Germany, 1788–1860
Arthur Schopenhauer
German pessimist who saw a blind, striving 'Will' as the engine of the world, and pointed to art and compassion as its rare sources of relief.
Arthur Schopenhauer in 2 lines
Every Arthur Schopenhauer passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
“Compassion is the basis of all morality.”
Where Arthur Schopenhauer lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
You have been alone long enough that you cannot tell which it is.
You are reducing your exposure to other people's availability. The danger is armour that hardens into something you cannot remove.
A stranger needs help and you have somewhere to be.
You are admitting the size of what you actually give rather than inflating it. The danger is that honesty about limits slowly widens them.
You are deciding whether to bring someone into this world.
You are taking seriously that no one asked to be here. The cost is a logic that, followed strictly, ends everything.
Reading Arthur Schopenhauer today
Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in 1788–1860, from Germany — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Arthur Schopenhauer is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 2 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Albert Camus — France/Algeria, 1913–1960
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- David Hume — Scotland, 1711–1776
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Hannah Arendt — Germany & United States, 1906–1975
Argues the same cases
Aristotle, David Hume, Henry David Thoreau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Epictetus, Jeremy Bentham take positions on the same dilemmas as Arthur Schopenhauer, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.