Arthur Schopenhauer

I was born in Danzig in 1788 to a mercantile household; when politics shifted, we removed to Hamburg. My father died in 1805; my mother, Johanna, held salons I soon found wearisome. I studied at Göttingen and Berlin, first medicine and the natural sciences, then, under the spell of Plato, the Upanishads, and above all Kant, turned to philosophy. In Jena, 1813, I took my doctorate with On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, a propaedeutic for all that followed.

My central book, The World as Will and Representation (1818/19; enlarged 1844), holds that the world is our representation, shaped by our forms of cognition, while the inner nature of things is a blind, incessant will. Hence life oscillates between craving and boredom. I did not preach optimism; I sought lucidity. In ethics I found one counterweight: compassion, the only non-egoistic motive, argued fully in On the Basis of Morality (1840). Art—most of all music—gives the rarest respite, presenting the will without images.

I despised bombast and academic traffic, especially Hegel’s. In 1820 I set my Berlin lectures against his hour and spoke largely to empty benches. I left during the cholera of 1831 and settled in Frankfurt, where I lived quietly with my poodles—often named Atman—wrote aphoristically, and won a prize for On the Freedom of the Will (1839). Long neglected, I found readers after Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). I remained the same; fashion at last turned its head.