Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)
Related: German philosophy - pessimism
The Schopenhauer Cure: A Novel (2005) - Irvin Yalom
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]A wide range of authors (from Thomas Hardy to Woody Allen) and artists have been influenced by this system of aesthetics, and in the 20th century this area of Schopenhauer's work garnered more attention and praise than any other. [Aug 2006]
Schopenhauer has influenced the work of more, and more distinguished, creative writers than any philosopher since his day, more even than Marx. This is especially true among novelists: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Zola, Maupassant, Proust, Hardy, Conrad, and Thomas Mann must be included. He also influenced short-story writers such as Maugham and Borges, poets such as Rilke and Eliot, and dramatists such as Pirandello and Beckett. They were attracted, variously, by his psychological insight, his understanding of unconscious motivation, his disenchanted view of human beings, and his non-religious view of the cosmos, as well as by his teachings about the arts and the fact that he was himself a great prose writer. --Bryan Magee
Contemporaries: Ingres - Stendhal - Thomas De Quincey - Lord Byron - Théodore Géricault - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Eugène Delacroix
Biography
Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher born in Gda?sk (Danzig), Poland. He is one of the most important 19th century philosophers, most famous for his work, The World as Will and Representation. He is known for having espoused a sort of philosophical pessimism that saw life as being essentially evil and futile, but saw hope in aesthetics, sympathy for others and ascetic living. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer [Feb 2005]Philosophical Pessimism [...]
Term frequently used to cover the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. (More about the pessimist aspects of his metaphysics of the will.)The term has also been used to describe the position of the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, although he clearly states in his philosophical treatise Om det tragiske that pessimism is a term which cannot describe his biosophy (partially inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer [Feb 2005]
Schopenhauer and sex
Schopenhauer is also famous for his essay Über die Weiber, in which he expressed his opposition to what he called "Teutonico-Christian stupidity" on female affairs. He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey", and opposed Schiller's poem in honor of women, Würde der Frauen. The essay does give two compliments however: that "women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than [men] are" and are more sympathetic to the sufferring of others.The ultra-intolerant view of women contrast with Schopenhauer's generally liberal views on other social issues [he was strongly against taboos on issues like suicide and masochism and condemned the treatment of Negro slaves]. This polemic on female nature has since fiercely attacked by feminists as misogynistic; some people nevertheless hold it to be accurate. In any case, the controversial writing has influenced many, from Nietzsche to 19th century feminists. While Schopenhauer's hostility to women may tell us more about his biography than about philosophy, his biological analysis of the difference between the sexes, and their separate roles in the struggle for survival and reproduction, anticipates some of the claims that were later ventured by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists in the twentieth century.--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer [Jul 2004]
Boredom [...]
Essays
On the Suffering of the World
On the Vanity of Existence [boredom]
On the Antithesis of Thing in Itself and Appearance
On Affirmation and Denial of the Will to Live
On the Indestructibility of our Essential Being by Death
On Suicide
On Women
On Thinking for Yourself
On Religion: A Dialogue
Aphorisms
On Philosophy and the Intellect
On Ethics
On Law and Politics
On Aesthetics
On Psychology
On Religion
On Books and Writing
On Various Subjects
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