A dromedary camel passing through the eye of a needle, as a symbol of the improbable Peace of Westphalia. Engraving, Johann Vogel: Meditationes emblematicae de restaurata pace Germaniae, 1649.
The term "eye of a needle" is used as a metaphor for a very narrow opening. It occurs several times throughout the Talmud. The New Testament
quotes Jesus as saying that "it is easier for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God". It
also appears in the Qur'an
7:40, "Indeed, those who deny Our verses and are arrogant toward them –
the gates of Heaven will not be opened for them, nor will they enter
Paradise until a camel enters into the eye of a needle. And thus do We
recompense the criminals."
The eye of a sewing needle is the part formed into a loop for pulling thread, located at the end opposite from the point.
Aphorisms
Judaism
The Babylonian Talmud applies the aphorism
to unthinkable thoughts. To explain that dreams reveal the thoughts of a
man's heart and are the product of reason rather than the absence of
it, some rabbis say:
They do not show a man a palm tree of gold, nor an elephant going through the eye of a needle.
A midrash on the Song of Songs uses the phrase to speak of God's willingness and ability beyond comparison to accomplish the salvation of a sinner:
The Holy One said, open for me a
door as big as a needle's eye and I will open for you a door through
which may enter tents and [camels?].
Rav Sheishet of Nehardea applied the same aphorism to the convoluted reasoning for which the sages of Pumbedita were evidently famous: "Are you from Pumbedita, where they push an elephant through the eye of a needle?" (Baba Metzia, 38b).
Christianity
A church portal relief in Dortmund referencing Jesus's use of "camel through the eye of a needle" aphorism.
"The eye of a needle" is a portion of a quotation attributed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels:
"I tell you the truth, it is hard
for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man
to enter the kingdom of God." When the disciples heard this, they were
greatly astonished and asked, 'Who then can be saved?' Jesus looked at
them and said, 'With man this is impossible, but with God all things are
possible.'
The saying was a response to a young rich man
who had asked Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus
replied that he should keep the commandments, which the man replied
that he had done so. Jesus responded, "If you want to be perfect, go,
sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure
in heaven. Then come, follow me." The young man became sad and was
unwilling to do that. Jesus then spoke that response, leaving his
disciples astonished.
In modern times, the scripture has been used as a counterargument to the prosperity gospel, the belief that accruing wealth is a virtue favored by God.
Gate
The "Eye of the Needle" has been claimed to be a gate in Jerusalem,
which opened after the main gate was closed at night. A camel could not
pass through the smaller gate unless it was stooped and had its baggage
removed. The story has been put forth since at least the 15th century
and possibly as far back as the 9th century. However, there is no widely
accepted evidence for the existence of such a gate.
Islam
According to the English interpretation of the Quran:
To those who reject Our signs and
treat them with arrogance, no opening will there be of the gates of
heaven, nor will they enter the garden, until the camel can pass through
the eye of the needle: Such is Our reward for those in sin.
The camel, in Arabic jamal, can also be translated as "twisted rope".
Schopenhauer's birthplace house, ul. Św. Ducha (formerly Heiligegeistgasse)
Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, in Danzig (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; present-day Gdańsk, Poland) on Heiligegeistgasse (present day Św. Ducha 47), the son of Johanna Schopenhauer (née Trosiener; 1766–1838) and Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer (1747–1805), both descendants of wealthy German-Dutch patrician families. 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. His firm continued trading in
Danzig where most of their extended families remained. Adele, Arthur's only sibling, was born on July 12, 1797.
In 1797, Arthur was sent to Le Havre
to live with the family of his father's business associate, Grégoire de
Blésimaire. He seemed to enjoy his two year stay there, learning to
speak French and fostering a life-long friendship with Jean Anthime
Grégoire de Blésimaire. As early as 1799, Arthur started playing the flute. In 1803, he accompanied his parents on a European tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria and Prussia. Viewed as primarily a pleasure tour, Heinrich used the opportunity to visit some of his business associates abroad.
Heinrich offered Arthur a choice: he could stay at home and
start preparations for university, or he could travel with them and
continue his merchant education. Arthur chose to travel with them. He
deeply regretted his choice later because the merchant training was very
tedious. He spent twelve weeks of the tour attending school in Wimbledon, where he was disillusioned by strict and intellectually shallow Anglican religiosity. He continued to sharply criticize Anglican religiosity later in life despite his general Anglophilia. He was also under pressure from his father, who became very critical of his educational results.
In 1805, Heinrich drowned in a canal near their home in Hamburg.
Although it was possible that his death was accidental, his wife and son
believed that it was suicide. He was prone to unsociable behavior such
as anxiety and depression; each becoming more pronounced later in his life. Heinrich had become so fussy, even his wife started to doubt his mental health.
"There was, in the father's life, some dark and vague source of fear
which later made him hurl himself to his death from the attic of his
house in Hamburg."
Arthur showed similar moodiness during his youth and often
acknowledged that he inherited it from his father. There were other
instances of serious mental health history on his father's side of the
family. Despite his hardship, Schopenhauer liked his father and later referred to him in a positive light. Heinrich Schopenhauer left the family with a significant inheritance
that was split in three among Johanna and the children. Arthur
Schopenhauer was entitled to control of his part when he reached the age
of majority. He invested it conservatively in government bonds and
earned annual interest that was more than double the salary of a
university professor. After quitting his merchant apprenticeship, with some encouragement from his mother, he dedicated himself to studies at the Ernestine Gymnasium, Gotha, in Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg.
While there, he also enjoyed social life among the local nobility,
spending large amounts of money, which deeply concerned his frugal
mother.
He left the Gymnasium after writing a satirical poem about one of the
schoolmasters. Although Arthur claimed that he left voluntarily, his
mother's letter indicates that he may have been expelled.
Schopenhauer as a youth
Arthur spent two years as a merchant in honor of his dead father.
During this time, he had doubts about being able to start a new life as a
scholar.
Most of his prior education was as a practical merchant and he had
trouble learning Latin; a prerequisite for an academic career.
His mother moved away, with her daughter Adele, to Weimar—the then centre of German literature—to
enjoy social life among writers and artists. Arthur and his mother did
not part on good terms. In one letter, she wrote: "You are unbearable
and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are
overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply
because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other
people." His mother, Johanna, was generally described as vivacious and sociable.
After they split, they did not meet again. She died 24 years later.
Some of Arthur's negative opinions about women may be rooted in his
troubled relationship with his mother.
Arthur moved to Hamburg to live with his friend Jean Anthime, who was also studying to become a merchant.
Education
He
moved to Weimar but did not live with his mother, who even tried to
discourage him from coming by explaining that they would not 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 that 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, the most celebrated of them being Goethe.
Arthur attended her parties, usually when he knew that Goethe would be
there—although the famous writer and statesman seemed not even to notice
the young and unknown student. It is possible that Goethe kept a
distance because Johanna warned him about her son's depressive and
combative nature, or because Goethe was then on bad terms with Arthur's
language instructor and roommate, Franz Passow. Schopenhauer was also captivated by the beautiful Karoline Jagemann, mistress of Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and he wrote to her his only known love poem.
Despite his later celebration of asceticism and negative views of
sexuality, Schopenhauer occasionally had sexual affairs—usually with
women of lower social status, such as servants, actresses, and sometimes
even paid prostitutes.
In a letter to his friend Anthime he claims that such affairs continued
even in his mature age and admits that he had two out-of-wedlock
daughters (born in 1819 and 1836), both of whom died in infancy.
In their youthful correspondence Arthur and Anthime were somewhat
boastful and competitive about their sexual exploits—but Schopenhauer
seemed aware that women usually did not find him very charming or
physically attractive, and his desires often remained unfulfilled.
He arrived at the newly founded University of Berlin
for the winter semester of 1811–12. At the same time, his mother had
just begun her literary career; she published her first book in 1810, a
biography of her friend Karl Ludwig Fernow, which was a critical success. Arthur attended lectures by the prominent post-Kantian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, but quickly found many points of disagreement with his Wissenschaftslehre; he also found Fichte's lectures tedious and hard to understand. He 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. He also attended the lectures of the famous Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom he also quickly came to dislike. His notes and comments on Schleiermacher's lectures show that Schopenhauer was becoming very critical of religion and moving towards atheism. He learned by self-directed reading; besides Plato, Kant and Fichte he also read the works of Schelling, Fries, Jacobi, Bacon, Locke, and much current scientific literature. He attended philological courses by August Böckh and Friedrich August Wolf and continued his naturalistic interests with courses by Martin Heinrich Klaproth, Paul Erman, Johann Elert Bode, Ernst Gottfried Fischer, Johann Horkel, Friedrich Christian Rosenthal and Hinrich Lichtenstein (Lichtenstein was also a friend whom he met at one of his mother's parties in Weimar).
Early work
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.
He returned to Weimar, but left after less than a month disgusted by
the fact that his mother was now living with her supposed lover, Georg
Friedrich Konrad Ludwig Müller von Gerstenbergk (1778–1838), a civil
servant twelve years younger than her; he considered the relationship an
act of infidelity to his father's memory. He settled for a while in Rudolstadt, hoping that no army would pass through the small town. He 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. He completed his dissertation at about the same time as the French army was defeated at the Battle of Leipzig.
He became irritated by the arrival of soldiers in the town and accepted
his mother's invitation to visit her in Weimar. She tried to convince
him that her relationship with Gerstenbergk was platonic and that she
had no intention of remarrying.
But Schopenhauer remained suspicious and often came in conflict with
Gerstenbergk because he considered him untalented, pretentious, and nationalistic. His mother had just published her second book, Reminiscences of a Journey in the Years 1803, 1804, and 1805,
a description of their family tour of Europe, which quickly became a
hit. She found his dissertation incomprehensible and said it was
unlikely that anyone would ever buy a copy. In a fit of temper Arthur
told her that people would read his work long after the "rubbish" she
wrote was totally forgotten. In fact, although they considered her novels of dubious quality, the Brockhaus publishing firm
held her in high esteem because they consistently sold well. Hans
Brockhaus (1888–1965) later claimed that his predecessors "saw nothing
in this manuscript, but wanted to please one of our best-selling authors
by publishing her son's work. We published more and more of her son
Arthur's work and today nobody remembers Johanna, but her son's works
are in steady demand and contribute to Brockhaus'[s] reputation." He kept large portraits of the pair in his office in Leipzig for the edification of his new editors.
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 extreme self-confidence and
tactless criticisms—soon made Goethe become distant again and after 1816
their correspondence became less frequent.
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.
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 Eastern philosophy (see also Indology). Schopenhauer was immediately impressed by the Upanishads (he called them "the production of the highest human wisdom", and believed that they contained superhuman concepts) and the Buddha, and put them on a 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. Schopenhauer held a profound respect for Indian philosophy; although he loved Hindu texts, he was more interested in Buddhism, which he came to regard as the best religion. His studies on Hindu and Buddhist texts were constrained by the lack of adequate literature, and the latter 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.
In
the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as
that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be
the solace of my death.
Schopenhauer in 1815. Portrait by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl.
As the relationship with his mother fell to a new low, in May 1814 he left Weimar and moved to Dresden. He continued his philosophical studies, enjoyed the cultural life, socialized with intellectuals and engaged in sexual affairs. His friends in Dresden were Johann Gottlob von Quandt, Friedrich Laun, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause
and Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl, a young painter who made a romanticized
portrait of him in which he improved some of Schopenhauer's unattractive
physical features. His criticisms of local artists occasionally caused public quarrels when he ran into them in public. Schopenhauer's main occupation during his stay in Dresden was his seminal philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation, which he started writing in 1814 and finished in 1818. He was recommended to the publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus by Baron Ferdinand von Biedenfeld, an acquaintance of his mother.
Although Brockhaus accepted his manuscript, Schopenhauer made a poor
impression because of his quarrelsome and fussy attitude, as well as
very poor sales of the book after it was published in December 1818.
In September 1818, while waiting for his book to be published and
conveniently escaping an affair with a maid that caused an unwanted
pregnancy, Schopenhauer left Dresden for a year-long vacation in Italy. He visited Venice, Bologna, Florence, Naples and Milan, travelling alone or accompanied by mostly English tourists he met. He spent the winter months in Rome, where he accidentally met his acquaintance Karl Witte and engaged in numerous quarrels with German tourists in the Caffè Greco, among them Johann Friedrich Böhmer, who also mentioned his insulting remarks and unpleasant character.
He enjoyed art, architecture, and ancient ruins, attended plays and
operas, and continued his philosophical contemplation and love affairs.
One of his affairs supposedly became serious, and for a while he
contemplated marriage to a rich Italian noblewoman—but, despite his
mentioning this several times, no details are known and it may have been
Schopenhauer exaggerating.
He corresponded regularly with his sister Adele and became close to her
as her relationship with Johanna and Gerstenbergk also deteriorated.
She informed him about their financial troubles as the banking house of
A. L. Muhl in Danzig—in which her mother invested their whole savings
and Arthur a third of his—was near bankruptcy. Arthur offered to share his assets, but his mother refused and became further enraged by his insulting comments.
The women managed to receive only thirty percent of their savings while
Arthur, using his business knowledge, took a suspicious and aggressive
stance towards the banker and eventually received his part in full. The affair additionally worsened the relationships among all three members of the Schopenhauer family.
He shortened his stay in Italy because of the trouble with Muhl and returned to Dresden.
Disturbed by the financial risk and the lack of responses to his book
he decided to take an academic position since it provided him with both
income and an opportunity to promote his views. He contacted his friends at universities in Heidelberg, Göttingen and Berlin and found Berlin most attractive. He scheduled his lectures to coincide with those of the famous philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whom Schopenhauer described as a "clumsy charlatan".
He was especially appalled by Hegel's supposedly poor knowledge of
natural sciences and tried to engage him in a quarrel about it already
at his test lecture in March 1820. Hegel was also facing political suspicions at the time, when many progressive professors were fired, while Schopenhauer carefully mentioned in his application that he had no interest in politics.
Despite their differences and the arrogant request to schedule lectures
at the same time as his own, Hegel still voted to accept Schopenhauer
to the university. Only five students turned up to Schopenhauer's lectures, and he dropped out of academia. A late essay, "On University Philosophy", expressed his resentment towards the work conducted in academies.
After his tenure in academia, he continued to travel extensively, visiting Leipzig, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Schaffhausen, Vevey, Milan and spending eight months in Florence.
Before he left for his three-year travel, Schopenhauer had an incident
with his Berlin neighbor, 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise
Marquet. The details of the August 1821 incident are unknown. He
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. She claimed that he had attacked her so
violently that she had become paralyzed on her right side and unable to
work. She 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. 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 (the treatment
his doctor used suggests syphilis). He contacted publishers, offering to translate Hume into German and Kant into English, but his proposals were declined.
Returning to Berlin, he began to study Spanish so he could read some
of his favorite authors in their original language. He liked Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, and especially Baltasar Gracián.
He also made failed attempts to publish his translations of their
works. Few attempts to revive his lectures—again scheduled at the same
time as Hegel's—also failed, as did his inquiries about relocating to
other universities.
During his Berlin years, Schopenhauer occasionally mentioned his desire to marry and have a family. For a while he was unsuccessfully courting 17-year-old Flora Weiss, who was 22 years younger than himself. His unpublished writings from that time show that he was already very critical of monogamy but still not advocating polygyny—instead musing about a polyamorous relationship that he called "tetragamy". He had an on-and-off relationship with a young dancer, Caroline Richter (she also used the surname Medon after one of her ex-lovers).
They met when he was 33 and she was 19 and working at the Berlin Opera.
She 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
(she soon had another pregnancy but the child was stillborn). As Schopenhauer was preparing to escape from Berlin in 1831, due to a cholera epidemic, he offered to take her with him on the condition that she left her young son behind.
She 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. 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.
Upon his arrival in Frankfurt, he experienced a period of depression and declining health. He renewed his correspondence with his mother, and she seemed concerned that he might commit suicide like his father.
By now Johanna and Adele were living very modestly. Johanna's writing
did not bring her much income, and her popularity was waning. Their correspondence remained reserved, and Arthur seemed undisturbed by her death in 1838. His relationship with his sister grew closer and he corresponded with her until she died in 1849.
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. He lived alone except for a succession of pet poodles named Atman and Butz. In 1836, he published On the Will in Nature. In 1836 he sent his essay "On the Freedom of the Will" to the contest of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and won the prize for the following year. He 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. The Society was appalled that
several distinguished contemporary philosophers were mentioned in a
very offensive manner, and claimed that the essay missed the point of
the set topic and that the arguments were inadequate. Schopenhauer, who had been very confident that he would win, was enraged by this rejection. He published both essays as The Two Basic Problems of Ethics.
The first edition, published in 1841, again failed to draw attention
to his philosophy. In the preface to the second edition, in 1860, he was
still pouring insults on the Royal Danish Society.
Two years later, after some negotiations, he managed to convince his
publisher, Brockhaus, to print the second, updated edition of The World as Will and Representation. That book was again mostly ignored and the few reviews were mixed or negative.
Schopenhauer began to attract some followers, mostly outside
academia, among practical professionals (several of them were lawyers)
who pursued private philosophical studies. He jokingly referred to them
as "evangelists" and "apostles". One of the most active early followers was Julius Frauenstädt,
who wrote numerous articles promoting Schopenhauer's philosophy. He was
also instrumental in finding another publisher after Brockhaus declined
to publish Parerga and Paralipomena, believing that it would be another failure.
Though Schopenhauer later stopped corresponding with him, claiming that
he did not adhere closely enough to his ideas, Frauenstädt continued to
promote Schopenhauer's work. They renewed their communication in 1859 and Schopenhauer named him heir for his literary estate. Frauenstädt also became the editor of the first collected works of Schopenhauer.
In 1848 Schopenhauer witnessed violent upheaval in Frankfurt after General Hans Adolf Erdmann von Auerswald and Prince Felix Lichnowsky were murdered. He became worried for his own safety and property. Even earlier in life he had had such worries and kept a sword and loaded pistols near his bed to defend himself from thieves.
He 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. The rebellion passed without any loss to Schopenhauer and he later praised Alfred I, Prince of Windisch-Grätz for restoring order.
He 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. As Young Hegelians
were advocating change and progress, Schopenhauer claimed that misery
is natural for humans and that, even if some utopian society were
established, people would still fight each other out of boredom, or
would starve due to overpopulation.
In 1851 Schopenhauer published Parerga and Paralipomena,
which, as the title says, contains essays that are supplementary to his
main work. It was his first successful, widely read book, partly due to
the work of his disciples who wrote praising reviews. The essays that proved most popular were the ones that actually did not contain the basic philosophical ideas of his system. Many academic philosophers considered him a great stylist and cultural critic but did not take his philosophy seriously. His early critics liked to point out similarities of his ideas to those Fichte and Schelling, or to claim that there were numerous contradictions in his philosophy.
Both criticisms enraged Schopenhauer. He was becoming less interested
in intellectual fights, but encouraged his disciples to do so.
His private notes and correspondence show that he acknowledged some of
the criticisms regarding contradictions, inconsistencies, and vagueness
in his philosophy, but claimed that he was not concerned about harmony
and agreement in his propositions and that some of his ideas should not be taken literally but instead as metaphors.
Academic philosophers were also starting to notice his work. In
1856 the University of Leipzig sponsored an essay contest about
Schopenhauer's philosophy, which was won by Rudolf Seydel's very critical essay. Schopenhauer's friend Jules Lunteschütz
made the first of his four portraits of him—which Schopenhauer did not
particularly like—which was soon sold to a wealthy landowner, Carl
Ferdinand Wiesike, who built a house to display it. Schopenhauer seemed
flattered and amused by this, and would claim that it was his first
chapel.
As his fame increased, copies of paintings and photographs of him were
being sold and admirers were visiting the places where he had lived and
written his works. People visited Frankfurt's Englischer Hof to observe him dining. Admirers gave him gifts and asked for autographs.
He 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.
He remained healthy in his own 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 had been declining since his youth and he developed problems with rheumatism. He remained active and lucid, continued his reading, writing and correspondence until his death. The numerous notes that he made during these years, amongst others on aging, were published posthumously under the title Senilia.
In the spring of 1860 his health began to decline, and he experienced
shortness of breath and heart palpitations; in September he suffered
inflammation of the lungs and, although he was starting to recover, he
remained very weak.
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. He died of pulmonary-respiratory failure
on 21 September 1860 while sitting at home on his couch. He died at the
age of 72 and had a funeral conducted by a Lutheran minister.
Philosophy
The world as representation
Schopenhauer saw his philosophy as an extension of Kant's, and used the results of Kantian epistemological investigation (transcendental idealism) as starting point for his own. Kant had argued that the empirical world is merely a complex of appearances whose existence and connection occur only in our mental representations. Schopenhauer reiterates this in the first sentence of his main work: "The world is my representation (Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung)".
Everything that there is for cognition (the entire world) exists simply
as an object in relation to a subject—a 'representation' to a subject.
Everything that belongs to the world is, therefore, 'subject-dependent'.
In Book One of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer considers the world from this angle—that is, insofar as it is representation.
Theory of perception
In November 1813 Goethe invited Schopenhauer to help him 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.
Kant openly admitted that it was Hume's skeptical assault on causality that motivated the critical investigations in his Critique of Pure Reason and gave an elaborate proof to show that causality is a priori. After G. E. Schulze
had made it plausible that Kant had not disproven Hume's skepticism, it
was up to those loyal to Kant's project to prove this important matter.
The 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.
He, on the other hand, was occupied with the questions: 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?
The sensations in the hand of a man
born blind, on feeling an object of cubic shape, are quite uniform and
the same on all sides and in every direction: the edges, it is true,
press upon a smaller portion of his hand, still nothing at all like a
cube is contained in these sensations. His Understanding draws the
immediate and intuitive conclusion from the resistance felt, that this
resistance must have a cause, which then presents itself through that
conclusion as a hard body; and through the movements of his arms in
feeling the object, while the hand's sensation remains unaltered, he
constructs the cubic shape in Space. If the representation of a cause
and of Space, together with their laws, had not already existed within
him, the image of a cube could never have proceeded from those
successive sensations in his hand.
Causality is therefore not an empirical concept drawn from objective
perceptions, as Hume had maintained; instead, as Kant had said,
objective perception presupposes knowledge of causality.
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 inverts the impressions on the retinas, and that uses the change in
the apparent position of an object relative to more distant objects
provided by binocular vision to perceive depth and distance.
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, and, in the subsequent editions of Fourfold Root, an extensive exposition is given in § 21.
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 very being in-itself of all things, Schopenhauer argues, is will (Wille).
The empirical world that appears to us as representation has plurality
and is ordered in a spatio-temporal framework. The world as thing
in-itself must exist outside the subjective forms of space and time.
Although the world manifests itself to our experience as a multiplicity
of objects (the "objectivation" of the will), each element of this
multiplicity has the same blind essence striving towards existence and
life. Human rationality is merely a secondary phenomenon that does not
distinguish humanity from the rest of nature at the fundamental,
essential level. 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. Schopenhauer's
philosophy of the will as the essential reality behind the world as
representation is often called metaphysical voluntarism.
For Schopenhauer, understanding the world as will leads to ethical concerns (see the ethics section below for further detail), which he explores in the Fourth Book of The World as Will and Representation and again in his two prize essays on ethics, On the Freedom of the Will and On the Basis of Morality.
No individual human actions are free, Schopenhauer argues, because they
are events in the world of appearance and thus are subject to the
principle of sufficient reason: a person's actions are a necessary
consequence of motives and the given character of the individual human.
Necessity extends to the actions of human beings just as it does to
every other appearance, and thus we cannot speak of freedom of
individual willing. Albert Einstein quoted the Schopenhauerian idea that
"a man can do as he will, but not will as he will."
Yet the will as thing in-itself is free, as it exists beyond the realm
of representation and thus is not constrained by any of the forms of
necessity that are part of the principle of sufficient reason.
According to Schopenhauer, salvation from our miserable existence
can come through the will's being "tranquillized" by the metaphysical
insight that reveals individuality to be merely an illusion. The saint
or 'great soul' intuitively "recognizes the whole, comprehends its
essence, and finds that it is constantly passing away, caught up in vain
strivings, inner conflict, and perpetual suffering".
The negation of the will, in other words, stems from the insight that
the world in-itself (free from the forms of space and time) is one. Ascetic
practices, Schopenhauer remarks, are used to aid the will's
"self-abolition", which brings about a blissful, redemptive "will-less"
state of emptiness that is free from striving or suffering.
In his main work, Schopenhauer praised the Dutch Golden Age artists,
who "directed such purely objective perception to the most
insignificant objects, and set up a lasting monument of their
objectivity and spiritual peace in paintings of still life. The aesthetic beholder does not contemplate this without emotion."
For Schopenhauer, human "willing"—desiring, craving, etc.—is at the root of suffering.
A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation.
Here one moves away from ordinary cognizance of individual things to
cognizance of eternal Platonic Ideas—in other words, cognizance
that is free from the service of will. In aesthetic contemplation, one
no longer perceives an object of perception as something from which one
is separated; rather "it is as if the object alone existed without
anyone perceiving it, and one can thus no longer separate the perceiver
from the perception, but the two have become one, the entirety of
consciousness entirely filled and occupied by a single perceptual
image". Subject and object are no longer distinguishable, and the Idea comes to the fore.
From this aesthetic immersion, one is no longer an individual who
suffers as a result of servitude to one's individual will but, rather,
becomes a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of cognition".
The pure, will-less subject of cognition is cognizant only of Ideas, not
individual things: this is a kind of cognition that is unconcerned with
relations between objects according to the Principle of Sufficient
Reason (time, space, cause and effect) and instead involves complete
absorption in the object.
Art is the practical consequence of this brief aesthetic
contemplation, since it attempts to depict the essence/pure Ideas of the
world. 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.
According to Daniel Albright, "Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself".
He deemed music a timeless, universal language comprehended everywhere,
that can imbue global enthusiasm, if in possession of a significant
melody.
Mathematics
Schopenhauer's realist views on mathematics are evident in his criticism of 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.
The Euclidean method of
demonstration has brought forth from its own womb its most striking
parody and caricature in the famous controversy over the theory of parallels,
and in the attempts, repeated every year, to prove the eleventh axiom
(also known as the fifth postulate). The axiom asserts, and that indeed
through the indirect criterion of a third intersecting line, that two
lines inclined to each other (for this is the precise meaning of "less
than two right angles"), if produced far enough, must meet. Now this
truth is supposed to be too complicated to pass as self-evident, and
therefore needs a proof; but no such proof can be produced, just because
there is nothing more immediate.
Throughout his writings,
Schopenhauer criticized the logical derivation of philosophies and
mathematics from mere concepts, instead of from intuitive perceptions.
In fact, it seems to me that the
logical method is in this way reduced to an absurdity. But it is
precisely through the controversies over this, together with the futile
attempts to demonstrate the directly certain as merely indirectly
certain, that the independence and clearness of intuitive evidence
appear in contrast with the uselessness and difficulty of logical proof,
a contrast as instructive as it is amusing. The direct certainty will
not be admitted here, just because it is no merely logical certainty
following from the concept, and thus resting solely on the relation of
predicate to subject, according to the principle of contradiction. But
that eleventh axiom regarding parallel lines is a synthetic propositiona priori, and as such has the guarantee of pure, not empirical, perception; this perception is just as immediate and certain as is the principle of contradiction itself, from which all proofs originally derive their certainty. At bottom this holds good of every geometrical theorem ...
Although Schopenhauer could see no justification for trying to prove
Euclid's parallel postulate, he did see a reason for examining another
of Euclid's axioms.
It surprises me that the eighth axiom, "Figures that coincide with one another are equal to one another", is not rather attacked. For "coinciding with one another" is either a mere tautology, or something quite empirical,
belonging not to pure intuition or perception, but to external sensuous
experience. Thus it presupposes mobility of the figures, but matter alone is movable in space. Consequently, this reference to coincidence with one another forsakes pure space, the sole element of geometry, in order to pass over to the material and empirical.
Schopenhauer asserts that the task of ethics is not to prescribe
moral actions that ought to be done, but to investigate moral actions.
As such, he states that philosophy is always theoretical: its task to
explain what is given.
According to Kant's transcendental idealism, space and time are
forms of our sensibility in which phenomena appear in multiplicity.
Reality in itself is free from multiplicity, not in the sense that an object is one, but that it is outside the possibility of multiplicity. Two individuals, though they appear distinct, are in-themselves not distinct.
Appearances are entirely subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason. The egoistic individual who focuses his aims on his own interests has to deal with empirical laws as well as he can.
What is relevant for ethics are individuals who can act against
their own self-interest. If we take a man who suffers when he sees his
fellow men living in poverty and consequently uses a significant part of
his income to support their needs instead of his own pleasures, then the simplest way to describe this is that he makes less distinction between himself and others than is usually made.
Regarding how things appear to us, the egoist asserts a
gap between two individuals, but the altruist experiences the sufferings
of others as his own. In the same way a compassionate man cannot hurt
animals, though they appear as distinct from himself.
What motivates the altruist is compassion. The suffering of
others is for him not a cold matter to which he is indifferent, but he
feels connectiveness to all beings. Compassion is thus the basis of
morality.
Eternal justice
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.
Unlike temporal or human justice, which requires time to repay an
evil deed and "has its seat in the state, as requiting and punishing",
eternal justice "rules not the state but the world, is not dependent
upon human institutions, is not subject to chance and deception, is not
uncertain, wavering, and erring, but infallible, fixed, and sure".
Eternal justice is not retributive, because retribution requires time.
There are no delays or reprieves. Instead, punishment is tied to the
offence, "to the point where the two become one. ... Tormenter and
tormented are one. The [Tormenter] errs in that he believes he is not a
partaker in the suffering; the [tormented], in that he believes he is
not a partaker in the guilt."
Suffering is the moral outcome of our attachment to pleasure.
Schopenhauer deemed that this truth was expressed by the Christian dogma
of original sin and, in Eastern religions, by the dogma of rebirth.
Quietism
He 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. For him,
a happy individual life in a world of suffering is like a beggar who
dreams one night that he is a king.
Those who have experienced this intuitive knowledge cannot affirm
life, but exhibit asceticism and quietism, meaning that they are no
longer sensitive to motives, are not concerned about their individual
welfare, and accept without resistance the evil that others inflict on
them. They welcome poverty and neither seek nor flee death. Schopenhauer referred to asceticism as the denial of the will to live.
Human life is a ceaseless struggle for satisfaction and, instead
of continuing their struggle, ascetics break it. It does not matter if
these ascetics adhere to the dogmata of Christianity or to Dharmic religions, since their way of living is the result of intuitive knowledge.
The Christian mystic and the teacher of the Vedanta philosophy
agree in this respect also, they both regard all outward works and
religious exercises as superfluous for him who has attained to
perfection. So much agreement in the case of such different ages and
nations is a practical proof that what is expressed here is not, as
optimistic dullness likes to assert, an eccentricity and perversity of
the mind, but an essential side of human nature, which only appears so
rarely because of its excellence.
Psychology
Philosophers
have not traditionally been impressed by the necessity of sex, but
Schopenhauer addressed sex and related concepts forthrightly:
... one ought rather to be
surprised that a thing [sex] which plays throughout so important a part
in human life has hitherto practically been disregarded by philosophers
altogether, and lies before us as raw and untreated material.
He named a force within man that he felt took invariable precedence over reason: the Will to Live or Will to Life (Wille zum Leben), 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:
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 ...
Schopenhauer's politics were an echo of his system of ethics, which he elucidated in detail in his Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (the two essays On the Freedom of the Will and On the Basis of Morality).
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. He also defended the independence
of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power, and a
monarch as an impartial element able to practise justice (in a practical
and everyday sense, not a cosmological one).
He 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".
Intellect in monarchies, he writes, always has "much better chances
against stupidity, its implacable and ever-present foe, than it has in
republics; but this is a great advantage."On the other hand, Schopenhauer disparaged republicanism as being "as unnatural to man as it is unfavorable to higher intellectual life and thus to the arts and sciences".
By his own admission, Schopenhauer did not give much thought to
politics, and several times he wrote proudly of how little attention he
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 maintained his 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."
Punishment
The
State, Schopenhauer claimed, punishes criminals to prevent future
crimes. It places "beside every possible motive for committing a wrong a
more powerful motive for leaving it undone, in the inescapable
punishment. Accordingly, the criminal code is as complete a register as
possible of counter-motives to all criminal actions that can possibly be
imagined ..." He claimed that this doctrine was not original to him but had appeared in the writings of Plato, Seneca, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Anselm Feuerbach.
Races and religions
Schopenhauer
attributed civilizational primacy to the northern "white races" due to
their sensitivity and creativity (except for the ancient Egyptians and
Hindus, whom he saw as equal):
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.
Schopenhauer was fervently opposed to slavery. Speaking of the treatment of slaves in the slave-holding states of the United States,
he condemned "those devils in human form, those bigoted, church-going,
strict sabbath-observing scoundrels, especially the Anglican parsons
among them" for how they "treat their innocent black brothers who
through violence and injustice have fallen into their devil's claws".
The slave-holding states of North America, Schopenhauer writes, are a
"disgrace to the whole of humanity".
In his Metaphysics of Sexual Love, Schopenhauer wrote:
Further, the consideration as to the complexion is very
decided. Blondes prefer dark persons, or brunettes; but the latter
seldom prefer the former. The reason is, that fair hair and blue eyes
are in themselves a variation from the type, almost an abnormity,
analogous to white mice, or at least to grey horses. In no part of the
world, not even in the vicinity of the pole, are they indigenous, except
in Europe, and are clearly of Scandinavian origin. I may here express
my opinion in passing that the white colour of the skin is not natural
to man, but that by nature he has a black or brown skin, like our
forefathers the Hindus; that consequently a white man has never
originally sprung from the womb of nature, and that thus there is no
such thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every white
man is a faded or bleached one. Forced into the strange world, where he
only exists like an exotic plant, and like this requires in winter the
hothouse, in the course of thousands of years man became white. The
gipsies, an Indian race which immigrated only about four centuries ago,
show the transition from the complexion of the Hindu to our own.
Therefore in sexual love nature strives to return to dark hair and brown
eyes as the primitive type; but the white colour of the skin has become
a second nature, though not so that the brown of the Hindu repels us.
Finally, each one also seeks in the particular parts of the body the
corrective of his own defects and aberrations, and does so the more
decidedly the more important the part is.
Schopenhauer also maintained a marked metaphysical and political anti-Judaism.
He 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. He saw this as opposed to the
ignorant drive toward earthly utopianism and superficiality of a worldly
"Jewish" spirit:
[Judaism] is, therefore, the crudest and poorest of all religions and consists merely in an absurd and revolting theism. It amounts to this that the κύριος ['Lord'],
who has created the world, desires to be worshipped and adored; and so
above all he is jealous, is envious of his colleagues, of all the other
gods; if sacrifices are made to them he is furious and his Jews have a
bad time ... It is most deplorable that this religion has become the
basis of the prevailing religion of Europe; for it is a religion without
any metaphysical tendency. 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.
Women
In his 1851
essay "On Women", Schopenhauer expressed opposition to what he called
"Teutonico-Christian stupidity" of "reflexive, unexamined reverence for
the female (abgeschmackten Weiberveneration)".
He wrote: "Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and
teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves
childish, frivolous and short-sighted." He opined that women are
deficient in artistic faculties and sense of justice, and expressed his
opposition to monogamy.
He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey". The essay does give
some compliments: "women are decidedly more sober in their judgment
than [men] are", and are more sympathetic to the suffering of others.
Schopenhauer's writings influenced many, from Friedrich Nietzsche to nineteenth-century feminists. 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.
When the elderly Schopenhauer sat for a sculpture portrait by the Prussian sculptor Elisabet Ney in 1859, he was much impressed by the young woman's wit and independence, as well as by her skill as a visual artist. After his time with Ney, he told 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."
Pederasty
In the third, expanded edition of The World as Will and Representation (1859), Schopenhauer added an appendix to his chapter on the Metaphysics of Sexual Love. He wrote that pederasty
has the benefit of preventing ill-begotten children. Concerning this,
he stated that "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".
Schopenhauer ends the appendix with the statement that "by expounding
these paradoxical ideas, I wanted to grant to the professors of
philosophy a small favour. I have done so by giving them the opportunity
of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty."
Heredity and eugenics
Schopenhauer at age 58 on 16 May 1846
Schopenhauer viewed personality and intellect as inherited. He quotes Horace's saying, "From the brave and good are the brave descended" (Odes, iv, 4, 29) and Shakespeare's line from Cymbeline, "Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base" (IV, 2) to reinforce his hereditarian argument. Mechanistically, Schopenhauer believed that a person inherits his
intellect through his mother, and personal character through the father.
This belief in heritability of traits informed Schopenhauer's view of
love—placing it at the highest level of importance. For Schopenhauer the
"final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of
more importance than all other ends in human life. What it all turns
upon is nothing less than the composition of the next generation. ... It
is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human
race to come, which is here at stake." This view of the importance for
the species of whom we choose to love was reflected in his views on eugenics or good breeding. Here Schopenhauer wrote:
With our knowledge of the complete unalterability both of
character and of mental faculties, we are led to the view that a real
and thorough improvement of the human race might be reached not so much
from outside as from within, not so much by theory and instruction as
rather by the path of generation. Plato had something of the kind in
mind when, in the fifth book of his Republic, he explained his plan for increasing and improving his warrior caste. If we could castrate all scoundrels and stick all stupid geese in a convent, and give men of noble character a whole harem,
and procure men, and indeed thorough men, for all girls of intellect
and understanding, then a generation would soon arise which would
produce a better age than that of Pericles.
In another context, Schopenhauer reiterated his eugenic thesis: "If
you want Utopian plans, I would say: the only solution to the problem is
the despotism of the wise and noble members of a genuine aristocracy, a genuine nobility, achieved by mating
the most magnanimous men with the cleverest and most gifted women. This
proposal constitutes my Utopia and my Platonic Republic." Analysts (e.g., Keith Ansell-Pearson) have suggested that Schopenhauer's anti-egalitarianist
sentiment and his support for eugenics influenced the neo-aristocratic
philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who initially considered Schopenhauer
his mentor.
As a consequence of his monistic philosophy, Schopenhauer was very concerned about animal welfare.
For him, all individual animals, including humans, are essentially
phenomenal manifestations of the one underlying Will. For him the word
"will" designates force, power, impulse, energy, and desire; it is the
closest word we have that can signify both the essence of all external
things and our own direct, inner experience. Since every living thing
possesses will, humans and animals are fundamentally the same and can
recognize themselves in each other. For this reason, he claimed that a good person would have sympathy for animals, who are our fellow sufferers.
Compassion for animals is
intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be
confidently asserted that he who is cruel to living creatures cannot be a
good man.
Nothing leads more definitely to a
recognition of the identity of the essential nature in animal and human
phenomena than a study of zoology and anatomy.
— On the Basis of Morality, chapter 8
The assumption that animals are
without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral
significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and
barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
— On the Basis of Morality, chapter 8
In 1841, he praised the establishment in London of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,
and in Philadelphia of the Animals' Friends Society. 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. To reinforce his points, Schopenhauer referred to anecdotal reports of the look in the eyes of a monkey who had been shot and also the grief of a baby elephant whose mother had been killed by a hunter.
Schopenhauer was very attached to his succession of pet poodles. He criticized Spinoza's belief that animals are a mere means for the satisfaction of humans.
Intellectual interests and affinities
Indology
Photo of Schopenhauer, 1852
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 ("The Great Secret"). He was so impressed by its philosophy
that he called it "the production of the highest human wisdom", and
believed it contained superhuman concepts. Schopenhauer considered India as "the land of the most ancient and most pristine wisdom, the place from which Europeans could trace their descent and the tradition by which they had been influenced in so many decisive ways", and regarded the Upanishads
as "the most profitable and elevating reading which [...] is possible
in the world. It has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace
of my death."
Schopenhauer was first introduced to Anquetil du Perron's translation by Friedrich Majer in 1814. They met during the winter of 1813–1814 in Weimar at the home of Schopenhauer's mother, according to the biographer Safranski. Majer was a follower of Herder, and an early Indologist.
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. This was through his neighbor of two years, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause.
Krause was then a minor and rather unorthodox philosopher who attempted
to mix his own ideas with ancient Indian wisdom. Krause had also
mastered Sanskrit, unlike Schopenhauer, and they developed a professional relationship. It was from Krause that Schopenhauer learned meditation and received the closest thing to expert advice concerning Indian thought.
The view of things [...] that all
plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals,
passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation
after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity
really existing, which is present and identical in all alike;—this
theory, I say, was of course known long before Kant; indeed, it may be
carried back to the remotest antiquity. It is the alpha and omega of the
oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas,
whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the
Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies
enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many
varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated.
— On the Basis of Morality, chapter 4
The book Oupnekhat (Upanishad) always lay open on his table, and he invariably studied it before going to bed. He 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. Most noticeable, in the case of Schopenhauer's work, was the significance of the Chandogya Upanishad, whose Mahāvākya, Tat Tvam Asi, is mentioned throughout The World as Will and Representation.
Buddhism
Schopenhauer noted a correspondence between his doctrines and the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. Similarities centered on the principles that life involves suffering, that suffering is caused by desire (taṇhā),
and that the extinction of desire leads to liberation. Thus three of
the four "truths of the Buddha" correspond to Schopenhauer's doctrine of
the will.
In Buddhism, while greed and lust are always unskillful, desire is
ethically variable – it can be skillful, unskillful, or neutral.
For Schopenhauer, will had ontological primacy over the intellect; desire is prior to thought. Schopenhauer felt this was similar to notions of puruṣārtha or goals of life in VedāntaHinduism.
In Schopenhauer's philosophy, denial of the will is attained by:
personal experience of an extremely great suffering that leads to loss of the will to live; or
knowledge of the essential nature of life in the world through observation of the suffering of other people.
Buddhist nirvāṇa is not equivalent to the condition that Schopenhauer described as denial of the will. Nirvāṇa is not the extinguishing of the person
as some Western scholars have thought, but only the "extinguishing"
(the literal meaning of nirvana) of the flames of greed, hatred, and
delusion that assail a person's character. Schopenhauer 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.
Buddhist philosopher Keiji Nishitani sought to distance 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.
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.
The argument that Buddhism affected Schopenhauer's philosophy more than any other Dharmic faith loses credence since he did not begin a serious study of Buddhism until after the publication of The World as Will and Representation in 1818.
Scholars have started to revise earlier views about Schopenhauer's
discovery of Buddhism. Proof of early interest and influence appears in
Schopenhauer's 1815/16 notes (transcribed and translated by Urs App)
about Buddhism. They are included in a recent case study that traces
Schopenhauer's interest in Buddhism and documents its influence. Other scholarly work questions how similar Schopenhauer's philosophy actually is to Buddhism.
Magic and occultism
Some traditions in Western esotericism and parapsychology interested Schopenhauer and influenced his philosophical theories. He 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. This
theory notably parallels Aleister Crowley's system of magick and its emphasis on human will.
Given the importance of the Will to Schopenhauer's overarching system,
this amounts to "suggesting his whole philosophical system had magical
powers." Schopenhauer rejected the theory of disenchantment and claimed philosophy should synthesize itself with magic, which he believed amount to "practical metaphysics."
Neoplatonism, including the traditions of Plotinus and to a lesser extent Marsilio Ficino, has also been cited as an influence on Schopenhauer.
Interests
Schopenhauer had a wide range of interests, from science and opera to occultism and literature.
In his student years, Schopenhauer went more often to lectures in
the sciences than philosophy. He 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.
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.
If Goethe had not been sent into the world simultaneously
with Kant in order to counterbalance him, so to speak, in the spirit of
the age, the latter would have been haunted like a nightmare many an
aspiring mind and would have oppressed it with great affliction. But now
the two have an infinitely wholesome effect from opposite directions
and will probably raise the German spirit to a height surpassing even
that of antiquity.
In philosophy, his most important influences were, according to himself, Kant, Plato and the Upanishads. 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.
Thoughts on other philosophers
Giordano Bruno and Spinoza
Schopenhauer saw Bruno and Spinoza
as philosophers not bound to their age or nation. "Both were fulfilled
by the thought, that as manifold the appearances of the world may be, it
is still one being, that appears in all of them. ...
Consequently, there is no place for God as creator of the world in their
philosophy, but God is the world itself."
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. Bruno on the other hand, who knew much
about nature and ancient literature, presented his ideas with Italian
vividness, and is amongst philosophers the only one who comes near
Plato's poetic and dramatic power of exposition.
Schopenhauer noted that their philosophies do not provide any
ethics, and it is therefore very remarkable that Spinoza called his main
work Ethics.
In fact, it could be considered complete from the standpoint of
life-affirmation, if one completely ignores morality and self-denial.
It is yet even more remarkable that Schopenhauer mentions Spinoza as an
example of the denial of the will, if one uses the French biography by
Jean Maximilien Lucas as the key to Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione.
Immanuel Kant
Schopenhauer's
philosophy took Kant's work as its foundation. While he praised Kant's
greatness, he nonetheless included a highly detailed criticism of
Kantian philosophy as an appendix to The World as Will and Representation.
The importance of Kant for Schopenhauer, in philosophy as well as on a
personal level, cannot be overstated. Kant's philosophy was the
foundation of Schopenhauer's, and he had high praise for the Transcendental Aesthetic section of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. 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:
I have already explained in the
preface to the first edition, that my philosophy is founded on that of
Kant, and therefore presupposes a thorough knowledge of it. I repeat
this here. For Kant's teaching produces in the mind of everyone who has
comprehended it a fundamental change which is so great that it may be
regarded as an intellectual new-birth. It alone is able really to remove
the inborn realism which proceeds from the original character of the
intellect, which neither Berkeley nor Malebranche
succeed in doing, for they remain too much in the universal, while Kant
goes into the particular, and indeed in a way that is quite unexampled
both before and after him, and which has quite a peculiar, and, we might
say, immediate effect upon the mind in consequence of which it
undergoes a complete undeception, and forthwith looks at all things in
another light. Only in this way can any one become susceptible to the
more positive expositions which I have to give. On the other hand, he
who has not mastered the Kantian philosophy, whatever else he may have
studied, is, as it were, in a state of innocence; that is to say, he
remains in the grasp of that natural and childish realism in which we
are all born, and which fits us for everything possible, with the single
exception of philosophy.
In his study room, one bust was of Buddha, the other was of Kant.
The bond which Schopenhauer felt with the philosopher of Königsberg is
demonstrated in an unfinished poem he dedicated to Kant (included in
volume 2 of the Parerga):
With my eyes I followed thee into the blue sky, And there thy flight dissolved from view. Alone I stayed in the crowd below, Thy word and thy book my only solace.— Through the strains of thy inspiring words I sought to dispel the dreary solitude. Strangers on all sides surround me. The world is desolate and life interminable.[267]
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. The inadmissibility of this reasoning was also
acknowledged by Schopenhauer. He insisted that this was a true
conclusion, drawn from false premises.
Post-Kantian school
The leading figures of post-Kantian philosophy—Johann Gottlieb Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel—were
not respected by Schopenhauer. He argued that they were not
philosophers at all, for they lacked "the first requirement of a
philosopher, namely a seriousness and honesty of inquiry."
Rather, they were merely sophists who, excelling in the art of
beguiling the public, pursued their own selfish interests (such as
professional advancement within the university system). Diatribes
against the vacuity, dishonesty, pomposity, and self-interest of these
contemporaries are to be found throughout Schopenhauer's published
writings. The following passage is an example:
All this explains the painful
impression with which we are seized when, after studying genuine
thinkers, we come to the writings of Fichte and Schelling, or even to
the presumptuously scribbled nonsense of Hegel, produced as it was with a
boundless, though justified, confidence in German stupidity. With those
genuine thinkers one always found an honest investigation of truth and just as honest
an attempt to communicate their ideas to others. Therefore whoever
reads Kant, Locke, Hume, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Descartes feels
elevated and agreeably impressed. This is produced through communion
with a noble mind which has and awakens ideas and which thinks and sets
one thinking. The reverse of all this takes place when we read the
above-mentioned three German sophists. An unbiased reader, opening one
of their books and then asking himself whether this is the tone of a
thinker wanting to instruct or that of a charlatan wanting to impress,
cannot be five minutes in any doubt; here everything breathes so much of
dishonesty.
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.
Whereas Fichte was merely a windbag (Windbeutel), Hegel was a "commonplace, inane, loathsome, repulsive, and ignorant charlatan." The philosophers Karl Popper and Mario Bunge agreed with this distinction. Hegel, Schopenhauer wrote in the preface to his Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics,
not only "performed no service to philosophy, but he has had a
detrimental influence on philosophy, and thereby on German literature in
general, really a downright stupefying, or we could even say a
pestilential influence, which it is therefore the duty of everyone
capable of thinking for himself and judging for himself to counteract in
the most express terms at every opportunity."
Schopenhauer remained the most influential German philosopher until the First World War. His 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 Mainländer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Olga Plümacher and Agnes Taubert. His 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. The French writer Maupassant commented that "to-day even those who execrate him seem to carry in their own souls particles of his thought". Other philosophers of the 19th century who cited his influence include Hans Vaihinger, Volkelt, Solovyov and Weininger.
Schopenhauer was well read by physicists, most notably Einstein, Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Majorana. Einstein described Schopenhauer's thoughts as a "continual consolation" and called him a genius. In his Berlin study three figures hung on the wall: Faraday, Maxwell, Schopenhauer.Konrad Wachsmann
recalled: "He often sat with one of the well-worn Schopenhauer volumes,
and as he sat there, he seemed so pleased, as if he were engaged with a
serene and cheerful work."
When Erwin Schrödinger discovered Schopenhauer ("the greatest savant of the West") he considered switching his study of physics to philosophy. He maintained the idealistic views during the rest of his life.Wolfgang Pauli accepted the main tenet of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, that the thing-in-itself is will.
But most of all Schopenhauer is famous for his influence on artists. Richard Wagner became one of the earliest and most famous adherents of the Schopenhauerian philosophy. The admiration was not mutual, and Schopenhauer proclaimed: "I remain faithful to Rossini and Mozart!" So he has been nicknamed "the artist's philosopher". See also Influence of Schopenhauer on Tristan und Isolde.
Schopenhauer depicted on a 500 million Danzig papiermark note (1923)
Under the influence of Schopenhauer, Leo Tolstoy
became convinced that the truth of all religions lies in
self-renunciation. When he read Schopenhauer's philosophy, Tolstoy
exclaimed "at present I am convinced that Schopenhauer is the greatest
genius among men. ... It is the whole world in an incomparably beautiful
and clear reflection." He said that what he has written in War and Peace is also said by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation.
Jorge Luis Borges
remarked that the reason he had never attempted to write a systematic
account of his world view, despite his penchant for philosophy and
metaphysics in particular, was because Schopenhauer had already written
it for him.
Other figures in literature who were strongly influenced by Schopenhauer were Thomas Mann, Thomas Hardy, Afanasy Fet, J.-K. Huysmans and George Santayana. In Herman Melville's final years, while he wrote Billy Budd,
he read Schopenhauer's essays and marked them heavily. Scholar Brian
Yothers notes that Melville "marked numerous misanthropic and even
suicidal remarks, suggesting an attraction to the most extreme sorts of
solitude, but he also made note of Schopenhauer's reflection on the
moral ambiguities of genius."
Schopenhauer's attraction to and discussions of both Eastern and
Western religions in conjunction with each other made an impression on
Melville in his final years.
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. "With his truths Schopenhauer gave me a spiritual world and an awareness of happiness."
Friedrich Nietzsche owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading The World as Will and Representation and admitted that he was one of the few philosophers that he respected, dedicating to him his essay "Schopenhauer als Erzieher" one of his Untimely Meditations.
Commemorative stamp of the Deutsche Bundespost
Early in his career, Ludwig Wittgenstein
adopted Schopenhauer's epistemological idealism, and some traits of
Schopenhauer's influence (particularly Schopenhauerian
transcendentalism) can be observed in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Later on, Wittgenstein rejected epistemological transcendental idealism for Gottlob Frege's conceptual realism. In later years, Wittgenstein became highly dismissive of Schopenhauer, describing him as an ultimately shallow thinker. His friend Bertrand Russell had a low opinion on the philosopher, and even came to attack him in his History of Western Philosophy for hypocritically praising asceticism yet not acting upon it.
Opposite to Russell on the foundations of mathematics, the Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer incorporated Kant's and Schopenhauer's ideas in the philosophical school of intuitionism,
where mathematics is considered as a purely mental activity instead of
an analytic activity wherein objective properties of reality are
revealed. Brouwer was also influenced by Schopenhauer's metaphysics, and
wrote an essay on mysticism.
Schopenhauer's philosophy has made its way into a novel, The Schopenhauer Cure, by American existential psychiatrist and emeritus professor of psychiatry Irvin Yalom.
Schopenhauer's philosophy, and the discussions on philosophical pessimism it has engendered, has been the focus of contemporary thinkers such as David Benatar, Thomas Ligotti, and Eugene Thacker. Their work also served as an inspiration for the popular HBO TV series True Detective