As a radical young thinker in Germany in the early nineteenth century, Arthur Schopenhauer railed against the dominant ideas of the day. He dismissed the pre-eminent German philosopher Georg Hegel as a pompous charlatan, and turned instead to the Enlightenment thinking of Immanuel Kant for inspiration.
Schopenhauer’s central idea was that everything in the world was driven by the Will - broadly, the ceaseless desire to live. But this, he argued, left us swinging pointlessly between suffering and boredom. The only escape from the tyranny of the Will was to be found in art - and particularly in music.
Schopenhauer was influenced by Eastern philosophy, and in turn his own work had an impact well beyond the philosophical tradition in the West, helping to shape the work of artists and writers from Richard Wagner to Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus to Sigmund Freud.
Contributors
A.C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London
Christopher Janaway, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton
Béatrice Han-Pile, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex
