GERMAN IDEALIST PHILOSOPHER (1788-1860) ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

2. Introduction Arthur Schopenhauer was born at Danzig (Gdansk), on the 22nd of February, 1788, in a
merchant family. He preferred a scholarly and academic career. Although he was born in England
and had some education there and in France, he spent most of his adult life in Frankfurt am Main; he
died in 1860. His work was recognized later after 1890s. 2

3. • Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the great original writers of the nineteenth century. • His central
concept of the will lead him to regard human beings as striving irrationally and suffering in a world that
has no purpose; • a condition redeemed by the elevation of aesthetic consciousness and • overcome by
the will’s self-denial and a mystical vision of the self as one with the world as a whole. 3

4. Early days • His infancy was contemporaneous with the French Revolution, a political event in which
his parents took the liveliest interest, and which naturally aroused all his father's keen republicanism.
When he was five years old, his parents changed to Swedish Pomerania. Thence they made their way to
Hamburg. He had great affection for his father. 4

5. • In Arthur's ninth year, his parents undertook a journey through France. • They left the boy behind
them at Havre with a M. Gregoire, a business friend. Here he remained two years, and was educated. •
Arthur thoroughly mastered the French language, that when he came back to Hamburg it was found he
had forgotten his native tongue, and was forced to learn it again. • Arthur frequently recalled these two
years spent in France as the happiest of his boyhood. 5

6. • In 1809, Schopenhauer studied at the University of Gottingen. • During the first year, he heard
lectures on Constitutional History, Natural History, Mineralogy, Physics, Botany, and the History of the
Crusades. • In the philosophical faculty, he devoted his attention to Plato and Kant, before attempting
the study of Aristotle and Spinoza. There was some British influence on his work too. 6

7. • After receiving his doctorate, Schopenhauer returned to Weimar to live in his mother’s house, but
the two could not agree. • She found him moody, surly, and sarcastic; he found her vain and shallow. •
He left to establish his residence in Dresden in 1814, there to begin his major philosophical work. For the
remaining twenty-four years of Johanna Schopenhauer’s life, mother and son did not meet. 7

8. Three possible spheres of happiness he admitted; dividing all possessions into what a man is, that
which he has, and that which he represents. ‘Philosophy is an alpine road, and the precipitous path
which leads to it is strewn with stones and thorns. The higher you climb, the lonelier, the more desolate
grows the way; but he who treads it must know no fear; he must leave everything behind him; he will at
last have to cut his own path through the ice. His road will often bring him to the edge of a chasm,
whence he can look into the green valley beneath….. 8

9. Giddiness will draw him down, but he must resist and hold himself back. In return, the world will
soon lie far beneath him ; its deserts and bogs will disappear from view; its irregularities grow
indistinguishable; its discords cannot pierce so high; its roundness becomes discernible. The climber
stands amid clear fresh air, and can behold the sun when all beneath is still shrouded in the blackness of
night.' 9

10. Schopenhauer spent his vacations at Weimar and made one excursion into the Harz Mountains. In
1811 he quitted Göttingen for the University of Berlin, where he once more pursued a varied course of
studies with eager energy. That first winter he attended Fichte's lectures on Philosophy.
Schopenhauer's writing style was from the first clear, classical, and exact ; a circumstance he attributed
in a great degree to his early training. 10

11. Misanthrope or an amiable man? 11 Schopenhauer was at heart an amiable man, forced to put on
an exterior armour of gruffness as protection from those who should have been his warmest friends,
and proved his most irritating, disdainful enemies. Two letters reveal Schopenhauer in an amiable and
social light; the pleasing scenery of Thuringia had exercised some charm even over this morose spirit.

12. ‘I leave everything else, and follow my idea’ Genius must be egotistic in a certain sense; it must
place self-culture in the chief position; this very egotism is an element inalienable from its due
development. Schopenhauer was a harsh uncompromising temperament; yet he too felt he had his
mission towards the world, and he must fulfill it after his bent. His patriotism was limited to the
German language, whose powerful beauties he appreciated so keenly. 12

13. First book In 1813 he wrote his first work, ‘On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient
Reason’, a thesis which gained for him the degree of doctor of philosophy of Jena University. In this, he
expounded his epistemology based on the Kantian doctrine of the ideality of space, time, and the
categories. 13

14. Life’s work In Dresden, after completing a brief treatise on the nature of color, Schopenhauer was
ready to begin serious preparation of his greatest philosophical work, ‘The World as Will and Idea.’ Its
three books, with an appendix on Kantian philosophy, include the conceptual ideas that Schopenhauer
developed and elaborated throughout his career as an independent philosopher. 14

15. Everything that is capable of being regarded by us as an object, i.e., the entire compass of our ideas,
these are respectively: Four Classes, 1. Phenomena, or the objects of sensuous perception ; 2. Reason,
or the objects of rational perception ; 3. Being, under the categories of space and time ; and 4. the Will.
15

16. Schopenhauer developed his pessimistic system as a follower of Immanuel Kant. In The World as Will
and Idea, he identifies the will as the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’ that comprehends the external world
through the mental constructs of time, space, and causality. As Schopenhauer understood it, will
comprises intellect, personality, and the potential for growth and development. 16

17. Although powerful, WILL is not free but is controlled by causation like all else that exists. Confronting
a meaningless existence and a godless universe, Schopenhauer concluded that ethical behavior requires
withdrawal from the pleasures of life in favor of contemplation. The individual must tame the will so
that it becomes less insistent on its egoistic desires, which lead only to further desires. 17

18. Where others are concerned, the proper attitude is compassion, since they too suffer an identical
fate. The truth of Christianity, according to Schopenhauer, lies in its early emphasis on renunciation of
the world and an ascetic life. He failed to clarify how this asceticism could be achieved in the absence of
freedom. 18

19. His work includes a suggestion, because human actions are explicable through motives, he equates
motive with cause. Thus, causation may be rooted in intellectual concepts. As the individual recognizes
the futility of existence, he or she can become compassionate toward others and accept the futility of
desire. 19

20. Book 1 explains the world, everything that the mind perceives, as representation, a mental construct
of the subject. Through perception, reasoning, and reflection and by placing external reality within the
mental categories of time, space, and causality, one understands how the world operates. Yet one never
understands reality as it exists, for the subjective remains an essential element of all perception. 20

21. Book 2 makes plain, the fundamental reality that eludes understanding is, the will, that Kantian
thing- in-itself. Will exists in everything—as a life force and much more. In plants, it drives growth,
change, and reproduction. In animals, it includes all of these as well as sensation, instinct, and limited
intelligence. Only in humans does the will become self- conscious, through reflection and analysis,
though the will is by no means free in the usual sense. 21

22. • Every action is determined by motives—to Schopenhauer another name for causes—that
predetermine one’s choices. • Thus, one may will to choose but not will to will. • With its conscious and
unconscious drives, will presses each person toward egoistic individualism; yet demands of the will, far
from bringing peace, well-being, and gratification, lead only to additional struggle and exertion. • Hence,
unhappiness in life inevitably exceeds happiness. 22

23. Book3: As a respite from the imperious demands of the will, people find solace in the beauty that
exists in nature and art, and the awakening of the aesthetic sense serves to tame the will by leading it
toward disinterested contemplation. To enter a room and discover a table filled with food is to
anticipate involvement, consumption, and interaction with others. 23

24. 24 Fourth Book of The World as Will and Idea takes us back to the world as will, considered now with
respect to its ‘affirmation and negation’, or at any rate the affirmation and negation of the ‘will to life’
that Schopenhauer finds to be the essence of each individual. This final part – by far the longest and, in
Schopenhauer’s words, the ‘most serious’ – is concerned with ethics, in both a narrower and broader
sense.

25. • In book 4, Schopenhauer explores saintliness, which implies denial and permanent taming of the
will. • To look at a painting of the same scene invites simply reflection and appreciation, removing any
practical considerations from the will, thereby suspending its feverish activity. • Yet the solace afforded
by beauty is only temporary. • By recognizing that others experience the same unrelenting strife that
the will creates in oneself, one can develop compassion. 25

26. 26 Calling on mystical ideas from diverse cultural traditions, Schopenhauer argues that only such a
radical transformation, occasioned by a deep and rare knowledge of the ubiquity of suffering and the
illusoriness of the individual, can restore any value to our existence. The world in itself, outside of the
forms of space and time that govern the world as representation for us, cannot be separated into
individuals. The truly wise human being would comprehend this and would cease to be attached to the
strivings of the particular individual manifestation of will he or she is.

27. 27 In a survey of German philosophy in 1877 Wilhelm Wundt called Schopenhauer ‘the born leader
of Non- Academic Philosophy in Germany’, saying that ‘the chief attraction of Schopenhauer’s
philosophy [has been] simply his Pessimism’, in which [he has] completely . . . fallen in with the current
of his time’. The initial fame of his popular writings in Parerga and Paralipomena paved the way for
Schopenhauer’s other works

28. Parerga and Paralipomena 28 Two Greek words for title: ‘parerga’ meaning ‘subordinate works’,
paralipomena ‘things ‘left aside’ or ‘passed over’. The concern was: the nature of philosophy, idealism,
the history of philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, religion, and the ‘affirmation and negation of the will to
life’. The fame of writings in ‘P and P’ paved the way for a six- volume edition of his works, edited by
Frauenstädt in 1873, and opened a period in which the systematic philosophy became more widely read
and commented upon.

29. Biographical note: Immanuel Kant 29 With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the
good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather only in
a good will. A good will is one that acts in accordance with universal moral laws that the autonomous
human being freely gives itself. These laws obligate her or him to treat other human beings as ends
rather than as means to an end.

30. Immanuel Kant 30 Kant’s theses that the mind itself makes a constitutive contribution to its
knowledge, which is therefore subject to limits that cannot be overcome, that morality is rooted in
human freedom and acting autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles, and that
philosophy involves self-critical activity, irrevocably reshaped philosophy.

31. Swami Vivekananda on Schopenhauer 31 Schopenhauer makes the will stand in the place of the
Absolute. But the absolute cannot be presented as will, for will is something changeable and
phenomenal, and over the line, drawn above time, space, and causation, there is no change, no motion;
it is only below the line that external motion and internal motion, called thought begin. There can be no
will on the other side, and will therefore, cannot be the cause of this universe.

32. 32 Coming nearer, we see in our own bodies that will is not the cause of every movement. I move
this chair; my will is the cause of this movement, and this will becomes manifested as muscular motion
at the other end. But the same power that moves the chair is moving the heart, the lungs, and so on, but
not through will. Given that the power is the same, it only becomes will when it rises to the plane of
consciousness, and to call it will before it has risen to this plane is a misnomer. This makes a good deal
of confusion in Schopenhauer's philosophy.

33. 33 Will is entirely personal; therefore we cannot go with Schopenhauer at all. Will is a compound—a
mixture of the internal and the external. Suppose a man were born without any senses, he would have
no will at all. Will requires something from outside, and the brain will get some energy from inside;
therefore will is a compound, as much a compound as the wall. We do not agree with the will-theory of
these German philosophers at all. Will itself is phenomenal and cannot be the Absolute. It is one of the
many projections. There is something which is not will, but is manifesting itself as will. That I can
understand.

34. 34 But that will is manifesting itself as everything else, I do not understand, seeing that we cannot
have any conception of will, as separate from the universe. When that something which is freedom
becomes will, it is caused by time, space, and causation. Take Kant's analysis. Will is within time, space,
and causation. Then how can it be the Absolute? One cannot will without willing in time. I will here point
out the difference between Schopenhauer and the Indian philosophy. Schopenhauer says that desire, or
will, is the cause of everything. It is the will to exist that make us manifest, but we deny this.

35. 35 The will is identical with the motor nerves. When I see an object there is no will; when its
sensations are carried to the brain, there comes the reaction, which says "Do this", or "Do not do this",
and this state of the ego-substance is what is called will. There cannot be a single particle of will which is
not a reaction. So many things precede will. It is only a manufactured something out of the ego, and the
ego is a manufacture of something still higher — the intelligence — and that again is a modification of
the indiscrete nature.

36. 36 That was the Buddhistic idea, that whatever we see is the will. It is psychologically entirely wrong,
because will can only be identified with the motor nerves. If you take out the motor nerves, a man has
no will whatever. This fact, as is perhaps well known to you, has been found out after a long series of
experiments made with the lower animals. Schopenhauer caught this idea of willing from the Buddhists.
This idea of will has been the corner-stone of both the Buddhist and the Vedanta system, has
penetrated into Schopenhauer's system of philosophy.

37. 37 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND SCHOPENHAUER Some time in August, 1867, Friedrich Nietzsche, who
was then a student of philology at the University of Leipzig, found in an antiquarian shop a copy of ‘Die
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.' The book was new to him and he carried it home. When he had finished
reading it, Schopenhauer had gained another disciple. The primal nature of the will was the connecting
link between them. But, Nietzsche's interests were never in the direction of metaphysics which
Schopenhauer represented. Nietzsche differs from Schopenhauer in distinguishing between conscious
and unconscious idea, and also speaks of an original intelligence that logically precedes individual
existence.