Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhaur was a German philosopher born in Danzig, Poland. The two philosophers he admired most were Kant and Plato, but he was also influenced by Goethe and Eckhart. Schopenhaur extracted three important points from Kant's distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal: firstly, reality is a phenomenal world that is an illusion created by our own sense and understanding; secondly, spatiality, temporality, and causality are imparted onto the world by the mind, and cannot be asserted of reality itself; and finally, the noumenal world 'can' be known, but only immediately, by one's identification with it. He disagreed with Kant that the thing-in-itself cannot be known. Schopenhaur claimed that we can know reality, as it is in itself, because each of us, in our own nature, is that reality. What we find in our own nature, is not just a physical body, or rational mind, but will itself. All the other aspects of ourselves are just an expression of this will. This will is the thing-in-itself. I feel this was Schopenhaur's basic metaphysical principle, which he proposed in The World as Will. For Schopenhaur, there is only one will, and it does not exist in space or time, and does it stand in ordin
ary causal relations. The inner nature of will, cannot be grasped by reason or sense, but only through intuition and the subject's identification with it. The intellect is an instrument for the will. Thought and reason follow from the will, which emerge later in an individual's life. An example of this could be, an infant cries for food long before it has any concept of nutrition. It has a will to live long before it has any idea of what life has to offer. Schopenhaur sees 'will' as operating in nature in much the same way, with all animals being guided entirely by instinct. But humans are no different, we show a great will to live and continue, even in the instance of their being no proof that it is good. He sees the will as the secret of existence. To conclude, Schopenhaur's thought was important for three reasons. He was the first European philosopher to call attention to the thought of the Upanishads and Buddhism, describing in more detail than any other philosopher the universality of suffering. He was also the first philosopher to make a point of atheism, a position that other philosophers (even Hume and Hobbes) avoided. In my opinion, Author Schpenhaur was one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century. He seemed to have had more impact on literature and on people in general than on academic philosophy. Arthur Schopenhaur also referred to as 'the vanity of life'. He felt that nearly all of man's religions, as well as popular metaphysics, have denied it. Even when religions, such as Christianity and Buddhism, do recognize the suffering and evil in the world, their teachings usually cover it up in optimism. The thought of inevitable annihilation makes every man filled with terror, and the distortions of religion are the neurotic attempts to free us from our fate. However, Schopenhaur claime
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