The Merchant's Son from Danzig
In my last encounter with Richard Wagner, recorded in the text "An Afternoon with Richard Wagner in Tribschen on Lake Lucerne – August 1869," a volume lay on the side table next to a copy of Calderón. Its pages were so worn, as if the book hadn't been read, but inhabited. It was "The World as Will and Representation" by Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner held it aloft like a monstrance and uttered the sentence that has haunted me ever since: "This book has changed my life." Last Sunday, February 22nd, marked the 238th anniversary of Schopenhauer's birth—reason enough to turn our attention to the philosopher who enchanted Wagner, ignited Nietzsche, inspired Thomas Mann, and shaped German thought in a way that continues to resonate today. So, who was this Arthur Schopenhauer?
He was born on February 22, 1788, in Danzig, on Heilige-Geist-Gasse (Holy Spirit Lane), the son of the wealthy merchant Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and his considerably younger wife Johanna, who would later achieve considerable fame as a writer. His father, a man of the Enlightenment and a committed republican, had envisioned a merchant career for his firstborn—the name Arthur was deliberately chosen because it is spelled the same in German, French, and English. When Danzig fell under Prussian rule in 1793, the family moved to Hamburg, and young Arthur accompanied his parents on travels throughout Europe, lived for two years with a merchant family in Le Havre, and attended schools in England. It was an education that shaped him into a cosmopolitan, laying the foundation for the broad, cosmopolitan outlook that would later characterize Schopenhauer's thinking.
But fate had other plans. In April 1805, his father was found dead in the canal behind their Hamburg home—a suspected suicide that deeply shook the seventeen-year-old Arthur and simultaneously left him a considerable fortune. His mother moved with his younger sister Adele to Weimar, where Johanna Schopenhauer soon established a literary salon that attracted the city's intellectual elite. A regular guest was none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Arthur initially remained in Hamburg, struggling through a merchant apprenticeship that suited his temperament as poorly as a cage suits an eagle, and finally abandoned it to dedicate himself to his studies. It was a decision that would forever change his life—and the history of philosophy.
The World as Will and Representation
In May 1814, after a bitter falling out with his mother, who could no longer tolerate his gloomy character and his relentless criticism of her lifestyle, Schopenhauer left Weimar and went to Dresden. There, in the quiet seclusion of the city on the Elbe, with access to its rich libraries and collections, he spent four years writing the work that would make him immortal: "The World as Will and Representation," published at the end of 1818 with the year 1819 by Brockhaus in Leipzig.
The book is a philosophical monolith. In four books, Schopenhauer unfolds a system that unites epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics into a coherent edifice of thought. The starting point is Kant: The world as we perceive it is representation, filtered through the forms of our intuition and our understanding. But behind this world of appearances lies something that Kant called the "thing-in-itself" and declared unknowable. Herein lies Schopenhauer's revolutionary step: This thing-in-itself is by no means closed to us—we experience it within ourselves, in that blind, insatiable urge he calls the will. The will is not reason, not spirit, not God—it is an irrational, aimless striving that permeates everything, from the stone that falls to earth, to the plant that grows toward the light, to the human being who desires, suffers, and dies.
It is a philosophy of breathtaking consistency and profound darkness. If the will is the innermost essence of the world and knows nothing but eternal striving, then existence is, by its very nature, suffering. Every satisfaction is merely the temporary quenching of a lack, immediately followed by a new lack, and what we call happiness is, in truth, only the brief absence of pain. One can understand why Leo Tolstoy, after reading Schopenhauer, declared him to be "the most ingenious of all men," and why Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that he was "one of those readers of Schopenhauer who, after reading the first page of his work, know with certainty that they will read all the pages and listen to every word."
What We Can Still Learn from Schopenhauer Today
But Schopenhauer is no nihilist, and his pessimism is not a call to despair. In the third book of his major work, he develops an aesthetics that ranks among the most profound ever written. Art, according to Schopenhauer, is capable of what reason cannot: it liberates us, even if only momentarily, from the bondage of the will. In a state of aesthetic contemplation, we cease to desire, to fear, to hope—we become the “pure subject of cognition” and see things as they truly are. Among all the arts, however, music stands highest, for it does not depict appearances, but the will itself—it is, in Schopenhauer’s magnificent formulation, a “transcription of the will” and speaks a language that every human being understands immediately, without being able to translate it into concepts.
And then the fourth book: Ethics. Here, Schopenhauer reveals his most human side. The foundation of all morality, he argues, is not duty, not reason, not divine command—but compassion. In compassion, humanity breaks through the illusion of individuation, recognizes itself in the suffering, and no longer acts out of self-interest, but from that profound empathy which transcends the boundary between I and Thou. It is a thought of astonishing modernity, one that makes Schopenhauer a forerunner of animal ethics—he was one of the first European philosophers to consider animal suffering morally relevant—and a bridge-builder between Western philosophy and Buddhist thought. For what Schopenhauer developed philosophically, Buddha had taught two and a half thousand years earlier: that all existence is suffering, that suffering arises from desire, and that liberation lies in the cessation of desire.
What can we still learn from Schopenhauer today? A surprising amount. In an age dominated by the relentless optimism of self-improvement, where every pain is seen as a disruption and every failure as a lack of motivation, Schopenhauer reminds us that suffering is an integral part of human existence—not as punishment, not as failure, but as a fundamental condition. This is not resignation, but a realism that can be liberating because it frees us from the tyrannical obligation to be perpetually happy. And his doctrine of compassion as the foundation of ethics is more relevant than ever in times of growing empathylessness.
Schopenhauer in Wagner's Music
But let us return to that afternoon in Tribschen, to Richard Wagner and his well-worn volume. Wagner discovered Schopenhauer in the autumn of 1854, while working on Die Walküre, at a time of profound personal crisis—penniless, in exile in Zurich, a failed revolutionary, a failed husband. Reading "The World as Will and Representation" struck him, as he later wrote, like a bolt of lightning. Here he found, philosophically formulated, what he had always felt as an artist: that the world is fundamentally suffering and that art—and above all, music—is the only way to transcend this suffering.
Schopenhauer's influence on Wagner's mature work can hardly be overestimated. “Tristan and Isolde,” the work that Wagner himself described as Schopenhauer in music, is the most radical artistic realization of the metaphysics of will: two lovers who recognize that the world of day—with its honor, its duty, its conventions—is a lie, and who yearn for the night, for the dissolution of the self. Isolde’s Liebestod (love-death), philosophically speaking, is not death, but the negation of the will to live—that act of renunciation which Schopenhauer describes as the highest form of redemption.
The Ring of the Nibelung, whose composition Schopenhauer’s reading effectively bisected, also bears the traces of this conversion. Wotan, the father of the gods, who ultimately loses everything because his will drives him into ever deeper entanglements, is a profoundly Schopenhauerian figure. And in Parsifal, Wagner's last work, everything culminates: the pure fool who becomes "knowing through compassion," who attains redemption not through reason but through empathy—this is Schopenhauer's ethics, condensed into a sacred festival drama that Wagner himself no longer called theater, but ritual. That afternoon in Tribschen, Wagner said: "Parsifal will bring all of this together: the Grail, compassion, renunciation. Western form, Eastern content." It is perhaps the most precise description of what Schopenhauer's philosophy has contributed to German culture.
A Legacy That Resonates
Arthur Schopenhauer died on September 21, 1860, in Frankfurt am Main, where he had spent the last thirty years of his life—as a bachelor, an eccentric, a biting critic of Hegel, accompanied by a number of poodles, all of whom he named Atma, after the Sanskrit word for the world soul. He met the belated fame that finally came to him after decades of neglect with that caustic humor that has made his "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life" one of the most widely read philosophical books in the German language.
His influence on the German mind is immense and extends far beyond Wagner and Nietzsche. Sigmund Freud acknowledged that Schopenhauer's concept of the unconscious will paved the way for his theory of the unconscious. Thomas Mann wrote his great novels in Schopenhauer's shadow. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse—they all drew from this wellspring. And the spread of Buddhism in Germany, which seems so natural to us today, is inconceivable without Schopenhauer: He was the first great European thinker to treat Eastern philosophy not as an exotic curiosity, but as an equal tradition of wisdom.
So if we ask who Arthur Schopenhauer was, the answer is this: He was a thinker who dared to look the world in the face without blinking, and who found not despair in this unflinching examination, but beauty—the beauty of art, the depth of compassion, and that quiet serenity that arises when one ceases to demand from the world what it cannot give. Wagner knew this when he held up that well-worn volume in Tribschen. And perhaps we, too, 238 years after Schopenhauer's birth, should pick up this book once more—not to become pessimistic, but to understand what it means to be human.
Sapere aude!
S.
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