When1: 1813
When2: 1851
Who: Arthur Schopenhauer [Schopenhauer, Arthur]
What: philosopher/pessimist
Where: Germany
works\ On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason [1813]; World as Will and Idea or The World as Will and Representation [1818 and 1844]; On the Will in Nature [1836]; Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics [1841]; On the Freedom of the Will [1841]; On the Basis of Morality [1841]; Incidentals and Supplements or Philosophical Writings [1851]
Detail: He lived 1788 to 1860 and was a pessimist. Plato, Kant, and Vedic thought influenced him. Philosophy is art, not science, based on people's will.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is perception without will.
As people become less individual, they can better know the ideal.
Epistemology
Knowledge depends on having objective concepts {Idea, Schopenhauer} {objective concept} about reasoning, space, time, and causes.
Perceptions are individual, are in space and time, and have causes. From perceptions, people abstract subjective images or representations {Vorstellung}, which are also memories and imagination objects, using reason. From representations, people can know geometry, arithmetic, space, and time. From causes, space, time, and reason, people can know the world. The Ideas unify all knowledge.
Humor depends on feelings of superiority [1819].
Ethics
The Will, and individual wills, are always unhappy, because they never have complete satisfaction.
Individual wills conflict as they try to live and gain their desires. Conflicts of wills lead to inability to satisfy desires and thus pain and suffering.
People can never overcome the will to live, but to obtain happiness people should try to deny or negate will. They should quiet desires, have contempt for life, and become selfless {self-abnegation}. People can quiet will by sympathizing with suffering and by contemplating art and science.
Pleasure is relief from suffering and dissatisfaction.
Ethics {ethics of pity} depends on sympathy, compassion for the inescapable suffering and pain felt by other people. People should feel others' pain and should not inflict suffering. By submerging self and sympathizing with others, people decrease conflict of wills. The ideal is to unify all wills, and so end suffering and obtain justice.
Will feels itself to be free, but it actually acts deterministically. Freedom is acting to deny or negate will to live.
Metaphysics
Will to live or exist is essence of reality. Will is subjective thing-in-itself that has no object except itself, and so it can only will that it exist and live. Will has no outside method, object, purpose, or conclusion and is therefore absolute unreason.
All individual wills unite in the Will {world-will}.
All existing things manifest Will {voluntarism}. Will causes things to move and so keeps individuals restless and unsatisfied.
The world formed by Will is necessary and has determination, with an infinite number of relations and ideas.
All things in world result from physical cause, logical reason, mathematical reason, or moral cause.
Mind
Undirected forces {will to live, Schopenhauer} are true natures of people {absolute virtualism}. The will to live is individual, subjective, and irrational but is part of world-will. Will is separate from body. Will feels itself to be free, but all actions are deterministic. Will encounters resistance to its acts from everything, because everything has will or manifests will.
Social Sciences>Philosophy>History>Mind
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Date Modified: 2022.0224