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Financial independence enabled Schopenhauer to devote his life to philosophy, and he 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.
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NINETEENTH CENTURY
IDEALIST PHILOSOPHER
(accused of being a
misanthrope ) .
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Introduction
Arthur Schopenhauer was born at Danzig, 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, he spent most of his adult life in
Frankfurt am Main; he died in 1860.
His work was recognized later after 1890s.
Schopenhauer is one of the great original writers of
the nineteenth century, and a unique voice in the
history of thought.
His central concept of the will leads 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 finally
overcome by the will’s self-denial and a mystical
vision of the self as one with the world as a whole.
Early days
Of the first few years of his life we know nothing. 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 to
Swedish Pomerania. Thence they made their way to
Hamburg.
In Arthur's ninth year, his parents undertook a journey through
France. On its conclusion they left the boy behind them at
Havre with a M. Gregoire, a business friend. Here he
remained two years, and was educated together with M.
Gregoire's son. His father's object was that Arthur should
thoroughly master the French language, an object so
completely realized that when he came back to Hamburg it
was found he had forgotten his native tongue, and was forced
to learn it again like a foreigner. Arthur frequently recalled
these two years spent in France as the happiest of his
boyhood.
In 1809, Schopenhauer studied at the University of
Gottingen, where he matriculated in the medical
faculty. During the first year of his residence he
heard lectures on Constitutional History, Natural
History, Mineralogy, Physics, Botany, and the History
of the Crusades, besides reading at home on all
cognate matters. In the philosophical faculty, he
devoted his attention to Plato and Kant, before
attempting the study of Aristotle and Spinoza.
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.
Disagreements and quarrels led her to dismiss him,
and 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.
Three possible spheres of happiness
Schopenhauer 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…..
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.'
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.
Misanthrope or an amiable man?
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.
‘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.
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.
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, and in which he
expounded his epistemology based on the Kantian
doctrine of the ideality of space, time, and the
categories.
Everything 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fundamental reality that eludes understanding
is, as book 2 makes plain, 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.
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.
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.
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. In book 4, Schopenhauer explores
saintliness, which implies denial and permanent
taming of the will. By recognizing that others
experience the same unrelenting strife that the will
creates in oneself, one can develop compassion.