Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (born in Danzig, February 22, 1788–died in Frankfurt am Main, September 1, 1860) was a German philosopher whose philosophy was influenced by Plato, Immanuel Kant and the teachings of the Upanishads. He had an outspoken pessimistic view of life, because life for him equalled willing and willing resulted in suffering. The main themes of his philosophical thought are present in his major work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung ('The World as Will and Representation', or 'The World as Will and Idea'), published in 1819.
Early life and study
In his childhood he travelled extensively and went to Germany, France and England. His mother was a novelist and through her Arthur became acquainted with Goethe, Schlegel and the Brothers Grimm. He briefly studied medicine at the University of Göttingen and went to Berlin to study philosophy. In 1813 he received a doctorate in Jena for his dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, in which he laid the groundwork for his later philosophy.
Philosophy
The World as Will and Idea
Schopenhauer begins his book with the line "The World is my idea". By that he means that what we know of the outer world is not by means of direct experience; it is our idea of the world as we know it through our perceiving consciousness. Schopenhauer has an interesting and tangled relationship with the history of philosophy, particularly Plato and Kant.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato already made a distinction between the phenomenal world and the true world of ideas. Schopenhauer likewise makes a distinction but in order to understand the ways in which he is Platonic and the ways he is not requires some background in Schopenhauer' engagement with Kant, one that informs and directs his own re-definition of Plato's Forms.
Kant is a dualist insofar as he separates the world of our senses and the world of things-in-themselves. For Kant, things-in-themselves must remain unknown to us because of the restrictions of our cognition. (Perhaps, in a sense, the division of noumenal and phenomenal makes for the very restriction.) For Kant, noumena include the soul, God, and other 'things-in-themselves' intuited by the intellect. These things beyond experience are to be opposed to phenomenon, the objects of experience that are perceived through the senses. Because we are only ever able to 'experience' phenomena, the noumenal world represents a world beyond experience and beyond practical reason. In 'determinate' experience, we are able to judge and categorize the world of phenomena. We can see, following on the scientific model of causality, that events in the physical world submit to rules of causality. However, the noumenal world is not determinable in a similar way.
But there is a further and necessary distinction that must be made. Where Kant allows for a plurality of things-in-themselves, Schopenhauer does not. The world of experience is, in a drastic way, the phenomenon of a thing-in-itself that is one and undivided.
For Schopenhhauer, as made plain in his dissertation The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the two-world model of reality of Plato, Leibniz and, to a lesser degree, Kant, misunderstands the function of causality when it admits to supersensible causation (§18).Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag