Schopenhauer: who he was and what he argued, from will to pessimism

Who Arthur Schopenhauer was

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788 in Danzig, now Gdańsk in Poland, the son of a wealthy merchant; his mother later made a name for herself as a popular novelist. He studied at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin and tried to build a university teaching career in Berlin, without success. In 1833 he settled in Frankfurt am Main, the city where he died on 21 September 1860, in his own apartment.

His best-known book, The World as Will and Representation, was already finished in March 1818. A reluctant publisher brought it out that December, dated 1819, and it found no readers. The second edition arrived in 1844. Fame, when it came, didn’t come from this systematic work but from Parerga and Paralipomena, the collection of essays and aphorisms he published in 1851. Another text, The Art of Being Right, written around 1830, stayed among his papers and appeared only after his death, in 1864.

Plato’s theory of Ideas comes back at the centre of his aesthetics, so the ancient debate is worth having in mind: the Recap on Aristotle and Plato sets the two Greek masters side by side.

The world as will and representation

The starting point is a distinction Schopenhauer inherits from Kant: the world we know is the world of phenomena, things as they appear to us, and underneath it lies the thing in itself, which Schopenhauer identifies with the will. He accepts the distinction and puts a name to the other half. Whatever can be said about the interior of things, he answers, comes down to will. The world, he writes, is will and representation at the same time.

The word deserves a warning, because in everyday English it pulls in the wrong direction. Schopenhauer’s will is not a subject deciding to do something. It is the force underlying every representation and the world as a whole, blind and unaware, at work throughout nature: a principle of striving with neither consciousness nor goal.

Human beings, in this picture, are first of all expressions of the will to live; will is also the underlying essence of human character.

Why Schopenhauer is called a pessimist

Calling Schopenhauer a pessimist is the most common way of introducing him, and the pessimism comes from the description just given rather than from a sour temperament. If the ground of the world is a blind striving with no destination, then the world as a whole is left without plan or purpose, it is not put together rationally, and existence turns out to be marked by conflict, struggle and dissatisfaction. Everyday life is suffering by its very definition, and the world of everyday life is essentially violent and frustrating. The world’s single will tears itself apart endlessly through the multitude of individuals, and what you see, looking at existence, is a permanent war of all against all. He goes as far as arguing that anyone who truly grasped the nature of their own existence would judge it preferable never to have existed.

The ways out

If the will is the problem, the answer is to quiet it, and Schopenhauer names three attitudes that manage it.

Art. Its highest aim, for him, is to communicate the Platonic Ideas (the theory of Ideas has its own Recap on Plato). In aesthetic contemplation a person stops registering themselves as a separate individual, absorbed in the object in front of them; the experience is precious because it offers a respite from the cycle of craving and suffering. Genius, in his account, is a person given by nature a surplus of intellect over will.

Practical example: in front of a painting that holds you still, or a piece of music you play twice in a row, for a few minutes you stop thinking about what you are missing. That pause is what Schopenhauer calls losing the sense of your own individuality, with attention resting on the object rather than on yourself.

Compassion. In compassion, according to Schopenhauer, every person feels all the suffering of the world as their own, and that is exactly why it is the basis of morality. His moral maxim comes down to two plain imperatives: injure nobody, and give others whatever help you can. To moral consciousness he assigns the job of quieting the will, so the support of morality here is feeling someone else’s suffering rather than a form of reason.

Asceticism. This is the most radical attitude: renunciation, resignation, willlessness. Schopenhauer calls this the denial of the will to live, and salvation, for him, sits in that resignation. Ancient philosophy came at the question of how to live from its own angles, and two Recaps cover them: Hellenistic philosophy and Neoplatonism.

What is left, after Schopenhauer

Of the thinkers Schopenhauer influenced, the one named most often is Friedrich Nietzsche, who subordinated science to art; the influence of Schopenhauer’s denial of the will on him was especially marked. There is also a more precise point: the Stanford Encyclopedia notes that his account of intelligible character resonates with Nietzsche’s injunction to “become what one is”.