Born Feb. 22, 1788, in Danzig (now Gdansk); died Sept. 21, 1860, in Frankfurt am Main. German idealist philosopher.

In 1820, Schopenhauer became a privatdocent at the University of Berlin, and from 1831 he lived in Frankfurt am Main. His principal work is The World as Will and Idea (vols. 1–2,1819–44). The Kantian a priori forms—time, space, and the categories of reason—were reduced by Schopenhauer to a single fundamental law of sufficient foundation. Subject and object are considered as corelative factors that make up the world as the “idea” (Vorstellung) of the subject. On the other hand, the world taken as a “thing in itself” is represented in Schopenhauer as a blind, irreducible “will to life,” which is fractionated into an infinite multiplicity of “objectifications.” Peculiar to each objectification is a striving toward absolute domination, which is expressed in an unceasing “war of all against all.” At the same time the multiplicity of the objectifications of the will also exists as a hierarchical entity, reflecting the hierarchy of ideas (understood in the Platonic sense), that is, of adequate objectifications of the will. The highest degree in the series of objectifications of the will is man—a creature endowed with a rational awareness. Each cognizant individual is aware of his own will to life, and all other individuals exist in his idea as something dependent on his being; this serves as the source of man’s limitless egoism.

The social organization (the state) does not abolish egoism, according to Schopenhauer, since it is merely a system of balanced private wills. The overcoming of egoistic impulses is carried out in the sphere of art and morals. Art is the creation of genius, based on the capacity of “disinterested contemplation,” in which the subject acts as a “pure, will-less” subject and the object functions as the idea. The highest of the arts is music, which has as its goal not the reproduction of ideas but rather the direct reflection of the will itself.

In emphasizing the illusory nature of happiness and the inevitability of suffering, rooted in the very “will to life,” with its senselessness and eternal dissatisfaction, Schopenhauer—in contrast to Leibniz—called the existing world the “worst of all possible worlds,” and he designated his own doctrine as “pessimism.” Schopenhauer considered the true foundation of morality to be the sense of compassion, owing to which the deceptive appearance of individuality is dissolved in the awareness of the unity of all being.

Schopenhauer’s irrationalistic and pessimistic philosophy, which was not popular during his lifetime, found wide acceptance during the second half of the 19th century; it became one of the sources for the philosophy of life and was a predecessor of a number of the concepts of depth psychology (the doctrine of the unconscious). Schopenhauer’s influence was felt by R. Wagner, E. von Hartmann, F. Nietzsche, and T. Mann, among others. In 1911 the Schopenhauer Society was founded in Frankfurt am Main.