The philosopher of pessimism lived comfortably on government bond interest
Arthur Schopenhauer taught that the world is driven by a blind, irrational will and praised the denial of self. He could afford to think so freely because his inheritance, parked in government bonds, paid him more than twice a professor's salary. His own mother called him unbearable and conceited.
Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788 in Danzig, today's Gdańsk, to wealthy, republican, Anglophile merchant parents who moved to Hamburg when Prussia absorbed the city in 1793. At nine he spent two happy years with a business family in Le Havre, learning French and making a lifelong friend. In 1803 he chose a grand European tour over preparing for university, which meant merchant training he found dreary and a spell at a Wimbledon school whose Anglican piety struck him as shallow.
His father drowned in a Hamburg canal in 1805; the family believed it was suicide, and Arthur acknowledged inheriting his father's dark moods. He kept up the merchant apprenticeship for two years out of loyalty, then escaped to school in Gotha, which he left after mocking a teacher in verse, possibly by expulsion. His mother Johanna had moved to Weimar and built a celebrated salon frequented by Goethe. Their letters were brutal: she scolded his habit of picking holes in everyone, and he accused her of extravagance and disloyalty to his father's memory.
He enrolled in medicine at Göttingen in 1809, where Gottlob Ernst Schulze steered him toward Plato and Kant, and he switched to philosophy around 1810 to 1811. At the new University of Berlin he sat through Fichte's lectures and found them tedious and muddled, and he soon disliked the theologian Schleiermacher as well, drifting toward atheism. He always valued his scientific training, attending more science than philosophy lectures in Berlin.
The World as Will and Representation appeared in 1818 and was expanded in 1844. Building on Kant but rejecting the German idealists of his day, it treated the visible world as the outward face of a single striving will. He was among the first Western philosophers to embrace ideas from Indian thought such as asceticism and the world as appearance. His books drew little notice while he lived; after his death on 21 September 1860 they shaped philosophy, literature and psychology.
Source: Arthur Schopenhauer
