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"Everything is will," tells us Arthur Schopenhauer (1778, Dantzig - 1860, Frankfurt) studied philosophy at the University of Jena. He was a champion of deep pessimism.
His mother was a writer of some fame who organized literary meetings, which allowed him to meet personalities such as Goethe.
Schopenhauer was the first great Western philosopher who brought the thoughts of his time into contact with those of the Far East. He has influences from Kant, Plato, Spinoza, Baltasar Gracián and Hindu literature.
He influenced Richard Wagner through his book The World as Will and Representation. And he also had a decisive impact on Nietzsche. Schopenhauer was a defender of animal rights and free will.
His most famous work, The World as a Will to Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), constitutes from a literary point of view a masterpiece of the German language of all times.
In it, Schopenhauer presents a philosophical system that included a single "metaphysics" as the sole foundation of reality. The main characteristic of all things, including human beings, is "will", which is blind, irrational, absurd and the source of immense suffering in the world.
Everything is will, Schopenhauer points out, to talk about individual and collective conflicts:
"The will is the fundamental principle of being and is above thinking and feeling as an autonomous driving force."
His philosophy culminates with the Buddhist ideal of nirvana, absolute serenity, which annihilates "the will to live." He also stressed the importance of aesthetic contemplation in art and moral compassion as a means of escape from suffering.
Schopenhauer sees in India the voice of essential wisdom with an uncontaminated tradition, in the face of the false progress of European modernity:
"Man must free himself from his painful and disappointing desires and seek true wisdom in meditation in an ascetic form."
This fascination with India and China had an impact on European youth. This mythical India will populate the imagination of European culture and become a cliché, which, by the way, should not be underestimated either from a sociological or philosophical point of view.
The most suggestive representative will be Mircea Eliade, who personifies the young and restless European who sees India as a path of initiation. On a literary level, we find it in the novel The Razor's Edge, by W. Somersten Maughan, a writer who will explicitly recognize the great influence that Schopenhauer has had on him.
Philosophy, starting with Schopenhauer, will reflect on eastern wisdom, basically, that which is transmitted through Vedanta and, secondarily, through Buddhism. Although, later, interest will shift from India to China and Japan. An interest in hermeneutics and the history of Eastern religions will also arise.
Surely motivated by his contacts with Eastern philosophy, compassion towards animals is so closely linked to goodness of character that it can be safely stated that someone who is cruel to animals cannot be a good person (coincidences are observed with the thought of Kant).
Unbounded compassion for all living beings is the firmest and surest proof of good moral conduct. Neither the world is a contraption -Machwerk- for our use nor are animals a factory product for our use.
Man does not owe compassion - Erbarmen - to animals, but justice. Man has made the Earth a hell for animals.
Peter Singer, Australian philosopher, (1946) says: "All creatures were created to provide man with food, skins, to be martyred and exterminated. For these creatures all humans are Nazis; for animals life is an eternal Treblinka".
Pessimism, introspection and willpower are present in his ideology:
Schopenhauer declared himself passionate about the Spanish language, its authors and proverbs, as witnessed by the approximately thirty books in Spanish present in his private library. According to a letter addressed to the editor of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Schopenhauer began to learn Spanish in 1825: "Since 1825 I have been dedicated to the study of Spanish and now I read his excellent edition of Calderón without any difficulty."
In fact, his philosophy has much in common with Calderón's philosophical dramas Life is a Dream and The Constant Prince, which Goethe also admired.
Among the authors he admired was Baltasar Gracián (Belmonte de Gracián, 1601 - Tarazona, 1658), Jesuit and writer of the Golden Age, whom he considered his favorite author "and one of the first in the world."
His admiration for Gracián reached such a point that he set out to translate Gracián's Oracle manual y arte de prudencia into German, with the title Handorakel, and which he translated and published between 1828 and 1832. Regarding El criticón, he praised the work as "the most greatest and most beautiful allegory that has ever been written."
Among the books in Spanish found in his personal library, are the following editions by Baltasar Gracián: Manual Oracle and Art of Prudence; The hero; The politician Don Fernando the Catholic; The discreet
These are Gracián's phrases:
Baltasar Gracián's thinking is pessimistic. The world is a hostile and deceptive space, where appearances prevail over virtue and truth. Man is a weak, interested and malicious being.
A good part of his works are concerned with providing the reader with skills and resources that allow him to navigate the pitfalls of life. To do this, you must know how to assert yourself, be prudent and take advantage of wisdom based on experience.
All of this has meant that Gracián is considered a precursor of existentialism and postmodernism. He influenced French freethinkers such as La Rochefoucauld.
His work The World as Will and Representation earned him recognition in philosophical and cultural circles. Before Richard Wagner could finish his Gesamtkunstwerk and see how it was performed, a friend introduced him to Schopenhauer's work (1819), which caused him a deep shock. Wagner commented that "it had the same effect on him as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."
He read the book four times and said it expressed the powers of intuition and the irrational, which Bergson, Freud and others would explore in the following century.
