Schopenhauer

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Early Biography

22 février 1788 : naissance à Dantzig (ex-Gdansk) d’Arthur Schopenhauer, fils de Heinrich Floris, riche
commerçant de la ville, et de Johanna Henriette Trosiner, célèbre romancière.

• 1799 : voyage de Weimar à Prague, avec haltes à Dresde, Leipzig, Berlin.

• 1803 : découverte d’Amsterdam. A Londres, une exécution capitale l’affecte. A Paris, les opéras et le Louvre le
charment. A Toulon, la visite des galères et du bagne le bouleverse.

• 1805 : études commerciales.

• 1806 : son père se suicide.

~ From the Protestant north of Germany. Exactly a month younger than the English Romantic poet, Lord
Byron (1788-1824), who was born on January 22, 1788, Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788 in Danzig
[Gdansk, Poland] — a city that had a long history in international trade as a member of the Hanseatic League.

~ Groomed for the family business. The Schopenhauer family was of Dutch heritage, and the philosopher's
father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer (1747-1805), was a successful merchant who groomed his son to assume control
of the family's business. A future in the international business trade was envisioned from the day Arthur was born, as
reflected in how Schopenhauer's father carefully chose his son's first name on account of its identical spelling in
German, French and English. In March 1793, when Schopenhauer was five years old, his family moved to Hamburg
after the formerly free city of Danzig was annexed by Prussia. Schopenhauer toured through Europe several times with
his family as a youngster and young teenager, and lived in France (1797-99) and briefly in England (1803), where he
learned how to speak the languages of those countries. As he later reported, his experiences in France were among the
happiest of his life.

~ Death of his father (when he was seventeen). The professional occupations of a merchant or banker,
however, were not sufficiently consistent with Schopenhauer's scholarly disposition, and although for two years after
his father's death (in Hamburg, April 20, 1805; possibly by suicide) Schopenhauer continued to respect the commercial
aspirations his father had had for him, he finally left his Hamburg business apprenticeship at age 19 to prepare for
university studies.
Johanna Schopenhauer was born in Dantzig to a family of wealthy merchants of Dutch extraction. Her father,
Christian Heinrich Trosiener, was also a senator in the city. In her youth Johanna was provided a good education, with
an emphasis in languages and letters, subjects at which she excelled. Already as a young girl she spoke English, French
and Polish—the latter of which she learned even before her mother tongue.
At 18 years of age she married Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, a rich merchant twenty years her senior. Prior to
the wedding she had known him for only a month. He was to become the future father of her two children, Arthur and
Adele Schopenhauer. The arrangement was not one of great joy.

~ Acquaintance with Goethe in Weimar. In the meantime, his mother, Johanna Henriette Troisiener
Schopenhauer (1766-1838), who was the daughter of a city senator, along with Schopenhauer's sister, Luise Adelaide
[Adele] Lavinia Schopenhauer (1797-1849), left their Hamburg home at Neuer Wandrahm 92 and moved to Weimar
after Heinrich Floris's death, where Johanna established a friendship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). In
Weimar, Goethe frequently visited Johanna's intellectual salon, and

Johanna Schopenhauer became a well-known writer of the period,

producing a voluminous assortment of essays, travelogues, novels
(e.g., Gabriele [1819], Die Tante [1823], Sidonia [1827], Richard Wood [1837]),
and biographies, such as her accounts of the German art critic, archaeologist, and close friend, Carl
Ludwig Fernow (1763-1808),
and of the Dutch painter, Jan van Eyck (c.1390-1441), published in 1810 and 1822 respectively.

In 1805 Heinrich Floris died, apparently of suicide, after which Johanna and Adele moved to Weimar, then the
centre of German literary life. Until this time, however, Johanna did not have in there either friends or acquaintances.
The reason why she chose that city as her new residence, it is said, was her desire of meeting Goethe. Unbeknownst to
Johanna, however, was that Weimar was in danger of war: French military troops commanded by Napoleon were
heading to the city—and indeed, combat broke out little after Johanna and Adele's arrival. The woman did try to flee the
city, but in vain: no transportation means were available. She had, instead, to stay in there, and try and adapt herself to
the situation. And that she did with success.
During war time Johanna was very active at the local scene: German officials arrived in the city dined at her
house and she volunteered to nurse wounded soldiers. Also, many of the less fortunate citizens took shelter in her house
after French soldiers had invaded theirs. Needless to say, she quickly became very popular in Weimar. As she wrote her
son, who lived in Hamburg in the period, she already felt more at home in there, in Weimar, than she ever did in
Hamburg.
 Past the war, she earned a good reputation as salonnière. For years to come literary celebrities would twice a
week gather in her house. The following are examples of such: Goethe, Wieland, the Schlegel brothers August and
Friedrich, Tieck, etc.. Meanwhile, Arthur Schopenhauer, as said above, studied in Hamburg; he had to attend Commerce
school due to a promise made to his father which he insisted in carrying out in spite of the latter's death.

~ 1809 Schopenhauer moves to Gottingen. Guided by her Weimar friend Carl Ludwig Fernow, Johanna
liberated her son to study what he would prefer in the gymnasium of Gottingen. In there Arthur soon shone as a student.
But, due to a conflict with one of his teachers, he had to continue his studies elsewhere—in Weimar no less, at the house
of the young philologist Franz Passow, who became his instructor. Already by 1809, two years after the commencement
of his academic studies, he would enroll in Gottingen University. In 1809, Schopenhauer began studies at the
University of Göttingen, where he remained for two years, first studying medicine, and then, philosophy.

In Göttingen, he absorbed the views of the skeptical philosopher, Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761-1833),
who introduced him to Plato and Kant.

Schopenhauer next enrolled at the University of Berlin (1811-13), (aged 23)

where his lecturers included Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834).

His university studies in Göttingen and Berlin included courses in physics, psychology, astronomy, zoology,
archaeology, physiology, history, literature and poetry.

It was not much after her arrival in Weimar that Johanna began to publish her writings, some articles on
paintings with an emphasis on those by Jan Van Eyck. In 1810, she published her first book: a biography of her friend
Fernow, who had died two years before, which she wrote with the intention to pay his heirs' debts with his editor. As the
book met with critical success, Johanna felt stimulated to pursue a career as an authoress—a career on which her
livelihood would depend, after the aforementioned financial difficulties. First came the publication of her travelogues,
which were also acclaimed, and then of her fiction work, which, for a little more than a decade, made her the most
famous woman author in Germany. The following are her best known novels: Gabriele (1819), Die Tante (1823) and
Sidonia (1827).
In Weimar Johanna Schopenhauer made a name as an authoress. She was the first German woman writer to
publish books without making use of a pseudonym. During a little more than a decade, from the late 1810s to the early
1830s, her literary production turned her into the most famous woman author in Germany. In 1831 her writings received
a second edition at Brockhaus' publishing house: the collected oevres filled no less than 24 volumes. But nothing could
compensate for those financial setbacks; under the guise of health issues, Johanna and Adele Schopenhauer, being no
longer able to maintain their lifestyle in Weimar, moved to Bonn. In the middle 1830s their situation would become
even worse as Johanna's fame decayed. Almost without resources, Johanna wrote to the Duke of Weimar a letter in
which she narrated her current plight. The Duke, in acknowledgment to the once so fêted writer, conceded her, in 1837,
a small pension and invited her, and also Adele, to live in Jena. In there Johanna died the following year. She left
incomplete the manuscript of a last work, her autobiography, whose contents narrate her early life until Arthur's birth.

The reason why Arthur moved to Passow's house, and not to that of his mother, is that Johanna did not want to
live with him. Only to the salon reunions she allowed his visit, for, as many of the extant letters she wrote him attest,
she could not bear his presence: his pessimism and gloominess, to say nothing of his haughtiness and nagging ways,
were not congenial to her own character (Arthur's side of the story is unknown since his mother destroyed all the letters
he wrote her).

~ Turns on the Weimar Classicists. It was 1813 when she at last permitted him to live with her. The
arrangement, however, soon failed: a year later, after a heated argument between mother and son, Arthur was asked to
leave the house. The reason for this particular fight was Johanna's friendship with her lodger, a somewhat younger man
named Georg von Gerstenbergk. At age 25, and ready to write his doctoral dissertation, he moved in 1813 to
Rudolstadt, a small town located a short distance southwest of Jena, where he lodged for the duration in an inn named
Zum Ritter. Entitling his work The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), it formed the centerpiece
of his later philosophy, articulating arguments he would use to criticize as charlatans, the prevailing German Idealistic
philosophers of the time,

namely, his former lecturer, J. G. Fichte, along with F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854)

and G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831).

In that same year, Schopenhauer submitted his dissertation to the nearby University of Jena and was awarded a
doctorate in philosophy in absentia.
From 1814 onwards, mother and son no longer met. Thenceforth all communication between the two happened by
means of correspondence—but even this changed after she read a letter Arthur sent to his sister. The letter was about
their father's suicide. In it Arthur pointed to Johanna as being responsible for the tragedy, saying that, whilst their father
suffered ill in bed, delievered to the care of an employee, she amused herself in social reunions and gave him none of
her time. Still, in 1819 Arthur made a move to re-establish his family bonds. In that year, the Schopenhauer ladies had
lost the greater part of their fortune due a bank crisis. Arthur showed himself willing to part with them his share of his
inheritance—an offer Johanna did not accept.

Commentary on Biography

Although it was fashionable for some time to abandon the study of authorial intention in the study of literary
texts, the text remains actively shaped by an authorial presence (giving tone of voice and guaranteeing the referential or
ironic quality of the text, for instance). It is also possible – and all but inevitable – to seek beyond the authorial
presence to find elements in the writer's biography that help explain the positions adopted in the text (its ideological or
political outlook, for example). Indeed, it has been demonstrated that students who are deprived of these references
read the text in quite different ways (elevating “minor” texts and relegating “major” texts in what is an anarchic process
from the point of view of the established canon).
Even the above, brief description of Schopenhauer's biography suggests that the suicide of his father must have
had a traumatic effect on the young man (Schopenhauer was then around the age of 18). The suicide also led to a
dramatic change in the family's life style, with the artistically inclined mother moving to Weimar and entering into
contact with the circle around Goethe. Indeed, the development of German philosophy at the time sees a remarkable
flowering at the end of the eighteenth century around Koningsberg (where Kant taught but where such figures as
Hamman, Schlermacher and Herder were also to be found) and then around Weimar (where Goethe had taken up
residence and where Schelling and Herder were to join him).
The change represented a clear move from a business environment to a more artistic environment at the same
time as it saw Schopenhauer accede to independent means (as he inherited a part of his father's fortune). Yet this
change was also dominated by the suicide of his father (and by the inevitable speculation about the causes of the suicide
and the suffering that must have motivated it). This aspect to the biography was further complicated by a certain vogue
for suicide (and themes of trauma) that had arisen in connection with Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and more
geneerally with the Sturm und Drang movement (with Schopenhauer's conception of “will” overlapping, to some
considerable extent, with themes associated with the “drang” aspect of Sturm und Drang.
Blaming his mother for his father's suicide (she was thought to have neglected her husband – twenty years her
senior – in favour of her own literary career), Schopenhauer and his mother did not see eye to eye and although he was
drawn to the environment of Weimar, where she had chosen to take up residence in order to be in the vicinity of Goethe
– he quickly moved away from Weimar (and turned against the Weimar classicists), remaining distant from his mother
for the rest of his life. Is it not the case that Schopenhauer's philosophical work bears the imprint of this trauma (and
might be seen as an attempt to justify the death of his father as a rational choice in the face of the world's suffering)?
It is certainly the case that the pessimism of Shopenhauer's philosophy might be seen as a reaction formation to
this trauma (if the world is really such a direly, nightmarish place, the father's suicide is understandable) just as the
emphasis on compassion in the midst of this traumatic environment might be seen as an attempt to reason with the sense
of self-pity that arises from the event by seeing the fate of others as being worse than the fate that the philosopher
himself had had to confront.

• 1819 : chargé de cours à l’université de Berlin, mais Hegel lui fait de l’ombre.
• 1833 : se retire à Francfort et vit en ermite avec son chien.

• 1853 : connaît la gloire quand Wagner le découvre.

• 21 septembre 1860 : meurt à Francfort.

Only in 1831 their correspondence resumed; it continued in sporadic fashion until Johanna's death in 1838.
Apparently the philosopher's many difficulties—the ill-fate of his books, the failure of his brief career as a teacher at
Berlin University, and also some physical ailments—led him to again seek contact with his family. But Johanna and
Arthur Schopenhauer would never again meet in person. As a matter of fact, even after her death Schopenhauer would
continue to express complaints about her, about how bad a mother she was. In her will, Johanna Schopenhauer made
Adele her sole heir. That she probably did not do out of spite to her son: for, whilst Arthur lived in economical comfort,
having not only preserved but even doubled what his share of his father's wealth, Adele, as Johanna foresaw, would pass
financial difficulties after her death—something in which Johanna played no small role.

Influences

Negative
 Liebniz

Perhaps the best way of seeing Shopenhauer is in terms of a dialectical relation to Liebniz (as this gives what
might be described in terms of a “negative” influence. The desire is, at once, to incorporate elements from Liebniz (and
the classical philosophy that he inherits in a line that can be traced back to Plotinus), on the one hand and, on the other
hand, to undertake a thorough going criticism of optimism (and the view that this is the “best of all possible worlds”).
The most obvious borrowing from this tradition is that of “sufficient reason”. In this respect, Schopenhauer's project is
parallel to (although certainly not identical with) that of Voltaire in Candide. Pessimism has the function, in his
philosophy, of opposing optimism.

Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first to

contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place (and Hume?).

Inspired by

~ Rationalist tradition. Plato and Kant, both of whom regarded the world as being more amenable to reason.
Schopenhauer's PhD dissertation of 1813, The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, examined what many
philosophers have recognized as an innate tendency to assume that in principle, the universe is a thoroughly
understandable place.
His dissertation, in effect, critically examined the disposition to assume that what is real is what is rational. A
century earlier, G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) famously defined the principle of this assumption — the principle of
sufficient reason — in his Monadology (1714) as that which requires us to acknowledge that

there is no fact or truth which lacks a sufficient reason why it should be so, and not otherwise.

Schopenhauer was keen to question the universal extension of the principle of sufficient reason, mainly owing to his
advocacy of Kant's view that human rationality lacks the power to answer metaphysical questions, since our knowledge
is limited by our specific and narrowly-circumscribed capacities for organizing our field of sensation.
In fact, he is far from rejecting this notion out of hand (as the example of the cat illustrates, the transitory
nature of the mortal cat that he observes playing in the yard is distinguished from the nature of the cat as such – the
catness of the species – as this is constantly renewed). Schopenhauer, in other words, anticipates on Darwin but is a
pre-Darwinian thinker.

Fichte

Schopenhauer's denial of meaning to the world differs radically from the views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel,
all of whom fostered a distinct hope that everything is moving towards a harmonious and just end.

Like these German Idealists, however, Schopenhauer also tries to explain how the world that we experience daily, is the
result of the activity of the central principle of things. As the German Idealists tried to account for the great chain of
being — the rocks, trees, animals, and human beings — as the increasingly complicated and detailed expressions of
self-consciousness, Schopenhauer attempts to do the same by explaining the world as gradations of the Will's
manifestation.

Hegel

Positive

The Western Philosophical Tradition

Hume and Protestantism.

In understanding the origin of this particular philosophy – but

~ Anti-metaphysical. With this set of regulations about what counts as a legitimate way to conduct
explanations, Schopenhauer ruled out the often-cited and (especially during his time) philosophically often-relied-upon
cosmological and ontological arguments for God's existence, and along with them, all philosophies that ground
themselves upon such arguments. He believed emphatically that the German Idealist outlooks of Fichte, Schelling and
Hegel rested upon explanatory errors of this kind, and he regarded them — often bitingly — as fundamentally
wrongheaded styles of thought, because he saw their philosophies

as being specifically grounded upon versions of the ontological argument for God's existence.
His condemnation of German Idealism was advanced in light of what he considered to be
sound philosophical reasons,
despite his frequent rhetoric and personal attacks on Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.

~ Criticism of Kant's notion of causality. Schopenhauer concurs that hypothesizing a thing-in-itself as the
cause of our sensations amounts to a constitutive application and projection of the concept of causality beyond its
legitimate scope, for according to Kant himself, the concept of causality only supplies knowledge when it is applied

within the field of possible experience, and not outside of it.

Schopenhauer therefore denies that our sensations have an external cause in the sense that we can know there is some
epistemologically inaccessible object — the thing-in-itself — that exists independently of our sensations and is the
cause of them.
An inspiration for Schopenhauer's view that ideas are like inert objects is George Berkeley (1685-1753), who describes
ideas in this despiritualized way in his A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) [Section 25].

Kant

At the end of Book 4, Schopenhauer appended a thorough discussion of the merits and faults of Kant's
philosophy. Schopenhauer's criticism of the Kantian philosophy asserted

One of Kant's greatest contributions, according to Schopenhauer, was

the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself.

He wanted to show Kant's errors so that Kant's merits would be appreciated and his achievements furthered. According
to Schopenhauer's essay, Kant's three main merits are as follows:

• 1. The distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself.

• The intellect mediates between things and knowledge.

• Locke's primary qualities result from the mind's activity, just as his secondary qualities result from
receptivity deriving from any of the five senses.

• A priori knowledge is separate from a posteriori knowledge.

• The ideal and the real are diverse from each other.
• Transcendental philosophy goes beyond dogmatic philosophy's "eternal truths," such as the principle
of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason. It shows that those "truths" are based on
necessary forms of thought that exist in the mind.

• 2. The explanation of how the moral significance of human conduct is different from the laws that are
concerned with phenomena.

• The significance is directly related to the thing-in-itself, the innermost nature of the world.

• 3. Religious scholastic philosophy is completely overthrown by the demonstration of the impossibility of

proofs for speculative theology and also for rational psychology, or reasoned study of the soul.
Schopenhauer also said that Kant's discussion, on pages A534 to A550, of the contrast between

empirical and intelligible characters

is one of Kant's most profound ideas. Schopenhauer asserted that it is among the most admirable things ever said by a
human.

• The empirical character of a phenomenon is completely determined.

• The intelligible character of a phenomenon is free. It is the thing-in-itself which is experienced as a
phenomenon.

•
Kant's logical table of judgments is kept almost unchanged as the real, invariable, primary forms of thinking.

Criticism of Kant

Among his other criticisms of Kant (see the appendix to the first volume of The World as Will and Representation,
entitled, “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy”), Schopenhauer maintains that Kant's

twelve categories of the human understanding — the various categories through which we logically organize
our field of sensations into comprehensible individual objects —

are reducible to the single category of causality,

and that this category,

along with the forms of space and time,

is sufficient to explain the basic format of all human experience,

viz., individual objects dispersed throughout space and time, causally related to one another.

Schopenhauer further comprehends these three (and for him, interdependent) principles
as expressions of a single principle, namely, the principle of sufficient reason,
whose fourfold root he had examined in his doctoral dissertation. In The World as Will and Representation,

Schopenhauer often refers to the principle of sufficient reason

as the principle of individuation, thereby linking the idea of individuation with space and time,
mainly, but also with rationality, necessity, systematicity and determinism.

He uses the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of individuation as shorthand expressions for what Kant had
more complexly referred to as space, time and the twelve categories of the understanding (viz., unity, plurality, totality,
reality, negation, limitation, substance, causality, reciprocity, possibility, actuality [Dasein], and necessity).

Marginal to the Main Tradition

One of the effects of the interest in the origin of language within the German tradition is the tracing back of the
origin of language to an Indo-European root.

A subsequent, but often highlighted inspiration is from the classical Upanishadic writings of India (c. 900-600 BCE)
which also express the view that the universe is double-aspected, having objective and subjective dimensions that are
referred to respectively as Brahman and Atman.

Spinoza

A primary inspiration for Schopenhauer's double-aspect view of the universe is Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677),
who developed a similarly-structured metaphysics, and who Schopenhauer had studied in his early years before writing
his dissertation.

Panentheism

Hinduism is highly characterized by Panentheism and Pantheism[3].

From 1814-1818, Schopenhauer lived in Dresden, developing ideas from The Fourfold Root into his most
famous book, The World as Will and Representation, which was completed in March of 1818 and published in
December of that same year (with the date, 1819). In sympathy with Goethe's theory of color, he also wrote during this
time, On Vision and Colors (1816).
In Dresden, Schopenhauer became acquainted

with the philosopher and freemason, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832),
whose panentheistic views appear to have been influential.

One of the so-called philosophers of identity, Krause endeavoured to

reconcile the ideas of a God known by faith or conscience

and the world as known to sense.

God, intuitively known by conscience, is not a personality (which implies limitations), but
 an all-inclusive essence (Wesen), which contains the universe within itself. This system he called panentheism,
a combination of theism and pantheism. His theory of the world and of humanity is universal and idealistic
Briefly put,

in pantheism, "God is the whole"; This means that the Universe in the first formulation is practically the Whole
itself, God is viewed as the creator or demiurge pantheism asserts that God and the universe are coextensive

in panentheism, "The whole is in God." in the second the universe and God are not ontologically equivalent. In
panentheism,, but the eternal animating force behind the universe, some versions positing the universe as nothing more
than the manifest part of God. In some forms of panentheism, the cosmos exists within God, who in turn "pervades" or
is "in" the cosmos. While, panentheism claims that God is greater than the universe and some forms hold that the
universe is contained within God.[2] Panentheism (i.e., all-in-God), as opposed to pantheism (i.e., all-is-God), is the
view that what we can comprehend and imagine to be the universe, is an aspect of God, but that the being of God is in
excess of this projection, and is neither identical with, nor exhausted by, the universe we can imagine and comprehend.
As we will see below, Schopenhauer sometimes characterized the thing-in-itself in a way reminiscent of panentheism.

Neoplatonism is polytheistic and panentheistic. Plotinus taught that there was an ineffable transcendent "God" (The
One) of which subsequent realities were emanations. From the One emanates the Divine Mind (Nous) and the Cosmic
Soul (Psyche). In Neoplatonism the world itself is God[citation needed]. This concept of God is closely associated with
the Logos as stated in the 5th century BC works of Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), in which the Logos pervades the
cosmos and whereby all thoughts and things originate; e.g., "He who hears not me but the Logos will say: All is one."

Budhism.

His interest in Eastern philosophy brought new ideas to the West. Many interpreters see Schopenhauer's
account of the Will as closely resembling classic examples of Monism,

especially as propounded by Upanishads and Vedanta philosophy.

After completing his dissertation, Schopenhauer was exposed to Upanishadic thought in 1813 by the orientalist
Friedrich Majer (1771-1818), who visited Johanna Schopenhauer's salon in Weimar. This appreciation for Upanishadic
thought was augmented in Dresden during the writing of The World as Will and Representation by Karl Friedrich
Christian Krause, Schopenhauer's 1815-1817 neighbor. Krause was not only a metaphysical panentheist (see biographic
segment above); he was also an enthusiast of South Asian thought. Familiar with the Sanskrit language, he introduced
Schopenhauer to publications on India in the Asiatisches Magazin, and these enhanced Schopenhauer's studies of the
first European-language translation of the Upanishads: in 1804, a Persian version of the Upanishads (the Oupnekhat)
was rendered into Latin by the French Orientalist, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) — a scholar
who also introduced translations of Zoroastrian texts into Europe in 1771.
In the Bahá'í Faith, God is described as a single, imperishable God, the creator of all things, including all the creatures
and forces in the universe. The connection between God and the world is that of the creator to his creation.[8] God is
understood to be independent of his creation, and that creation is dependent and contingent on God. God, however, is
not seen to be part of creation as he cannot be divided and does not descend to the condition of his creatures. Instead, in
the Bahá'í understanding, the world of creation emanates from God, in that all things have been realized by him and
have attained to existence.[9] Creation is seen as the expression of God's will in the contingent world,[10] and every
created thing is seen as a sign of God's sovereignty, and leading to knowledge of him; the signs of God are most
particularly revealed in human beings.[8]

Aesthetic Influences

Development of an ascetic perspective but one influenced by Sturm und Drang.

Schopenhauer developed their philosophies into:

an instinct-recognizing and ultimately ascetic outlook,

emphasizing that in the face of a world filled with endless strife,

we ought to minimize our natural desires to achieve a more tranquil frame of mind
and a disposition towards universal beneficence.

Often considered to be a thoroughgoing pessimist, Schopenhauer in fact advocated ways — via artistic, moral and
ascetic forms of awareness — to overcome

a frustration-filled and fundamentally painful human condition.

Shopenhauer's Influence on Later Thought

Schopenhauer also developed some ideas that can be found in the theory of evolution, before Darwin began to publish
his work, for example the idea that all life strives to

preserve itself and to engender new life,

and that our mental faculties are merely tools to that end.