- Arthur Shopenhauer was a German philosopher and one of the greatest thinkers ever. Schopenhauer created his own original philosophical conception by merging elements from the philosophies of Plato and Kant with the suggestion exercised by oriental doctrines, characterized by a strong pessimism, which had an extraordinary influence, on subsequent philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, and, in general, on European culture, entering the current of philosophies of life.- IMDb Mini Biography By: SC
- Due to the Prussian occupation of Danzig, the family moved to Hamburg, where the republican-minded father set up a trading business. For two years, from 1797 to 1799, Arthur Schopenhauer did a commercial apprenticeship with his businessman friend Grégoire de Blésimaire in Le Havre. From 1799 to 1803 he attended a private school in Hamburg. In 1800 he took his parents on trips to Karlsbad, Göttingen, Weimar, Berlin, Dresden and Jena and later accompanied them on trips through the Netherlands, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Austria. After the death of his father, Schopenhauer did not decide to become a merchant, instead preparing to study at the Gymnasium in Gotha and Weimar from 1807 to 1809. In October 1809 he began to study medicine in Göttingen and attended, among other things, the lectures of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.
In 1811 he moved to Berlin and devoted himself to studying philosophy. There he also met his teachers Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Daniel Friedrich Schleiermacher. In 1823 he received his doctorate in Jena with his dissertation "On the fourfold root of the theorem of sufficient reason". After his father's death, his mother and sister moved to Weimar. There Johanna Schopenhauer worked as a writer and maintained a literary salon. At times Schopenhauer settled in this family circle. But disputes with his mother about her lifestyle prompted him to leave Weimar again. From 1814 to 1818 he stayed in Dresden. After his doctorate, a contact developed between Schopenhauer and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe because of his color theory. In 1816 Schopenhauer's work "Über das Sehn und die Farben" was published - translated into Latin in 1830 - which was initially intended as a further development of Goethe's color theory. But then it showed a division of their views.
In 1818 the first part of his main work "The World as Will and Representation" was completed, but it did not find much resonance. In it he explains his view that the whole world is an idea. But it goes beyond that and encounters the will of man. In it he recognizes the metaphysical being of substance as the essence of every substance in nature. Schopenhauer thus made the will the basis of all reality and the world the human imagination. For him, the will stands outside of space and time and outside of causation. Only space and time give the objects their multiplicity. The objectification of the will are platonic ideas. Only the artistic genius is able to represent the eternal ideas. Schopenhauer's metaphysics of art influenced the work of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Schopenhauer, eternal striving is inherent in the will. He never reaches his goal and therefore never gets any satisfaction - that means no happiness. Life becomes suffering that only ends with the destruction of the will.
Schopenhauer thus taught a pessimistic philosophy of will. On the other hand, as a result of his metaphysics of the will, he named compassion as the basis of morality. In 1818 Schopenhauer traveled to Italy for several months. After his return and a short stay in Weimar and Dresden, he took up a professorship in philosophy at the University of Berlin. He presented his trial lecture "On the Four Different Kinds of Causes" in the presence of Georg Hegel. In 1822 he undertook a second trip to Italy via Switzerland, Milan, Venice and Florence. In 1825 Jean Paul published a positive review of Schopenhauer's main work in the "Kleine Bücherschau". In the same year the translation of Baltasar Gracián's "Hand-Orakel und Kunst der Weltklugheit" was published, but only posthumously. His work "About the Will of Nature" was published in 1836. In 1831 cholera broke out in Berlin and Schopenhauer moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he remained until the end of his life. He worked there as a private scholar.
In 1841 the title "The Two Basic Problems of Ethics" appeared. With this work, the two prize writings "On the Freedom of Human Will", for which Schopenhauer was honored by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in 1839, and "On the Foundation of Morals" were published. In 1844 he finished the second part of The World as Will and Representation. His other works include "Notes on my life" (1851) and "Parerga and Paralipomena" 1851.
Arthur Schopenhauer died on September 21, 1860 in Frankfurt am Main.
He is widely considered to be one of the most critical and deepest thinkers in human history, and his influence is therefore greater than one might assume.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth
- Loved animals, especially dogs. Had several dogs in his life; the last one, a poodle, was named Atman; after the brahmanistic source of all being.
- It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.
- Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
- Life is a business that does not cover the costs.
- Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
- We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
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