Arthur Schopenhauer

1788-1860 · German · Metaphysics, Ethics, Aesthetics, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy of Religion

Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.

Born in Danzig in 1788, Schopenhauer's father likely died by suicide in 1805, freeing him from a merchant apprenticeship. He composed The World as Will and Representation at twenty-eight, scheduled his Berlin lectures against Hegel's at the same hour, and watched almost no one attend. Decades in Frankfurt followed — dining alone, watching his philosophy go unread — until the 1850s, when fame arrived.

Topics Arthur Schopenhauer addresses

• the world as will and representation
• the will to life
• the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason
• the thing in itself as will
• the principium individuationis
• the body as objectified will
• the primacy of the will over the intellect
• Platonic Ideas as immediate objectifications of will
• aesthetic contemplation
• music as copy of the will itself
• the denial of the will to life
• asceticism and the saint
• pessimism
• suffering as essential
• life as pendulum between pain and boredom
• compassion as sole moral foundation
• tat tvam asi
• the veil of Maya
• empirical character and intelligible character
• genius as objective contemplation
• the sublime
• the three ways of escape
• suicide as affirmation of the will
• the metaphysics of sexual love

Converse with Arthur Schopenhauer on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Arthur Schopenhauer's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.