ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, PHILOSOPHICAL PESSIMISM

Arthur Schopenhauer

Today, The Grandma has read about Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher. The Grandma loves Philosophy but she has to accept that she does not like Schopenhauer although he is one of the most popular and prestigious philosophers of his age and he has been a great influence to other philosophers, scientists and artists. Philosophy is something to read and think again and again and it is often usual that you reread an author and you find new things or points of view that you have not seen before. This is one of the reasons because of The Grandma has decided to reread Schopenhauer, another reason has been to homage him on the anniversary of his birthday.

Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788-21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, expanded in 1844, wherein he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable metaphysical will.

Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Eastern philosophy, such as asceticism and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.

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Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, Schopenhauer has had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science. His writing on aesthetics, morality, and psychology influenced thinkers and artists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Those who cited his influence included philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Anthony Ludovici, scientists Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein, psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges, and Samuel Beckett.

Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788, in the city of Danzig (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; present-day Gdańsk, Poland) on Heiligegeistgasse, the son of Johanna Trosiener and Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, both descendants of wealthy German-Dutch patrician families.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Neither of them was very religious; both supported the French Revolution, and were republicans, cosmopolitans and Anglophiles. When Danzig became part of Prussia in 1793, Heinrich moved to Hamburg -a free city with a republican constitution, protected by Britain and Holland against Prussian aggression- although his firm continued trading in Danzig where most of their extended families remained. Adele, Arthur's only sibling was born on 12 July 1797.

He moved to Weimar but didn't live with his mother, who even tried to discourage him from coming by explaining that they wouldn't get along very well. Their relationship deteriorated even further due to their temperamental differences. He accused his mother of being financially irresponsible, flirtatious and seeking to remarry, which he considered an insult to his father's memory.

His mother, while professing her love to him, criticized him sharply for being moody, tactless, and argumentative -and urged him to improve his behavior so he would not alienate people. Arthur concentrated on his studies which were now going very well and he also enjoyed the usual social life such as balls, parties and theater. By that time Johanna's famous salon was well established among local intellectuals and dignitaries, most celebrated of them being Goethe.  

He left Weimar to become a student at the University of Göttingen in 1809. He arrived to the newly founded University of Berlin for the winter semester of 1811–12. At the same time his mother just started her literary career; she published her first book in 1810, a biography of her friend Karl Ludwig Fernow, which was a critical success. 

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Schopenhauer left Berlin in a rush in 1813 fearing that the city could be attacked and that he could be pressed into military service as Prussia just joined the war against France.

Also contrary to his mother's prediction, Schopenhauer's dissertation made an impression on Goethe to whom he sent it as a gift. Although it is doubtful that Goethe agreed with Schopenhauer's philosophical positions he was impressed by his intellect and extensive scientific education. Their subsequent meetings and correspondence were a great honor to a young philosopher who was finally acknowledged by his intellectual hero. They mostly discussed Goethe's newly published and somewhat lukewarmly received, work on color theory. 

Schopenhauer soon started writing his own treatise on the subject, On Vision and Colors, which in many points differed from his teacher's. Although they remained polite towards each other, their growing theoretical disagreements -and especially Schopenhauer's tactless criticisms and extreme self-confidence- soon made Goethe become distant again and after 1816 their correspondence became less frequent.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer admitted that he was greatly hurt by this rejection, but he continued to praise Goethe, and considered his color theory a great introduction to his own.

Another important experience during his stay in Weimar was his acquaintance with Friedrich Majer -a historian of religion, orientalist and disciple of Herder- who introduced him to the Eastern philosophy. Schopenhauer was immediately impressed by the Upanishads and the Buddha and put them at par with Plato and Kant. He continued his studies by reading the Bhagavad Gita, an amateurish German journal Asiatisches Magazin and Asiatick Researches by The Asiatic Society.

Although he loved Hindu texts he was more interested in Buddhism, which he came to regard as the best religion. However, his early studies were constrained by the lack of adequate literature, and were mostly restricted to Early Buddhism. He also claimed that he formulated most of his ideas independently, and only later realized the similarities with Buddhism.

After his academic failure he continued to travel extensively, visiting Leipzig, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Schaffhausen, Vevey, Milan and spending eight months in Florence.

Schopenhauer enjoyed Italy, where he studied art and socialized with Italian and English nobles. It was his last visit to the country. He left for Munich and stayed there for a year, mostly recuperating from various health issues, some of them possibly caused by venereal diseases. He contacted publishers offering to translate Hume into German and Kant into English but his proposals were declined.

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Schopenhauer claimed that in his last year in Berlin, he had a prophetic dream that urged him to escape the city. As he arrived in his new home in Frankfurt he supposedly had another supernatural experience, an apparition of his dead father and his mother, who was still alive. This experience led him to spend some time investigating paranormal phenomena and magic. He was quite critical of the available studies and claimed that they were mostly ignorant or fraudulent, but he did believe that there are authentic cases of such phenomena and tried to explain them through his metaphysics as manifestations of the will.

In July 1832 Schopenhauer left Frankfurt for Mannheim but returned in July 1833 to remain there for the rest of his life, except for a few short journeys. In 1836, he published On the Will in Nature. In 1836 he sent his essay On the Freedom of the Will.

Academic philosophers were also starting to notice his work. In 1856 University of Leipzig sponsored an essay contest about Schopenhauer's philosophy.

He remained healthy in his old age, which he attributed to regular walks no matter the weather, and always getting enough sleep. He had a great appetite and could read without glasses but his hearing was declining since his youth and he developed problems with rheumatism. He remained active and lucid, continued his reading, writing and correspondences until his death. The numerous notes that he made during these years, amongst others on aging, were published posthumously under the title Senilia. 

Arthur Schopenhauer

In the spring of 1860 his health started to decline. In September he suffered inflammation of the lungs and although he was starting to recover he remained very weak. He died on 21 September 1860 while sitting at home on his couch. He was 72.

Schopenhauer saw his philosophy as a continuation of that of Kant, and used the results of his epistemological investigations, that is, transcendental idealism, as starting point for his own.

In November 1813 Goethe invited Schopenhauer for research on his Theory of Colours. Although Schopenhauer considered colour theory a minor matter, he accepted the invitation out of admiration for Goethe. Nevertheless, these investigations led him to his most important discovery in epistemology: finding a demonstration for the a priori nature of causality.

The difference between the approach of Kant and Schopenhauer was this: Kant simply declared that the empirical content of perception is given to us from outside, an expression with which Schopenhauer often expressed his dissatisfaction. He, on the other hand, was occupied with: how do we get this empirical content of perception; how is it possible to comprehend subjective sensations limited to my skin as the objective perception of things that lie outside of me?

Causality is therefore not an empirical concept drawn from objective perceptions, but objective perception presupposes knowledge of causality. Hereby Hume's skepticism is disproven.

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By this intellectual operation, comprehending every effect in our sensory organs as having an external cause, the external world arises. With vision, finding the cause is essentially simplified due to light acting in straight lines. We are seldom conscious of the process that interprets the double sensation in both eyes as coming from one object; that turns the upside down impression, and that adds depth to make from the planimetrical data stereometrical perception with distance between objects.

Schopenhauer stresses the importance of the intellectual nature of perception; the senses furnish the raw material by which the intellect produces the world as representation. He set out his theory of perception for the first time in On Vision and Colors.

Schopenhauer developed a system called metaphysical voluntarism. For Schopenhauer, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world.

The task of ethics is not to prescribe moral actions that ought to be done, but to investigate moral actions. Philosophy is always theoretical: its task to explain what is given.

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Schopenhauer's realist views on mathematics are evident in his criticism of the contemporaneous attempts to prove the parallel postulate in Euclidean geometry. Writing shortly before the discovery of hyperbolic geometry demonstrated the logical independence of the axiom -and long before the general theory of relativity revealed that it does not necessarily express a property of physical space- Schopenhauer criticized mathematicians for trying to use indirect concepts to prove what he held was directly evident from intuitive perception.

For Schopenhauer, human desiring, willing, and craving cause suffering or pain. A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation.

Schopenhauer calls the principle through which multiplicity appears the principium individuationis. When we behold nature we see that it is a cruel battle for existence. Individual manifestations of the will can maintain themselves only at the expense of others -the will, as the only thing that exists, has no other option but to devour itself to experience pleasure. This is a fundamental characteristic of the will, and cannot be circumvented.

Suffering is the moral retribution of our attachment to pleasure. Schopenhauer deemed that this truth was expressed by Christian dogma of original sin and in Eastern religions with the dogma of rebirth.

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Every person takes the limits of their own

field of vision for the limits of the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer