Jump to content

Arthur Schopenhauer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by AjitPD (talk | contribs) at 15:55, 29 August 2007 (clean up, Replaced: → (6) using AWB). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Era19th century philosophy
RegionWestern Philosophy
SchoolKantianism, idealism
Main interests
Metaphysics, aesthetics, phenomenology, morality, psychology
Notable ideas
Will, Fourfold root of reason
Signature

Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher. He is most famous for his work The World as Will and Representation.

Life

Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in Gdańsk (Danzig) in Poland. He was the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and Johanna Schopenhauer, who were both descendants of wealthy German middle class mercantile families from Gdańsk (Danzig). Schopenhauer's father had strong feelings against any kind of nationalism. Indeed, the name "Arthur" was selected by his father especially because it was the same in English, German, and French.

Schopenhauer as a youth

His parents were both from the city, and Johanna was an author as well. After Gdańsk (Danzig) was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia during the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, the Schopenhauer family moved to Hamburg. In 1805, Schopenhauer's father died (some speculate he committed suicide), and Johanna moved to Weimar. Because of a promise to pursue a business career, Schopenhauer remained in Hamburg. His disgust with this career, however, drove him away to join his mother in Weimar after only a year. He never got along with his mother; when the writer Goethe, who was a friend of Johanna Schopenhauer, told her that he thought her son was destined for great things, Johanna objected: she had never heard there could be two geniuses in a single family.

Schopenhauer became a student at the University of Göttingen. There he studied metaphysics and psychology under Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who advised him to concentrate on Plato and Kant. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Jena in absentia. In 1819 in Dresden his illegitimate child was born and died the same year [1][2]. In 1820, Schopenhauer became a lecturer at the University of Berlin; it was there that his opposition to G. W. F. Hegel began. He attended lectures by the prominent post-Kantian philosopher J. G. Fichte and the theologian Schleiermacher, but reacted against the extreme idealism of Fichte. Schopenhauer scheduled his own lectures to coincide with Hegel's, in an attempt to demolish student support of Hegel's philosophy. However, only five students turned up to Schopenhauer's lectures, and he dropped out of academia. He never taught at a university again. A late essay On University Philosophy expressed his resentment towards university philosophy.

In 1831, a cholera epidemic broke out in Berlin and both Hegel and Schopenhauer fled; but Hegel returned prematurely, caught the infection, and died a few days later. Schopenhauer moved south, and settled permanently in Frankfurt in 1833. There he remained for the next twenty-seven years, living alone except for a succession of pet poodles named Atma and Butz.

Schopenhauer's gravestone

While in Berlin, Schopenhauer was named as a defendant in an action at law initiated by a woman named Caroline Marquet.[1] She asked for damages, alleging that Schopenhauer had pushed her. Knowing that he was a man of some means and that he disliked noise, she deliberately annoyed him by raising her voice while standing right outside his door. Marquet alleged that the philosopher had assaulted and battered her after she refused to leave his doorway. Her companion testified that she saw Marquet prostrate outside of his apartment. Because Marquet won the lawsuit, he made payments to her for the next twenty years.[2] When she died, he wrote, "Obit anus, abit onus" (The old woman dies, the burden is lifted).

Schopenhauer had a robust constitution, but in 1860 his health began to deteriorate. He died of heart failure on September 21 of that year at the age of 72.

Thought

Philosophy

The starting point for Schopenhauer's philosophy is the world itself. While he had read and understood all philosophical discourse that preceded him including Plato, Aristotle and Kant, he was completely original. It would be wrong to see his philosophy as something merely derived from other philosophers.The well-spring of all his insight was the physical world around him. To this he applied an intellect of extraordinary depth and perception. His philosophy is more like a mirror reflecting in all its beauty and greatness the universe, its riddle and its answer. [citation needed]

Schopenhauer called himself a Kantian, but hurled invective at several other contemporary German philosophers who had been influenced by Kant. These included Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling. He formulated a pessimistic philosophy that gained importance and support after the failure of the German and Austrian revolutions of 1848.

Schopenhauer's starting point was Kant's division of the universe into the phenomenal and the noumenal. Schopenhauer extended Kant's ideas to, in his opinion, gain greater understanding of the noumenal. For instance, he suggested that noumenal reality was singular because multiplicity was part of phenomenal experience. Some commentators suggest that Schopenhauer claimed that the noumenon was the same as that in us which we call Will. Other commentators, like Bryan Magee, suggest that he considered will to be the most immediate manifestation of the noumenon that we can experience. Given his adoration of Kant it is difficult to see how Schopenhauer could have held that the noumenon could be known in any way.

Will and desire

A key aspect of Schopenhauer's thought is the investigation of what makes man less than reasonable. This force he calls "Wille zum Leben" or Will (lit. will-to-life), by which he means the forces driving man, to remain alive and to reproduce, a drive intertwined with desire. This Will is the inner content and the driving force of the world. For Schopenhauer, Will had ontological primacy over the intellect; in other words, desire is understood to be prior to thought, and, in a parallel sense, Will is said to be prior to being. These ideas have strong parallels to the notion of purushartha or goals of life in Vedanta Hindu / Buddhist thought, and Schopenhauer drew attention to these similarities.

In attempting to solve or alleviate the fundamental problems of life, Schopenhauer was a rare philosopher who considered philosophy and logic less important (or less effective) than art, certain charitable practices ("loving kindness", in his terms), and certain forms of religious discipline. Schopenhauer concluded that discursive thought (such as philosophy and logic) could neither touch nor transcend the nature of desire — i.e., Will. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer proposed that humans living in the realm of objects are living in the realm of desire, and thus are eternally tormented by that desire. The role of desire in Schopenhauer is similar to the role of Kāma, sensual gratification, which is treated as one of the goals of life relating to the second stage of life in the Hindu tradition.

Metaphysics

For Schopenhauer, the aesthetic viewpoint is more objective than the scientific viewpoint precisely because it separates the intellect from the will in the form of art. The ability to view nature aesthetically is a telltale sign of a genius. An important metaphysical distinction that Schopenhauer makes involves the notion of the will versus art. In a sense, Schopenhauer claimed that the body is an extension of the will, while art is a spontaneous act which cannot be linked to either the body or the intellect. The intellect for Schopenhauer allows man to suffer because it brings the suffering or pain of the world into a more vivid consciousness. Logically speaking then, the more intellectually-inclined person suffers most.

Aesthetic contemplation for Schopenhauer translates into an immediate objectification of the will. He employs a Platonic allegory to demonstrate that all existence is ultimately futile since it can be fundamentally characterized by a want of satisfaction that can never be attained. This want is otherwise known as happiness. Schopenhauer's metaphysics is said by many to be essentially marked by an all-encompassing pessimism. This pessimism serves as a stark contrast to Schopenhauer's Romantic contemporaries in 19th century Germany. His contemporaries, who include Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling, all tended to employ a wide-ranging optimism concerning the seemingly progressive history of mankind.

Other notable ideas pertaining to Schopenhauer's metaphysics entail the notion of how art is conceived. Schopenhauer argued that art was a spontaneous, pre-determined idea which the artist has in mind before even attempting to create. Art, therefore, placed man above science and ultimately nature since it effectively goes beyond the realm of sufficient reason. Science, for Schopenhauer, shall be relegated to the boundaries of reason and, thus, the genius is precluded from entering its territory. Moreover, philosophy is not necessarily a pursuit of wisdom but, rather, it can be viewed as a means for interpreting the personal experiences of one's own life. Schopenhauer maintained that desire produces suffering and, thus, one ought to be wary of the torturous effects of hedonism.

Aesthetics

Main article: Schopenhauer's aesthetics

This wild and powerful drive to reproduce, however, caused suffering or pain in the world. For Schopenhauer, one way to escape the suffering inherent in a world of Will was through art.

Through art, Schopenhauer thought, the thinking subject could be jarred out of their limited, individual perspective to feel a sense of the universal directly—the "universal" in question, of course, was the will. The contest of personal desire with a world that was, by nature, inimical to its satisfaction is inevitably tragical; therefore, the highest place in art was given to tragedy. Music was also given a special status in Schopenhauer's aesthetics as it did not rely upon the medium of representation to communicate a sense of the universal.

Schopenhauer believed the function of art to be a meditation on the unity of human nature, and an attempt to either demonstrate or directly communicate to the audience a certain existential angst for which most forms of entertainment—including bad art—only provided a distraction. A wide range of authors (from Thomas Hardy to Woody Allen) and artists have been influenced by this system of aesthetics, and in the 20th century this area of Schopenhauer's work garnered more attention and praise than any other.

According to Daniel Albright (2004: p39, n34), "Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself."

Buddhism

Schopenhauer's philosophy is similar to Buddhism in many ways. Buddhism teaches what it calls the Four Noble Truths:

  1. There is suffering or dukkha;
  2. Suffering results from desire;
  3. Desires can be totally eliminated (the eventual state of Nirvana)
  4. Following the Eightfold Path leads to Nirvana.

Schopenhauer's philosophy asserts the first three of Buddhism's four truths in that it associates will with desire, appetite, and craving. However, instead of the fourth truth, Schopenhauer describes a twofold path. Denial of the will is attained by either:

  1. Personal experience of an extremely great suffering that leads to loss of the will to live; or
  2. Knowledge of the essential nature of life in the world through observation of the suffering of other people.

Buddhist Nirvana is equivalent to the condition that Schopenhauer described as denial of the will. Occult historian[citation needed] Joscelyn Godwin stated, "It was Buddhism that inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner. This Orientalism reflected the struggle of the German Romantics, in the words of Leon Poliakov, to free themselves from Judeo-Christian fetters" (Arktos, p. 38). In opposition to Joscelyn Godwin's claim that Buddhism inspired Schopenhauer, the philosopher himself made the following statement in his discussion of religions:

If I wished to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I should have to concede to Buddhism pre-eminence over the others. In any case, it must be a pleasure to me to see my doctrine in such close agreement with a religion that the majority of men on earth hold as their own, for this numbers far more followers than any other. And this agreement must be yet the more pleasing to me, inasmuch as in my philosophizing I have certainly not been under its influence (emphasis added). For up till 1818, when my work appeared, there was to be found in Europe only a very few accounts of Buddhism, … .

— ’’The World as Will and Representation’’, Vol. 2, Ch. 17

Buddhist philosopher Nishitani Keiji however sought to distance real Buddhism from Schopenhauer. While Schopenhauer's philosophy may sound rather mystical in such a summary, his methodology was resolutely empirical, rather than speculative or transcendental:

Philosophy... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.

— Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga & Paralipomena, vol. i, pg. 106., trans. E.F.J. Payne

Also note:

This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.

— Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, vol. i, pg. 273, trans. E.F.J. Payne

Ethics

Schopenhauer's moral theory proposed that of three primary moral incentives, compassion (Mitleid) was the genuine motivator to moral expression. He ruled the other two, malice and egoism, corrupt as moral incentives. The identification of compassion as the true moral incentive was a central aspect of Schopenhauer's mission, and associated his thoughts firmly with eastern thought.

Psychology

Schopenhauer was perhaps even more influential in his treatment of man's psychology than he was in the realm of philosophy.

Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed by the tribulations of love, but Schopenhauer addressed it and related concepts forthrightly:

"We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man [love] has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material."

He gave a name to a force within man which he felt had invariably precedence over reason: the Will to Live (Wille zum Leben), defined as an inherent drive within human beings, and indeed all creatures, to stay alive and to reproduce.

Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental, but rather understood it to be an immensely powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world:

"The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it."
"What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation ..."

These ideas foreshadowed and laid the groundwork for Darwin's theory of evolution and Freud's concepts of the libido and the unconscious mind.[citation needed]

Political and social thought

Politics

Schopenhauer's politics were, for the most part, a much diminished echo of his system of ethics (the latter being expressed in Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, available in English as two separate books, On the Basis of Morality and On the Freedom of the Will; ethics also occupies about one quarter of his central work, The World as Will and Representation). In occasional political comments in his Parerga and Paralipomena and Manuscript Remains, Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government. What was essential, he thought, was that the state should "leave each man free to work out his own salvation", and so long as government was thus limited, he would "prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of [his] fellow rats" — i.e., a monarch. Schopenhauer did, however, share the view of Thomas Hobbes on the necessity of the state, and of state violence, to check the destructive tendencies innate to our species. Schopenhauer, by his own admission, did not give much thought to politics, and several times he writes prideful boasts of how little attention he had paid "to political affairs of [his] day". In a life that spanned several revolutions in French and German government, and a few continent-shaking wars, he did indeed maintain his aloof position of "minding not the times but the eternities". He wrote many disparaging remarks about Germany and the Germans. A typical example is "For a German it is even good to have somewhat lengthy words in his mouth, for he thinks slowly, and they give him time to reflect." (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2, Ch. 12)

Schopenhauer possessed a distinctly hierarchical conception of the human races, attributing civilizational primacy to the northern "white races" due to their sensitivity and creativity:

"The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmans, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature and out of it all came their high civilization." (Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume II, Section 92)

Schopenhauer additionally maintained a marked metaphysical and political anti-Judaism. Schopenhauer argued that Christianity constituted a revolt against the materialistic basis of Judaism, exhibiting an Indian-influenced ethics reflecting the Aryan-Vedic theme of spiritual "self-conquest" as opposed to the ignorant drive toward earthly utopianism of the superficially this-worldly Jewish spirit:

"While all other religions endeavor to explain to the people by symbols the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the struggle with other nations" ("Fragments for the history of philosophy," Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume I).

As noted scholar Bernard Lazare commented in his work Antisemitism: Its History and Causes: "Schopenhauer had professed...the antisemitism consisting in combating the optimism of the Jewish religion, an optimism which Schopenhauer found low and degrading, and with which he contrasted Greek and Hindu religious conceptions." (cf. Maria Groener, "Schopenhauer und die Juden" (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, n.d., about 1920); Micha Brumlik (1991), "Das Judentum in der Philosophie Schopenhauers", in Marcel Marcus, et al. (eds), "Israel und Kirche heute").

Views on women

Before delving into Schopenhauer's famously misogynistic perspective on women, one should digest an important quotation, spoken to Richard Wagner's friend Malwida von Meysenbug, "I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man."[3]

Schopenhauer is famous for his essay "On Women" (Über die Weiber), in which he expressed his opposition to what he called "Teutonico-Christian stupidity" on female affairs. He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey", and opposed Schiller's poem in honor of women, Würde der Frauen. The essay does give two compliments however: that "women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than [men] are" and are more sympathetic to the suffering of others. However, the latter was discounted as weakness rather than humanitarian virtue.

In 1821 he fell in love with 19-year old opera singer Caroline Richter, called Medon, and had a relationship with her for several years. However he discarded marriage plans: "Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties", or even more drastic: "Marrying means, to grasp blindfold into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes." At the age of 43 in 1831, he again took interest in a younger woman, the 17-year old Flora Weiss, who rejected her older adorer. [3]

The ultra-intolerant view of women contrasts with Schopenhauer's generally liberal views on other social issues: he was strongly against taboos on issues like suicide and masochism and condemned the treatment of African slaves. This polemic on female nature has since been fiercely attacked as misogynistic. However, he did not hold a universally negative opinion of women; one should note that Schopenhauer had a very high opinion of Madame de Guyon, whose writings and biography he highly recommended.

In any case, the controversial writing has influenced many, from Nietzsche to 19th century feminists. While Schopenhauer's hostility to women may tell us more about his biography than about philosophy, his biological analysis of the difference between the sexes, and their separate roles in the struggle for survival and reproduction, anticipates some of the claims that were later ventured by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists in the twentieth century.[citation needed]

Views on homosexuality

Schopenhauer was also one of the first philosophers since the days of Greek philosophy to address the subject of male homosexuality. In the third, expanded edition of The World as Will and Representation (1856), Schopenhauer added an appendix to his chapter on the "Metaphysics of Sexual Love". He wrote that only those who were too old or too young to reproduce strong, healthy children would resort to pederasty (Schopenhauer considered pederasty to be in itself a vice). He also wrote that homosexuality did have the benefit of preventing ill-begotten children. Concerning this he stated "...the vice we are considering appears to work directly against the aims and ends of nature, and that in a matter that is all important and of the greatest concern to her, it must in fact serve these very aims, although only indirectly, as a means for preventing greater evils." [4] Shrewdly anticipating the interpretive distortion on the part of the popular mind of his attempted scientific explanation of pederasty as a personal advocacy of a phenomenon Schopenhauer otherwise describes, in terms of spiritual ethics, as an "objectionable aberration", Schopenhauer sarcastically concludes the appendix with the statement that "by expounding these paradoxical ideas, I wanted to grant to the professors of philosophy a small favour, for they are very disconcerted by the ever-increasing publicization of my philosophy which they so carefully concealed. I have done so by giving them the opportunity of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty" (ibid., p. 567).

Influences

Schopenhauer said he was influenced by the Upanishads, Immanuel Kant, and Plato. References to Eastern philosophy and religion appear frequently in Schopenhauer's writing. As noted above, he appreciated the teachings of the Buddha and even called himself a Buddhaist[5] He said that his philosophy could not have been conceived before these teachings were available.

Concerning the Upanishads and Vedas, he writes in The World as Will and Representation:

If the reader has also received the benefit of the Vedas, the access to which by means of the Upanishads is in my eyes the greatest privilege which this still young century (1818) may claim before all previous centuries, if then the reader, I say, has received his initiation in primeval Indian wisdom, and received it with an open heart, he will be prepared in the very best way for hearing what I have to tell him. It will not sound to him strange, as to many others, much less disagreeable; for I might, if it did not sound conceited, contend that every one of the detached statements which constitute the Upanishads, may be deduced as a necessary result from the fundamental thoughts which I have to enunciate, though those deductions themselves are by no means to be found there.[6]

He summarised the influence of the Upanishads thusly: 'It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death!

Other influences were: Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Matthias Claudius, George Berkeley, David Hume, René Descartes.[citation needed]

Hegel

Schopenhauer expressed his dislike for the philosophy of his contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel many times in his published works. The following quotation is typical:

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.

— Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, pp 15-16

In his "Foreword to the first edition" of his work Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, Schopenhauer suggested that he had shown Hegel to have fallen prey to the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Schopenhauer thought that Hegel used deliberately impressive but ultimately vacuous verbiage. He suggested his works were filled with "castles of abstraction"[citation needed] that sounded impressive but ultimately contained no verifiable content. He also thought that his glorification of church and state were designed for personal advantage and had little to do with the search for philosophical truth.[citation needed] For instance, the Right Hegelians interpreted Hegel as viewing the Prussian state of his day as perfect and the goal of all history up until then.[citation needed] So, although Schopenhauer may have appeared vain and overly vociferous in his constant attacks on Hegel, they were not necessarily devoid of merit.

Kant

Main article: Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy (Schopenhauer)

Schopenhauer's identification of the Kantian noumenon (i.e., the actually existing entity) with what he termed Will deserves some explanation. The noumenon was what Kant called the Ding an Sich, the "Thing in Itself", the reality that is the foundation of our sensory and mental representations of an external world. In Kantian terms, those sensory and mental representations are mere phenomena. Schopenhauer departed from Kant in his description of the relationship between the phenomenon and the noumenon. According to Kant, things-in-themselves ground the phenomenal representations in our minds. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, believed phenomena and noumena to be two different sides of the same coin. Noumena do not cause phenomena, but rather phenomena are simply the way by which our minds perceive the noumena, according to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. This is explained more fully in Schopenhauer's doctoral thesis, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Schopenhauer's second major departure from Kant's epistemology concerns the body. Kant's philosophy was formulated as a response to the radical philosophical skepticism of David Hume, who claimed that causality could not be observed empirically. Schopenhauer begins by arguing that Kant's demarcation between external objects, knowable only as phenomena, and the Thing in Itself of noumenon, contains a significant omission. There is, in fact, one physical object we know more intimately than we know any object of sense perception. It is our own body.

We know our human bodies have boundaries and occupy space, the same way other objects known only through our named senses do. Though we seldom think of our bodies as physical objects, we know even before reflection that it shares some of their properties. We understand that a watermelon cannot successfully occupy the same space as an oncoming truck. We know that if we tried to repeat the experiment with our own bodies, we would obtain similar results. We know this even if we do not understand the physics involved.

We know that our consciousness inhabits a physical body, similar to other physical objects only known as phenomena. Yet our consciousness is not commensurate with our body. Most of us possess the power of voluntary motion. We usually are not aware of the breathing of our lungs or the beating of our hearts unless somehow our attention is called to them. Our ability to control either is limited. Our kidneys command our attention on their schedule rather than one we choose. Few of us have any idea what our livers are doing right now, though this organ is as needful as lungs, heart, or kidneys. The conscious mind is the servant, not the master, of these and other organs. These organs have an agenda which the conscious mind did not choose, and over which it has limited power.

When Schopenhauer identifies the noumenon with the desires, needs, and impulses in us that we name "Will," what he is saying is that we participate in the reality of an otherwise unachievable world outside the mind through will. We cannot prove that our mental picture of an outside world corresponds with a reality by reasoning. Through will, we know—without thinking—that the world can stimulate us. We suffer fear, or desire. These states arise involuntarily. They arise prior to reflection. They arise even when the conscious mind would prefer to hold them at bay. The rational mind is for Schopenhauer a leaf borne along in a stream of pre-reflective and largely unconscious emotion. That stream is will, and through will, if not through logic, we can participate in the underlying reality that lies beyond mere phenomena. It is for this reason that Schopenhauer identifies the noumenon with what we call our will.

See also:

Influence

Schopenhauer is thought to have influenced the following intellectual figures and schools of thought: Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Charles Darwin, Theodule Ribot, Ferdinand Tönnies, Eugene O'Neill, Max Horkheimer, C. G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Karl Popper, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Wilhelm Busch, Dylan Thomas, Leo Tolstoy, Emil Cioran, Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, Joseph Campbell, Eduard von Hartmann, Phenomenalism, and Recursionism.[citation needed]

Quotes

Wikiquote has quotations related to Arthur Schopenhauer.

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."

Selected bibliography

  • Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, 1813 (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason)
  • Über das Sehn und die Farben, 1816 (On Vision and Colours) ISBN 0-85496-988-8
  • Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1818/1819, vol 2 1844 (The World as Will and Representation, sometimes also known in English as The World as Will and Idea)
    • Vol. 1 Dover edition 1966, ISBN 0-486-21761-2
    • Vol. 2 Dover edition 1966, ISBN 0-486-21762-0
    • Peter Smith Publisher hardcover set 1969, ISBN 0-8446-2885-9
    • Everyman Paperback combined abridged edition (290 p.) ISBN 0-460-87505-1
  • Über den Willen in der Natur, 1836 (On the Will in Nature) ISBN 0-85496-999-3
  • Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens, 1839 (On the Freedom of the Will) ISBN 0-631-14552-4
  • Über die Grundlage der Moral, 1840 (On the Basis of Morality)
  • Parerga und Paralipomena, 1851 ISBN 0-19-924221-6

Online:

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Addressed in: Russell, Bertrand (1945).
  2. ^ Safranski (1990), Chapter 19
  3. ^ Safranski (1990), Chapter 24. Page 348.
  4. ^ On page 566 of Schopenhauer, Arthur. "The World as Will and Representation: Volume Two". Dover
  5. ^ Abelsen, Peter (1993). "Schopenhauer and Buddhism." Philosophy East & West, 44:2 p. 255. Retrieved on: August 18, 2007.
  6. ^ The World as Will and Representation Preface to the first edition, p. xiii)

References

  • Albright, Daniel (2004) Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-01267-0.
  • Russell, Bertrand (1945) A History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. Simon and Schuster.
  • Safranski, Rüdiger (1990) Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-79275-0

Secondary literature

Books:

  • Atwell, John. Schopenhauer on the Character of the World, The Metaphysics of Will.
  • --------, Schopenhauer, The Human Character.
  • Christopher Janaway, 2003. Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-825003-7
  • --------, Schopenhauer: A Very Short introduction.
  • Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer.
  • Gerard Mannion, "Schopenhauer, Religion and Morality - The Humble Path to Ethics", Ashgate Press, New Critical Thinking in Philosophy Series, 2003, 314pp

Articles:

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Arthur Schopenhauer.
German Wikisource has original text related to this article:


Template:Link GA

Template:Persondata

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur_Schopenhauer&oldid=154409359"