Arthur Schopenhauer
Life swings between suffering and boredom.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860, Germany (born in Danzig, today Gdańsk, Poland)) : philosophical pessimism. The world we see is only our representation. Behind it there is one single reality, which everyone feels within: the will, a blind drive with no goal that always wants more. On AskPhilosophy: 9 reconstructed arguments, 5 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 3 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
The first major Western philosopher to put suffering and a blind craving at the centre of everything, and one of the first to call himself openly an atheist. He was also one of the first to take Indian thought seriously (Upanishads, Buddhism). Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann and the young Wittgenstein read him closely.
His times
The son of a wealthy merchant and of a successful novelist, he lived on his inheritance. His great book of 1819 went almost unnoticed. In Berlin he scheduled his lectures at the same hour as Hegel's, then at the height of his fame: the room stayed nearly empty. Settled in Frankfurt from 1833, he became famous only after 1851, with the Parerga, a few years before his death.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceA declared atheist. The principle of the world is a blind will, not a mind that sees: a seeing and good being would never have made such a losing bargain. Yet he respects religions as wisdom in images for ordinary people.
As Kant's heir, he holds that time, space and causality are forms our mind imposes on experience, so some truths are known a priori. But he ranks intuition above abstract concepts.
A first certainty: the world exists only as representation for a subject. And we know from within what it is in itself: the will, which everyone feels in their own body.
Neither dualist nor materialist. Knowledge is known to us only as a phenomenon of the brain; but brain and matter are themselves only representations. The ground of things is neither mind nor matter: it is the will.
Every act follows necessarily from the character, innate and constant, and the present motive: we can do what we will, but not will otherwise. He keeps a deeper freedom, outside time: that of our very being, which grounds our responsibility.
Morality is not a command of reason, as in Kant. But it has a real ground: beneath the many individuals there is one single will. The good person sees himself in the other ("This art thou").
Philosophy judges by reasons; religions are a "metaphysics of the people", believed on authority. He does not despise them: they say in images a truth (the world is a vale of tears) that philosophy says in concepts.
The world has no reason or goal in itself: it comes from a blind will. But he gives suffering a meaning: it teaches us to turn away from willing. A "meaning" that consists in being freed from life.
Humans are first of all selfish, often cruel: "man is a wolf to man". Compassion exists and grounds morality, but it is the exception.
The state and laws are needed because people are selfish and unjust, not because they are good. Politics interests him little; his political texts are not yet in our corpus.
An ethics of compassion: against Kant, he holds that all true love is compassion, and that abstract duty makes no one good.