Philosopher · Modern
Arthur Schopenhauer
1788–1860 · Transcendental idealism of the Will; philosophical pessimism
An atheist who read the Upanishads nightly, praised the New Testament, Eckhart, Tauler, Guyon and the Christian ascetics for teaching the denial of the will, and called original sin the one great truth of Christianity.
The World as Will and Representation (1818; expanded 1844) takes Kant's thing-in-itself to be Will, a blind, endless striving that appears as the world of representation ordered by space, time and causality, the principium individuationis; the individual is an illusion of that principle, the intellect a tool of the will, and life a pendulum between pain and boredom. Release comes first through aesthetic contemplation, in which the will is stilled before the Platonic Ideas, and finally through compassion (the basis of all morality, On the Basis of Morality, 1840) and the ascetic denial of the will, which he found in the saints of Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism. The Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will (1839) denies liberum arbitrium (“man can do what he wills but cannot will what he wills”), and Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) made him famous late.
Why he matters: He is the atheist who took suffering, sin and asceticism more seriously than most Christians, and Fr. Frederick Copleston wrote the first English Catholic study of him; Nietzsche, Wagner, Tolstoy and Wittgenstein all passed through him, and his reading of Christianity as a religion of the denial of the will is the mirror image of the Church's theology of the Cross. Anyone who thinks Buddhism and Christianity say the same thing has usually learned it from him.
Where to be careful
His monism of the Will denies creation and a personal God (Lateran IV; Dei Filius ch. 1), his determinism denies free will (Trent Session 6 canon 5), his contempt for the body and sexual desire and his reading of existence itself as guilt are Manichaean in tendency (CCC 364, 1762–1775), and his salvation is annihilation rather than communion. What remains is compassion as the heart of morality, the reality of original sin and of suffering, and the dignity of contemplation and asceticism.
Reading
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The World as Will and RepresentationArthur Schopenhauer · Book IV for the ethics of compassion and the denial of the will.
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On the Basis of MoralityArthur Schopenhauer · Compassion against Kant's categorical imperative.
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Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of PessimismFrederick Copleston · A Jesuit's sympathetic and critical study.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.