Arthur Schopenhauer
Understand desire; make room for compassion.
Schopenhauer interprets the world as representation for a subject and manifestation of restless will. Art, compassion and asceticism become different responses to desire and suffering, within a body of work whose prejudices also require critical examination.
How does life change when desire no longer promises final satisfaction?
Biography
Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in Danzig into a prosperous merchant family. His father Heinrich Floris intended him for commerce; his mother Johanna became a successful writer. Following Danzig’s annexation by Prussia, the family moved to Hamburg. Travel, language learning and schooling in England gave him an unusually European education. His father’s death in 1805 profoundly disturbed his life, although it cannot explain his entire philosophy. He gradually abandoned a commercial career while relations with his mother became increasingly difficult. Inherited resources later provided a degree of intellectual independence unavailable to many contemporaries and helped sustain his lengthy work outside a successful academic appointment.
02 /Philosophy
A known object always appears to a subject through forms of cognition. This dependence does not reduce the world to private fantasy: it asks what makes experience possible and what experience cannot disclose.
03 /Reading guides
Original introductions to enter the works, discover their central questions and take the reflection further.
04 /Bibliography
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
A first reading.
From body to will: follow the argument
Enter The World through the body’s double experience and test the transition to a metaphysics of nature.
The World as Will and Representation — ICan compassion ground morality?
Read On the Basis of Morality through motives, visible actions and attention to other beings.
On the Basis of MoralityRecognize a stratagem without losing the question
Use Eristic Dialectic to notice when discussion leaves relevant reasons behind.
Eristic Dialectic — The Art of Being Right