Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a German philosopher born in Danzig, the son of a merchant and of a novelist. His main work, The World as Will and Representation, published in 1818 when he was thirty, argued that the reality behind appearances is a blind, striving will and that life is therefore suffering, from which art, compassion and asceticism offer the only relief. It was ignored for decades while he lectured to empty rooms in Berlin, deliberately scheduling his classes against Hegel's. Fame came late, with the essays and aphorisms of Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851. Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Freud and Thomas Mann all read him closely.