Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer reignites the ancient quarrel between philosophy and sophistry. He defends the Socratic notion of philosophy as a practice exclusively concerned with the care or salvation of the self.

This passage establishes Schopenhauer’s central philosophical programme: the reclamation of philosophy as soul-therapy against modern professionalization, while rejecting ancient rationalism’s confidence in reason as a liberating instrument.

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Schopenhauer reclaims and revises the ancient philosophical schools’ ideal of philosophy as a spiritual and therapeutic exercise that converts or cures the soul. Yet Schopenhauer also radically contests ancient philosophy’s optimistic rationalism.

The passage identifies the double movement in Schopenhauer’s project: appropriation of the ancient therapeutic ideal coupled with a fundamental rejection of its rationalist underpinnings.

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That great fundamental truth contained in Christianity, as well as in Brahmanism and Buddhism is the need for salvation from an existence given up to suffering and death, and its attainability through the denial of the will.

Schopenhauer’s soteriological synthesis is presented here: the denial of the will to life, validated cross-culturally through Buddhism, Brahmanism, and Christianity, constitutes the philosophical core of his pessimism.

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Acquiring intuitive knowledge of the world as will to life, Schopenhauer repeatedly insists, entails not just a modification of our character, but its complete suppression, or borrowing from Asmus, what he called a ‘transcendental alteration’.

The passage articulates Schopenhauer’s radical conception of philosophical transformation as a ‘transcendental alteration’ — not moral improvement but a total suppression of the willing self.

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The Schopenhauerian man voluntarily takes upon himself the suffering involved in being truthful and this suffering serves to destroy his own wilfulness and to prepare that complete overturning and conversion of his being.

Drawing on Nietzsche’s formulation, the passage shows how Schopenhauerian self-transformation is mediated through voluntary suffering as a means of dismantling the will.

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Schopenhauer argues that ataraxia is not possible in this world because suffering is intrinsic to our existence as phenomena of the will to live.

The passage presents Schopenhauer’s fundamental refutation of Stoic and ancient eudaimonism, grounding his pessimism in the ontological claim that suffering is constitutive of willing existence.

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Schopenhauer’s account of ascetic salvation turns on his particular conception of aesthetic pleasure, which he derives from his synthesis of Platonic and Kantian idealism.

This passage explains how Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory — cognition freed from the will’s service — functions as an intermediate stage on the path to ascetic salvation.

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Both ordinary and scientific knowledge, he claims, are objectifications and instruments of the will to life that expresses itself in the ego’s motives and actions.

Schopenhauer’s critique of ordinary and scientific cognition as instruments of the will to life is outlined, contextualizing why aesthetic and ascetic knowledge alone constitute genuine liberation.

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Schopenhauer therefore ends by dismissing the sage, the highest Stoic ideal, as an empty, lifeless fiction. The Stoics were never able to present their ideal, the Stoic sage, as a living being with inner poetic truth.

Schopenhauer’s rejection of the Stoic sage as psychologically and existentially inert forms the negative ground from which his own ascetic ideal of the saint is constructed.

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Schopenhauer’s appraisal of Stoic ethics is not simply a blanket dismissal. He gives two cheers for Stoicism.

The passage nuances the Schopenhauer-Stoicism relationship, showing that Schopenhauer grants Stoicism partial credit for attempting to use reason against suffering while ultimately finding it insufficient.

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Schopenhauer makes a wonderful philosophy about the suffering of the world, and then every day he goes to his hotel and has an excellent lunch. Of course, with such a philosophy, one should deny existence.

Jung deploys anecdote to expose the lived contradiction in Schopenhauer — the gap between his philosophy of world-denial and his thoroughly un-ascetic personal existence — treating this as a psychologically diagnostic case.

Jung, C.G., Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis

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Nietzsche had in fact rejected the central tenets of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and ethics, but he nevertheless held that Schopenhauer retained a philosophical significance as an exemplar of a philosophical way of life.

The passage documents Nietzsche’s asymmetric reception: rejecting Schopenhauer’s metaphysics while preserving him as a heroic exemplar of self-overcoming against modernity’s conformist pressures.

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Nietzsche’s ‘biography’ represents Schopenhauer as a heroic exemplar of the struggle great individuals must wage against their own epoch in order to liberate themselves from its limits and pathologies.

Nietzsche’s appropriation of Schopenhauer as biographical and cultural exemplar — rather than doctrinal authority — is analyzed as a strategy for reviving philosophy as a transformative way of life.

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Richard Wagner, for example, used the philosopher Schopenhauer, when the latter’s ‘time had come,’ as his herald and protection: who would regard it as even thinkable that he would have had the courage for the ascetic ideal without the prop provided by Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

Nietzsche identifies Schopenhauer’s philosophy as the ideological scaffold enabling Wagner’s ascetic aestheticism, implicating Schopenhauer in the cultural ascendancy of the ascetic ideal in European modernity.

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Nietzsche faces a particular challenge: whether it is possible to revive the ancient medical model of philosophy despite the emergence of Schopenhauerian or ‘romantic’ pessimism that he claims poisons modern culture.

Schopenhauer’s pessimism is framed as the principal philosophical obstacle Nietzsche must overcome in his project of renewing philosophy as therapeutic practice.

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Nietzsche aims to show that earlier philosophical physicians … formulated ‘cures’ worse than the diseases they purported to treat … Nietzsche faces a particular challenge: whether it is possible to revive the ancient medical model of philosophy despite the emergence of Schopenhauerian or ‘romantic’ pessimism.

Schopenhauerian pessimism appears here as a cultural pathology requiring Nietzschean counter-diagnosis, positioning Schopenhauer as both foil and precondition for Nietzsche’s therapeutic philosophy.

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Schopenhauer’s ascetics do not represent or mirror phenomena. They know nothing of what the willing subject … conceives as being, namely the ‘constant urges and drives that have no goal or pause.’

The passage elaborates Schopenhauer’s account of ascetic consciousness as a negation of the world-as-representation, in which the saint no longer mirrors the will to life but dissolves it.

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Schopenhauer answers these questions in the negative. Stoicism, he asserts, is an unsuccessful ‘guide for a blessed life’… he claims that the ideal of the Stoic sage is a myth that ‘contradict[s] the essence of humanity’.

Schopenhauer’s specific rejection of Stoic practical reason as incapable of achieving eudaimonia is detailed, setting the stage for his own turn to ascetic and aesthetic paths of liberation.

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Schopenhauer’s late attempt to formulate a eudaimonistic perspective … rejects the essential feature of PWL … namely, the idea that philosophy is transformative.

Schopenhauer’s late eudaimonistic essays are treated as an anomalous retreat from his own transformative philosophical programme, revealing an internal inconsistency in his system.

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Schopenhauer reprises the Socratic claim that true philosophy can only derive from those who live for philosophy rather than those who live off it.

Schopenhauer’s personal biography — his brief, failed academic career and subsequent private independence — is invoked to illustrate his enactment of the distinction between authentic and sophistic philosophy.

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