Draft:Arthur Schopenhauer

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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a German philosopher best known for his work, The World as Will and Representation, published in 1819 and further developed in 1844. He is regarded by many as the philosopher of pessimism.

Philosophy

Schopenhauer never deviated from his early philosophy and The World as Will and Representation. He argued that the world that humans experience is dependent on cognition, more so than of the world as a manifested environment. Cognitive scientists later came to explore this notion, but his primary influence is in the Nietzchien school. His notions of sexual desires being a significant underlying part of what he called the Will, later came to be explored in depth by Freud. Other elements of Schopenhauer's Will include the vast difference in human perception from the objective world. The world is comprised, in Schopenhauer's mind, of the Will, consisting of all of our underlying mental faculties. The representation of our physical lives and observations are cast onto the Will, thus forming our World. We are, however, rather irrational creatures by default. Schopenhauer also wrote The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument (1831).

Character

Schopenhauer is regarded as the philosopher of pessimism for a number of reasons. He once had an altercation with two women outside his door that he thought to be listening to him. The altercation resulted in his pushing a woman down a flight of stairs, who recovered and milked his income for the rest of his life. Philosophically, he may be regarded as a pessimist because he advocated for the minimising of suffering, not the increase of happiness. This is a common trend in Eastern philosophy and was little heard of in Western philosophy prior to Schopenhauer. He was educated and knowledgeable on Eastern and Western philosophy, in a time rare for this to be the case.

Disdain for Hegel

Schopenhauer quite possibly hated Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel more than anyone else on earth. German philosophy had the misfortune of being completely dominated by Hegel during much of Schopenhauer's philosophical life. Schopenhauer worked with him at Heidelberg University and arranged his lectures to coincide with Hegel's, expecting more students. The opposite happened and sent Schopenhauer into a deep and visceral hatred for Hegel. Schopenhauer had at one point five students to Hegel's three hundred. After observing Hegel's lectures filled and no students for his own, he wrote one of the most impressively insulting roasts in philosophy:

“”Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.

He further expressed this in On the Basis of Morality (1840) as follows:

“”If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. … Further, f I were to say that this summus philosophus … scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.