ABSTRACT
The son of a wealthy merchant in Danzig, Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860) studied medicine and then philosophy, first at the University of Göttingen, where he studied under Kant’s critic G. E. Schulze (“Aenesidemus”), and then at the University of Berlin, where Schopenhauer encountered Fichte. From 1814 to 1818 he composed his main work, The World as Will and Representation, and after an aborted philosophical career in Berlin in 1820, and enabled by his inheritance, he pursued philosophy as a private scholar. Schopenhauer described himself as deeply influenced by both Plato and
Kant, as well as by ideas from Eastern religions, and his philosophy had features similar to those of the early romantics as well as elements of the thought of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Despite these influences, Schopenhauer was particularly hostile to the views of the post-Kantians, and he opposed to their rationalism a particularly pessimistic view of the world as godless and meaningless. Schopenhauer had remained largely unread and unknown until the 1850s when he started to receive attention. He became increasingly well known after his death in 1860, and, especially towards the end of the century, had come to influence a wide audience, especially literary and other artists, such as Wagner, Tolstoy and Proust. Among Schopenhauer’s earliest enthusiastic supporters was Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900) who, in 1872, at the age of twenty-eight, published his first major work The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. This work bore the stamp of the ideas of the composer Richard Wagner, with whom Nietzsche had become associated, partly through their mutual interest in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Somewhat like Schelling and other “early romantics” of the 1790s, Wagner had sought to effect a transformation in modern European culture by aesthetic means and saw his music dramas as playing a role in modern culture analogous to that of tragedy in the ancientGreek world.
