Being one of the first philosophers to ever really question the value of existence,
to systematically combine eastern and western modes of thinking,
and to introduce the arts as a serious philosophical focus, Arthur Schopenhauer
is perhaps one of the darkest and most comprehensive philosophers in western history.
Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in what is now Gdansk, Poland, but spent the majority
of his childhood in Hamburg, Germany after his family moved there when he was five.
He was born to a wealthy family, his father being a highly successful international merchant.
As a result of this, young Schopenhauer would be expected to follow in his father’s footsteps.
However, from an early age, he had no interest in business, and instead, found himself compelled
towards academics. And after going on a trip around Europe with his parents to prepare him
for his merchant career, the greater exposure he would receive to the pervasive suffering
and poverty of the world would cause him to become all the more interested in pursuing
the path of scholarship and intellectually examining, down to its very core, how the
world worked and why—or perhaps more accurately, how and why it appeared to work so negatively.
After eventually going against his family’s readymade path of international business,
Schopenhauer would attend the University of Göttingen in 1809, where, in his third semester,
he would become more introduced and focused on philosophy. The following year,
he would transfer to the University of Berlin to study under a better philosophy program led
by distinguished philosophy lecturers of the time. However, Schopenhauer would soon find
academic philosophy to be unnecessarily obscure, detached from real concerns of life, and often
tethered to theological agendas; all of which, he despised. Eventually, he left the academic,
intellectual circuit, and spent the following decade philosophizing and writing on his own.
By age thirty, Schopenhauer had published the two works that would go on to define
his entire career, contain his complete, unified philosophical system from which
he would never deviate, and eventually influence the entire course of western thinking with.
The first groundwork of his philosophy was established in his dissertation,
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, published in 1813,
and his entire unified philosophical system, including his metaphysics, epistemology, ethics,
aesthetics, value judgments, and so forth, was laid out in his subsequent masterwork,
The World as Will and Representation, published in 1819. Despite these impressive works going on
to hold major stake in western philosophy, influencing some of the greatest thinkers
and schools of thought thereafter, during this time, they would go mostly unnoticed.
Over the decades following his early work, throughout his thirties and forties,
Schopenhauer would spend his time working to be a lecturer at university, as well as a translator of
French to English prose, while continuing to write on-and-off along the side. He found very little
success in all of it. His lectures were unpopular, his translations received very little interest,
and his philosophical work remained mostly overlooked. Only by around his fifties,
did Schopenhauer finally start to receive any notable recognition, at all. And only
after publishing a book of essays and aphorisms in 1851, would he achieve the status of fame,
which he would remain in for the rest of his life until he died in 1860 at the age of seventy-two.
In terms of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system established within his work, it is relevant to
note that it leaned heavily on the work of his predecessor, Immanuel Kant. In Schopenhauer’s
mind, he was completing Kant’s system of transcendental idealism. Building off his
interpretation of Kant, Schopenhauer essentially suggested that the world as we know and experience
it, is exclusively a representation created by our mind through our senses and forms of cognition.
Consequently, we cannot access the true nature of external objects outside our mental,
phenomenological experience of them. Deviating from Kant, however, Schopenhauer would go onto to
argue that not only can we not know nor access the varying objects of the world as they really are
outside of our conscious experience, but there is, in fact, no plurality of objects
beyond our experience, at all. Rather, beyond our experience is, according to Schopenhauer,
a singular, unified oneness of reality—a sort of essence or force that drives existence
that is beyond time, beyond space, and beyond all objectivation. Schopenhauer would go on to explore
and define this force by referencing and probing into the experience of living within the body,
suggesting that this is the only thing in the world that we have access to
that is not solely a mental representation of an object but is also a firsthand, subjective
experience from within it. From here, Schopenhauer would suggest that what is found from within,
at the core of our being, is an unconscious, restless, striving force towards survival,
nourishment, and reproduction. He would term this force the Will to live. Essentially, this would
lead him to the conclusion that reality is made up of two sides; one side being the plurality
of things as they are represented to a conscious apparatus, and the other side being the singular,
unified force of the Will—hence the name of his master work, The World as Will and Representation.
It is worth noting that the term Will can perhaps be misleading in that it might seem
to imply an intention or human-like conscious motivation, but the Will, for Schopenhauer,
is a blind, unconscious striving with no goal or purpose other than to keep itself going
for the sake of keeping itself going. All of the material world operates by and through this Will,
moving, striving, consuming, and violently expressing itself in order to sustain itself.
Schopenhauer’s work was largely a response to Kant and the western philosophical tradition,
but his work also contains distinct notes of Hinduism and Buddhism. His conclusion of the
nature of reality is strikingly similar to that of both. And his qualitative assessment of reality’s
negative relationship with the conscious self mirrors ideas central to Buddhism. This made
Schopenhauer one of the first philosophers to ever really combine eastern and western thinking
in such a systematically comprehensive way. Especially similar to Buddhism, Schopenhauer
would top off his philosophical medley with a layer of dark, unwavering pessimism. “Unless
suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.
It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world,
and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no
purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt,
to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.” Schopenhauer wrote. As a
qualitative assessment of the nature of reality, he would describe the Will to live as a sort of
malevolent force that we, as individual selves, become victims of in its process of continuation,
deceived by our own mind and body to go against our fundamental interests and yearnings in order
to carry it out. Since the Will has no aim or purpose other than its perpetual continuation,
then the will can never be satisfied. And since we are expressions of it, neither can we.
Thus, we are driven to consume beings, things, ideas, goals, circumstances, and all the rest,
constantly hoping we will feel a satisfaction or happiness as result, while constantly being left
in the wake of each achievement unsatisfied. "Human life must be some kind of mistake.
The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs
and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state
of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom.” Schopenhauer wrote.
As the best possible ways of sort of escaping and dealing with this,
Schopenhauer would put forth two primary methods: one, engaging in arts and philosophy, and two, the
practicing of asceticism, traditionally being the deprivation of nearly all desire, self-indulgence,
and everything past the bare minimum. In this later method, Schopenhauer felt that by denying
the Will from being fed, so-to-speak, one would turn the Will against itself and overcome it.
However, he also recognized the sheer difficulty of this for the majority of people
and suggested the average person should simply make their best efforts towards
letting go of ideals of happiness and pleasure, and rather, focus on the minimization of pain.
Happiness in life, for Schopenhauer, is not a matter of joys and pleasures, but rather,
the reduction and freedom from pain as much as possible. “The safest way
of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.” he wrote.
Alternatively, engaging in arts and philosophy, in Schopenhauer’s mind, served as another, more
accessible method. He felt that good art could provide a source of clarity into the nature and
problems of being, without any of the illusion or drapery. And while engaging in this sort of art,
one would have a transcendent-like experience that provides a relief and comfort from existence.
As a result of this concept, Schopenhauer would end up being one
of first thinkers to ever really introduce philosophical significance to the arts,
and would eventually become known by many as the ‘artist’s philosopher.’
Of course, throughout his work in general, Schopenhauer makes large, often unprovable,
and unknowable claims about the nature of reality and the value of existing within it. Some of which
is validly constructed and worth considering, but some of which is likely not. Ultimately,
any attempt to define and assess the side of reality beyond logic and reason through systematic
logic and reason is perhaps paradoxical in way that is beyond repair. What precisely is the Will,
where does it come from, where does it end, and how can we know or prove it?
And in terms of Schopenhauer’s suggestion that one should turn against the Will
through an ascetic process of self-denial, if all of life operates through the Will,
to turn against it, would seem to merely be the Will turning against the Will for reasons that
favor it. And there can be no turning against the Will if the Will is doing the turning.
Alternatively, considering the view of Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who notably followed in
Schopenhauer’s footsteps, the endless cycle of desire and dissatisfaction caused by the Will
is actually a good thing that we can use as fuel towards the process of self-overcoming and growth,
which we can then obtain life’s meaning from. Of course, this is the more pleasant
of the two interpretations, but it isn’t clear which is more apt and/or accurate, if either.
Ultimately, Schopenhauer is another surprising, yet seemingly common story where a highly
important thinker, artist, or writer, barely caught any recognition in their life, if at all,
only to die and end up with their name in nearly every history book on the subject.
One trait these stories do all seem to have in common, though,
is a refusal to stop, a refusal to budge from pursuing and defending the world as one sees it.
Schopenhauer never deviated from the philosophical system he created in his twenties
and never stopped confidently working to build upon it and reinforce it throughout his life,
despite the world seeming to suggest to him he should do otherwise. And yet, now,
it is hugely significant to the world that he did exactly what he did. For some, his work might be
bleak and disconcerting, but for others, his work, like all great works of dark, melancholic honesty,
is comforting, relieving, and legitimizing. It reminds us that are not crazy, and our sadness
and suffering are not unfounded, even when they may feel like it. We are merely put in a crazy,
sad, violent reality with a mind and body that are often all in conspiracy against us.
Because of this and many other reasons unmentioned, his work would go on to
influence artists like Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler; writers like Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy,
and Samuel Beckett; and thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein,
as well as many others, ultimately influencing the course of modern thinking, forever.
Having been one of the first to properly and philosophically bring the value of life
and the possibility of meaning into question, Schopenhauer helped locate the early budding
problem of the growing agnostic world that philosophy would need to address.
With humanity seemingly suspending further out into a void of meaning,
his unyielding and fearless confrontation with the nature of existence, including all its
horrors and miseries, revealed an opening of new possibilities towards finding answers from within.