PhilosophersArthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer

Life swings between suffering and boredom.

Philosophical pessimism1788 – 1860 GermanyPessimistMetaphysician of the willCritical heir of KantAtheist
Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung
The world is my representation. First words of his great book.
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Sein Leben schwingt also, gleich einem Pendel, hin und her, zwischen dem Schmerz und der Langenweile
Life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and boredom.
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Du kannſt thun was du willſt: aber du kannſt, in jedem gegebenen Augenblick deines Lebens, nur Ein Beſtimmtes wollen
You can do what you will: but at any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing.
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das Leben ein Geschäft, das nicht die Kosten deckt
Life is a business that does not cover its costs.
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sie selbst also unter den möglichen die schlechteste
Our world is the worst of all possible worlds: a little worse, and it could no longer exist. His ironic retort to Leibniz.
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Misconceptions

Nuanced
Schopenhauer wrote: "Man can do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants."

The formula sums up his thought well, but we have not found it in that form in his books. It was popularised above all by Einstein, who quotes it from memory as "a saying of Schopenhauer" in his essay "The World as I See It" (c. 1930-1931, reprinted in 1934 in Mein Weltbild) and in his 1932 "Credo". Schopenhauer writes: "You can do what you will: but at any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing." And he asks: "Can you also will what you will?"

False
Schopenhauer, the pessimist, recommended suicide.

He refuses to call suicide a crime. But he judges it futile: the person who kills himself wills life and only refuses the conditions it offers him. It is an affirmation of the will, not a deliverance. He compares it to a clumsy experiment that destroys the very consciousness awaiting the answer.

Nuanced
For Schopenhauer, the world does not exist: everything is illusion.

The world as we see it exists only for a subject who perceives it: it is a representation. But it has a real being, which each of us knows from within through our own body: the will. So the world is both representation and will, as the title of his book says.