Arthur Schopenhauer
German philosopher
1788 CE to 1860 CE
Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) is a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity.
At age 25, he publishes his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examines the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal world.
Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, claims that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will.
His analysis of will leads him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fully satisfied.
The corollary of this is an ultimately painful human condition.
Consequently, he considers that a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic teachings of Vedanta, Buddhism and the Church Fathers of early Christianity, is the only way to attain liberation.
Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influences many well-known thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche,Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges.
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Napoleon has attempted to awe Alexander with the glories of the French Empire.
The meeting has become a great conference involving an array of kings, princes, dukes, barons and notables from all over Europe.
Among the attendees is Talma and the entire Comedie Française, who have presented sixteen French tragedies over the course of the Congress.
Goethe is courted by Napoleon himself and the twenty-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer has arrived in Goethe's train and cast a cynical eye over the proceedings.
Out of the meetings come an agreement, the Erfurt Convention, in fourteen articles, calling upon Britain to cease its war against France, recognizing the Russian conquest of Finland from Sweden, and stating that in case of war with Austria, Russia should aid France "to the best of its ability."
The two emperors depart for their homelands on October 14.
Six months later the expected war with Austria will begin, and Alexander will barely live up to his agreement, aiding France as little as possible.
By 1810 both emperors will be considering war with one another.
Erfurt is the last meeting between the two leaders.
Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher who emphasizes the force of the human will, was born in the city of Danzig (Gdańsk), the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and Johanna Schopenhauer, both descendants of wealthy German Patrician families.
When the Kingdom of Prussia acquired the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth city of Danzig in 1793, Schopenhauer's family had moved to Hamburg.
Schopenhauer's father may have committed suicide in 1805.
Shortly thereafter, Schopenhauer's mother Johanna moved to Weimar, at this time the center of German literature, to pursue her writing career.
After one year, Schopenhauer left the family business in Hamburg to join her.
In 1809, he became a student at the University of Göttingen, where he studied metaphysics and psychology under the author of Aenesidemus, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who had advised him to concentrate on Plato and Immanuel Kant.
In Berlin, from 1811 to 1812, he had attended lectures by the prominent post-Kantian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher.
In 1814, Schopenhauer had begun his seminal work The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung).
Completing it in 1818, he publishes it the following year.
In Dresden in 1819, Schopenhauer fathers, with a servant, an illegitimate daughter who is born and dies the same year.