Arthur Schopenhauer

German philosopher (1788–1860), born in Danzig into a family of wealthy merchants, an upbringing that provided him with lifelong financial independence, allowing him to devote himself entirely to philosophy without needing a university chair. His masterwork, The World as Will and Representation (1818), published when he was only thirty and initially almost entirely ignored, expounds a pessimistic metaphysical system of radical originality: starting from the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer identifies the latter with a blind, irrational, purposeless cosmic 'will', a universal force of desire and striving that objectifies itself throughout nature — from gravity to animal instincts and human desire — and which is an inexhaustible source of suffering, since every satisfied desire immediately generates another, condemning existence to a perpetual cycle of dissatisfaction. This metaphysical pessimism, deeply influenced by his discovery of Indian and Buddhist philosophy — he was one of the first European philosophers to take the Upanishads and Eastern thought seriously — leads him to propose two paths of partial release from suffering: aesthetic contemplation, especially through music, which allows the individual to momentarily escape the bondage of individual will, and, more radically, asceticism and the voluntary denial of the will to live, akin to the Buddhist ideal of renunciation. A brilliant but difficult and notoriously misanthropic philosopher, he maintained a bitter rivalry with Hegel, whose obscurity and systematic optimism he openly disdained, and his philosophy, though marginal during his lifetime, exerted a decisive influence on later thinkers and artists such as Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud and Tolstoy.

16 works

• Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit
• Essays of Schopenhauer
• On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in N
• The Art of Controversy
• The Basis of Morality
• The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer the Wisdom of Life
• The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims
• The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature
• The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, a Dialogue, Etc.
• The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism
• The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Literature
• The Failure of Philosophy
• The Metaphysics of Fine Art
• The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3)
• The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3)
• The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 3 of 3)