146 Facts About Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, which characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind noumenal will.

Schopenhauer was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance.

Schopenhauer's work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.

Schopenhauer's writing on aesthetics, morality, and psychology have influenced many thinkers and artists.

Schopenhauer's firm continued trading in Danzig where most of their extended families remained.

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Schopenhauer seemed to enjoy his two-year stay there, learning to speak French and fostering a life-long friendship with Jean Anthime Gregoire de Blesimaire.

Schopenhauer deeply regretted his choice later because the merchant training was very tedious.

Schopenhauer spent twelve weeks of the tour attending school in Wimbledon, where he was disillusioned by strict and intellectually shallow Anglican religiosity.

Schopenhauer continued to sharply criticize Anglican religiosity later in life despite his general Anglophilia.

Schopenhauer was under pressure from his father, who became very critical of his educational results.

Schopenhauer was prone to anxiety and depression; each becoming more pronounced later in his life.

Arthur Schopenhauer was entitled to control of his part when he reached the age of majority.

Schopenhauer invested it conservatively in government bonds and earned annual interest that was more than double the salary of a university professor.

Schopenhauer left the Gymnasium after writing a satirical poem about one of the schoolmasters.

Schopenhauer's mother moved away, with her daughter Adele, to Weimar—then the centre of German literature—to enjoy social life among writers and artists.

Schopenhauer accused his mother of being financially irresponsible, flirtatious and seeking to remarry, which he considered an insult to his father's memory.

Schopenhauer left Weimar to become a student at the University of Gottingen in 1809.

Schopenhauer studied metaphysics, psychology and logic under Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the author of Aenesidemus, who made a strong impression and advised him to concentrate on Plato and Immanuel Kant.

Schopenhauer did not regret his medicinal and scientific studies; he claimed that they were necessary for a philosopher, and even in Berlin he attended more lectures in sciences than in philosophy.

Schopenhauer's friends included Friedrich Gotthilf Osann, Karl Witte, Christian Charles Josias von Bunsen, and William Backhouse Astor Sr.

Schopenhauer later mentioned Fichte only in critical, negative terms—seeing his philosophy as a lower-quality version of Kant's and considering it useful only because Fichte's poor arguments unintentionally highlighted some failings of Kantianism.

Schopenhauer attended the lectures of the famous Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom he quickly came to dislike.

Schopenhauer learned by self-directed reading; besides Plato, Kant and Fichte he read the works of Schelling, Fries, Jacobi, Bacon, Locke, and much current scientific literature.

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 had just joined the war against France.

Schopenhauer settled for a while in Rudolstadt, hoping that no army would pass through the small town.

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Schopenhauer spent his time in solitude, hiking in the mountains and the Thuringian forest and writing his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Schopenhauer completed his dissertation at about the same time as the French army was defeated at the Battle of Leipzig.

Schopenhauer became irritated by the arrival of soldiers in the town and accepted his mother's invitation to visit her in Weimar.

Schopenhauer's tried to convince him that her relationship with Gerstenbergk was platonic and that she had no intention of remarrying.

Schopenhauer's found his dissertation incomprehensible and said it was unlikely that anyone would ever buy a copy.

Also contrary to his mother's prediction, Schopenhauer's dissertation made an impression on Goethe, to whom he sent it as a gift.

Schopenhauer soon started writing his own treatise on the subject, On Vision and Colors, which in many points differed from his teacher's.

Schopenhauer later 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.

Schopenhauer was immediately impressed by the Upanishads and the Buddha, and put them on a par with Plato and Kant.

Schopenhauer continued his studies by reading the Bhagavad Gita, an amateurish German journal Asiatisches Magazin and Asiatick Researches by the Asiatic Society.

Schopenhauer held a profound respect for Indian philosophy; although he loved Hindu texts, he never revered a Buddhist text but regarded Buddhism as the most distinguished religion.

Schopenhauer claimed that he formulated most of his ideas independently, and only later realized the similarities with Buddhism.

Schopenhauer read the Latin translation and praised the Upanishads in his main work, The World as Will and Representation, as well as in his Parerga and Paralipomena, and commented,.

Schopenhauer was recommended to the publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus by Baron Ferdinand von Biedenfeld, an acquaintance of his mother.

Schopenhauer visited Venice, Bologna, Florence, Naples and Milan, travelling alone or accompanied by mostly English tourists he met.

Schopenhauer spent the winter months in Rome, where he accidentally met his acquaintance Karl Witte and engaged in numerous quarrels with German tourists in the Caffe Greco, among them Johann Friedrich Bohmer, who mentioned his insulting remarks and unpleasant character.

Schopenhauer enjoyed art, architecture, and ancient ruins, attended plays and operas, and continued his philosophical contemplation and love affairs.

Schopenhauer corresponded regularly with his sister Adele and became close to her as her relationship with Johanna and Gerstenbergk deteriorated.

Schopenhauer shortened his stay in Italy because of the trouble with Muhl and returned to Dresden.

Schopenhauer claimed that he had just pushed her from his entrance after she had rudely refused to leave, and that she had purposely fallen to the ground so that she could sue him.

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Schopenhauer's claimed that he had attacked her so violently that she had become paralyzed on her right side and unable to work.

Schopenhauer's immediately sued him, and the process lasted until May 1827, when a court found Schopenhauer guilty and forced him to pay her an annual pension until her death in 1842.

Schopenhauer enjoyed Italy, where he studied art and socialized with Italian and English nobles.

Schopenhauer left for Munich and stayed there for a year, mostly recuperating from various health issues, some of them possibly caused by venereal diseases .

Schopenhauer contacted publishers, offering to translate Hume into German and Kant into English, but his proposals were declined.

Schopenhauer liked Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, and especially Baltasar Gracian.

Schopenhauer made failed attempts to publish his translations of their works.

Schopenhauer had an on-and-off relationship with a young dancer, Caroline Richter .

Schopenhauer's had already had numerous lovers and a son out of wedlock, and later gave birth to another son, this time to an unnamed foreign diplomat .

Schopenhauer's refused and he went alone; in his will he left her a significant sum of money, but insisted that it should not be spent in any way on her second son.

Schopenhauer claimed that, in his last year in Berlin, he had a prophetic dream that urged him to escape from the city.

Schopenhauer 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.

Schopenhauer renewed his correspondence with his mother, and she seemed concerned that he might commit suicide like his father.

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.

Schopenhauer lived alone except for a succession of pet poodles named Atman and Butz.

Schopenhauer sent another essay, "On the Basis of Morality", to the Royal Danish Society for Scientific Studies, but did not win the prize despite being the only contestant.

Schopenhauer, who had been very confident that he would win, was enraged by this rejection.

Schopenhauer published both essays as The Two Basic Problems of Ethics.

Schopenhauer began to attract some followers, mostly outside academia, among practical professionals who pursued private philosophical studies.

Schopenhauer was instrumental in finding another publisher after Brockhaus declined to publish Parerga and Paralipomena, believing that it would be another failure.

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In 1848, Schopenhauer witnessed violent upheaval in Frankfurt after General Hans Adolf Erdmann von Auerswald and Prince Felix Lichnowsky were murdered.

Schopenhauer gave a friendly welcome to Austrian soldiers who wanted to shoot revolutionaries from his window and as they were leaving he gave one of the officers his opera glasses to help him monitor rebels.

Schopenhauer even modified his will, leaving a large part of his property to a Prussian fund that helped soldiers who became invalids while fighting rebellion in 1848 or the families of soldiers who died in battle.

In 1851, Schopenhauer published Parerga and Paralipomena, which contains essays that are supplementary to his main work.

Schopenhauer was becoming less interested in intellectual fights, but encouraged his disciples to do so.

Schopenhauer seemed flattered and amused by this, and would claim that it was his first chapel.

Schopenhauer complained that he still felt isolated due to his not very social nature and the fact that many of his good friends had already died from old age.

Schopenhauer remained healthy in his own old age, which he attributed to regular walks no matter the weather and always getting enough sleep.

Schopenhauer had a great appetite and could read without glasses, but his hearing had been declining since his youth and he developed problems with rheumatism.

Schopenhauer remained active and lucid, continued his reading, writing and correspondence until his death.

The last friend to visit him was Wilhelm Gwinner; according to him, Schopenhauer was concerned that he would not be able to finish his planned additions to Parerga and Paralipomena but was at peace with dying.

Schopenhauer died of pulmonary-respiratory failure on 21 September 1860 while sitting at home on his couch.

Schopenhauer died at the age of 72 and had a funeral conducted by a Lutheran minister.

Schopenhauer saw his philosophy as an extension of Kant's, and used the results of Kantian epistemological investigation as starting point for his own.

Schopenhauer did not deny that the external world existed empirically but followed Kant in claiming that our knowledge and experience of the world is always indirect.

Schopenhauer reiterates this in the first sentence of his main work: "The world is my representation ".

In Book One of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer considers the world from this angle—that is, insofar as it is representation.

Difference between the approaches 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.

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.

Schopenhauer set out his theory of perception for the first time in On Vision and Colors, and, in the subsequent editions of Fourfold Root, an extensive exposition is given in § 21.

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In Book Two of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer considers what the world is beyond the aspect of it that appears to us—that is, the aspect of the world beyond representation, the world considered "in-itself" or "noumena", its inner essence.

The advanced cognitive abilities of human beings, Schopenhauer argues, serve the ends of willing—an illogical, directionless, ceaseless striving that condemns the human individual to a life of suffering unredeemed by any final purpose.

Music, for Schopenhauer, is the purest form of art because it is the one that depicts the will itself without it appearing as subject to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, therefore as an individual object.

Schopenhauer deemed music a timeless, universal language comprehended everywhere, that can imbue global enthusiasm, if in possession of a significant melody.

Schopenhauer asserts that the task of ethics is not to prescribe moral actions that ought to be done, but to investigate moral actions.

Schopenhauer calls the principle through which multiplicity appears the principium individuationis.

Schopenhauer deemed that this truth was expressed by the Christian dogma of original sin and, in Eastern religions, by the dogma of rebirth.

Schopenhauer who sees through the principium individuationis and comprehends suffering in general as his own will see suffering everywhere and, instead of fighting for the happiness of his individual manifestation, will abhor life itself since he knows that it is inseparably connected with suffering.

Schopenhauer referred to asceticism as the denial of the will to live.

Schopenhauer named a force within man that he felt took invariable precedence over reason: the Will to Live or Will to Life, defined as an inherent drive within human beings, and all creatures, to stay alive; a force that inveigles us into reproducing.

Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental, but rather understood it as an immensely powerful force that lay unseen within man's psyche, guaranteeing the quality of the human race:.

Schopenhauer's politics were an echo of his system of ethics, which he elucidated in detail in his Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik .

In occasional political comments in his Parerga and Paralipomena and Manuscript Remains, Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government.

Schopenhauer shared the view of Thomas Hobbes on the necessity of the state and state action to check the innate destructive tendencies of our species.

Schopenhauer defended the independence of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power, and a monarch as an impartial element able to practise justice .

Schopenhauer declared that monarchy is "natural to man in almost the same way as it is to bees and ants, to cranes in flight, to wandering elephants, to wolves in a pack in search of prey, and to other animals".

Schopenhauer wrote many disparaging remarks about Germany and the Germans.

Schopenhauer attributed civilizational primacy to the northern "white races" due to their sensitivity and creativity :.

Schopenhauer argued that Christianity constituted a revolt against what he styled the materialistic basis of Judaism, exhibiting an Indian-influenced ethics reflecting the Aryan-Vedic theme of spiritual self-conquest.

Schopenhauer saw this as opposed to the ignorant drive toward earthly utopianism and superficiality of a worldly "Jewish" spirit:.

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Schopenhauer's writings influenced many, from Friedrich Nietzsche to nineteenth-century feminists.

Schopenhauer wrote that pederasty has the benefit of preventing ill-begotten children.

Mechanistically, Schopenhauer believed that a person inherits his intellect through his mother, and personal character through the father.

Schopenhauer went so far as to protest using the pronoun "it" in reference to animals because that led to treatment of them as though they were inanimate things.

Schopenhauer was very attached to his succession of pet poodles.

Schopenhauer criticized Spinoza's belief that animals are a mere means for the satisfaction of humans.

Schopenhauer read the Latin translation of the ancient Hindu texts, the Upanishads, translated by French writer Anquetil du Perron from the Persian translation of Prince Dara Shukoh entitled Sirre-Akbar .

Schopenhauer was so impressed by its philosophy that he called it "the production of the highest human wisdom", and believed it contained superhuman concepts.

Schopenhauer was first introduced to Anquetil du Perron's translation by Friedrich Majer in 1814.

Schopenhauer did not begin serious study of the Indic texts until the summer of 1814.

Safranski maintains that, between 1815 and 1817, Schopenhauer had another important cross-pollination with Indian thought in Dresden.

Schopenhauer called the opening up of Sanskrit literature "the greatest gift of our century", and predicted that the philosophy and knowledge of the Upanishads would become the cherished faith of the West.

Schopenhauer noted a correspondence between his doctrines and the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.

Schopenhauer, will had ontological primacy over the intellect; desire is prior to thought.

Schopenhauer felt this was similar to notions of purusartha or goals of life in Vedanta Hinduism.

Schopenhauer made the following statement in his discussion of religions:.

Schopenhauer praised animal magnetism as evidence for the reality of magic in his On the Will in Nature, and went so far as to accept the division of magic into left-hand and right-hand magic, although he doubted the existence of demons.

Schopenhauer grounded magic in the Will and claimed all forms of magical transformation depended on the human Will, not on ritual.

Schopenhauer had a wide range of interests, from science and opera to occultism and literature.

Schopenhauer kept a strong interest as his personal library contained near to 200 books of scientific literature at his death, and his works refer to scientific titles not found in the library.

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Many evenings were spent in the theatre, opera and ballet; Schopenhauer especially liked the operas of Mozart, Rossini and Bellini.

Schopenhauer considered music the highest art, and played the flute during his whole life.

Schopenhauer saw Bruno and Spinoza as philosophers not bound to their age or nation.

Schopenhauer expressed regret that Spinoza stuck for the presentation of his philosophy with the concepts of scholasticism and Cartesian philosophy, and tried to use geometrical proofs that do not hold because of vague and overly broad definitions.

Schopenhauer noted that their philosophies do not provide any ethics, and it is therefore very remarkable that Spinoza called his main work Ethics.

Schopenhauer maintained that Kant stands in the same relation to philosophers such as Berkeley and Plato, as Copernicus to Hicetas, Philolaus, and Aristarchus: Kant succeeded in demonstrating what previous philosophers merely asserted.

Schopenhauer writes about Kant's influence on his work in the preface to the second edition of The World as Will and Representation:.

The bond which Schopenhauer felt with the philosopher of Konigsberg is demonstrated in an unfinished poem he dedicated to Kant :.

Schopenhauer dedicated one fifth of his main work, The World as Will and Representation, to a detailed criticism of the Kantian philosophy.

Schopenhauer praised Kant for his distinction between appearance and the thing-in-itself, whereas the general consensus in German idealism was that this was the weakest spot of Kant's theory, since, according to Kant, causality can find application on objects of experience only, and consequently, things-in-themselves cannot be the cause of appearances.

Schopenhauer insisted that this was a true conclusion, drawn from false premises.

Schopenhauer deemed Schelling the most talented of the three and wrote that he would recommend his "elucidatory paraphrase of the highly important doctrine of Kant" concerning the intelligible character, if he had been honest enough to admit he was parroting Kant, instead of hiding this relation in a cunning manner.

Schopenhauer reserved his most unqualified damning condemnation for Hegel, whom he considered less worthy than Fichte or Schelling.

Schopenhauer remained the most influential German philosopher until the First World War.

Schopenhauer's philosophy was a starting point for a new generation of philosophers including Julius Bahnsen, Paul Deussen, Lazar von Hellenbach, Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, Ernst Otto Lindner, Philipp Mainlander, Friedrich Nietzsche, Olga Plumacher and Agnes Taubert.

Schopenhauer's legacy shaped the intellectual debate, and forced movements that were utterly opposed to him, neo-Kantianism and positivism, to address issues they would otherwise have completely ignored, and in doing so he changed them markedly.

Schopenhauer was well read by physicists, most notably Einstein, Schrodinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Majorana.

When Erwin Schrodinger discovered Schopenhauer he considered switching his study of physics to philosophy.

Schopenhauer maintained the idealistic views during the rest of his life.

Sergei Prokofiev, although initially reluctant to engage with works noted for their pessimism, became fascinated with Schopenhauer after reading Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life in Parerga and Paralipomena.

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Schopenhauer's philosophy has made its way into a novel, The Schopenhauer Cure, by American existential psychiatrist and emeritus professor of psychiatry Irvin Yalom.