Arthur Schopenhauer
1788–1860 22 entries
Biography
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher, known for his pessimism and for his clear, elegant prose. He was born in Danzig, the son of a wealthy merchant, and his mother Johanna was a successful novelist. After his father’s death he gave up a career in trade and studied philosophy in Göttingen and Berlin. In 1818 he published his main work, The World as Will and Representation, which holds that behind the world we perceive lies a blind, restless will, the source of all suffering.
The book was barely noticed, and his lectures in Berlin, which he scheduled at the same hour as Hegel’s, drew almost no students. He spent the rest of his life as a private scholar in Frankfurt, with a poodle for company. Fame came only in his last years, with the collection of essays and aphorisms Parerga and Paralipomena. He was among the first Western philosophers to draw on Indian thought, and he influenced Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Freud.