenomenal world.  Schopenhauer believed that music was the purest art -- one step from will.

A second way to transcend suffering is through ethical salvation -- compassion.  Here, too, it is the recognition of self-in-others and others-in-self that leads to a quieting of the will.

But these are only partial answers.  The full answer requires religious salvation -- asceticism, the direct stilling of all desires by a life of self-denial and meditation.  Without the will, only nothingness remains, which is Nirvana.

Schopenhauer lived many years of his life a bitter and reclusive man, unable to deal with his lack of success in life.  He began publishing his works again in 1836, and intellectuals all over Europe began to develop an interest in him.

Sadly, Schopenhauer developed heart problems and on September 21, 1860, he died.  After his death, he would powerfully influence such notables as the composer Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann and many other writers.