Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer has been dubbed the philosopher of the artist for the inspiration his aesthetic has provided to artists of all kinds. He is also known as the philosopher of pessimism, as he articulated a vision of the world that questions the value of existence. His elegant and vigorous prose has earned him the reputation of being one of Germany's greatest stylists. While he never achieved the fame of post-Kantian philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel in his lifetime, his thought influenced the work of such prominent figures as Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and, most notably, Friedrich Nietzsche. He is also known for being the first German philosopher to incorporate Eastern thought into his writings.

Schopenhauer's thought is iconoclastic for several reasons. While he considered himself the only true philosophical heir to Kant, he held that the world was essentially irrational. Writing at the time of German Romanticism, he developed a classicist aesthetic that emphasized the eternal. While German philosophers were rooted in universities and immersed in the theological concerns of the time, Schopenhauer was an atheist who remained on the margins of academia.

Schopenhauer's lack of recognition for much of his life may have been due to the iconoclastic character of his thought, but probably also to his irascible and obstinate temperament. The diatribes against Hegel and Fichte that pepper his works attest to his state of mind. Whatever the reason why Schopenhauer's philosophy was ignored for so long, it fully deserves the prestige it enjoyed too late in life.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788 in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, a prosperous merchant, and his wife, Johanna, much younger than him. The family moved to Hamburg when Schopenhauer was five years old, as his father, a defender of the Enlightenment and republican ideals, considered Danzig unsuitable after the Prussian annexation. His father wanted Arthur to become a cosmopolitan merchant like him, so he traveled extensively with him during his youth. He also arranged for Arthur to live with a French family for two years when he was nine years old, which allowed him to become fluent in French.

From a young age, Arthur longed to dedicate himself to academic life. Instead of forcing him to go his own way, Heinrich offered him two options: he could accompany his parents on a trip to Europe, after which he would work as an apprentice with a merchant, or he could attend a gym to prepare for university. Arthur chose the first option, and having witnessed firsthand during this trip the profound suffering of the poor helped shape his pessimistic philosophical view of the world.

After returning from his travels, Arthur began his apprenticeship with a merchant to prepare for his career. When Arthur was 17, his father passed away, probably by suicide. After his death, Arthur, his sister Adele, and his mother inherited a considerable fortune. Two years after his father's death, encouraged by his mother, Schopenhauer freed himself from the obligation to comply with his wishes and began attending a gym in Gotha. He was an exceptional student: he mastered Greek and Latin, but was expelled for making fun of a teacher.

Meanwhile, his mother, who by all indications was unhappy in her marriage, took advantage of her newfound freedom to move to Weimar and integrate into the social and intellectual life of the city. There she was a great success, both as a writer and hostess, and her salon became the centre of the intellectual life of the city, regularly attended by such prominent figures as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Schlegel brothers (Karl Wilhelm Friedrich and August Wilhelm) and Christoph Martin Wieland. Johanna's success influenced Arthur's future, as she introduced him to Goethe, which eventually led them to collaborate on a theory of colors. At one of his mother's meetings, Schopenhauer also met the orientalist Friedrich Majer, who awakened in Arthur a lifelong interest in Eastern thought. However, Johanna and Arthur never got along: she found him taciturn and overly critical, and he considered her a superficial careerist. Tensions between them reached a fever pitch when Arthur was 30, at which point she asked him never to contact her again.

Before his break with his mother, Arthur entered the University of Göttingen in 1809, where he enrolled in medicine. In his third semester in Göttingen, Arthur decided to devote himself to the study of philosophy, for, in his own words: "Life is an unpleasant matter... I have decided to dedicate mine to reflecting on it."

Schopenhauer studied philosophy under the tutelage of Gottlieb Ernst Schultz, whose major work was a critical commentary on Kant's system of transcendental idealism. Schultz insisted that Schopenhauer begin his studies of philosophy by reading the works of Immanuel Kant and Plato, the two thinkers who became the most influential philosophers in the development of his own mature thought. Schopenhauer also began to study the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, of whose thought he became deeply critical.

Schopenhauer moved to the University of Berlin in 1811 with the purpose of attending the classes of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, then considered the most interesting and important German philosopher of his time. Schopenhauer also attended the classes of Friedrich Schleiermacher, as he was recognized as a translator and commentator on Plato of great competence. Schopenhauer became disillusioned both with these thinkers and with university intellectual life in general, which he considered unnecessarily abstruse, far removed from true philosophical concerns and biased by theological interests.

Napoleon's Grande Armée arrived in Berlin in 1813, and soon after Schopenhauer moved to Rudolstat, a small town near Weimar, to escape political turmoil. There he wrote his doctoral thesis, The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, in which he carried out a systematic investigation of this principle. He considered his project a response to Kant, who, in delimiting the categories, neglected the forms that ground them. The following year, Schopenhauer settled in Dresden, hoping that the city's tranquil bucolic surroundings and rich intellectual resources would lead to the development of his philosophical system. Schopenhauer also initiated an in-depth study of Baruch Spinoza, whose notion of natura naturans, which characterized nature as self-activity, became key to the formulation of his theory of the will in his mature system.

During his stay in Dresden, he wrote On Vision and Colors, the result of his collaboration with Goethe. In this work, he started from Goethe's theory to develop a theory superior to that of his mentor. Schopenhauer's relationship with Goethe was strained after the publication of the work. During his time in Dresden, Schopenhauer devoted himself to completing his philosophical system, which combined Kant's transcendental idealism with his original conception of the will as the thing-in-itself. He published his major work, The World as Will and Representation, in December 1818 (with a publication date of 1819). To his chagrin, the book had no repercussion among the public.

In 1820, Schopenhauer obtained permission to teach at the University of Berlin. He deliberately, and brazenly, scheduled his lectures at the same time as those of G. W. F. Hegel, the most distinguished member of the faculty. Schopenhauer's classes were attended by only a few students, while Hegel's was attended by more than 200. Although he remained on the list of professors in Berlin for many years, no one showed any interest in attending his classes, which only fueled his contempt for academic philosophy.

The next decade was perhaps Schopenhauer's darkest and least productive. Not only did he suffer from the lack of recognition that his innovative philosophy received, but he also suffered from various diseases. He tried to carve out a career as a translator of French and English prose, but these attempts did not arouse much interest either. During this time, Schopenhauer also lost a lawsuit against seamstress Caroline Luise Marguet, which began in 1821 and was settled five years later. Marguet accused Schopenhauer of punching and kicking her when she refused to leave the anteroom of her apartment. As a result of the lawsuit, Schopenhauer had to pay him 60 thalers annually for the rest of his life.

i. Schopenhauer's
Metaphysics and Epistemology The starting point of Schopenhauer's metaphysics is Immanuel Kant's system of transcendental idealism, as explained in the Critique of Pure Reason. While Schopenhauer criticizes much of the content of Kant's Transcendental Analytics, he endorses his metaphysical approach by limiting the sphere of metaphysics to articulating the conditions of experience, rather than transcending its limits. In addition, he accepts the results of Transcendental Aesthetics, which demonstrate the veracity of transcendental idealism. Like Kant, Schopenhauer maintains that the phenomenal world is a representation, that is, an object for the subject conditioned by the forms of our knowledge. At the same time, Schopenhauer simplifies the activity of the Kantian cognitive apparatus by affirming that all cognitive activity occurs according to the principle of sufficient reason, that is, that nothing exists without a reason for being.

In his doctoral thesis, published under the title "The Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason," Schopenhauer argues that all our representations are connected according to one of four manifestations of the principle of sufficient reason, each of which refers to a different class of objects. The principle of sufficient reason of becoming, which refers to empirical objects, provides an explanation in terms of causal necessity: every material state presupposes a previous state from which it is regularly derived. The principle of sufficient reason of knowledge, which refers to concepts or judgments, provides an explanation in terms of logical necessity: for a judgment to be true, it must have a sufficient foundation. As for the third branch of the principle, that of space and time, the foundation of being is mathematical: space and time are constituted in such a way that all their parts determine each other. Finally, for the principle relative to the will, we require as a foundation a motive, which is an internal cause of that which was done. Every action presupposes a motive from which it necessarily derives.

Schopenhauer argues that previous philosophers, including Kant, have failed to recognize that the first and second manifestations are distinct, and therefore tend to confuse logical foundations and causes. Moreover, until now philosophers had not recognized the workings of this principle in the fields of mathematics and human action. Schopenhauer was therefore confident that his thesis would not only provide a valuable correction to previous explanations of the principle of sufficient reason, but would also allow any kind of explanation to acquire greater certainty and precision.

It should be noted that, although Schopenhauer's explanation of the principle of sufficient reason is largely based on Kant's conception of faculties, it presents important discrepancies with Kant's in several respects. For Kant, understanding always operates through concepts and judgments, and the faculties of understanding and reason are distinctively human (at least as far as the animate beings we know are concerned). Schopenhauer, on the other hand, affirms that understanding is not conceptual and that it is a faculty possessed by both animals and humans. Moreover, Schopenhauer's explanation of the fourth root of the principle of sufficient reason contradicts the Kantian conception of human freedom, since Schopenhauer holds that actions necessarily follow from their motives.

Schopenhauer incorporates his explanation of the principle of sufficient reason into the metaphysical system of his major work, The World as Will and Representation. As we have seen, Schopenhauer, like Kant, maintains that representations are always constituted by the forms of our knowledge. However, Schopenhauer points out that there is an internal nature in phenomena that escapes the principle of sufficient reason. For example, etiology (the science of physical causes) describes the way in which causality operates according to this principle, but

For example, etiology (the science of physical causes) describes how causality operates on this principle, but it cannot explain the natural forces that underlie and determine physical causality. All these forces remain, to use Schopenhauer's term, as "hidden qualities."

At the same time, there is an aspect of the world that is not given to us simply as a representation: our own body. We are aware of our body as objects in space and time, as one representation among others, but we also experience it in a very different way, as the felt experience of our own intentional body movements (i.e., kinesthesia). This felt consciousness is distinct from the spatiotemporal representation of the body. Since we understand what we are independently of representation, we can extend this understanding to any other representation. Thus Schopenhauer concludes that the innermost nature [Innerste], the underlying force of all representation and also of the world as a whole, is the will, and all representation is an objectification of the will. In short, the will is the thing in itself. Therefore, Schopenhauer can claim to have completed Kant's project because he has successfully identified the thing itself.

Although every representation is an expression of will, Schopenhauer denies that every object in the world acts intentionally or is conscious of its own movements. The will is a blind, unconscious force present throughout nature. Only in its highest objectifications, that is, only in animals, does this blind force become aware of its own activity. While the conscious, purposeful effort implied by the term "will" is not a fundamental characteristic of will, it is the way we experience it, and Schopenhauer chooses the term with this in mind.

Thus, the title of Schopenhauer's major work, The World as Will and Representation, aptly summarizes his metaphysical system. The world is the world of representation, as a space-time universal of individualized objects, a world constituted by our own cognitive apparatus. At the same time, the inner being of this world, that which is outside our cognitive apparatus or what Kant calls the thing-in-itself, is the will; the original force manifested in every representation.

ii. Schopenhauer's
ideas and aesthetics Schopenhauer maintains that space and time, principles of individuation, are alien to the thing in itself, since they constitute the modes of our knowledge. For us, the will is expressed in various individualized beings, but the will itself is an indivisible unity. It is the same force that operates in our own will, in the movements of animals, plants, and inorganic bodies.

However, if the world is composed of undifferentiated will, why does this force manifest itself in such different ways? Schopenhauer's answer is that the will is objectified in a hierarchy of beings. In its lowest degree, we see it objectified in natural forces, and in its highest degree, in the human species. The phenomena of the higher degrees of the will are produced by conflicts between different phenomena of the lower degrees, and in the phenomenon of the higher Idea, the lower degrees are subsumed. For example, the laws of chemistry and gravity continue to operate in animals, although these lower grades cannot fully explain their movements. Although Schopenhauer explains the degrees of will in terms of development, he insists that gradations did not develop over time, since such an understanding would assume that time exists independently of our cognitive faculties. Thus, in all natural beings we see the will expressing itself in its various objectifications. Schopenhauer identifies these objectifications with the Platonic Ideas for several reasons. They are outside of space and time, they relate to individual beings as their prototypes, and they are ontologically prior to the individual beings that correspond to them.

Although the laws of nature presuppose the Ideas, we cannot intuit them simply by observing the activities of nature, because of the relation between the will and our representations.

The will is the thing in itself, but our experience of the will, our representations, are constituted by our form of knowledge, the principle of sufficient reason. This principle produces the world of representation as a nexus of spatiotemporal and causally related entities. Thus, Schopenhauer's metaphysical system seems to impede our access to the Ideas as they are in themselves, or in a way that transcends this causally related spatiotemporal framework.

However, Schopenhauer affirms that there is a type of knowledge free of the principle of sufficient reason. For Kant, having knowledge that is not conditioned by our forms of cognition would be impossible. Schopenhauer makes such knowledge possible by distinguishing the conditions of knowledge, namely, the principle of sufficient reason, from the condition of objectivity in general. Being an object for a subject is a condition of objects more fundamental than the principle of sufficient reason for Schopenhauer. Since the principle of sufficient reason allows us to experience objects as particulars existing in space and time with a causal relationship to other things, to have an experience of an object only insofar as it is presented to a subject, apart from the principle of sufficient reason, is to experience an object that is neither spatiotemporal nor has a causal relationship to other objects. Such objects are the Ideas, and the kind of cognition that involves perceiving them is aesthetic contemplation, for the perception of the Ideas is the experience of beauty.

Schopenhauer argues that the ability to transcend everyday perspective and contemplate the objects of nature from an aesthetic perspective is not within the reach of most human beings. Rather, this ability is the hallmark of genius, and Schopenhauer describes the content of art by analyzing genius.

The genius, Schopenhauer affirms, is the one to whom nature has endowed a superfluity of intellect over the will. For Schopenhauer, the intellect is designed to serve the will. Since in living organisms the will manifests itself as the impulse of self-preservation, the intellect serves individual organisms by regulating their relations with the outside world to ensure their own survival. Since the intellect is designed to be completely in the service of the will, it remains inactive, to use Schopenhauer's eloquent metaphor, unless the will awakens it and sets it in motion. Ordinary knowledge, therefore, always refers to the relations, established by the principle of sufficient reason, of objects according to the demands of the will.

Although the intellect exists solely to serve the will, in certain human beings the intellect endowed by nature is so disproportionately large that it far exceeds what is necessary to serve the will. In such individuals, the intellect can free itself from the will and act independently. A person with such an intellect is a genius (only men can have such a capacity, according to Schopenhauer), and this will-free activity is contemplation or aesthetic creation. Genius is distinguished, therefore, by his ability to devote himself to the contemplation of Ideas without will for a prolonged period, which allows him to repeat what he has understood by creating a work of art. By producing a work of art, genius makes beauty accessible to non-geniuses as well. While those who are not geniuses cannot intuit the Ideas in nature, they can intuit them in a work of art, since the artist reproduces nature in the work in such a way that the viewer is able to contemplate it disinterestedly, that is, freed from his own will, as an Idea.

Schopenhauer states that aesthetic contemplation is characterized by objectivity. The intellect, in its normal functioning, is at the service of the will. Therefore, our habitual perception is always biased by our subjective efforts. The aesthetic point of view, being free from such efforts, is more objective than any other way of contemplating an object. Art does not transport the viewer to an imaginary or even ideal realm, but rather gives them the opportunity to observe life without the distorting influence of their own will.

b. The human will: capacity for action, freedom and ethical
action i.
Any account of human agency in Schopenhauer must be given in terms of his conception of the will. For Schopenhauer, all acts of will are bodily movements and are therefore not the internal cause of bodily movements. What distinguishes an act of will from other events, which are also expressions of will, is that it meets two criteria: it is a bodily movement caused by a motive and is accompanied by a direct awareness of that movement. Schopenhauer offers both a psychological and physiological explanation of the motives. In its psychological explanation, motives are causes that occur in the realm of cognition, or internal causes. Motives are mental events that arise in response to awareness of some motivating object. Schopenhauer argues that these mental events can never be desires or emotions: desires and emotions are expressions of the will and are therefore not included in the class of representations. Rather, a motive is the awareness of some object of representation. These representations can be abstract (thinking about the concept of an object) or intuitive (perceiving an object). In this way, Schopenhauer offers a causal view of action, a view in which mental events provoke physical events.

In Schopenhauer's physiological explanation of motives, these are brain processes that cause certain neural activities, which are translated into body movement. Psychological and physical explanations coincide to the extent that Schopenhauer conceives the mental and the physical as two spheres with a double dimension. The mental and the physical are not two causally linked realms, but two aspects of the same nature, where one cannot be reduced to the other or explained by it.

Importantly, in the physiological explanation, will is not a function of the brain, but manifests as irritability in muscle fibers throughout the body.

According to Schopenhauer, willpower, understood as muscle irritability, is a continuous effort for activity in general. Since this effort lacks direction, it points in all directions at once and therefore produces no physical movement. However, when the nervous system provides the direction for this movement (i.e., when motives act on the will), the movement acquires direction and bodily movement occurs. Nerves do not move muscles, but provide the opportunity for them to move.

The causal mechanism in acts of will is necessary and licit, as are all causal relations according to Schopenhauer. Acts of will are derived from motives with the same necessity with which the motion of a billiard ball is derived from being struck. However, this explanation raises a problem regarding the unpredictability of acts: if the causal process is governed by laws and if acts of will are causally determined, Schopenhauer must explain the unpredictability of human actions. This unpredictability, he argues, is due to the impossibility of exhaustively knowing the character of an individual. Each character is unique, so it's impossible to fully predict how a motif or set of motifs will affect body movement. In addition, we are generally unaware of a person's beliefs about the motive, and these beliefs influence their response. However, if we had a complete description of a person's character, as well as his beliefs, we could predict with scientific accuracy what body movement would result from a particular motive.

Schopenhauer distinguishes between causality that occurs through stimuli, which is mechanistic, and that which occurs through motives. Each type of causality occurs with necessity and legality. The difference between these different classifications of causes lies in the commensurability and proximity of cause and effect, not in their degree of legality. In mechanical causality, the cause is contiguous and commensurable to the effect, both the cause and the effect are easily perceived, and therefore their causal legality is clear. For example, a billiard ball must be hit to move, and the force with which it hits one ball will be equal to the force with which the other ball moves. In stimuli, the causes are proximate: there is no separation between receiving the impression and being determined by it. At the same time, cause and effect are not always commensurable: for example, when a plant rises towards the sun, the sun, as a cause, does not make any movement to produce the effect of the plant's movement. In motivational causality, the cause is neither proximate nor proportional: the memory of Helen can, for example, cause entire armies to throw themselves into battle. Consequently, legality in motivational causality is difficult, if not impossible, to perceive.

Since human action is causally determined, Schopenhauer denies that humans can freely choose how to respond to motives. In any event, the agent has at his disposal a single option of action, and he carries it out of necessity. Therefore, Schopenhauer must explain that agents experience their own actions as contingent. In addition, it must explain the active nature of agency, i.e., that agents experience their actions as something they do and not as something that happens to them.

Schopenhauer offers an explanation of the active nature of agency, but not in terms of the causal efficacy of agents. Instead, the key to explaining human agency lies in the distinction between intelligible and empirical character. Our intelligible character is that which transcends space and time, and constitutes the original force of the will. We cannot access it, as it exists outside of our forms of knowledge. Like all the forces of nature, it is original, unalterable and inexplicable. Our empirical character is that which manifests itself in individual acts of will: it is, in short, the phenomenon of intelligible character. The empirical character is the object of experience and is therefore linked to the forms of experience, namely space, time and causality.

However, intelligibility is not determined by these forms and is therefore free. Schopenhauer calls this freedom transcendental, since it lies outside the realm of experience. While we cannot experience our intelligible character, we are aware that our actions emanate from it and are therefore deeply ours. This awareness explains why we experience our actions as original and spontaneous. Thus, our acts are at the same time events linked to other events in a causal chain determined by laws and acts that emanate directly from our own character. Our actions can embody both characterizations, apparently contradictory, because they refer to acts from two different aspects of our character: the empirical and the intelligible.

Our characters also explain why we attribute moral responsibility to agents, even when the acts are causally conditioned. Characters determine the consequences that motives have on our bodies. However, Schopenhauer affirms, our characters are entirely ours: they are fundamentally what we are. That is why we assign praise or reproach not to acts, but to the agents who commit them. And so we hold ourselves accountable: not because we could have acted differently given our nature, but because we might have been different from who we are. While there is no freedom in our action, there is freedom in our essence, in our intelligibility, insofar as our essence lies outside the forms of our cognition, that is, space, time, and causality.

ii. Ethics
Like Kant, Schopenhauer reconciles freedom and necessity in human action by distinguishing between the phenomenal and noumenal realms. However, he harshly criticized Kant's deontological framework. Schopenhauer accused Kant of committing a petitio principii, since he assumed from the beginning of his ethics the existence of purely moral laws and, subsequently, constructed an ethics to account for these laws. Schopenhauer argues, however, that Kant does not provide any proof of the existence of such laws. In fact, Schopenhauer claims that there are no such laws, which are based on theological assumptions. Schopenhauer also attacks the Kantian conception of morality, characterized by an unconditioned duty. The notion of "duty" only has motivational force when it is accompanied by the threat of sanctions. Since no duty can be unconditioned to the extent that its motivational force comes from the implicit threat of punishment, all imperatives are, in fact, according to Schopenhauer, hypothetical

. Schopenhauer also does not accept Kant's claim that morality derives from reason: like David Hume, Schopenhauer regards reason as instrumental. The origins of morality are not to be found in reason, but in the feeling of compassion that allows us to transcend selfishness. The moral precept is: "Do no harm to anyone and help others to the best of your ability." Most people act exclusively from selfish motives, for, as Schopenhauer explains, our knowledge of our own well-being and suffering is direct, while knowledge of the well-being and suffering of others is always merely a representation and therefore does not affect us.

Although most people are guided primarily by selfish interests, some exceptional people may act out of compassion, and it is compassion that forms the basis of Schopenhauer's ethics. Compassion arises from the awareness of the suffering of others, and Schopenhauer characterizes it as a type of felt knowledge. Compassion is born from the realization that individuation is merely phenomenal. Consequently, the ethical perspective expresses a deeper knowledge than is found in the ordinary way of seeing the world. In fact, the feeling of compassion is nothing more than the felt knowledge that the suffering of others has a reality equal to one's own, insofar as the world itself is an undifferentiated unity. Schopenhauer asserts that this knowledge cannot be taught or even communicated, but can only be acquired through experience.

Since compassion is the basis of Schopenhauer's ethics, the ethical meaning of behavior lies solely in the motive, an aspect of his ethics that has an affinity with Kant. Thus, Schopenhauer distinguishes the just person from the good person not by the nature of his actions, but by his level of compassion: the just person understands the principle of individuation enough to avoid harming another, while the good person understands it even more, to the point that the suffering of others affects him almost as much as his own. Such a person not only avoids harming others, but actively strives to alleviate their suffering. At its best, someone can recognize the suffering of others so clearly that they are willing to sacrifice their own well-being for the good of others, if in doing so the suffering they will alleviate outweighs the suffering they must endure. This, according to Schopenhauer, is the culminating point of ethical conduct.

Schopenhauer's
pessimism Schopenhauer's pessimism is the best-known feature of his philosophy, and he is often called the philosopher of pessimism. Schopenhauer's pessimistic view derives from his description of the intrinsic nature of the world as a blind, aimless endeavor.

Since the will has no goal or purpose, its satisfaction is impossible. The will is objectified in a hierarchy of gradations, from inorganic to organic life, and each degree of objectification, from gravity to animal movement, is characterized by an insatiable eagerness. Moreover, every force of nature and every organic form is engaged in a struggle to wrest matter from other forces or organisms. Thus, existence is marked by conflict, struggle and dissatisfaction.

Schopenhauer goes on to say that the achievement of a goal or desire produces satisfaction, while the frustration of that achievement produces suffering. Since existence is marked by lack or lack, and the satisfaction of this lack is unsustainable, existence is characterized by suffering. This conclusion is valid for all nature, including inanimate ones, insofar as they are essentially will. However, suffering is more evident in the lives of human beings because of their intellectual capacities. Instead of serving as a relief from suffering, the human intellect causes it to manifest itself with greater clarity and awareness. Even with the use of reason, human beings cannot in any way alter the degree of misery they experience; in fact, reason only magnifies the degree of suffering. Thus, all the daily activities of humanity are not only fruitless, but also illusory, insofar as they are aimed at satisfying a blind and insatiable will.

Since the essence of existence is insatiable eagerness, and this eagerness is suffering, Schopenhauer concludes that non-existence is preferable to existence. However, suicide is not the solution. The problem of existence cannot be solved by suicide, for, since all existence is suffering, death does not put an end to suffering, but only ends the form it takes. The proper response to recognizing that all existence is suffering is to turn away from one's desire or to renounce it. In this sense, Schopenhauer's thought finds confirmation in the Eastern texts that he read and admired: the goal of human life is to depart from desire. Salvation is only found in resignation.

A consistent pessimist, not a bitter armchair critic. His central thesis—that the essence of reality is a blind and insatiable "will," and that satisfied desire only gives way to another desire—was not a literary pose: he organized his life around it. He sought to reduce his own suffering and avoid friction with others. Single, solitary, and methodical. He never married and distrusted marriage (he wrote a short and rather acerbic treatise on love and women, difficult to read today without discomfort). He lived alone, with an almost monastic schedule: writing in the morning, a hearty lunch at midday, a walk in the afternoon, and reading at night. In Frankfurt, he was always seen on the same promenade with his poodle, whom he called Atma ("soul of the world" in Sanskrit). Table and conversation. He ate daily at the same inn, the table at the Hotel Englischer Hof, and valued after-dinner conversation as his only social interaction: he enjoyed lively discussion, but with rules—no arguments about topics he didn't understand, no noise. He was more sociable than his reputation suggests, though always in his own way and with a certain distance. Irascible and litigious. The most famous episode: in 1821 he pushed a seamstress down the stairs as she spoke on the landing of his building; she was left with injuries, and he paid her a lifetime pension for about twenty years. When she died, he wrote in his notebook the Latin phrase "Obit anus, abit onus" ("the old woman dies, the burden is gone"). It's a good portrait of his petty side. Fears and obsessions. He was terrified of cholera (which got him out of Berlin in 1831), slept with loaded pistols, wouldn't let anyone shave his neck, and was obsessive about his accounts and money, which he managed zealously.

Economic independence and pride. He lived off a well-managed family inheritance, which allowed him to be independent of the university and patrons. This fueled his disdain for "academic philosophy" and his freedom to speak his mind.

Aphoristic and incisive. That's his trademark: short, pithy phrases, each ending with a concrete image that seals the point. Think of "life swings, like a pendulum, between pain and boredom"—it's not an elaborate system, it's a fleeting insight.

Metaphorical and highly visual. He translates the abstract into physical scenes: willpower as a blind man carrying a sighted cripple, life as a bill paid with work, desire as hunger returning. He writes to be seen, not just understood.

Culture without empty pedantry. He quotes Kant with almost filial respect, but also the Upanishads, Buddhism, the Stoics, and the French moralists (La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Gracián). He was one of the first great European philosophers to take Indian thought seriously.

Controversial and sarcastic. He used open contempt against Hegel and the German idealists, employing sarcasm and sometimes direct insults. In conversation, he was witty and biting; on paper, that same vein appears in his short essays, much freer than his treatises.

Clear and without jargon. Unlike the academic prose of his time, he avoids technical jargon. His German is clean, rhythmic, sometimes elegant, and very translatable—that's why it has aged so well and why it is read by people who are not philosophers.

Two registers. The systematic treatise (The World as Will and Representation) is dense, architectural, with lengthy developments; the essay and the aphorism are rapid, ironic, almost conversational. Therein lies the Schopenhauer who is quoted.

His main ideas about love are summarized in the following points:

The genius of the species: What we call "romantic love" or "infatuation" is not born of the individual or his soul, but of the Will (a blind and irrational force that governs the world).

Nature uses the mirage of passion to make you believe that you are pursuing your own happiness, when in reality you are only working to bring a new being into the world.

The illusion of the better half: When two people feel an irresistible attraction, Schopenhauer explains that they are not chosen because of spiritual affinity, but because their physical and biological characteristics complement each other to generate the best possible offspring.

Source of pain and suffering: As love is a blind impulse based on desire and lack, it inevitably leads to suffering and disappointment once the reproductive purpose is fulfilled or frustrated.

The metaphor of porcupines: In his writings on human relationships, Schopenhauer compared dealing with others—including love—to a group of porcupines in winter: they need to get together to keep warm from the cold, but if they get too close, they stick their quills into each other (forcing them to seek a safe distance).

Pessimistic and critical vision: His demystifying stance is widely developed in essays such as Love, Women and Death, where he analyzes this force from a biological and deeply skeptical perspective.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer expounded a profoundly misogynistic view in his celebrated essay On Women (Über die Weiblichkeit, included in Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851) and in his posthumous collection The Art of Treating Women.
Her main ideas on the subject can be summarized in the following points:

Schopenhauer's

main arguments• Intellectual inferiority ("intellectual myopia"): She maintained that women lack the capacity for deep reason, objectivity, a sense of justice and artistic or philosophical creation. He believed that their perspective is narrow and that they only perceive the immediate.

• Infantile nature: He classified them as beings in an intermediate state between boy and man, describing them as "eternally childish", impulsive, vain and guided by coquetry.

• Exclusively biological purpose: From his metaphysics of the will to live, he affirmed that the only function of women is the procreation and preservation of the species, acting as an instrument of nature above their individuality.

• Criticism of the Western "lady": He rejected the position of honor and veneration that, according to him, the West and romanticism granted to women. He argued that the Eastern or traditional model of subordination was more appropriate.

• Defense of polygamy: He argued against monogamy and equal civil or marital rights for women, stating that granting them a status equivalent to men generated social disorder, spinsters and prostitution.

Little and badly, if we take his own philosophy as a yardstick. Schopenhauer was not a seducer; He was a man who distrusted love and yet pursued it several times, almost always with weak

results. His idea of courtship

In Metaphysics of Sexual Love (the chapter that added to The world as will and representation) argues something uncomfortable: falling in love is a deception of the species. The "will" makes us see in a specific person the embodiment of an ideal, and all this rapture actually serves to bring together two biological inheritances and produce a well-formed child. When the child is born, the spell is broken and disappointment remains. Hence its fame that marriage is a debt that is paid with one's entire life. With that theory in mind, courting was, for him, knowingly letting himself be deceived.

How he was in practice

• More talkative than gallant. His terrain was after-dinner talk and witty talk, not romantic gestures. It is known that he was lively, witty and a good storyteller when he was comfortable.

• Shy and awkward formally. It was difficult for him to get directly approached; he preferred the closeness that daily contact gives to the declaration.

• Attracted to young women, with little success. Their known attempts remained in frustration or friendship. In his twenties, in Weimar, he fell in love with Caroline Jagemann, the Duke's actress and lover, without any real chance.

• No period romanticism. There are no flowers, serenades or passionate letters in the style of the Romanticism that he detested so much.

Biographical and historical factors of his position

• Family relationship: He suffered a very tense and distant relationship with his mother, the writer Johanna Schopenhauer, and marked the trauma of his father's suicide in his youth.
• Heartbreaks: She had multiple failed relationships and emotional rejections throughout her life.
• The context of the nineteenth century: Their opinions reflect the dominant patriarchal and bourgeois prejudice of the time, long before the emergence of the first waves of feminism.

Caroline Medon (Intermittent Love): She had an unstable relationship for years with this Berlin chorus girl and actress. He never married her because he demanded absolute freedom, distrusted female fidelity, and hated the idea of her having a child by another man. Even so, in his will he left him a pension for life.

What did he think about homosexuality?

The origin of the doubt usually comes from a controversial appendix that Schopenhauer added in 1859 to his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation, entitled "On Pederasty" (a term that in his time was used, in the style of ancient Greece, to refer to the relationships between adult men and young men/adolescents, not childhood).

From the point of view of his philosophy, homosexuality posed a difficult theoretical problem: if he claimed that all sexual impulses existed solely to procreate and perpetuate the species, why did same-sex attraction exist?

To resolve this contradiction in his system, Schopenhauer proposed a biological explanation very particular to the time:

1. He stated that nature, seeing that very young (immature) or very old (with weakened sperm) men would beget weak or defective children, activates in them a kind of "deviation of instinct".

2. Thus, according to his theory, nature preferred to push them towards non-reproductive relationships rather than allow the genetic degradation of the species.

Although Schopenhauer used harsh language and reflected the social prejudices of his century, his analysis attempted to be merely metaphysical and evolutionary, treating the subject as a strategy of nature and refraining from making a condemnatory moral or criminal judgment. However, in her private life, her desires and frustrations were directed entirely towards the female sex.