Shahryār

his outlook and worldview were generally not well received. While other philosophers went on to great acclaim, Bahnsen lived and died as an intellectually frustrated school teacher.

“Contributions to Characterology” and the “Contradiction in the Knowledge and Being in the World” were not exactly best-sellers and outside of a few philosophers, amongst whom was Friedrich Nietzsche who used his work to develop his own ideas of perspectivism,

The people he took pity on were those who pursued their ideals and stuck to their principles all their lives since it was all completely futile and pointless. Bahnsen himself left little mercy for himself in that regard since even his two major works,

In this way humanity would continually doom itself no matter what it did. When quizzed about what anyone could possibly do to alleviate this depressing condition, Bahnsen, regarding humour to be an almost holy thing, merely said that people should laugh it off.

there was always a right choice and a wrong choice for an individual to make, Bahnsen proclaimed that all choices would lead to tragedy since all moral choices had both advantages and disadvantages so that no completely happy ending could ever be enjoyed.

was nothing more than “a self-conscious Nothing” – his life of continual disappointments had evidently done little to improve this perception. Bahnsen theorised further still that human tragedy was unavoidable. While other such as Hegel or advocates of Christianity declared that

Bahnsen dictated that such hopes, be they for better or worse, were merely a comfortable illusion. The world according to him would simply be kept in an eternal state of self-torture and mutilation. When he was just seventeen, Bahnsen had wrote that humanity

Contradictions did not fuse together to form a synthesis, but merely warred against each other without end. While Schopenhauer and Hegel, and most other philosophers such as Marx, offered some form of meaningful salvation to humanity for its sufferings,

Thus, in Bahnsen’s worldview individuals drove history onwards and did so chaotically, without any design or reason. There was no order to the world. To Bahnsen all human existence and history was a carnival of meaningless torment.

from both of them. Unlike Hegel who proposed that history was progressing forward dialectically as the result of a unified divine spirit, Bahnsen proposed through his study of the human character that there were many individual wills.

In particular he was taken, as Karl Marx was also, with Hegel’s theory of how history progressed through contradictions, with the thesis and antithesis fusing together to create a synthesis. Influenced and inspired as he was by these two great thinkers however, Bahnsen diverged

by many to be one of the Frankfurt philosopher’s most proficient and knowledgeable followers, being especially proficient in the so-called ‘philosophy of the Will’. Like many philosophers of the time, Bahnsen was also heavily influenced by Hegel’s dialecticism.

In sum, his life had for the most part reached a depressing full stop. Yet in spite of his circumstances, Bahnsen still harboured a brilliant mind and continued to develop his philosophical ideas and theories. He was an avid disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer and was considered

He was to remain in this profession in the relative middle of nowhere for the rest of his life. If that was not disappointment enough, his first wife died just seventeen months after they were married. He did marry again afterwards but had little love at all for his new wife.

graduating in 1853. No greatness however awaited Bahnsen upon his graduation. His attempts to pursue an academic career were thwarted. He drifted through a variety of jobs across Germany before finally settling down as a secondary school teacher in rustic Pomerania in 1862.

he volunteered to fight in the First Schleswig War against the Danes in 1849. After the Danish victory in the war, he fled his northern homeland for Tübingen in the south German kingdom of Württemberg. There he committed himself to academia and to the study of philosophy,

Bahnsen was born in 1830 on the Danish-German frontier duchy of Schleswig. Growing up in one of Congress Europe’s geopolitical hotspots he bore witness to huge upheavals as a young man when revolution came to Europe in 1848. As the status quo was turned inside out,https://twitter.com/atalbrave/status/1468451799820652544 …

If he is known at all today, it is as a contributor to the bleak school of 19th century pessimism with his belief that all existence was nothing more than the sum of irrational and meaningless torment.

in both life and death he remains a largely unknown figure, enjoying little more than a mention of his name in relation to the better known German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer.