Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher born in 1788, known as the philosopher of pessimism. He was one of the first thinkers to bring Eastern philosophical ideas to Western philosophy. Schopenhauer's father was a wealthy merchant, and his mother was a popular author, among the first German women to publish books without a pseudonym. As a young man, Schopenhauer was destined to follow in his father's footsteps as a merchant. However, his father had gone through a period of depression before he was found drowned in a canal in 1805. It is suspected that it might have been a suicide. Schopenhauer acknowledged inheriting the melancholy from his father. He had affection for his father but had a terrible relationship with his mother, admitting that the happiest years of his childhood were those spent away from her. Schopenhauer developed a general distrust of people, a depressed view of the world, an inability to maintain close relationships with anyone, and a sense of personal insecurity, whether in the form of anxiety attacks, phobias, or hypochondria. However, his father's death freed him from the worldly life of business, and Schopenhauer almost fiercely plunged into study, taking private lessons and attending lectures on Medicine, Philosophy, Mathematics, History, Physics, and Astronomy, among others. He approached each subject with the utmost concentration and pursued it as far as one could reasonably expect from a student of his age.

His progress was so remarkable that his tutors began to predict a distinguished future for him as a classical scholar. As a polyglot, he knew German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Ancient Greek. In 1813, Schopenhauer moved to a quiet country to work on his doctoral thesis titled On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, where he establishes the philosophical principle that nothing is without a reason why it is, conditioning how we perceive the world of representation, a central theme of his later work. However, Schopenhauer became increasingly disillusioned with academic philosophers, due to their emphasis on abstractions and generalizations, rather than experience. He believed that academic philosophers acquired their philosophical problems conceptually, while true philosophers acquired them existentially, through involuntary reflection on their own existence and experience. Schopenhauer's life's work would be distinguished by lived experience. Above all, there is a man speaking: a whole man, a whole life, a whole way of seeing the world are reflected in those pages. Schopenhauer's writing is far from the sterile and academic German of the time; his work is direct, colloquial, concrete, full of metaphors and anecdotes. During this time, Schopenhauer encountered Hinduism and Buddhism, which opened up a new world of thought to him.

He fell in love with the Latin translation of the Upanishads and for most of his life, he read a few pages every night before going to bed. He wrote: It is the most rewarding and uplifting reading (except for the original text) possible in the whole world; it has been the solace of my life and will be that of my death. In 1821, Schopenhauer had an incident with his neighbor. It is said that the woman knew he was rich and pretended to fall down the stairs, accusing Schopenhauer of it. She sued him and won the case. Schopenhauer had to pay her a pension for the remaining 20 years of her life. When she died, Schopenhauer wrote triumphantly in his diaries: The old woman dies, the burden is lifted. His magnum opus is The World as Will and Representation, published at the end of 1818 when he was 30 years old. The second edition was published in 1844 and includes an edited version of the first edition, as well as additional comments on his ideas, it was revised a year before his death. Much of his later writings are a reflection or enrichment of this work written in his twenties, from which he never strayed. The work of his life is unitary in a way that makes it better understood as a unique and organic whole. This masterpiece contains all of Schopenhauer's philosophy: epistemology, metaphysics

From the book to clarify the connection of each part with the other. Schopenhauer was convinced that in his masterpiece he had finally solved the fundamental problems of philosophy. However, his work hardly sold, was not reviewed, or read. This neglect continued until his old age and was thus the dominant feature of his life experience. It is necessary to consider it along with maternal rejection to explain his deep pessimism. Hegel was a contemporary of Schopenhauer and was at the height of his celebrity, attracting large crowds at the University of Berlin. For Hegel, the world is active and develops through the geist or spirit of the world as time progresses. At every moment in the history of the spirit of the world, there are internal contradictions within the zeitgeist that must be overcome through a dialogue between opposing ideas, advancing towards a final perfection that is the full realization of the spirit in history. Schopenhauer, however, believed that Hegel was a charlatan. The heavy terminology and obscurity were a smokescreen for rather empty thinking. He disagreed that we can attain knowledge of the absolute through reason and that we are progressing towards perfection over time. Schopenhauer tried to teach at the University of Berlin to spread his ideas at the same time that Hegel gave his lectures. The result was disastrous. Hardly anyone came. Frustrated, he left his position as a university professor shortly after. In 1851, Schopenhauer published Parerga

and omissions), complementary essays to his main work, which he considered the birth of his last child, completing his mission in the world. He felt as if a burden he had carried since he was 24, which weighed heavily on him, had been lifted from his shoulders. Schopenhauer's strange book titles must have certainly played a role in their lack of popular reception. However, it was his first successful and widely read book, partly due to the work of his disciples who wrote glowing reviews. Although he began to gain popularity, he preferred to live in solitude. He would rise early, read until noon, play the flute, have lunch in the same place as always, and take long walks with his poodles. He called them all Ātman, reflecting the Sanskrit word for true self. He adored them above all people. He would end the day by reading a few lines from the Upanishads before going to bed. Schopenhauer's life can be described as a dark, sad, long, and lonely life. In 1860, at the age of 72, Schopenhauer had breakfast and apparently was fine. Shortly after, he was found dead while still sitting at the table. 'The world is my idea': this is a truth valid for everything that lives and knows, although only man can bring it to reflective and abstract consciousness. This is how Schopenhauer begins his book. He wanted to understand the world in which he

In the world. He tried to form a coherent and unified interpretation of human experience and sought to identify the underlying force of reality. He called it Will (also called will to live or will to live), which is the essence of existence. Schopenhauer was influenced by Kant and, like him, believed that the world around us, with all its objects, are just representations, any reality we perceive has been placed there by our own mind forming ideas. This was Kant's idea of idealism, as he called it. The only thing we think about is what is in our mind. The sensory perception we have of the world is not the world, we do not have access to the world because we are always in our own head, I think, therefore I am, Descartes' mind-body division. However, for Schopenhauer, there must be something more than pure thought, something more than a brain in a jar. In fact, there is only one aspect of the world that is not merely given to us as a representation, an object that we embody in space and time, and with which we have a direct relationship, our body. Schopenhauer calls this the principle of individuation, our mode of cognition of the phenomenal world. It designates the singularity of each individual. But this is a barrier for us because the individual is an illusion, it is the external manifestation of our true and intimate being, the will, which connects us to

We are like men who sit in a dark cave, tied so fast that they cannot turn their heads, and who see only the shadows of the real things passing between them and a fire burning behind them, whose light casts shadows on the opposite wall; and even of themselves and others, they only see the shadows on the wall. Their wisdom would then consist in predicting the order of the shadows learned from experience. The real archetypes, on the contrary, to which these shadows correspond, the eternal Ideas, the original forms of all things, can only be said to have true being because they always are, but never become or perish. According to Schopenhauer, those for whom people and all things have never appeared as mere ghosts or illusions have no capacity for philosophy. Only the same unchangeable being exists before us, which today pursues the same ends as yesterday and will always pursue. The true symbol of nature is the circle. From this insight, Schopenhauer concludes that the underlying force of all representation and also of the world as a whole is the will. However, this can generate some confusion, as will connotes a kind of personality with a specific goal. It is not only our individual will; it also includes animals, trees, stones, and the entire cosmos. Schopenhauer's will can be seen as a force or energy; it is the thing-in-itself. While Kant believed that the thing-in-itself was a world beyond human reach, Schopenhauer

I believed that it is at the center of existence. The will is not rational, conscious, or intentional, but an irrational, unconscious, and blind desire that tirelessly strives for more activity. This is Schopenhauer's great vision, breaking with all his predecessors. The will is the tornado swirling within us, throwing us back and forth; it is the source of our insatiable appetite that results in struggle and misery. I hasten from desire to satisfaction; from satisfaction I leap to desire. Existence is typified by restlessness. The will is a war of all against all, a proto-Darwinian thought. Long before Freud's psychoanalysis, Schopenhauer argued that most of our inner life is unknown to us; our actions, decisions, and speeches are mostly unconsciously motivated by our impulses, so we do not even know our complete inner being. In summary, for Schopenhauer, the world has two interrelated aspects like two sides of the same coin: a world of representation, constituted by our minds, and a will, as the blind irrational force, at the center of existence, undifferentiated and beyond space, time, and causality. The world is will and representation. It is impossible to discover the secret of reality by first examining matter and then examining thought: we must start with what we know directly and intimately: ourselves. Thus, we already see that we can never reach the true nature of things from the outside.

No matter how much we investigate, we can never reach anything more than images and names. We are like a man who goes around a castle searching in vain for an entrance and, sometimes, sketching the facades. And yet, this is the method that all philosophers before me have followed. If we look at the outside world, common life is to study, graduate, get a job, get married, have children, work, and live happily ever after. Except that one does not live happily ever after. At best, one desire is satisfied for a short time, but immediately after, another desire arises; there is no final point of satisfaction, it is an endless effort. We live as objects in the great stream of desire, the will carries us like a leaf in a raging river. To describe the restless will, Schopenhauer uses the Greek myth of Ixion, who defied the gods and was tied to a winged fiery wheel that constantly spun for eternity. We think we are driven by what we see, when in truth, we are driven by what we feel, by our unconscious will. Men only crawl apparently from the front; in reality, they are pushed from behind. It is not life that tempts them, but necessity that drives them. If we want to understand reality, we must go beyond man as a rational animal, beyond intellect, to the unconscious will, which is: [T]he strong blind man who carries on his

Shoulders to the lame who sees. Will is superior to intellect. An elephant that had been led across Europe and had crossed hundreds of bridges refused to advance on a weak bridge, even though it had seen many horses and men cross it. This is the instinctive impulse. Will is the will to live, and the will for maximum life, its worst enemy is death. But, can it really overcome death? For Schopenhauer, the most powerful form of the will to live is the will to reproduce. Schopenhauer does not believe that we marry and have children to be happy, but that the will to live unconsciously moves us to fulfill our will to reproduce, for the sake of the species' propagation. Infatuation is an unconscious manipulation of the will that seeks to create balanced children. He writes: Each one seeks a partner who neutralizes their flaws, so they are not inherited... a physically weak man will seek a strong woman... Each will consider beautiful in another individual those perfections they lack themselves, even those imperfections that are opposite to theirs. Sexual drive is the inner life of the tree (the species) on which the individual's life grows. Schopenhauer wrote about this long before Freud's theory of sexuality. And certainly, Freud was amazed to discover his writings. For Schopenhauer, procreation is the highest point; and after achieving it, life.

The individual sinks slowly, while a new life ensures the durability of the species in nature, repeating the same phenomena. Thus, the alteration of death and reproduction is like the pulse of the species... death is to the species what sleep is to the individual... this is the great doctrine of the immortality of nature. But if the world is will, it must be a world of suffering. For every desire that is satisfied, ten are denied. Desire is infinite, fulfillment is limited. Each individual carries within themselves a disruptive contradiction; fulfilled desire breeds a new desire, and so on without ceasing. For Schopenhauer, life is evil because pain is its basic stimulus and reality. Pleasure is merely a negative cessation of pain. Every satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is, in reality and essence, only negative... We are not properly aware of the blessings and advantages we actually possess, nor do we appreciate them, but think of them merely as a matter of course, because they gratify us only negatively, by reducing suffering. As soon as suffering ceases, boredom overcomes us, meaning more suffering. Boredom is nothing but the feeling of the emptiness of existence. Suffering is not the cry of the individual. That is an illusion. Suffering is the cry of existence itself.

Schopenhauer writes, Life oscillates like a pendulum back and forth between pain and ennui... After man had transformed all pains and torments into the conception of hell, nothing was left for heaven except ennui. Most of our suffering is found in retrospect or anticipation; the pain itself is brief. How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than death itself! Finally, everywhere in nature we see struggle, competition, conflict, and a suicidal alteration of victory and defeat. [There was] a plain, as far as the eye could see, completely covered with skeletons... yet they were simply the skeletons of large turtles... that come out of the sea in this way to lay their eggs, and then are attacked by wild dogs... which, by their united efforts, lay them on their backs, strip off the small shell from their stomach, and devour them alive. But often a tiger pounces on the dogs... Now all this misery is repeated thousands and thousands of times, year after year. For this, then, these turtles are born. For Schopenhauer, this fundamental character remains unchanged in the human race. We find that man is a wolf to man. The total picture of life is almost too painful for contemplation; life depends on us not knowing it too well. Where did Dante take the materials for his hell if not from our actual world? And yet, he made a true hell out of it.

But when, on the contrary, he came to describe the sky and its delights, he faced an insurmountable difficulty because our world offers no material for this... Every epic and dramatic poem can only represent a struggle, an effort, a fight for happiness; happiness never lasting and complete in itself. It leads its heroes through a thousand dangers and difficulties to the goal: as soon as it is reached, it hastens to drop the curtain; for now it would have nothing else to do but to show that the bright goal in which the hero hoped to find happiness had only disappointed him, and that after its achievement, he was no better off than before. Schopenhauer describes us as hedgehogs huddling together to keep warm in winter, uncomfortable when too close because our spines prick each other, and yet miserable when kept apart because we freeze. The life of each individual, if examined as a whole, is truly a tragedy; but reviewed in detail, it takes on the character of a comedy. Optimism is a bitter mockery of our woes. A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, existing suddenly, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives a little; and then, once again, comes an equally long period in which he must not exist anymore. The heart rebels against this and feels it cannot be true. For Schopenhauer, death is the reflection of the previous abyss. Life smiles at death and laughs at suicide;

of unintended births. As a rule, it will be found that as soon as the terrors of life outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life. When in heavy and terrifying dreams anxiety reaches its peak, then it alone will awaken us, making all those nighttime monsters disappear. The same happens in the dream of life when the highest degree of distress forces us to break it. Schopenhauer saw life as a nightmare from which we cannot wake up. He believed that suicide should be looked upon with compassion: Who has not had acquaintances, friends, relatives who have voluntarily left this world? And are we supposed to think of them all with disgust, as criminals? I say no, and no again! However, he himself did not approve of suicide, as it denies the pains of life, unlike the renunciation of the will of the ascetic, which denies the pleasures of life. The only form of self-destruction he finds acceptable is the death of the ascetic by starvation, where the individual will to live is mastered. Suicide, the deliberate destruction of the only phenomenal existence, is a vain and senseless act, because the thing-in-itself is not affected by it, just as the rainbow endures no matter how quickly the drops supporting it change at that moment. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy is certainly very dark, but it also led him to

To seek tranquility and mental peace. It offers several alternatives: The denial of the will through asceticism, or through the wisdom of life, aesthetics, and ethics. Schopenhauer quotes the French writer Chamfort, who states that it is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it elsewhere. Knowing oneself is a perennial philosophical reflection, where one will discover not only one's own essence but also the essence of the universe. In his youth, Schopenhauer despised theologians and called religion the metaphysics of the masses, seeing how the church indoctrinated the minds of young children. But in later years, he began to see profound meaning in certain religious practices. He believes that Christianity is a profound philosophy of pessimism: [T]he doctrine of original sin (affirmation of the will) and salvation (negation of the will) is the great truth that constitutes the essence of Christianity. However, Schopenhauer believes that Buddhism and Hinduism are deeper than Christianity. Buddhists make the destruction of the will the totality of religion; our true nature is nothing, the realization of śūnyatā. Hindus saw that the ego was an illusion, blinded by Maya. The ego is the hallmark of self-ignorance. Transcending the ego leads to Ātman, the true self, whose aim is to merge with.

Brahman (the ultimate reality of existence), this is the source of the deepest self-knowledge. This resonated deeply with Schopenhauer's philosophy, who developed arguments against his predecessors in Western philosophy, and then discovered, to his astonishment, that he had arrived at a similar conclusion to that of Buddhists and Hindus. One way to escape suffering is to wage an inner war against the will to live, to stop desiring. The denial of the will ultimately leads to death, there is no salvation, enlightenment, or other meaningless words, but simply nothing. However, Schopenhauer knew how difficult it was to live an ascetic life, as only a few people could endure such a life. While the possession of material goods can never fully satisfy one's desires, wisdom can. And this leads to the wisdom of life, philosophy. Philosophy must be understood as an experience, it has to be felt rather than thought. Life before books, and when one reads, one must go to the authors themselves, rather than to the commentaries. Schopenhauer writes: When we read, someone else thinks for us; we merely repeat their mental process... Thus, if someone spends almost the whole day reading... they gradually lose the ability to think... this is the case with many scholars; they have read stupid things... The experience of the world can be considered as a kind of text, from which reflection and knowledge form the commentary.

When there is a lot of reflection and intellectual knowledge, and very little experience, the result is like those books that have two lines of text on each page for forty lines of commentary. One way out of the incessant effort of the will is the intelligent contemplation of life through philosophy. Schopenhauer tells us that genius is the power to completely keep one's own interests, desires, and goals out of sight. The secret of genius lies in the clear and impartial perception of the objective, the essential, and the universal. Although the intellect exists only to serve the will, in certain cases, the intellect is so disproportionately large that it far exceeds the amount necessary to serve the will. In such individuals, the intellect can free itself from the will and act independently, albeit only briefly. This will-less activity is contemplation or aesthetic creation, which Schopenhauer believes is the hallmark of genius. However, genius cannot socialize with others who think in terms of the temporal, the specific, and the immediate. He writes: People are sociable insofar as they are intellectually poor and generally vulgar. What makes people sociable is their inner poverty, which leads to external poverty. Humans are unable to bear solitude because inner emptiness drives them towards society. Genius is forced to isolate itself and sometimes into madness. The more intelligent one is, the more pain they endure. The person endowed with genius is the one who suffers the most.

In Schopenhauer's aesthetics, there is a subjective and objective experience. The subjective experience of aesthetics is the perception without will of the world; we are temporarily freed from individual will. Schopenhauer writes: It is the painless state that Epicurus valued as the highest good and as the state of the gods; because for the moment we are liberated from the miserable effort of will; we keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of will; Ixion's wheel stops. On the other hand, the objective side of the aesthetic experience is to communicate Platonic ideas, which represent the ultimate forms of perfection and beauty. They reveal some essential or universal quality of man and the world. These are experienced when our attention is fully focused on phenomena. Ideas are abstract objects that are not part of our creation, and they are beyond space, time, and causality. Arts such as sculpture, painting, poetry, and theater alleviate the sufferings and evils of life by showing us the eternal and universal behind the transitory and the individual, allowing us to partake in eternity. We shift our gaze away from the individual's particular objects of desire and feel like part of something universal. Art allows us to forget ourselves and become will-less. Our modern forms of art, such as movies and video games, also help us transcend our predetermined state. The most powerful experience of art is the feeling of the sublime. For Schopenhauer, this is present in works of art that overwhelm

On this planet, as a mere speck, we maintain a hostile relationship with the human world in general. However, one can consciously detach oneself from their world, and with both a loss of oneself and a release of will, we experience a state of elevation; this is the feeling of the sublime, which is mainly present in tragic drama. According to Schopenhauer, the power of the arts to lift us above the struggle of wills is possessed above all by music, which exists in a completely different realm than all other arts. It provides a profound pleasure through which we see the deepest recesses of our nature finding expression, calming our inner turmoil. He would undoubtedly agree with Nietzsche's quote that without music, life would be a mistake. Music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself, even as the Ideas, whose multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of individual things. Music is not, therefore, like the other arts, a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, whose objectivity is the Ideas. That is why the effect of music is much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, as they only speak of shadows, but it speaks of the thing in itself. The non-egoistic attitude obtained from aesthetics ultimately leads to Schopenhauer's ethics. His ethics stem from the awareness of the suffering of the aimless striving of another person's will. Our highest unity among ourselves is the basis

Harming others is harming oneself, and one should treat others as kindly as oneself, with the aim of reducing suffering in the world. In this type of selfless love, one feels another person's life in an almost magical way. In this intimate experience of the suffering of others, we connect with ourselves, with others, and with nature in the deepest possible way, leading to great serenity.

The Dark Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer

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The Dark Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer

The Dark Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer

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