Schopenhauer: A philosophy for life that prizes beauty and compassion

Schopenhauer: A philosophy for life that prizes beauty and compassion

Steven Gambardella

Schopenhauer’s ideas offer no consolation in themselves, there is no redemption in his world view, only relief. Instead of placing hope in a God or progress, Schopenhauer believed that we should look in two directions for peace of mind: compassion and art. To understand how he came to this conclusion, it’s worth unpacking his philosophy.

But what if we somehow had access to the world as it really is? What is outside our perception of the world, outside our senses and even outside of space and time and cause and effect? Schopenhauer calls it the “noumenal” aspect of the world (noumenal meaning “what is outside of experience”).

In short there is the universe in-itself and the universe for human beings. This is why Schopenhauer’s named his book The World as Will and Representation.

Schopenhauer believed that since our intellect imposes difference on the universe, the universe outside of our intellect must be an undifferentiated oneness.

'Materialism ... has failed, merely because it has not adequately known the matter out of which it thought to construct the world, and has therefore dealt not with matter itself, but with a false conception of it devoid of qualities.'
  –  Schopenhauer

'[M]aterialism ... is the philosophy of the subject who forgets himself in his calculation.'
  – Schopenhauer