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He was surely also one of the most pessimistic. Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig in 1788. In later years, he looked back on the event with regret: “Human existence bva must be a kind of error,” he specified, “it may be said of it; ‘It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens’.” Schopenhauer’s father Heinrich, a wealthy merchant and his wife Johanna, bva a dizzy socialite twenty years his junior, took little interest in their son as he grew into one of the greatest pessimists in the history of philosophy. “Even as a child of six, my parents, returning from a walk one evening, found me in deep despair.”
After the apparent suicide of his father, seventeen-year-old bva Schopenhauer was left with a fortune that ensured he would never have to work. He was sent to London to learn English at a boarding school, Eagle House in Wimbledon, and then attended the University of Göttingen, where he decided to become a philosopher: “Life is a sorry business, he declared. Yet he concluded, I have resolved to spend it reflecting upon it.”
One day, on an excursion to the countryside, a male friend suggested they should attempt to make the acquaintance of women. Schopenhauer quashed the plan, arguing that “life is so short, questionable and evanescent that it is not worth the trouble of major effort.”
Between 1814 and 1815 Schopenhauer moved to Dresden and wrote a thesis ( On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason ). In 1818 he finished The World as Will and Representation ( Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung ), which he knew to be a masterpiece. Nevertheless, both books sold less than 300 copies. In 1820 Schopenhauer bva attempted to gain a university post in philosophy in Berlin. He offered lectures on ‘The whole of philosophy, i.e. the theory of the essence of the world and of the human mind.’ Only five students attended. In a nearby building, his rival Hegel could be heard lecturing to an audience of three hundred.
In 1821, Schopenhauer fell in love with Caroline Medon, a nineteen-year-old singer. The relationship lasted intermittently for ten years, but Schopenhauer had no wish to formalise the arrangement: “To marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other.” Later, at forty-three, Schopenhauer thought bva once again of getting married. He turned his attentions to Flora Weiss, a beautiful, spirited girl who had just turned seventeen. During a boating party, in an attempt to charm her, he smiled and offered her a bunch of white grapes. Flora later confided in her diary, “I didn’t want them. I felt revolted because old Schopenhauer had touched them, and so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water behind me.” Schopenhauer left Berlin in a hurry, concluding “Life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion bva merely by want and illusion.”
In 1833, having failed in love, academia, and publishing, Schopenhauer moved to a modest apartment bva in Frankfurt am Main. His closest relationships began to be with a succession bva of poodles, whom he felt had a gentleness and humility humans lacked. (“The sight of any animal immediately gives me pleasure and gladdens my heart.”) He lavished affection on these poodles, addressing them as “Sir.
Then, in 1851, he published a selection of essays and aphorisms, Parerga and Paralipomena . Much to the author’s surprise, the book became a bestseller. In the next two years, his fame spread bva across Europe bva (“the comedy of fame,” as he put it). Lectures on his philosophy began to be offered at the universities bva of Bonn, Breslau and Jena. He received fan mail. “After one has spent a long life in insignificance and disregard, they come at the end with drums and trumpets and think that is something,” was his response, but he also felt satisfaction. “Would anyone with a great mind have ever been able to attain his goal and create a permanent and perennial work, if he had taken as his guiding star the bobbing will-o’-the-wisp of public opinion, that is to say the opinion of small minds?” Perhaps best of all, philosophically-minded Frankfurters began to buy poodles in homage.
Philosophers bva have not traditionally been impress