region	Western philosophy
Era	19th century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Signature	Arthur Schopenhauer Signature.svg
Name	Arthur Schopenhauer
Birth date	February 22, 1788
Birth place	Danzig
Death date	September 21, 1860
Death place	Frankfurt
Work institution	University of GöttingenUniversity of Berlin
School tradition	Kantianism, idealism
Main interests	Metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, phenomenology, morality, psychology
Notable ideas	Will, Fourfold root of reason, pessimism
Influences	Plato, Kant, Upanishads, Goethe, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Buddhism, Baltasar Gracián, Boehme
Influenced	Samuel Beckett, Henri Bergson, Jorge Luis Borges, Machado de Assis, Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, Jacob Burckhardt, Joseph Campbell, Clarence Darrow, Albert Einstein, Mihai Eminescu, Sigmund Freud, John N. Gray, Knut Hamsun, Thomas Hardy, Eduard von Hartmann, Hermann Hesse, Max Horkheimer, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Johannes Itten, Robinson Jeffers, Carl Jung, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Kraus, Jules Laforgue, Suzanne Langer, Thomas Ligotti, Thomas Mann, Guy de Maupassant, Philipp Mainländer, Ettore Majorana, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Marcel Proust, Gilbert Ryle, George Santayana, Jean-Paul Sartre, Erwin Schrödinger, Dylan Thomas, Leo Tolstoy, Leon Trotsky, Hans Vaihinger, Vivekananda, Richard Wagner, Otto Weininger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Wessel Zapffe, Michel Houellebecq}}

Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, ''On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason'', which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal world.

Schopenhauer's most influential work, ''The World as Will and Representation'', claimed that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled. Consequently, he considered that a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic teachings of Vedanta, Buddhism and the Church Fathers of early Christianity was the only way to attain liberation.

Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Gustav Jung, Leo Tolstoy, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Life

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in the city of Danzig (now Gdańsk) as 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 moved to Hamburg. In 1805, Schopenhauer's father may have committed suicide. Shortly thereafter, Schopenhauer's mother Johanna moved to Weimar, then the centre of German literature, to pursue her writing career. After one year, Schopenhauer left the family business in Hamburg to join her.

Schopenhauer became a student at the University of Göttingen in 1809. There he studied metaphysics and psychology under Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the author of ''Aenesidemus'', who 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 began his seminal work ''The World as Will and Representation'' (''Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung''). He would finish it in 1818 and publish it the following year. In Dresden in 1819, Schopenhauer fathered an illegitimate child who was born and died the same year. In 1820, Schopenhauer became a lecturer at the University of Berlin. He scheduled his lectures to coincide with those of the famous philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whom Schopenhauer described as a "clumsy charlatan". However, only five students turned up to Schopenhauer's lectures, and he dropped out of academia. A late essay, "On University Philosophy", expressed his resentment towards university philosophy.

While in Berlin, Schopenhauer was named as a defendant in an action at law initiated by a woman named Caroline Marquet. She asked for damages, alleging that Schopenhauer had pushed her. According to Schopenhauer's court testimony, she deliberately annoyed him by raising her voice while standing right outside his door. Marquet alleged that the philosopher had assaulted and battered her after she refused to leave his doorway. Her companion testified that she saw Marquet prostrate outside his apartment. Because Marquet won the lawsuit, he made payments to her for the next twenty years. When she died, he wrote on a copy of her death certificate, ''Obit anus, abit onus'' ("The old woman dies, the burden is lifted").

In 1821, he fell in love with nineteen-year old opera singer, Caroline Richter (called Medon), and had a relationship with her for several years. He discarded marriage plans, however, writing, "Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties", and "Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes." When he was forty-three years old, seventeen-year old Flora Weiss recorded rejecting him in her diary.

Schopenhauer had a notably strained relationship with his mother Johanna Schopenhauer. After his father's death, Arthur Schopenhauer endured two long years of drudgery as a merchant, in honor of his dead father. Afterward, his mother retired to Weimar, and Arthur Schopenhauer dedicated himself wholly to studies in the gymnasium of Gotha. After he left it in disgust after seeing one of the masters lampooned, he went to live with his mother. But by that time she had already opened her infamous salon, and Arthur was not compatible with the vain, ceremonious ways of the salon. He was also disgusted by the ease with which Johanna Schopenhauer had forgotten his father's memory. Therefore, he gave university life a shot. There, he wrote his first book, ''On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason''. She informed him that the book was incomprehensible and it was unlikely that anyone would ever buy a copy. In a fit of temper Arthur Schopenhauer told her that his work would be read long after the rubbish she wrote would have been totally forgotten.

In 1831, a cholera epidemic broke out in Berlin and Schopenhauer left the city. Schopenhauer settled permanently in Frankfurt in 1833, where he remained for the next twenty-seven years, living alone except for a succession of pet poodles named Atman and Butz. The numerous notes that he made during these years, amongst others on aging, were published posthumously under the title ''Senilia''.

Schopenhauer had a robust constitution, but in 1860 his health began to deteriorate. He died of heart failure on 21 September 1860, while sitting on his couch at home. He was 72.

Thought

Philosophy of the "Will"

A key focus of Schopenhauer was his investigation of individual motivation. Before Schopenhauer, Hegel had popularized the concept of ''Zeitgeist'', the idea that society consisted of a collective consciousness which moved in a distinct direction, dictating the actions of its members. Schopenhauer, a reader of both Kant and Hegel, criticized their logical optimism and the belief that individual morality could be determined by society and reason. Schopenhauer believed that humans were motivated only by their own basic desires, or ''Wille zum Leben'' (Will to Live), which directed all of mankind. For Schopenhauer, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world. To Schopenhauer, the Will is a metaphysical existence which controls not only the actions of individual, intelligent agents, but ultimately all observable phenomena. Will, for Schopenhauer, is what Kant called the "thing-in-itself."

Art and aesthetics

For Schopenhauer, human desiring, "willing," and craving cause suffering or pain. A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation (a method comparable to Zapffe's "''Sublimation''"). Aesthetic contemplation allows one to escape, albeit temporarily, this pain because it stops one perceiving the world as mere presentation. Instead one no longer perceives the world as an object of perception (therefore as subject to the Principle of Sufficient Grounds; time, space and causality) from which one is separated; rather one becomes one with that perception:"''one can thus no longer separate the perceiver from the perception''" (''The World as Will and Presentation'', section 34). From this immersion with the world one no longer views oneself as an individual who suffers in the world due to their individual will but one becomes a "''subject of cognition''" to a perception that is, "''Pure, will-less, timeless''" (section 34) where the essence, "ideas", of the world are shown. Art is the practical consequence of this brief aesthetic contemplation as it attempts to depict one's immersion with the world, thus tries to depict the essence/pure ideas of the world. Music, for Schopenhauer, was the purest form of art because it was the one that depicted the will itself without it appearing as subject to the Principle of Sufficient Grounds, therefore as an individual object. According to Daniel Albright, "Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself."

Ethics

Schopenhauer's moral theory proposed that of three primary moral incentives, compassion, malice and egoism, compassion is the major motivator to moral expression. Malice and egoism are corrupt alternatives.

Punishment

According to Schopenhauer, whenever we make a choice, "we assume as necessary that that decision was preceded by something from which it ensued, and which we call the ground or reason, or more accurately the motive, of the resultant action." Choices are not made freely. Our actions are necessary and determined because "every human being, even every animal, after the motive has appeared, must carry out the action which alone is in accordance with his inborn and immutable character." A definite action inevitably results when a particular motive influences a person's given, unchangeable character. If there is no free will, should crimes be punished?

The State, Schopenhauer claimed, punishes criminals in order to prevent future crimes. It does so by placing "beside every possible motive for committing a wrong a more powerful motive for leaving it undone, in the inescapable punishment. Accordingly, the criminal code is as complete a register as possible of counter–motives to all criminal actions that can possibly be imagined…."

Should capital punishment be legal? "For safeguarding the lives of citizens," he asserted, "capital punishment is therefore absolutely necessary." "The murderer," wrote Schopenhauer, " who is condemned to death according to the law must, it is true, be now used as a mere ''means'', and with complete right. For public security, which is the principal object of the State, is disturbed by him; indeed it is abolished if the law remains unfulfilled. The murderer, his life, his person, must be the ''means'' of fulfilling the law, and thus of re–establishing public security." Schopenhauer disagreed with those who would abolish capital punishment. "Those who would like to abolish it should be given the answer: 'First remove murder from the world, and then capital punishment ought to follow.' "

People, according to Schopenhauer, cannot be improved. They can only be influenced by strong motives that overpower criminal motives. Schopenhauer declared that "real moral reform is not at all possible, but only determent from the deed…."

He claimed that this doctrine was not original with him. Previously, it appeared in the writings of Plato, Seneca, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Anselm Feuerbach. Schopenhauer declared that their teaching was corrupted by subsequent errors and therefore was in need of clarification.

Psychology

Schopenhauer was perhaps even more influential in his treatment of man's psychology than he was in the realm of philosophy.

Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed by the tribulations of sex, but Schopenhauer addressed it and related concepts forthrightly:

...one ought rather to be surprised that a thing [sex] which plays throughout so important a part in human life has hitherto practically been disregarded by philosophers altogether, and lies before us as raw and untreated material.

He gave a name to a force within man which he felt had invariably precedence over reason: the Will to Live or Will to Life (''Wille zum Leben''), defined as an inherent drive within human beings, and indeed all creatures, to stay alive and to reproduce.

Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental, but rather understood it to be an immensely powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world:

The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.

What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation ...

These ideas foreshadowed the discovery of evolution, Freud's concepts of the libido and the unconscious mind, and evolutionary psychology in general.

Political and social thought

Politics

Schopenhauer's politics were, for the most part, an echo of his system of ethics (the latter being expressed in ''Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik'', available in English as two separate books, ''On the Basis of Morality'' and ''On the Freedom of the Will''). Ethics also occupies about one quarter of his central work, ''The World as Will and Representation''.

In occasional political comments in his ''Parerga and Paralipomena'' and ''Manuscript Remains'', Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government. What was essential, he thought, was that the state should "leave each man free to work out his own salvation", and so long as government was thus limited, he would "prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of [his] fellow rats" — i.e., by a monarch, rather than a democrat. Schopenhauer shared the view of Thomas Hobbes on the necessity of the state, and of state action, to check the destructive tendencies innate to our species. He also defended the independence of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power, and a monarch as an impartial element able to practice justice (in a practical and everyday sense, not a cosmological one).

Schopenhauer, by his own admission, did not give much thought to politics, and several times he writes proudly of how little attention he had paid "to political affairs of [his] day". In a life that spanned several revolutions in French and German government, and a few continent-shaking wars, he did indeed maintain his aloof position of "minding not the times but the eternities". He wrote many disparaging remarks about Germany and the Germans. A typical example is, "For a German it is even good to have somewhat lengthy words in his mouth, for he thinks slowly, and they give him time to reflect."

Schopenhauer attributed civilizational primacy to the northern "white races" due to their sensitivity and creativity (Except for the Egyptians and Hindus whom he saw as equal):

The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmans, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature and out of it all came their high civilization.

Despite this, he was adamantly against differing treatment of races, was fervently anti-slavery, and supported the abolitionist movement in the United States. He describes the treatment of "[our] innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into [the slave-master's] devilish clutches" as "belonging to the blackest pages of mankind's criminal record".

Schopenhauer additionally maintained a marked metaphysical and political anti-Judaism. Schopenhauer argued that Christianity constituted a revolt against the materialistic basis of Judaism, exhibiting an Indian-influenced ethics reflecting the Aryan-Vedic theme of spiritual "self-conquest." This he saw as opposed to what he held to be the ignorant drive toward earthly utopianism and superficiality of a worldly Jewish spirit:

While all other religions endeavor to explain to the people by symbols the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the struggle with other nations.

Views on women

In Schopenhauer's 1851 essay "Of Women" ("Über die Weiber", full text), 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, "" ("Dignity of Women"). 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 suffering of others. However, the latter was discounted as weakness rather than humanitarian virtue.

Schopenhauer's controversial writings have influenced many, from Friedrich Nietzsche to nineteenth-century feminists. Schopenhauer's 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.

After the elderly Schopenhauer sat for a sculpture portrait by Elisabet Ney, he told Richard Wagner's friend Malwida von Meysenbug, "I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man."

Heredity and eugenics

Schopenhauer believed that a person inherits one's level of intellect through one's mother, and personal character through one's father. Schopenhauer quotes Horace's saying, "From the brave and good are the brave descended" (''Odes'', iv, 4, 29) and Shakespeare's line from ''Cymbeline'', "Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base" (IV, 2) to reinforce his hereditarian argument. On the question of eugenics, Schopenhauer wrote:

With our knowledge of the complete unalterability both of character and of mental faculties, we are led to the view that a real and thorough improvement of the human race might be reached not so much from outside as from within, not so much by theory and instruction as rather by the path of generation. Plato had something of the kind in mind when, in the fifth book of his ''Republic'', he explained his plan for increasing and improving his warrior caste. If we could castrate all scoundrels and stick all stupid geese in a convent, and give men of noble character a whole harem, and procure men, and indeed thorough men, for all girls of intellect and understanding, then a generation would soon arise which would produce a better age than that of Pericles.

Or more kindly - “The final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life. What it all turns upon is nothing less than the composition of the next generation.… It is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human race to come, which is here at stake.”

In another context, Schopenhauer reiterated his antidemocratic-eugenic thesis: "If you want Utopian plans, I would say: the only solution to the problem is the despotism of the wise and noble members of a genuine aristocracy, a genuine nobility, achieved by mating the most magnanimous men with the cleverest and most gifted women. This proposal constitutes my Utopia and my Platonic Republic". Analysts (e.g., Keith Ansell-Pearson) have suggested that Schopenhauer's advocacy of anti-egalitarianism and eugenics influenced the neo-aristocratic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who initially considered Schopenhauer his mentor.

Animal welfare

As a consequence of his philosophy, Schopenhauer was very concerned about the welfare of animals. For him, all animals, including humans, are phenomenal manifestations of Will. The word "will" designated, for him, force, power, impulse, energy, and desire; it is the closest word we have that can signify both the real essence of all external things and also our own direct, inner experience. Since everything is basically Will, then humans and animals are fundamentally the same and can recognize themselves in each other. For this reason, he claimed that a good person would have sympathy for animals, who are our fellow sufferers.

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he, who is cruel to living creatures, cannot be a good man.

Nothing leads more definitely to a recognition of the identity of the essential nature in animal and human phenomena than a study of zoology and anatomy.

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

In 1841, he praised the establishment, in London, of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and also the Animals' Friends Society in Philadelphia. Schopenhauer even went so far as to protest against the use of the pronoun "it" in reference to animals because it led to the treatment of them as though they were inanimate things To reinforce his points, Schopenhauer referred to anecdotal reports of the look in the eyes of a monkey who had been shot and also the grief of a baby elephant whose mother had been killed by a hunter.

He was very attached to his succession of pet poodles. Schopenhauer criticized Spinoza's belief that animals are to be used as a mere means for the satisfaction of humans.

Views on homosexuality and pederasty

Schopenhauer was also one of the first philosophers since the days of Greek philosophy to address the subject of male homosexuality. In the third, expanded edition of ''The World as Will and Representation'' (1856), Schopenhauer added an appendix to his chapter on the "Metaphysics of Sexual Love". He also wrote that homosexuality did have the benefit of preventing ill-begotten children. Concerning this, he stated, "... the vice we are considering appears to work directly against the aims and ends of nature, and that in a matter that is all important and of the greatest concern to her, it must in fact serve these very aims, although only indirectly, as a means for preventing greater evils." Shrewdly anticipating the interpretive distortion on the part of the popular mind of his attempted scientific ''explanation'' of pederasty as a personal ''advocacy'' of a phenomenon Schopenhauer otherwise describes, in terms of spiritual ethics, as an "objectionable aberration", Schopenhauer sarcastically concludes the appendix with the statement that "by expounding these paradoxical ideas, I wanted to grant to the professors of philosophy a small favour, for they are very disconcerted by the ever-increasing publicization of my philosophy which they so carefully concealed. I have done so by giving them the opportunity of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty."

Intellectual interests and affinities

Indology

Schopenhauer read the Latin translation of the Upanishads which had been translated by French writer Anquetil du Perron from the Persian translation of Prince Dara Shikoh entitled ''Sirre-Akbar'' ("The Great Secret"). He was so impressed by their philosophy that he called them "the production of the highest human wisdom", and considered them to contain superhuman conceptions. The Upanishads was a great source of inspiration to Schopenhauer, and writing about them he said:

It is the most satisfying and elevating reading (with the exception of the original text) which is possible in the world; it has been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death.

It is well known that the book ''Oupnekhat'' (Upanishad) always lay open on his table, and he invariably studied it before sleeping at night. He called the opening up of Sanskrit literature "the greatest gift of our century", and predicted that the philosophy and knowledge of the Upanishads would become the cherished faith of the West.

Schopenhauer was first introduced to the 1802 Latin Upanishad translation through Friedrich Majer. They met during the winter of 1813-1814 in Weimar at the home of Schopenhauer’s mother according to the biographer Sanfranski. Majer was a follower of Herder, and an early Indologist. Schopenhauer did not begin a serious study of the Indic texts, however, until the summer of 1814. Sansfranski maintains that between 1815 and 1817, Schopenhauer had another important cross-pollination with Indian Thought in Dresden. This was through his neighbor of two years, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. Krause was then a minor and rather unorthodox philosopher who attempted to mix his own ideas with that of ancient Indian wisdom. Krause had also mastered Sanskrit, unlike Schopenhauer, and the two developed a professional relationship. It was from Krause that Schopenhauer learned meditation and received the closest thing to expert advice concerning Indian thought.

Most noticeable, in the case of Schopenhauer’s work, was the significance of the Chandogya Upanishad, whose Mahavakya, Tat Tvam Asi is mentioned throughout The World as Will and Representation.

Buddhism

Schopenhauer noted a correspondence between his doctrines and the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. Similarities centered on the principles that life involves suffering, that suffering is caused by desire (tanha), and that the extinction of desire leads to liberation. Thus three of the four "truths of the Buddha" correspond to Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will. In Buddhism, however, while greed and lust are always unskillful, desire is ethically variable - it can be skillful, unskillful, or neutral.

For Schopenhauer, Will had ontological primacy over the intellect; in other words, desire is understood to be prior to thought. Schopenhauer felt this was similar to notions of purushartha or goals of life in Vedanta Hinduism.

In Schopenhauer's philosophy, denial of the will is attained by either:

personal experience of an extremely great suffering that leads to loss of the will to live

knowledge of the essential nature of life in the world through observation of the suffering of other people

However, Buddhist nirvana is not equivalent to the condition that Schopenhauer described as denial of the will. Nirvana is not the extinguishing of the ''person'' as some Western scholars have thought, but only the "extinguishing" (the literal meaning of nirvana) of the flames of greed, hatred, and delusion that assail a person's character. Occult historian Joscelyn Godwin (1945- ) stated, "It was Buddhism that inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner. This Orientalism reflected the struggle of the German Romantics, in the words of Leon Poliakov, to free themselves from Judeo-Christian fetters". In contradistinction to Godwin's claim that Buddhism inspired Schopenhauer, the philosopher himself made the following statement in his discussion of religions:

If I wished to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I should have to concede to Buddhism pre-eminence over the others. In any case, it must be a pleasure to me to see my doctrine in such close agreement with a religion that the majority of men on earth hold as their own, for this numbers far more followers than any other. And this agreement must be yet the more pleasing to me, inasmuch as ''in my philosophizing I have certainly not been under its influence'' [emphasis added]. For up till 1818, when my work appeared, there was to be found in Europe only a very few accounts of Buddhism.

Buddhist philosopher Nishitani Keiji, however, sought to distance Buddhism from Schopenhauer. While Schopenhauer's philosophy may sound rather mystical in such a summary, his methodology was resolutely empirical, rather than speculative or transcendental:

Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.

Also note:

This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.

The argument that Buddhism affected Schopenhauer’s philosophy more than any other Dharmic faith loses more credence when viewed in light of the fact that Schopenhauer did not begin a serious study of Buddhism until after the publication of ''The World as Will and Representation'' in 1818. Scholars have started to revise earlier views about Schopenhauer's discovery of Buddhism. Proof of early interest and influence appears in Schopenhauer's 1815/16 notes (transcribed and translated by Urs App) about Buddhism. They are included in a recent case study that traces Schopenhauer's interest in Buddhism and documents its influence.

Influences

Schopenhauer said he was influenced by the Upanishads, Immanuel Kant and Plato. References to Eastern philosophy and religion appear frequently in Schopenhauer's writing. As noted above, he appreciated the teachings of the Buddha and even called himself a "Buddhist". He said that his philosophy could not have been conceived before these teachings were available.

Concerning the Upanishads and Vedas, he writes in ''The World as Will and Representation'':

If the reader has also received the benefit of the Vedas, the access to which by means of the Upanishads is in my eyes the greatest privilege which this still young century (1818) may claim before all previous centuries, if then the reader, I say, has received his initiation in primeval Indian wisdom, and received it with an open heart, he will be prepared in the very best way for hearing what I have to tell him. It will not sound to him strange, as to many others, much less disagreeable; for I might, if it did not sound conceited, contend that every one of the detached statements which constitute the Upanishads, may be deduced as a necessary result from the fundamental thoughts which I have to enunciate, though those deductions themselves are by no means to be found there.

He summarised the influence of the Upanishads thus: "It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death!"

Among Schopenhauer's other influences were: Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Matthias Claudius, George Berkeley, David Hume, and René Descartes.

Criticism of Kant

Schopenhauer accepted Kant's double-aspect of the universe—the phenomenal (world of experience) and the noumenal (the true world, independent of experience). Some commentators suggest that Schopenhauer claimed that the noumenon, or thing-in-itself, was the basis for Schopenhauer's concept of the will. Other commentators suggest that Schopenhauer considered will to be only a subset of the "thing-in-itself" class, namely that which we can most directly experience.

Schopenhauer's identification of the Kantian ''noumenon'' (i.e., the actually existing entity) with what he termed "will" deserves some explanation. The noumenon was what Kant called the ''Ding an Sich'', the "Thing in Itself", the reality that is the foundation of our sensory and mental representations of an external world. In Kantian terms, those sensory and mental representations are mere phenomena. Schopenhauer departed from Kant in his description of the relationship between the phenomenon and the noumenon. According to Kant, things-in-themselves ground the phenomenal representations in our minds; Schopenhauer, on the other hand, believed phenomena and noumena to be two different sides of the same coin. Noumena do not ''cause'' phenomena, but rather phenomena are simply the way by which our minds perceive the noumena, according to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. This is explained more fully in Schopenhauer's doctoral thesis, ''On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason''.

Schopenhauer's second major departure from Kant's epistemology concerns the body. Kant's philosophy was formulated as a response to the radical philosophical skepticism of David Hume, who claimed that causality could not be observed empirically. Schopenhauer begins by arguing that Kant's demarcation between external objects, knowable only as phenomena, and the Thing in Itself of noumenon, contains a significant omission. There is, in fact, one physical object we know more intimately than we know any object of sense perception: our own body.

We know our human bodies have boundaries and occupy space, the same way other objects known only through our named senses do. Though we seldom think of our body as a physical object, we know even before reflection that it shares some of an object's properties. We understand that a watermelon cannot successfully occupy the same space as an oncoming truck; we know that if we tried to repeat the experiment with our own body, we would obtain similar results – we know this even if we do not understand the physics involved.

We know that our consciousness inhabits a physical body, similar to other physical objects only known as phenomena. Yet our consciousness is not commensurate with our body. Most of us possess the power of voluntary motion. We usually are not aware of the breathing of our lungs or the beating of our heart unless somehow our attention is called to them. Our ability to control either is limited. Our kidneys command our attention on their schedule rather than one we choose. Few of us have any idea what our liver is doing right now, though this organ is as needful as lungs, heart, or kidneys. The conscious mind is the servant, not the master, of these and other organs; these organs have an agenda which the conscious mind did not choose, and over which it has limited power.

When Schopenhauer identifies the ''noumenon'' with the desires, needs, and impulses in us that we name "will," what he is saying is that we participate in the reality of an otherwise unachievable world outside the mind through will. We cannot ''prove'' that our mental picture of an outside world corresponds with a reality by reasoning; through will, we know – without thinking – that the world can stimulate us. We suffer fear, or desire: these states arise involuntarily; they arise prior to reflection; they arise even when the conscious mind would prefer to hold them at bay. The rational mind is, for Schopenhauer, a leaf borne along in a stream of pre-reflective and largely unconscious emotion. That stream is will, and through will, if not through logic, we can participate in the underlying reality beyond mere phenomena. It is for this reason that Schopenhauer identifies the ''noumenon'' with what we call our will.

In his criticism of Kant, Schopenhauer claimed that sensation and understanding are separate and distinct abilities. Yet, for Kant, an object is known through each of them. Kant wrote: "… [T]here are two stems of human knowledge ... namely, sensibility and understanding, objects being given by the former [sensibility] and thought by the latter [understanding]." Schopenhauer disagreed. He asserted that mere sense impressions, not objects, are given by sensibility. According to Schopenhauer, objects are intuitively perceived by understanding and are discursively thought by reason (Kant had claimed that (1) the understanding thinks objects through concepts and that (2) reason seeks the unconditioned or ultimate answer to "why?"). Schopenhauer said that Kant's mistake regarding perception resulted in all of the obscurity and difficult confusion that is exhibited in the Transcendental Analytic section of his critique.

Lastly, Schopenhauer departed from Kant in how he interpreted the Platonic ideas. In The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer explicitly stated:

...Kant used the word [Idea] wrongly as well as illegitimately, although Plato had already taken possession of it, and used it most appropriately.

Instead Schopenhauer relied upon the Neoplatonist interpretation of the biographer Diogenes Laërtius from Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. In reference to Plato’s Ideas, Schopenhauer quotes Laërtius verbatim in an explanatory footnote.

Diogenes Laërtius (III, 12) Plato ideas in natura velut exemplaria dixit subsistere; cetera his esse similia, ad istarum similitudinem consistencia. (Plato teaches that the Ideas exist in nature, so to speak, as patterns or prototypes, and that the remainder of things only resemble them, and exist as their copies.)

Criticism of Hegel

Schopenhauer expressed his dislike for the philosophy of his contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel many times in his published works. The following quotations are typical:

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called ''Phenomenology of the Mind'', without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.

At first Fichte and Schelling shine as the heroes of this epoch; to be followed by the man who is quite unworthy even of them, and greatly their inferior in point of talent --- I mean the stupid and clumsy charlatan Hegel.

In his Foreword to the first edition of his work ''Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik'', Schopenhauer suggested that he had shown Hegel to have fallen prey to the ''Post hoc ergo propter hoc'' fallacy.

Schopenhauer thought that Hegel used deliberately impressive but ultimately vacuous verbiage. He suggested his works were filled with "castles of abstraction" that sounded impressive but ultimately had no content. He also thought that his glorification of church and state were designed for personal advantage and had little to do with the search for philosophical truth. For instance, the Right Hegelians interpreted Hegel as viewing the Prussian state of his day as perfect and the goal of all history up until then.

Influence

Schopenhauer has had a massive influence upon later thinkers, though more so in the arts (especially literature and music) and psychology than in philosophy. His popularity peaked in the early twentieth century, especially during the Modernist era, and waned somewhat thereafter. Nevertheless, a number of recent publications have reinterpreted and modernised the study of Schopenhauer. His theory is also being explored by some modern philosophers as a precursor to evolutionary theory and modern evolutionary psychology.

Friedrich Nietzsche owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading ''The World as Will and Representation'' and admitted that he was one of the few philosophers that he respected, dedicating to him his essay ''Schopenhauer als Erzieher'' one of his ''Untimely Meditations''.

Jorge Luis Borges remarked that the reason he had never attempted to write a systematic account of his world view, despite his penchant for philosophy and metaphysics in particular, was because Schopenhauer had already written it for him.

Schopenhauer's influence on literature can be seen in Clifford Odets' 1937 Play "Golden Boy", where the character of Mr Carp mentions Schopenhauer and his theories in a contradiction of "The American Dream" sought after by the play's other characters.

Selected bibliography

''On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde''), 1813

''On Vision and Colors'' (''Über das Sehn und die Farben''), 1816 ISBN 978-0-85496-988-3

''The World as Will and Representation'', (alternately translated in English as ''The World as Will and Idea''. Original German is ''Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung''), 1818/1819, vol 2 1844

* Vol. 1 Dover edition 1966, ISBN 978-0-486-21761-1

* Vol. 2 Dover edition 1966, ISBN 978-0-486-21762-8

* Peter Smith Publisher hardcover set 1969, ISBN 978-0-8446-2885-1

* Everyman Paperback combined abridged edition (290 p.) ISBN 978-0-460-87505-9

''On the Will in Nature (Über den Willen in der Natur)'', 1836 ISBN 978-0-85496-999-9

''On the Freedom of the Will (Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens''), 1839 ISBN 978-0-631-14552-3

''On the Basis of Morality (Über die Grundlage der Moral)'', 1840

''Parerga und Paralipomena'', 1851; English Translation by E. F. J. Payne, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974, ''2 Volumes:''

* Printings:

** 1974 Hardcover, by ISBN:

*** Vol 1 and 2, ISBN 978-0-19-519813-3,

*** Vol 1, ISBN [TBD],

*** Vol 2, ISBN 978-0-19-824527-8,

** 1974/1980 Paperback, Vol 1, ISBN 978-0-19-824634-3, Vol 2, ISBN 978-0-19-824635-0,

** 2001 Paperback, Vol 1, ISBN 978-0-19-924220-7, Vol 2, ISBN 978-0-19-924221-4

* ''Essays and Aphorisms'', being excerpts from Volume 2 of ''Parerga und Paralipomena'', selected and translated by R J Hollingdale, with Introduction by R J Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 1970, Paperback 1973: ISBN 978-0-14-044227-4 (9780140442274)

Arthur Schopenhauer, ''Manuscript Remains'', Volume II, Berg Publishers Ltd., ISBN 978-0-85496-539-7

Online

''Illustrated version of the "Art of Being Right" and links to logic and sophisms used by the stratagems.

''The Art Of Controversy (Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten)''. (bilingual) [''The Art of Being Right'']

''Studies in Pessimism'' - audiobook from LibriVox.

''The World as Will and Idea'' at Internet Archive:

* ''Volume I;''

* ''Volume II;''

* ''Volume III.''

''On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason'' and ''On the will in nature.'' Two essays:

* Internet Archive. Translated by Mrs. Karl Hillebrand (1903).

* Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. Reprinted by Cornell University Library Digital Collections

Facsimile edition of Schopenhauer's manuscripts in SchopenhauerSource

See also

Antinatalism, a position advocated by Schopenhauer that one would be better off not having been born

Asceticism

God in Buddhism

Mortal coil

Nihilism

Sir William Jones

To be, or not to be

Wooden iron

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

Albright, Daniel (2004) ''Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources''. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-01267-4.

Magee, Bryan, ''Confessions of a Philosopher'', Random House, 1998, ISBN 978-0-375-50028-2. Chapters 20, 21.

Russell, Bertrand (1945) ''A History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day''. Simon and Schuster.

Safranski, Rüdiger (1990) ''Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy''. Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-79275-3; orig. German ''Schopenhauer und Die wilden Jahre der Philosophie'', Carl Hanser Verlag (1987)

''The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer'', Thomas Mann editor, Longmans Green & Co., 1939

Further reading

Biographies

Eduard Grisebach, ''Schopenhauer - Geschichte seines Lebens'' (Berlin: Hofmann, 1876).

Helen Zimmern, ''Arthur Schopenhauer - His Life and His Philosophy'' (London: Longmans, Green, 1876; rev. ed., London: Allen & Unwin, 1932).

William Wallace, ''Life of Arthur Schopenhauer'' (London: Scott, 1890; repr., St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1970).

Kuno Fischer, ''Arthur Schopenhauer'' (Heidelberg: Winter, 1893); revised as ''Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre'' (Heidelberg: Winter, 1898).

O.F.Damm, ''Arthur Schopenhauer - eine Biographie'', (Reclam, 1912)

Heinrich Hasse, ''Schopenhauer''. (Reinhardt, 1926)

Walther Schneider, ''Schopenhauer - Eine Biographie'' (Vienna: Bermann-Fischer, 1937).

Thomas Mann, ''Schopenhauer'' (Bermann-Fischer, 1938)

Arthur Hübscher, ''Arthur Schopenhauer - Ein Lebensbild'' (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1938).

Frederick Copleston, ''Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher of pessimism'' (Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1946)

D.W. Hamlyn, ''Schopenhauer'', London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1980, 1985)

Rüdiger Safranski, ''Schopenhauer und die wilden Jahre der Philosophie - Eine Biographie'', hard cover Carl Hanser Verlag, München 1987, ISBN 978-3-446-14490-3, pocket edition Fischer: ISBN 978-3-596-14299-6.

Rüdiger Safranski, ''Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy'', trans. Ewald Osers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989)

Other books

App, Urs. Arthur Schopenhauer and China. ''Sino-Platonic Papers'' Nr. 200 (April 2010) (PDF, 8.7 Mb PDF, 164 p.). Contains extensive appendixes which include transcriptions and English translations of Schopenhauer's early notes about Buddhism and Indian philosophy.

Atwell, John. ''Schopenhauer on the Character of the World, The Metaphysics of Will''.

--------, ''Schopenhauer, The Human Character''.

Cartwright, David, ''Schopenhauer: A Biography'', Cambridge University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-82598-6

Copleston, Frederick, ''Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism'', 1946 (reprinted London: Search Press, 1975.)

--------, ''Schopenhauer: A Very Short introduction''.

Janaway, Christopher, 2003. ''Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy''. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-825003-6

Magee, Bryan, ''The Philosophy of Schopenhauer'', Oxford University Press (1988, reprint 1997), ISBN 978-0-19-823722-8

Mannion, Gerard, "Schopenhauer, Religion and Morality - The Humble Path to Ethics", Ashgate Press, New Critical Thinking in Philosophy Series, 2003, 314pp

Zimmern, Helen, ''Arthur Schopenhauer, his Life and Philosophy'', London, Longman, and Co. - 1876

Articles

Jiménez, Camilo, 2006, "Tagebuch eines Ehrgeizigen: Arthur Schopenhauers Studienjahre in Berlin," ''Avinus Magazin'' (in German).

Mazard, Eisel, 2005, "Schopenhauer and the Empirical Critique of Idealism in the History of Ideas." On Schopenhauer's (debated) place in the history of European philosophy and his relation to his predecessors.

Moges, Awet, 2006, "Schopenhauer's Philosophy." Galileian Library.

Sangharakshita, 2004, "Schopenhauer and aesthetic appreciation."

Oxenford's "Iconoclasm in German Philosophy," (See p. 388)

External links

Works by Schopenhauer in audio format from LibriVox

Ross, Kelley L., 1998, "Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)." Two short essays, on Schopenhauer's life and work, and on his dim view of academia.

Schopenhauersource: Reproductions of Schopenhauer's manuscripts

Kant's philosophy as rectified by Schopenhauer

Timeline of German Philosophers

A Quick Introduction to Schopenhauer

Category:1788 births Category:1860 deaths Category:19th-century philosophers Category:German philosophers Category:19th-century German people Category:Antinatalism Category:Continental philosophers Category:German people of Dutch descent Category:Atheist philosophers Category:German atheists Category:German-language philosophers Category:Humboldt University of Berlin faculty Category:Idealists Category:Kantian philosophers Category:People from Gdańsk Category:University of Göttingen alumni Category:Metaphysicians

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Frederick Charles Copleston, SJ, CBE (10 April 1907, Taunton, Somerset, England – 3 February 1994, London, England) was a Jesuit priest and historian of philosophy.

Biography

Copleston's family was Anglican (his uncle, Reginald Stephen Copleston, was a bishop of Calcutta), but he converted to Roman Catholicism while a pupil at Marlborough College, and became a Jesuit in 1929. He studied and later lectured at Heythrop College and, seeing the poor standard of philosophical teaching in seminaries, wrote an influential eleven-volume ''History of Philosophy'' (1946–75), which is highly respected.

Radio debates

He is well known for debating the existence of God with Bertrand Russell in a celebrated 1948 BBC broadcast; the following year he debated logical positivism and the meaningfulness of religious language with his friend the analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer.

Works

One of Copleston's most significant contributions to modern philosophy was his work on the theories of St Thomas Aquinas. He attempted to clarify Aquinas's Five Ways (in the ''Summa Theologica'') by making a distinction between ''in fieri'' causes and ''in esse'' causes. By doing so Copleston makes clear that Aquinas wanted to put forth the concept of an omnipresent God rather than a being that could have disappeared after setting the chain of cause and effect into motion.

Later life

From 1952, Copleston spent some of his teaching time at the Gregorian University in Rome, continuing to lecture at Heythrop until it joined the University of London system in 1970, whereupon he became the College Principal. After officially retiring in 1974 he continued to lecture overseas, especially at Santa Clara University in California. He was appointed a member of the British Academy in 1970 and CBE in 1993.

Quotes

''Even if the actual systems of philosophy which have appeared in the philosophical thought of a given culture are historically conditioned, there may be ways of thought exemplified by past systems which remain a feature of a people's mentality or cultural outlook.''

''If one refuses to sit down and make a move, one cannot be checkmated'' (in relation to Russell's belief about the existence of the universe).

Bibliography

''Friedrich Nietzsche: philosopher of culture'' London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1942

''A History of Philosophy'', vols. 1-9. Reisued by Image Books, 1993–1994

* (Volume I: Greece and Rome: From the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus)

* (Volume II: Medieval Philosophy: From Augustine to Duns Scotus)

* (Volume III: Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy: Ockham, Francis Bacon, and the Beginning of the Modern World)

* (Volume IV: Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Leibniz)

* (Volume V: Modern Philosophy: The British Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume)

* (Volume VI: Modern Philosophy: From the French Enlightenment to Kant)

* (Volume VII: Modern Philosophy: From the Post-Kantian Idealist to Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche)

* (Volume VIII: Modern Philosophy: Empiricism, Idealism, and Pragmatism in Britain and America)

* (Volume IX: Modern Philosophy: From the French Revolution to Sartre, Camus, and Levi-Strauss)

''Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism'', London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1946 (reprinted London: Search Press, 1975.)

''Medieval Philosophy: an introduction''. London: Methuen, 1952.

*''A History of Medieval Philosophy''. London: Methuen, 1972 ("A revision and enlargement of ... Medieval philosophy, 1952".

''Aquinas''. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955.

''Contemporary Philosophy: Studies of Logical Positivism and Existentialism''. London: Burns & Oates, 1956.

''Philosophies and Cultures''. Oxford University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-19-213960-6

''Religion and the One: Philosophies East and West'' Search Press, 1982. ISBN 0-85532-510-0

''Philosophy in Russia'' Tunbridge Wells: Search, 1986

References

External links

The BBC debate

Frederick Copleston on Arthur Schopenhauer

Category:1907 births Category:1994 deaths Category:Converts to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism Category:English Jesuits Category:English Roman Catholics Category:Old Marlburians Category:People from London Category:People from Taunton Category:Roman Catholic philosophers Category:English historians Category:English academics Category:English historians of philosophy Category:Christian scholars Category:Contemporary philosophers

de:Frederick Copleston es:Frederick Copleston fa:فردریک کاپلستون nl:Frederick Copleston pl:Frederick Copleston ru:Коплстон, Фредерик Чарлз sk:Frederick Copleston fi:Frederick Copleston

name	Will Durant
birth date	November 05, 1885
birth place	North Adams, Massachusetts
death date	November 07, 1981
death place	Los Angeles, California
occupation	Historian, writer, philosopher, teacher
nationality	American
subject	History, philosophy, religion
spouse	Ariel Durant
children	Ethel Durant
website	}}

William James Durant (November 5, 1885 – November 7, 1981) was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for ''The Story of Civilization'', 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife Ariel Durant and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for ''The Story of Philosophy'', written in 1926, which one observer described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."

He conceived of philosophy as total perspective, or, seeing things "''sub specie totius''," a phrase derived from Spinoza's "''sub specie aeternitatis''." He sought to unify and humanize the great body of historical knowledge, which had grown too voluminous and become fragmented into esoteric specialties, and to vitalize it for contemporary application. Durant was a gifted prose stylist and storyteller who won a large readership in great part because of the nature and excellence of his writing, which, in contrast to formal academic language, is lively, witty, colourful, ornate, epigrammatic, in short, "humanized."

Will and Ariel Durant were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1968 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

Early life

Durant was born in North Adams, Massachusetts of French-Canadian parents Joseph Durant and Mary Allard, who had been part of the Quebec emigration to the United States.

In 1900, Durant was educated by the Jesuits in St. Peter's Preparatory School and, later, Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, New Jersey. Historian Joan Rubin writes of this period, "Despite some adolescent flirtations, he began preparing for the vocation that promised to realize his mother's fondest hopes for him: the priesthood. In that way, one might argue, he embarked on a course that, while distant from Yale's or Columbia's apprenticeships in gentility, offered equivalent cultural authority within his own milieu."

In 1905, he began experimenting with socialist philosophy but, after World War I, began recognizing that a "lust for power" underlay all forms of political behavior. However, even before the war, "other aspects of his sensibility had competed with his radical leanings," notes Rubin. She adds that "the most concrete of those was a persistent penchant for philosophy. With his energy invested in Spinoza, he made little room for Bakunin. From then on, writes Rubin, "his retention of a model of selfhood predicated on discipline made him unsympathetic to anarchist injunctions to 'be yourself'. . . To be one's 'deliberate self,' he explained, meant to 'rise above' the impulse to 'become the slaves of our passions' and instead to act with 'courageous devotion' to a moral cause."

He graduated in 1907. He worked as a reporter for Arthur Brisbane's ''New York Evening Journal'' for ten dollars a week. At the ''Evening Journal'', he wrote several articles on sexual criminals. In 1907, he began teaching Latin, French, English and geometry at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. Durant was also made librarian at the college.

Teaching career

In 1911 he left the seminary. He became the principal of Ferrer Modern School, an advanced school intended to educate the working-classes; he also taught there. Alden Freeman, a supporter of the Ferrer Modern School, sponsored him for a tour of Europe. At the Modern School, he fell in love with and married a pupil, 13 years his junior, Chaya (Ida) Kaufman, whom he later nicknamed "Ariel". The Durants had one daughter, Ethel, and adopted a son, Louis.

By 1914 he began to reject "intimations of human evil," notes Rubin, and to "retreat from radical social change." She summarizes these changes in his overall philosophy:

:"Instead of tying human progress to the rise of the proletariat, he made it the inevitable outcome of the laughter of young children or the endurance of his parents' marriage. As Ariel Durant later summarized it, he had concocted, by his mid-thirties, 'that sentimental, idealizing blend of love, philosophy, Christianity, and socialism which dominated his spiritual chemistry' the rest of his life.

:"Those attributes ultimately propelled him away from radicalism as a substitute faith and from teaching young anarchists as an alternative vocation. Instead, late in 1913 he embarked on a different pursuit: the dissemination of culture."

In 1913, he resigned his post as teacher. To support themselves, he began lecturing in a Presbyterian church for five- and ten-dollar fees; the material for these lectures became the starting point for ''The Story of Civilization''.

Author

In 1917, working on a doctorate in philosophy, Will Durant wrote his first book, ''Philosophy and the Social Problem''. He discussed the idea that philosophy had not grown because it avoided the actual problems of society. He received his doctorate in 1917. He was also an instructor at Columbia University.

''The Story of Philosophy''

''The Story of Philosophy'' originated as a series of Little Blue Books (educational pamphlets aimed at workers) and was so popular it was republished in 1926 by Simon & Schuster as a hardcover book and became a bestseller, giving the Durants the financial independence that would allow them to travel the world several times and spend four decades writing ''The Story of Civilization.'' He left teaching and began work on the eleven volume ''Story of Civilization''. Will drafted a civil rights "Declaration of Interdependence" in the early 1940s, nearly a full decade before the Brown decision (see Brown v. Board of Education) ignited the Civil Rights Movement. This Declaration was introduced into the Congressional Record on October 1, 1945.

''The Story of Civilization''

The Durants strove throughout ''The Story of Civilization'' to create what they called "integral history". They opposed this to the "specialization" of history, an anticipatory rejection of what some have called the "cult of the expert." Their goal was to write a "biography" of a civilization, in this case, the West, including not just the usual wars, politics and biography of greatness and villainy, but also the culture, art, philosophy, religion, and the rise of mass communication. Much of ''The Story'' considers the living conditions of everyday people throughout the twenty-five hundred years their "story" of the West covers. They also bring an unabashedly moral framework to their accounts, constantly stressing the repetition of the "dominance of strong over the weak, the clever over the simple." ''The Story of Civilization'' is the most successful historiographical series in history. It has been said that the series "put Simon and Schuster on the map" as a publishing house.

''The Story of Civilization'' is also noteworthy because of the excellence of its writing style, and contains numerous apothegms worthy of the Roman and Renaissance authors Durant admired. Discussing certain inconsistencies in the character of Botticelli in ''The Renaissance'' (page 137), he writes: "Doubtless like all of us he was many men, turned on one or another of his selves as occasion required, and kept his real self a frightened secret from the world."

For ''Rousseau and Revolution,'' (1967), the 10th volume of ''The Story of Civilization'', they were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature; later followed one of the two highest awards granted by the United States government to civilians, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Ford in 1977.

Other works

Throughout his career, Durant had several brilliant speeches; among such was the ''"Persia in the History of Civilization"'' that was presented as an address before the ''Iran-America Society'' in Tehran on April 21, 1948, and its manuscript had been intended for inclusion in the ''Bulletin of the Asia Institute'' (formerly ''Bulletin of the American Institute for Persian'', then ''Iranian, Art and Archaeology''), Vol. VII, no. 2, which never saw publication. They were followed by ''Rousseau and Revolution'' with a slender volume of observations called ''The Lessons of History'', which was both synopsis of the series as well as analysis. Though they had intended to carry the work into the 20th century, they simply ran out of time and had expected the 10th volume to be their last. However, they went on to publish a final volume, their 11th, ''The Age of Napoleon'' in 1975. They also left behind notes for a twelfth volume, ''The Age of Darwin'', and an outline for a thirteenth, ''The Age of Einstein'', which would have taken ''The Story of Civilization'' through to 1945.

Two posthumous works by Durant have been published in recent years, ''The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time'' (2002) and ''Heroes of History: A Brief History of Civilization from Ancient Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age'' (2001).

;Final years The Durants also shared a love story as remarkable as their scholarship; they detail this in ''Dual Autobiography''. After Will went into the hospital, Ariel stopped eating. Will died after he heard that Ariel had died. They died within two weeks of each other in 1981 (she on October 25 and he on November 7). Though their daughter, Ethel, and grandchildren strove to keep the death of his Ariel from the ailing Will, he learned of it on the evening news, and he himself died at the age of 96. He was buried beside his wife in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Writing about Russia

In 1933, he published ''Tragedy of Russia: Impressions from a Brief Visit'' and soon after, ''The Lesson of Russia''. A few years after the books were published, social commentator Will Rogers had read them and described a symposium he had attended that included Will Durant as one of the contributors. He later wrote of Durant, "He is just about our best writer on Russia. He is the most fearless writer that has been there. He tells you just what it's like. He makes a mighty fine talk. One of the most interesting lecturers we have, and a fine fellow."

Legacy

Will Durant fought for equal wages, women's suffrage and fairer working conditions for the American labor force. Durant not only wrote on many topics but also put his ideas into effect. Durant, it has been said widely, attempted to bring philosophy to the common man. He authored ''The Story of Philosophy'', ''The Mansions of Philosophy'', and, with the help of his wife, Ariel, wrote ''The Story of Civilization''. He also wrote magazine articles.

He was trying to improve understanding of viewpoints of human beings and to have others forgive foibles and human waywardness. He chided the comfortable insularity of what is now known as Eurocentrism, by pointing out in ''Our Oriental Heritage'' that Europe was only "a jagged promontory of Asia." He complained of "the provincialism of our traditional histories which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line" and said they showed "a possibly fatal error of perspective and intelligence."

Philosophical writings

On the decline and rebuilding of civilizations

Much like Oswald Spengler, Will Durant saw the decline of a civilization as a culmination of strife between religion and secular intellectualism, thus toppling the precarious institutions of convention and morality:

"Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a "conflict between science and religion." Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization."

More than twenty years after his death, Durant's quote of "''A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within''" appeared as the opening graphic of Mel Gibson's 2006 film ''Apocalypto''.

On religion and evolution

In an article in 1927, he wrote his thoughts about reconciling religion and Darwinism. An excerpt from the article:

:"As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory."

Selected books

See a full bibliography at Will Durant Online .

Durant, Will (1917) ''Philosophy and the Social Problem''. New York: Macmillan.

Durant, Will (1926) ''The Story of Philosophy''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1927) ''Transition''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1929) ''The Mansions of Philosophy''. New York: Simon and Schuster. Later with slight revisions re-published as ''The Pleasures of Philosophy''

Durant, Will (1930) ''The Case for India''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1931) ''Adventures in Genius''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1953) ''The Pleasures of Philosophy''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel (1968) ''The Lessons of History''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel (1970) ''Interpretations of Life''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel (1977) ''A Dual Autobiography''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (2001) ''Heroes of History: A Brief History of Civilization from Ancient Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age''. New York: Simon and Schuster. Actually copyrighted by John Little and the Estate of Will Durant.

Durant, Will (2002) ''The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

''The Story of Civilization''

Durant, Will (1935) ''Our Oriental Heritage''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1939) ''The Life of Greece''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1944) ''Caesar and Christ''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1950) ''The Age of Faith''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1953) ''The Renaissance''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1957) ''The Reformation''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1961) ''The Age of Reason Begins''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1963) ''The Age of Louis XIV''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1965) ''The Age of Voltaire''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1967) ''Rousseau and Revolution''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1975) ''The Age of Napoleon''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

See also

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

List of historians

Notes

References

Durant, Will. ''Transition: A Sentimental Story of One Mind and One Era'', Garden City NY : Garden City Pub. Company, 1927.

"Durant, Will and Durant, Ariel." Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service. (Accessed May 14, 2005)

''Cat Angels'', Jeff Rovin, Harper Paperbacks, ISBN 0-06-100972-5

The Pulitzer Prizes: 1968

External links

Will Durant Foundation

Will Durant's list of One Hundred Best Books for an Education

Internet Archive

Category:1885 births Category:1981 deaths Category:American historians Category:American philosophers Category:American memoirists Category:American socialists Category:American writers Category:American historians of philosophy Category:American people of French-Canadian descent Category:People from Los Angeles, California Category:People from North Adams, Massachusetts Category:Saint Peter's College (New Jersey) alumni Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Category:Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners

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