Arthur Schopenhauer was born at Danzig (now known as Gdansk) in February of 1788. His father was a successful shipowner and merchant; his mother, a more literary type who, after her husband's suicide in 1805, became a minor novelist and convener of intellectual salons attended by, among other luminaries, Goethe. There is a record of a conversational snippet between her and her philosopher son as a young man. He said his book, The World as Will and Idea, would still be available long after her works had been forgotten. She said he was right, the entire first printing would always be available.
Schopenhauer had been groomed to work in the family business--the name Arthur was chosen because it was spelled the same in the languages of all the countries in which the firm operated--and, though he hated the work, he continued as a clerk for two years after his father's death, when his mother released him. It was 1807, he was 19, and the formal part of his higher education began. He started by studying science and medicine, then switched to philosophy, and, on the recommendation of his adviser, confined his "school reading" to Plato and Kant. He also read the texts of various eastern religions, especially the Upanishads. His PhD dissertation was completed in 1813. From 1814 to 1818 he lived in Dresden and wrote The World as Will and Idea. It is a complete exposition of his philosophy. He was 30 when it was published near the end of 1818.
Life, Schopenhauer told a friend, is a disagreeable thing (a "missliche Sache"), and "I have determined to spend it in reflecting on it." Hollingdale, who relates the anecdote, says this is precisely what Schopenhauer did, with the result that there are some gaps in the biographical record. He lived modestly on his patrimony during the years that The World as Will and Idea was ignored. After he became well known, things didn't change that much. For the last 27 years of his life, from the time he was 45 to 72, we know that he lived alone (except for a succession of pet poodles) in an apartment in Frankfurt, where he pursued daily an identical routine. He rose at 7, had nothing for breakfast but strong coffee, and wrote till noon. He then played the flute, at which he became skilled, for 30 minutes, whereupon he went out for lunch at the same inn every day. After lunch, he returned home and read until 4. Then, no matter the weather, he walked for two hours. At 6, he stopped off at the library and read a newspaper. In the evenings he attended the theatre or a concert and ate dinner afterwards at a hotel or restaurant--a different one from where he lunched. Then it was home to bed by 10. He did this for about 10,000 days in a row, until, in 1860, he died of a heart attack. The routine was interrupted only in order to receive visitors.
Playing a free association game with a philosophy major, "Schopenhauer" is apt to elicit the response: Pessimism. That's fair, as far as it goes, but the details are interesting. What he called "will" is something very close to what is often called now "the life force" or "the will to live." It's the primal, eldest source of all that is, according to Schopenhauer. By the time his life ended, his general outlook might have been interpreted as having anticipated Darwin. That human beings are continuous with the animals he averred before science confirmed it. Our higher reasoning powers, however, are a source of endless woe. The struggle to supply the necessities of life, if successful, becomes a struggle to acquire more and more. (If unsuccessful, so much the worse.) Contentedness is the ratio of things possessed to things desired, but efforts to increase the numerator, especially when successful, cause the denominator to spike. This results in restlessness and misery. Happiness is something negative, the mere absence of unhappiness, and the way to attain it is by lowering the denominator. But what is left as the denominator goes to zero? The desire even to be alive dissipates. You and I may think this counts against Schopenhauer, but he calmly assents to the charge that his philosphy is life-denying. Life's best lesson, he says, is that it teaches us not to want it.
His writing is characterized by vigor, clarity, and a lack of professional jargon. I shall set down some examples:
A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.
In our early youth we sit before the lfe that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear. For to him who does know, children can sometimes seem like innocent delinquents, sentenced not to death but to life, who have not yet discovered what their punishment will consist of. Nevertheless, everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say: 'Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse--until at last the worst of all arrives.'
Even if Leibniz's demonstration that this is best of all possible worlds were correct, it would still not be a vindication of divine providence. For the Creator created not only the world, he also created possibility itself: therefore he should have created the possibility of a better world than this one.
Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.
As far as I can see, it is only the monotheistic, that is to say Jewish, religions whose members regard self-destruction as a crime. This is all the more striking in that neither in the Old nor in the New Testament is there to be found any prohibition or even definite disapproval of it; so that religious teachers have to base their proscription of suicide on philosphical grounds of their own invention, which are however so poor that what their arguments lack in strength they have to try to make up for by the strength of the terms in which they express their abhorrence; that is to say, they resort to abuse.
Another fundamental error of Christianity is that it has in an unnatural fashion sundered mankind from the animal world to which it essentially belongs and now considers mankind alone as of any account, regarding the animals as no more than things. . . . The greatest benefit conferred by the railways is that they spare millions of draught-horses their miserable existence.
The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instil in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are? From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.
Schopenhauer did not always live up to his own creed. An account of his life, however brief, should include the information that, in 1821, when he was 33, he had a dispute with a female co-tenant, a seamstress, who he said repeatedly over time kept disrupting his concentration by chatting loudly and stupidly with other tenants in the hall outside his door. The argument disintegrated into a shoving match and ended when the seamstress fell down a flight of stairs. She sued, alleging that injuries she incurred made it impossible for her to earn a livelihood as a seamstress. Schopenhauer vigorously defended, and the suit dragged on, Bleak-House fashion, for five years, at which time the philosopher was ordered to pay the seamstress a small annual sum--60 talers, or about 9 pounds--for the rest of her life. This he did. When she died in 1852, more than 25 years after the order was entered, Schopenhauer received a copy of her death certificate and wrote across it: "Obit anus, abit onus" (the old woman dies, the debt departs).