Arthur Schopenhauer

Key ideas

Schopenhauer accepted Immanuel Kant's distinction between the world as it appears and the world in itself, but claimed we can glimpse the thing in itself from the inside: it is will, a blind, endless striving. Since striving means lack, and satisfaction only leads to boredom or new desires, life swings between pain and boredom.

He argued that we can do what we will but cannot will what we will: our character and motives fix our choices. His prize essay on the freedom of the will is a classic defence of a hard line on determinism.

His ethics is built on compassion, the recognition of the same suffering will in others, including animals. He was one of the first Western philosophers to engage seriously with Indian thought, and his work strongly influenced Friedrich Nietzsche, Wagner and Freud.

Life, briefly

Schopenhauer was the son of a wealthy merchant and a successful novelist, with whom he quarrelled bitterly. He scheduled his Berlin lectures at the same hour as Hegel's, the most popular philosopher in Germany, and almost nobody came.

He spent the last decades of his life in Frankfurt, living on inherited money with a succession of poodles, and found fame only in his sixties.

Major works

• The World as Will and Representation (1818, expanded 1844)
• On the Freedom of the Will (1839)
• On the Basis of Morality (1840)
• Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Arthur Schopenhauer
• WikipediaArthur Schopenhauer