Arthur Schopenhauer (original) (raw)

Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 - September 21, 1860) is one of the major 19th century German philosophers, born in Gdansk, (Danzig), Poland. His mother Johanna Schopenhauer was also born there and had become an author as well. Arthur was influenced by Friedrich Schelling, called himself a Kantian, and despised Hegel -- he formulated a pessimistic philosophy that gained importance and support after the failure of the German and Austrian revolutions of 1848.

Schopenhauer's starting point was Kant's division of the universe into phenomenon and noumenon, claiming that the noumenon was will and the most important since it is the inner content and the driving force of the world. For Schopenhauer, human will had primacy over the intellect, and the striving will was even more important. From this Schopenhauer devalued philosophy and logic for art because neither could prove the will. In "The World as Will and Representation," Schopenhauer posited that humans living in the realm of objects are living in the realm of desire, and thus are eternally tormented by that desire. For him, one way to escape this torment was art.

Through art, Schopenhauer thought, the thinking subject could be jarred out of their limited, individual perspective, to feel a sense of the universal directly --the "universal" in question, of course, was the will. The contest of personal desire with a world that was, by nature, inimical to its satisfaction is inevitably tragical; therefore, the highest place in art was given to tragedy. Music was also given a special status in Schopenhauer's aesthetics as it did not rely upon the medium of representation to communicate a sense of the universal. Schopenhauer believed the function of art to be a meditation on the unity of human nature, and an attempt to either demonstrate or directly communicate to the audience a certain existential horror for which most forms of entertainment --including bad art-- only provided a distraction. A wide range of authors (from Thomas Hardy to Woody Allen) and artists were influenced by this system of aesthetics, and in the 20th century this area of Schopenhauer's work garnered more attention and praise than any other.

Schopenhauer's politics were, for the most part, a much-diminished echo of his system of ethics (the latter was expressed in Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, available in English as two separate books, On the Basis of Morality and On the Freedom of the Will; ethics also occupy about one fourth of his central work, The World as Will and Representation). In occasional political comments in his Parerga and Paralimpomena and Manuscript Remains, Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government. What was essential, he thought, was that the state should "leave each man free to work out his own salvation", and so long as government was, thus, limited he would "prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of [his] fellow rats" --i.e., a monarch. Schopenhauer did, however, share the view of Thomas Hobbes so far as the necessity of the state, and of state violence, to check the destructive tendencies innate to our species. Schopenhauer, by his own admission, did not give much thought to politics, and several times he writes prideful boasts of how little attention he had paid "to political affairs of [his] day". In a life that spanned several revolutions in French and German government, and a few continent-shaking wars, he did indeed maintain his aloof position of "minding not the times but the eternities".

Schopenhauer is also famous for his essay �ber die Weiber, in which he expressed his opposition to what he called "Teutonico-Christian stupidity" on female affairs. He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey", and opposed Schiller's poem in honor of women, W�rde der Frauen. The essay also said that "women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than we are".

This polemic on female nature has since been fiercely attacked by feminists as misogynistic; some people nevertheless hold it to be accurate. In any case, the controversial writing has influenced many, from Nietzsche to 19th century feminists. While Schopenhauer's hostility to women may tell us more about his biography than about philosophy, his biological analysis of the difference between the sexes, and their separate roles in the struggle for survival and reproduction, anticipates some of the claims that were later ventured by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists in the twentieth century.

Schopenhauer on Hegel

Schopenhauer seem to have disliked just about everything concerning his contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The following quotation from On the Basis of Morality is quite famous:

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.

Major works

Works available on the Internet

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