17

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860)

Arthur Schopenhauer was a 19th century German philosopher of pessimism who gave
the will a leading place in his metaphysics. He articulated a worldview that challenges the
value of existence. Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Plato and Immanuel Kant, as
well as by Eastern religions like Buddhism, yet he rejected the prevalent at the time post-
Kantian philosophies of German idealism and optimism. Building on the transcendental
idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical
system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first
thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy,
such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance

Schopenhauer’s Life
Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788 in Danzig (modern day Gdansk, Poland). His
father was Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, a successful merchant. His mother was the talented
author Johanna Trosiener. His father was an admirer of Voltaire and was imbued with a keen
dislike of absolutist governments. When Danzig was annexed by Prussia in 1793, the family
moved to Hamburg. Schopenhauer travelled widely with his father as a youth, living for
periods in both France and England.

In 1805, when he was 17, his father died and Schopenhauer took over the family
business in Hamburg for a time, making him a rich man overnight. His mother, however,
moved to Weimar, then the centre of German literature, to pursue her writing career,
becoming a friend and favourite of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832). A year later,
Schopenhauer and his sister joined her there. His relations with his mother, however, were
bitter and antagonistic and eventually led to a more or less complete estrangement.

Little interested in a life of business and commerce, Schopenhauer used his private

means to finance his studies. He entered the University of Göttingen in 1809 to
study Metaphysics and Psychology under Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761-1833), who advised
him to concentrate on Plato and Kant. From 1811 to 1812, he attended lectures at
the University of Berlin given by the prominent post-Kantian Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the
theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 - 1834), although he reacted both against what he
saw as Fichte's extreme Idealism, and against Schleiermacher's assertion that the purpose of
philosophy is to gain knowledge of God.

He submitted his doctoral dissertation, "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of

Sufficient Reason", to the University of Jena and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1813. This work
already contained many of the arguments he would continue to use against the prevailing
German Idealist philosophers of the time (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel). 1 From 1814 until
1818, he worked on his seminal work "The World as Will and Representation" and published
it the following year (1819).2 In 1820, Schopenhauer became a lecturer at the University of
1
In some ways, he can be considered the absolute antithesis of the whole German Idealist movement: he hated
great systems, preferring to pursue single thoughts, and he opposed their religious stance and their
German Nationalism
2
In this book, he expounded his doctrine of Pessimism (the evaluation and perception of life in a
generally negative light). In dramatic and powerful prose, he described the world as a truly terrible place, full of
 18

Berlin and began his lengthy opposition to fellow lecturer G. W. F. Hegel, whom he accused
of (among other things) using deliberately impressive, but ultimately meaningless, language.
He devised an ill-fated plan to schedule his own lectures to coincide with Hegel's in an
unsuccessful attempt to attract student support away from Hegel. After the failure of this plan
(and an equally unsuccessful attempt a year or so later), he dropped out of academia and never
taught at a university again.

After the outbreak of a cholera epidemic in Berlin in 1831, both Schopenhauer

and Hegel moved away. Hegel returned prematurely to Berlin, caught the infection, and died,
but Schopenhauer settled permanently in Frankfurt in 1833. He remained there for the next
twenty-seven years until his death, living alone except for a succession of pet poodles,
observing a strict daily routine and taking an active interest in animal welfare. He continued to
write and publish, including "On the Will in Nature" in 1836, "On the Freedom of the Will" in
1839, "On the Basis of Morality" in 1840, and a set of philosophical reflections
called "Parerga und Paralipomena" in 1851. He finally received some long-awaited
recognition for his early works later in the 1850s, and his last book of somber essays and
aphorisms became an unlikely best seller.

It was only in his late years that Schopenhauer finally enjoyed a satisfaction of sorts,
through his relationship with the attractive sculptress and admirer of his philosophy, Elisabet
Ney (1833 - 1907). Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime,
Schopenhauer had a posthumous impact across various disciplines,
including philosophy, literature, and science. His writing on aesthetics, morality,
and psychology have influenced many thinkers and artists. It is true that he never achieved
the fame of such post-Kantian philosophers as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel in
his lifetime. At the same time we have acknowledge that his thought informed the work of
such luminaries philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein, scientists Erwin
Schrödinger and Albert Einstein, psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, writers Leo
Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis
Borges, Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett and composers Richard Wagner. In 1860,
his health (which had always been robust) began to deteriorate, and he died peacefully of heart
failure on 21 September 1860, aged 72.

Sources of Inspiration
Schopenhauer said he was influenced by the Upanishads, Immanuel Kant and Plato.
References to Eastern philosophy and religion appear frequently in his writing. He
appreciated the teachings of the Buddha and even called himself a Buddhist. He said that his
philosophy could not have been conceived before these teachings were available. Among
Schopenhauer’s other influences were: Shakespeare, Rousseau, Locke, Thomas
Reid, Spinoza, Matthias Claudius, George Berkeley, David Hume, and René Descartes. As a
polyglot, he knew German, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Latin and ancient Greek, and
was an avid reader of poetry and literature. He particularly
revered Goethe, Petrarch, and Shakespeare.
The importance of Kant for Schopenhauer, in philosophy as well as on a personal
level, cannot be overstated. Schopenhauer's philosophy took Kant's work as its foundation
and he had high praise for the Transcendental Aesthetic section of Kant's Critique of Pure

injustice, disease, repression, suffering and cruelty. Contrary to Leibniz's view that this is the best of all possible
worlds, Schopenhauer sought to prove that this is in fact the worst of all possible worlds and indeed that, if it
were only a little worse, it would be no longer capable of continuing to exist.
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Reason.3 Schopenhauer praised Kant for his distinction between appearance and the thing-in-
itself, whereas the general consensus in German idealism was that this was the weakest spot
of Kant's theory, since, according to Kant, causality can find application on objects of
experience only, and consequently, things-in-themselves cannot be the cause of appearances.
Although he considered himself Kant’s only true philosophical heir, he argued that the world
was essentially irrational.
Fight with Post-Kantian Philosophy
The leading figures of post-Kantian philosophy—Johann Gottlieb Fichte,  Schelling and G.
W. F. Hegel—were not respected by Schopenhauer. He argued that they were not
philosophers at all, for they lacked "the first requirement of a philosopher, namely a
seriousness and honesty of inquiry." Rather, they were merely sophists who, excelling in the
art of beguiling the public, pursued their own selfish interests (such as professional
advancement within the university system). Diatribes against the vacuity, dishonesty,
pomposity, and self-interest of these contemporaries are to be found throughout
Schopenhauer's published writings.
Schopenhauer reserved his most unqualified damning condemnation for Hegel, whom
he considered less worthy than Fichte or Schelling. Whereas Fichte was merely a windbag,
Hegel was a "commonplace, inane, loathsome, repulsive, and ignorant charlatan."  Hegel,
Schopenhauer wrote in the preface to his Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, not only
"performed no service to philosophy, but he has had a detrimental influence on philosophy.”

Schopenhauer’s Thought
Schopenhauer was very much an atypical philosopher. He was the first major philosopher to
be openly atheist, and was unusual in placing the arts and Aesthetics so highly. Schopenhauer
called himself a Kantian, and his starting point was certainly Kant's division of the universe
into the phenomenal (things as they appear, and which can be perceived using our senses) and
the noumenal (the "thing-in-itself", which is independent of us and which can only be thought
or imagined by humans). At the same time, his philosophy stands apart from other German
idealist philosophers in many respects. Perhaps most surprising would be the clarity and
elegance of his prose. Schopenhauer was a devoted reader of the great stylists in England and
France, and he tried to emulate their style in his own writings.

Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics and Epistemology

The starting point for Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is Immanuel Kant’s system of
transcendental idealism as explained in The Critique of Pure Reason. Although Schopenhauer
is quite critical of much of the content of Kant’s Transcendental Analytic, he endorses Kant’s
approach to metaphysics in Kant’s limiting the sphere of metaphysics to articulating the
conditions of experience rather than transcending the bounds of experience. Like Kant, he
argues that the phenomenal world is a representation, i.e., an object for the subject
conditioned by the forms of our cognition. At the same time, Schopenhauer simplifies the
activity of the Kantian cognitive apparatus by holding that all cognitive activity occurs

3
While he praised Kant's greatness, he nonetheless included a highly detailed criticism of Kantian
philosophy as an appendix to The World as Will and Representation.
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according to the principle of sufficient reason, that is, that nothing is without a reason for
being.

In Schopenhauer’s dissertation, he argues that all of our representations are connected

according to one of the four manifestations of the principle of sufficient reason, each of
which concerns a different class of objects. The principle of sufficient reason of becoming,
which regards empirical objects, provides an explanation in terms of causal necessity: any
material state presupposes a prior state from which it regularly follows. The principle of
sufficient reason of knowing, which regards concepts or judgments, provides an explanation
in terms of logical necessity: if a judgment is to be true, it must have a sufficient ground.
Regarding the third branch of the principle, that of space and time, the ground for being is
mathematical: space and time are so constituted that all their parts mutually determine one
another. Finally, for the principle regarding willing, we require as a ground a motive, which
is an inner cause for that which it was done. Every action presupposes a motive from which it
follows by necessity.

Influence of Eastern Thought

Schopenhauer held a profound respect for Indian philosophy; although he loved Hindu texts,
he was more interested in Buddhism, which he came to regard as the best religion. However,
his studies on Hindu and Buddhist texts were constrained by the lack of adequate literature,
and the latter were mostly restricted to Early Buddhism. He was genuinely interested and
knowledgeable about Hinduism and Buddhism, and the only major Western philosopher to
draw serious parallels between Western and Eastern Philosophy.

Schopenhauer read the Latin translation of the ancient Hindu texts, The Upanishads.

He was so impressed by their philosophy that he called them “the production of the highest
human wisdom”, and believed they contained superhuman concepts.4 The Upanishads was a
great source of inspiration to Schopenhauer. He called the opening up of Sanskrit literature
“the greatest gift of our century”, and predicted that the philosophy and knowledge of the
Upanishads would become the cherished faith of the West.5 Most noticeable, in the case of
Schopenhauer’s work, was the significance of the Chandogya Upanishad,
whose Mahavakya, Tat Tvam Asi is mentioned throughout The World as Will and
Representation.

Aesthetics

4
Schopenhauer was first introduced to the 1802 Latin Upanishad translation through Friedrich Majer. They met
during the winter of 1813–1814 in Weimar at the home of Schopenhauer’s mother according to the biographer
Safranski. Majer was a follower of Herder, and an early Indologist.
5
For Schopenhauer, will had ontological primacy over the intellect; desire is prior to thought. Schopenhauer felt
this was similar to notions of puruṣārtha or goals of life in Vedānta Hinduism. In Schopenhauer's philosophy,
denial of the will is attained by:
-personal experience of an extremely great suffering that leads to loss of the will to live; or
- knowledge of the essential nature of life in the world through observation of the suffering of other people.
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In Schopenhauer's Aesthetics, the aesthetic viewpoint is more objective than the scientific

viewpoint precisely because it separates the intellect from the Will in the form of art. He held
that the body is merely an extension of the Will, while art is a spontaneous act or pre-
determined idea which the artist has in mind before any attempts at creation, and therefore
cannot be linked to either the body or the intellect. Unlike science, then, art effectively
goes beyond the realm of sufficient reason.

Schopenhauer states that aesthetic contemplation is characterized by objectivity. The

intellect in its normal functioning is in the service of the will. As such, our normal perception
is always tainted by our subjective strivings. The aesthetic point of view, since it is freed
from such strivings, is more objective than any other ways of regarding an object. Art does
not transport the viewer to an imaginary or even ideal realm. Rather it affords the opportunity
to view life without the distorting influence of his own will.
For Schopenhauer, human "willing"—desiring, craving, etc.—is at the root
of suffering. A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation. Here
one moves away from ordinary cognizance of individual things to cognizance of eternal
Platonic Ideas—in other words, cognizance that is free from the service of will. In aesthetic
contemplation, one no longer perceives an object of perception as something from which one
is separated; rather "it is as if the object alone existed without anyone perceiving it, and one
can thus no longer separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one,
the entirety of consciousness entirely filled and occupied by a single perceptual
image". Subject and object are no longer distinguishable, and the Idea comes to the fore.
Music, for Schopenhauer, is the purest form of art because it is the one that depicts the will
itself without it appearing as subject to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, therefore as an
individual object.

Moral Philosophy

Like Kant, Schopenhauer reconciles freedom and necessity in human action through the
distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms. However, he was sharply critical
of Kant’s deontological framework. Schopenhauer charged Kant with committing a petitio
principii, for he assumed at the outset of his ethics that purely moral laws and then
constructed an ethics to account for such laws. Schopenhauer argues, however, that Kant
provides no proof for the existence of such laws. Indeed, Schopenhauer avers that no such
laws, which have their basis in theological assumptions, exist. Likewise, Schopenhauer
attacks Kant’s account of morality as characterized by an unconditioned ought. The notion of
‘ought’ only carries motivational force when accompanied by the threat of sanctions. Because
no ought can be unconditioned insofar as its motivational force stems from its implicit threat
of punishment, all imperatives are in fact, according to Schopenhauer, hypothetical.

Schopenhauer asserts that the task of ethics is not to prescribe moral actions that
ought to be done, but to investigate moral actions. As such, he states that philosophy is
always theoretical: its task to explain what is given. His Ethics were mainly expressed in
his "On the Freedom of the Will" of 1839 and "On the Basis of Morality" of 1840. His
identification of three primary moral incentives was a central aspect of his
mission: compassion (the genuine motivator to moral expression),
and malice and egoism (the corruptors of moral incentives). He saw love (as in the Ancient
Greek concept of "agape", rather than erotic love) as an immensely powerful force
lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world.
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Schopenhauer’s moral theory proposed that only compassion can drive moral acts.

According to Schopenhauer, compassion alone is the good of the object of the acts, that is,
they cannot be inspired by either the prospect of personal utility or the feeling of duty.
Mankind can also be guided by egoism and malice. Egotistic acts are those guided by self-
interest, desire for pleasure or happiness. Schopenhauer believed most of our deeds belong to
this class. Acts of malice are different from egotistic acts. As in the case of acts of
compassion, these do not target personal utility. Their aim is to cause damage to others,
independently of personal gains. He believed, like Swami Vivekananda in the unity of all
with one-self and also believed that ego is the origin of pain and conflicts, that reduction of
ego frames the moral principles.

Even though Schopenhauer ended his treatise on the freedom of human will with the
postulate of everyone’s responsibility for their character and, consequently, acts—the
responsibility following from one’s being the Will as noumenon (from which also all the
characters and creations come)—he considered his views incompatible with theism, on
grounds of fatalism and, more generally, responsibility for evil. He named a force within man
that he felt took invariable precedence over reason: the Will to Live or Will to Life, defined
as an inherent drive within human beings, and indeed all creatures, to stay alive; a force that
inveigles us into reproducing. He refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental,
but rather understood it as an immensely powerful force that lay unseen within
man’s psyche and dramatically shaped the world.

Atheism
When German philosophers were entrenched in the universities and immersed in the
theological concerns of the time, Schopenhauer was an atheist who stayed outside the
academic profession. He was critical of religion and objected to the notion that a god or gods
created this world. However, he was not an outspoken atheist in the sense of actively
speaking out against religion and all things supernatural. Rather, Schopenhauer was strongly
influenced by the Upanishads and Buddhism, and strongly advocated compassion. In
Schopenhauer’s philosophy the dogmas of Christianity lose their significance, and the “Last
Judgment” is no longer preceded by anything—”The world is itself the Last Judgment on
it.” Whereas God, if he existed, would be evil. He begins by denouncing Judaism, saying that
an all-benevolent God would not create a world full of misery. But according to the book of
Genesis, the Garden of Eden, where man lived before the Fall, was essentially paradise on
Earth. In addition, the philosopher falls pray to the classical misconception of blaming God for
all the evil.

Politics
Schopenhauer's politics were an echo of his system of ethics, which he elucidated in detail in
his Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (the two essays On the Freedom of the Will and On
the Basis of Morality). By his own admission, he did not give much thought to politics,6 but in
general, he was in favour of limited government, which would leave men free to work out
their own salvation. Schopenhauer shared the view of Thomas Hobbes on the necessity of the
state and state action to check the innate destructive tendencies of our species. He also

6
By his own admission, Schopenhauer did not give much thought to politics, and several times he
wrote proudly of how little attention he paid "to political affairs of his day".
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defended the independence of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power, and a
monarch as an impartial element able to practise justice (in a practical and everyday sense,
not a cosmological one). He declared that monarchy is "natural to man in almost the same
way as it is to bees and ants, to cranes in flight, to wandering elephants, to wolves in a pack
in search of prey, and to other animals". Intellect in monarchies, he writes, always has "much
better chances against stupidity, its implacable and ever-present foe, than it has in republics;
but this is a great advantage." 
Races and religions
He had a distinctly hierarchical conception of the races, attributing civilizational primacy to
the northern white races due to what he saw as their sensitivity and creativity.7 Having said
that, he was also adamantly against differing treatment of races, and was fervently anti-
slavery. He also held anti-Semitic views (arguing that Christianity constituted a revolt against
the materialistic basis of Judaism), a chauvinistic attitude to women (claiming that "woman is
by nature meant to obey"), and a partiality for the possibilities of eugenics. However, he had
generally liberal views on many other social issues, and was strongly against taboos on issues
like suicide and homosexuality. He was very concerned about the rights of animal, which he
saw as phenomenal manifestations of Will, just as were humans.

7
Eexceptions are given for the ancient Egyptians and Hindus, whom he saw as equal :
The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among
the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and
has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmans, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea
Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated
early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and
perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about
by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature and out of it all came their
high civilization.