Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer never married but had a relationship with Caroline Richter, an opera singer, beginning in 1821.

He was not at good terms with his mother. He disliked the literary salon his mother had opened and was shocked by the fact that she had forgotten about his father who passed away some years ago.

At the outbreak of cholera, he left Berlin for Frankfurt in 1833 and lived there alone, except for his pet poodles which gave him company.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788, in Danzig (Gdańsk), to Johanna Schopenhauer and Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer. Both his parents were descendants of wealthy German patrician families.

His father died in 1805; it is generally believed he committed suicide. His mother, a writer and an intellectual, started a literary salon in Weimar after her husband's death. Arthur had a strained relationship with his mother.

He was an intelligent young boy who enrolled at the University of Gottingen in 1809. There he studied metaphysics and psychology under Gottlob Ernst Schulze and was especially influenced by the ideas of Plato and Immanuel Kant. He also attended lectures by the prominent post-Kantian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher in Berlin in 1811-12.

He began working on ‘The World as Will and Representation’ in 1814. It took him a few years to complete the work which was ultimately published in 1818. The first volume covered his ideas on epistemology, ontology, aesthetics and ethics. The second volume would be published much later.

Schopenhauer became a lecturer at the University of Berlin in 1820. However he was unable to find success in his academic career as only five students turned up for his lecture, forcing him to drop out of academia.

In 1831 he wrote a sarcastic treatise ‘The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument’. In this work he gave 38 methods of beating an opponent in a debate. The introduction to the essay states that philosophers, especially since the time of Immanuel Kant, have not engaged with the darker art of the dialectic, of controversy.

He published the essay ‘On the Freedom of the Will’ in which he tried to answer the academic question "Is it possible to demonstrate human free will from self-consciousness?" which was posed by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in 1839.

He published a second edition of ‘The World as Will and Representation’ in 1844. It had two volumes. The first was a virtual reprint of the original, and the second was a collection of essays expanding topics covered in the first. The important topics covered in the work were his reflections on death and his theory on sexuality.

His single monumental work ‘The World as Will and Representation’ remains his greatest piece of work. The book is a philosophical genius in every sense as the author tries to illustrate non-rationality and universality as the supreme force behind the existence of both animate beings and inanimate objects.