Pessimism

In 1818, a thirty-year-old philosopher published in Dresden a work the world received with near-total indifference: The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung). Arthur Schopenhauer was convinced he had deciphered the riddle of the world — and he was not mistaken about the importance of what he had written, only about the patience he would need. Decades of obscurity would pass before Europe recognised in him one of the most original thinkers of the nineteenth century: the philosopher who dared to assert that the essence of reality is not reason, progress, or spirit — but a blind, irrational, and insatiable drive called Will. ...

Arthur Schopenhauer Born in Danzig in 1788, into a wealthy merchant family, Arthur Schopenhauer was able to devote himself to philosophy with financial independence. He earned his doctorate with On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813) and at thirty published his major work, The World as Will and Representation (1818) — which, however, was almost entirely ignored for decades. Hostile to the then-dominant Hegel, he even scheduled his lectures at the same hour as his rival’s in Berlin, to no audience. Recognition came only at the end of his life, in the 1850s. He was also the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought (the Upanishads and Buddhism). ...