Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer

Life and Works

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig in 1788, the son of a wealthy merchant. He had been educated for the business world by his father, but as soon as his father died Schopenhauer turned to the study of philosophy. He traveled extensively in Holland, England, France, Switzerland and Italy. He obtained his doctor's degree at Jena in 1813. A few years later he began to lecture at Berlin, but his attempts to stem the tide of Hegel's popularity there were unsuccessful.

He left the University and traveled again in Italy. In 1833 he retired to Frankfort on the Main, where he spent the remainder of his life writing his books in learned retirement. Always hostile to Idealism and particularly toward Hegelianism, he died in 1860, when Hegel's philosophy was already in its decline.

Schopenhauer's masterpiece of philosophical writing is The World as Will and Idea, which was published for the first time in 1818, although dated 1819. He also published Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics.

The World as Will and Idea

Schopenhauer was an anti-Hegelian who returned to Kant with the intention of determining the nature of the "thing in itself" by analyzing experience. But Schopenhauer was a son of Idealism; consequently he conceived reality monistically. For him the world was a phenomenal representation.

Kant began with experience and remained there, declaring that it is impossible to attain knowledge of the thing in itself. Schopenhauer also began with experience, but he believed that it is possible to pass beyond experience and to know the thing in itself. According to him, if we were merely rational beings, endowed with sense and intellect but devoid of volition, we would never be able to answer the question: "What is the external cause of our representations?" The world would be for us a dream, a mere representation, a mysterious signal devoid of meaning. But each one of us is also a body, and the corporeal life reveals itself as tendency, effort, activity, or in a word, as will. Will, therefore, is our reality.

Now, because of the monistic concept of Schopenhauer, the reality which we are (will) must be extended to all things in nature. Thus the entire reality is will. The primordial will is a blind unreasoning impulse to self-preservation. In other words, primordial reality is the will to live. The blind impulse to life is the cause impelling the will to display itself in a multiplicity of natural beings, with the purpose of becoming conscious. Hence this impulse makes its appearance in natural bodies in the form of mechanical forces -- in plants as vegetative life, in animals as instinct. Finally, by constructing the brain, the will attains consciousness in man. Once consciousness is attained, knowledge appears as the representation of the world.

Schopenhauer reduces all Kantian cognitive forms to time, space and mechanical causality. The will, in so far as it is universal, is beyond all these determinations of time and space and is lacking in any other determination. When it objectivates itself, it determines itself in a series of phenomena which exist in space and time and are connected with one another by mechanical causality.

Pessimism

If reality is the blind will to live, and the world is the objectivation of such a blind will, life is painful misery. Schopenhauer makes a broad and acute analysis of all the various branches of existence, only to conclude that life is essentially pain and that it is a mistake to persevere in the will to live. According to him, everywhere in the world everything is desire, because all -- everywhere -- is will. To desire signifies suffering distress on account of the lack of what is desired. If the desire is not satisfied, the distress remains and increases; if it is satisfied, satiety and annoyance follow, and this in turn causes new desires and new distresses.

The will finds thousands of pretexts for perpetuating this unsatisfied hunger of the will to live. These pretexts only perpetuate the misery of life.

• One such pretext and deceit is love. The will of the species masks itself under the pleasures of love with the purpose of perpetuating the desire for life in others. In so doing, it satisfies its own will to live.

• Another pretext and deceit is egoism, which impels us to increase the pains of others in the hope of gaining some advantage in our own miserable life.

• Still another deceit and illusion is progress which, in actuating itself, only makes more acute the sense of distress.

The Sacred Writer, in Schopenhauer's interpretation, says that increasing knowledge is only to increase distress. (Ref. Ecclesiastes 1:14, 18: I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a chase after wind...For in much wisdom there is sorrow and he who stores up knowledge stores up grief.)

The whole world is miserable because of the universal blind will to live. Man can avoid his share of misery by suppressing the will to live.

Schopenhauer's philosophy is the antithesis of that of Hegel. In Hegel, reality and rationality coincide. Struggle and injustice are nullified and are justified in the higher synthesis; and, finally, progress and history entirely justify evil in its extreme manifestations of war and national calamities. In Schopenhauer, on the contrary, reality is blind and therefore essentially irrational and evil. Love, progress, history do not justify and annul misery; they are deceits and illusions behind which the blind, unconscious will masks itself, for this will is never satisfied with living and suffering. The systems of Hegel and Schopenhauer represent different atheistic conceptions of the world and of life.

Applications of His Doctrine to Man

In such an irrational world, however, there exists a morality which is necessarily ascetic and nullifying. In a pessimistic morality there is no glorification of life, but nullification and destruction of the will to live. Indeed, if the root of all evils is the will to live, there is no other escape, no other remedy than to suppress this will. The steps which make possible the suppression of the instinct to life are three: aesthetics, ethics, ascetics. Schopenhauer is inspired by Neo-Platonism in this regard.

Aesthetics is the activity of man, absorbed in contemplation of the idea of beauty, untroubled by any desire and, consequently, by any evil. Wrapped up in aesthetic contemplation, he is not longer a slave of the will. But aesthetics is not sufficient, for the joy which it gives is possible only for intellectuals, and even in such persons it is of short duration. Hence it is necessary to ascend to the second grade, ethics.

Ethics makes man able to acknowledge that in addition to himself there are other men endowed with an essence like his own. Hence he is forced by ethics to suppress his egoism which, because of the desire for life, is the root of every evil. The fundamental characteristic of ethics is compassion. Man is immoral when he increases the misery of another or when he remains indifferent to another's suffering. On the contrary, he is moral when he feels the distress of those who are his fellow men, and tries to mitigate their pain. Thus he feels that he is one with all men, as in truth he is, by reason of the unity of the Universal Will from which everyone proceeds. But even ethics does not succeed in completely eradicating the insidious source of all evils, and hence it is necessary to ascend still further, to the third grade, ascetics.

Asceticism consists in the constant action of nullifying the will itself. Art suspends will; ethics mortifies it; ascetics nullifies it. Only the great penitents and saints have reached this stage. Schopenhauer, by a complete misunderstanding of spiritual life, believed the penitents and saints of the Church to be absolutely indifferent and detached from all that surrounds them, mentally dead to all things, while materially they continue to live.

The moral teaching of Schopenhauer, culminating in his asceticism, the nullifier of life, is completely opposed to Hegel's morality, which glorifies life. Both, however, are atheistic on account of the immanentist prejudice which vitiates them.