Arthur Schopenhauer

Introduction

Arthur Schopenhauer is the German philosopher of the early and mid-nineteenth century whose two-volume The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1819; second expanded edition 1844) developed the most distinctive post-Kantian metaphysical system after Hegel's. Where Hegel had identified ultimate reality with Absolute Spirit unfolding through rational dialectic, Schopenhauer identified ultimate reality with the Will — a blind, irrational, striving force that manifests in the empirical world as the conflict, suffering, and frustration that the human being experiences as the texture of existence.

The philosophical framework integrated several streams that the dominant German Idealist tradition had not engaged: a pessimistic ethics that took suffering rather than happiness as the texture of existence; a engagement with Buddhist and Hindu thought (Schopenhauer was one of the first European philosophers to engage Indian philosophy seriously and integrate it into Western metaphysics); an aesthetic theory that treated art as the path to temporary release from the Will's continuous striving; and an ethical framework grounded in compassion (Mitleid) for the suffering of others rather than in Kantian rational principles or Christian commandments.

Schopenhauer's institutional career was almost entirely unsuccessful. His attempt to lecture against Hegel at the University of Berlin in 1820 (he scheduled his lectures at the same hour as Hegel's and predictably drew no audience) is the canonical story of his marginalization. He retired to Frankfurt in 1833 and lived there as an independent philosopher until his death in 1860. The wide influence that his work eventually achieved arrived only in the last decade of his life and after his death; the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century engagement (Nietzsche, Wagner, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Freud, Mann, Borges) was almost all posthumous.

Life

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, in Danzig (now Gdańsk) to a wealthy merchant family. His father Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer was a Danzig businessman; his mother Johanna Schopenhauer was a writer who would become one of the major German novelists of the early nineteenth century. The family relocated to Hamburg in 1793 when Danzig was annexed by Prussia. Heinrich Schopenhauer died in 1805, probably by suicide, when Arthur was seventeen; the death and Arthur's complicated relationship with his mother shaped his subsequent pessimism in ways that have been continuously documented.

Schopenhauer's education was unusually broad. He spent two years in France during his early teens, then was apprenticed to a Hamburg merchant in compliance with his father's wishes. After his father's death, his mother allowed him to pursue academic study; he attended the universities of Göttingen and Berlin, taking his doctorate at Jena in 1813 with the dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde).

The Berlin years (1811–13) brought Schopenhauer into contact with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose lectures he attended with disappointment and from whom he derived the lifelong contempt for academic philosophy that would shape his career. The Weimar years (1813–14) brought him into close contact with Goethe, with whom he collaborated on color theory (On Vision and Colours, 1816) and from whom he derived influence on the aesthetic dimensions of his later work.

The composition of The World as Will and Representation occupied Schopenhauer through 1814–18. The book was published in December 1818 (with the imprint date 1819). It sold poorly; the publisher reported that most copies were pulped for paper.

Schopenhauer's attempt to enter academic life as a Privatdozent at Berlin in 1820 was a failure. His lectures, scheduled to compete with Hegel's, attracted no students; he never lectured again. He spent the next decade traveling in Italy and Germany, working on further projects (including the prize essays on the freedom of the will and the foundations of morality), and producing the materials that would become the second edition of his major work.

Schopenhauer retired to Frankfurt am Main in 1833 and remained there for the rest of his life. The late period saw the second edition of The World as Will and Representation (1844, with supplementary material), the two-volume Parerga and Paralipomena (1851, the collection of essays that eventually brought him popular recognition), and the revisions to his earlier works.

The recognition arrived in the last decade of his life. Parerga and Paralipomena (especially the essays on women, on suicide, on noise, on the suffering of the world) found a popular audience; the post-1848 European cultural mood, after the failure of the revolutions of 1848, was receptive to Schopenhauer's pessimism in ways the earlier optimistic Hegelian climate had not been. Disciples gathered; the major late engagement by figures like Richard Wagner (who adopted Schopenhauer's framework in the libretto of Tristan und Isolde and elsewhere) brought him broader cultural recognition. He died in Frankfurt on September 21, 1860, at age seventy-two.

The problem he worked on

Schopenhauer's intellectual project was the completion of Kant's critical philosophy through the identification of the thing-in-itself that Kant had treated as in principle unknowable. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason had divided the world into the phenomenal realm of appearances (which we know through the structures the mind imposes on experience) and the noumenal realm of things-in-themselves (which we cannot know because all our knowledge depends on the structures the mind imposes). Schopenhauer accepted the Kantian framework but argued that Kant had stopped one step short: the thing-in-itself can be known, not through the structures of theoretical cognition (which would indeed restrict us to appearances) but through the immediate self-acquaintance the agent has with their own striving and desire.

The central claim: when I look at my own body from the outside, I see it as a phenomenon among other phenomena; when I experience my body from the inside through my own willing, I have immediate acquaintance with the inner nature of the same reality that appears as my body. The inner nature, what my body is in itself, is Will. By the same token, the inner nature of every phenomenon in the world is Will; what we call material objects, organic processes, the natural world is the outer appearance of an inner reality that is at every point Will.

The framework modifies Kant's restriction. Where Kant had treated the noumenal as in principle unknowable, Schopenhauer treats it as known directly through self-experience and then identifiable as the inner nature of everything else by analogy with the inner nature of the self. The metaphysical move is substantial; its consequences shape the rest of the framework.

Contributions

The world as Will

The metaphysical core of Schopenhauer's framework is the identification of ultimate reality with the Will. The Will is not a personal subject's will (the Kantian rational will, the Christian individual soul); it is the impersonal striving force that manifests in every level of natural phenomena. In inorganic nature the Will manifests as the forces of gravity, magnetism, chemical attraction; in plant life as the growth and reproductive striving; in animal life as the instinctive drives toward food, sex, and self-preservation; in human life as the conscious desires that drive the agent through the sequence of strivings, frustrations, and momentary satisfactions that constitute ordinary existence.

The Will is blind in the precise sense that it has no purpose beyond its own continuation. It does not aim at any goal; it simply strives. The frustration that human beings experience as the texture of life is the consequence of this aimless striving: every satisfaction immediately produces a new desire; every accomplished goal immediately reveals its own emptiness; the agent who attains what they have wanted finds the wanting transferred to something else. Schopenhauer's pessimism follows from this metaphysics: existence is structured for frustration because the Will whose appearance existence is is structured for continuous striving without satisfaction.

Aesthetic experience as release

The second contribution of the framework is the aesthetic theory. Aesthetic experience, on Schopenhauer's account, produces temporary release from the Will's continuous striving. The aesthetic subject contemplates the aesthetic object without willing it, without wanting to use it, without the restless desire that ordinarily structures consciousness. The contemplation is will-less; for the duration of aesthetic experience the subject escapes the suffering that willing produces.

The framework gives aesthetic experience a metaphysical importance that the Kantian tradition had not granted it. Where Kant had treated aesthetic judgment as a feature of the disinterested pleasure produced by beautiful objects, Schopenhauer treats aesthetic experience as the path to temporary metaphysical release from the conditions of ordinary existence. The framework shaped subsequent aesthetic theory through Wagner (whose Schopenhauerian aesthetics shaped the conception of Tristan und Isolde and the late operas), through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century engagement with aesthetic autonomy, and through Nietzsche (whose early Birth of Tragedy, 1872, is Schopenhauerian in framework before Nietzsche's later break).

Music occupies a special place in Schopenhauer's aesthetic framework. Where the other arts represent particular Platonic Forms (the visual arts represent visible forms; literature represents human types), music represents the Will itself directly. The framework made Schopenhauer one of the few major modern philosophers to take music seriously as a philosophical subject; the Schopenhauerian influence on subsequent musical thought through Wagner, Nietzsche, Mahler, and the broader nineteenth- and twentieth-century engagement with the philosophy of music has been substantial.

Ethics: compassion (Mitleid)

The ethical framework is grounded in Mitleid (compassion, literally suffering-with). The agent recognizes the other person as another expression of the same Will that constitutes themselves; the metaphysical identity grounds the ethical recognition that the other's suffering is in a sense one's own. Compassion is the immediate recognition of this identity; ethical action follows from compassion as the response to recognized shared suffering.

The framework differs from the Kantian rationalist ethics that dominated the German tradition. Where Kant had grounded ethics in the rational principle of the categorical imperative and treated moral action as the rational agent's recognition of their duty, Schopenhauer grounded ethics in the immediate emotional recognition of shared suffering and treated moral action as the response to that recognition. The framework anticipates features of subsequent care ethics, features of the twentieth-century critique of rationalist ethics, and features of the contemporary engagement with empathy as a ground for ethical response.

Asceticism and the denial of the Will

The path to release from the Will (rather than the temporary release that aesthetic experience produces) is asceticism — the deliberate denial of the Will through the suppression of desire. The ascetic does not satisfy their desires but suppresses them; through this suppression, the striving that constitutes ordinary existence is reduced; the reduction approaches the release that the Buddhist tradition calls nirvana.

The framework shows the Buddhist and Hindu influence on Schopenhauer's late work. Schopenhauer was one of the first European philosophers to engage Indian thought seriously through the Latin translation of the Upanishads (the Oupnek'hat, by Anquetil-Duperron, 1801–02) and through subsequent translations. The framework of the denial of the Will, the path of ascetic practice, the recognition of the illusory character of individual existence (the Hindu doctrine of maya) all show the Indian influence on Schopenhauer's framework.

Key works

• On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813, dissertation; expanded second edition 1847)
• On Vision and Colours (1816)
• The World as Will and Representation (Volume 1, 1819; Volume 2, 1844, with new material)
• On the Will in Nature (1836)
• On the Freedom of the Will (1839, prize essay)
• On the Basis of Morality (1840, prize essay)
• Parerga and Paralipomena (two volumes, 1851)

The standard German edition is the Sämtliche Werke edited by Arthur Hübscher (Brockhaus, seven volumes, 1937–41; revised through multiple editions). The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer (general editor Christopher Janaway, 2010–18) is the dominant contemporary English edition; the older translations by E. F. J. Payne remain in print.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Kant (the framework Schopenhauer completed and modified); Plato (the Platonic Forms in the aesthetic theory); the Upanishads and Buddhism (the Indian framework Schopenhauer integrated through Anquetil-Duperron's Oupnek'hat); Spinoza (the parallel monism of substance); Goethe (the Weimar collaborator who shaped the aesthetic dimensions); the mystical tradition through Meister Eckhart and others (the framework of release through ascetic practice).

Influenced: Nietzsche (who described Schopenhauer as his educator in the early Untimely Meditations and whose entire philosophical development took place in continuous engagement with the Schopenhauerian framework, first in agreement, then in opposition); Richard Wagner (whose late operas developed the Schopenhauerian aesthetic framework); Leo Tolstoy (whose late ethical-religious work engaged Schopenhauer); Wittgenstein (whose early Tractatus shows Schopenhauerian influence, especially in the closing remarks on the mystical and the ethical); Sigmund Freud (whose framework of the unconscious drives partly inherits Schopenhauer's framework of the Will); Thomas Mann (whose novelistic engagement with Schopenhauer appears throughout the corpus); Jorge Luis Borges (whose late prose engages Schopenhauer); the broader European cultural reception of pessimism, of Buddhism, of the unconscious.

Reception

Schopenhauer's reception during his lifetime was almost entirely posthumous. The first volume of The World as Will and Representation sold so poorly that the publisher pulped most copies; the second edition (1844) attracted slightly more attention; the popular recognition arrived only with Parerga and Paralipomena in the last decade of his life.

The post-1860 reception was substantial. The late-nineteenth-century cultural climate of European pessimism (after the failure of 1848, in the context of industrial transformation and questioning of religious frameworks) was receptive to the Schopenhauerian framework. Nietzsche's engagement made Schopenhauer the central reference point for the late-nineteenth-century critique of conventional morality; Wagner's musical engagement made the framework a major reference for European cultural life; the Russian reception through Tolstoy and the broader European engagement through Mann, Hesse, and others continued through the twentieth century.

The contemporary engagement has been substantial. Christopher Janaway's Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy (1989) and the Cambridge Edition of the Works have shaped the contemporary scholarly engagement. Bryan Magee's The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1983, revised 1997) gave the major modern popular presentation. The recent engagement through Bernard Reginster, John Atwell, David E. Cartwright, and the broader Schopenhauer scholarship continues to develop the framework.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes David Cartwright's Schopenhauer: A Biography (2010, the standard biography), Christopher Janaway's continued work, the Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Janaway, ed., 1999), Robert Wicks's Schopenhauer (2008), John Atwell's Schopenhauer on the Character of the World (1995), and Bernard Reginster's The Affirmation of Life (2006) for the broader Nietzsche-Schopenhauer engagement. Active scholarly debates concern the relation between Schopenhauer's early and late thought, the precise interpretation of the Will, the substantive engagement with Indian philosophy, the relation between Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, and the contemporary applicability of the Schopenhauerian framework in conditions of ecological and political pessimism.

Further reading

• Kant — the predecessor whose critical philosophy Schopenhauer's framework completes and modifies
• German Idealism — the broader tradition Schopenhauer belongs to (against Hegel)
• Hegel — the contemporary against whom Schopenhauer defined his own framework
• Nietzsche — the successor whose entire philosophical development took place in engagement with Schopenhauer
• Wittgenstein — the successor whose early work shows Schopenhauerian influence
• Spinoza — the parallel monist whose system Schopenhauer engaged extensively

The German philosopher whose World as Will and Representation developed the post-Kantian metaphysics of the irrational Will and made him the principal Western philosophical conduit for Indian thought.