Arthur Schopenhauer

Independent activity Germany Germany 1788–1860 ○ Natural death

Pessimist philosopher, author of The World as Will and Representation

A philosopher born into a wealthy Danzig merchant family. His share of his father’s estate let him study at Göttingen and Berlin free of financial worry, and in 1819 he published his main work, The World as Will and Representation. In 1820–1821 he lectured at the University of Berlin at the same hour as Hegel but drew almost no listeners, and thereafter, scornful of university philosophy, lived as a private scholar. From 1833 he settled in Frankfurt, where he lived until his death. His philosophy, which saw the essence of the world as blind will and life as suffering, won belated fame once Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) found readers.

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

The World as Will and Representation

Starting from Kant, Schopenhauer held that the world we know is only representation, appearing to a subject, and that the thing in itself beneath it is a blind and endless will. Because the will always acts out of lack, life is essentially suffering, and the ways out of it lie in aesthetic contemplation, compassion and the ascetic denial of the will itself. His high regard for the Upanishads and Buddhism also set him apart from the German philosophy of his day. The first edition of 1819 barely sold, but the work grew greatly in the second edition of 1844, which added a second volume, and the third of 1859. Fame came only after Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) succeeded, and his influence reached Nietzsche, Wagner, Burckhardt and Wittgenstein.

The appendix on pederasty and Ulrichs

In the third edition of 1859 Schopenhauer added an appendix on pederasty to his chapter on the metaphysics of sexual love. While calling it an unnatural and repugnant monstrosity, he conceded that its universality across all ages and peoples and its ineradicability showed it to arise from human nature itself, and he proposed that nature used it to keep men of weakened procreative power from fathering children. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs first took up the passage in Inclusa (1864), and in Memnon (1868), §45, he quoted the sentence that the thing “somehow arises from human nature itself” as one of the scholarly testimonies for the inborn nature of the Urning’s disposition. He did not accept Schopenhauer’s particular hypothesis.