David Bather Woods

Few are persuaded by Schopenhauer’s argument that ours is the worst of all possible worlds. In this paper, I propose and defend an alternative reading of Schopenhauer’s argument. According to my reading, the argument has considerable polemical force against Leibnizian optimism independently of its positive success. Its force lies in its implicit proposal of worldly sustainability as a measure of worldly perfection. Worldly sustainability is the degree by which a possible world can tolerate alterations for the worse without ending. There is a natural connection between this measure of worldly perfection, on the one hand, and the inhabitants of the world, on the other, insofar as these inhabitants have an indirect interest in the global degree of worldly sustainability through their own will to exist. Measuring worldly perfection by the degree of existential sustainability is consistent with Schopenhauer’s general tendency to adopt the perspective of beings in the world when making evaluations of the world, always to the detriment of optimism. Regardless of whether Schopenhauer’s argument successfully inverts the thesis of Leibnizian optimism, therefore, it poses a serious and substantial challenge to the worldly values on which such optimism is based.

– An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism. – Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more. A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. In this engaging philosophical biography, David Bather Woods reevaluates Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher’s relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. Bather Woods weaves together Schopenhauer’s ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. In doing so, this book answers some of life’s most challenging questions about how to deal with pain and loss, and how to live with ourselves and each other. Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn’t give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer’s life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) lived through an era of great political turmoil, but previous assessments of his political thought have portrayed him as a pessimistic observer with no constructive solutions to offer. By assembling and contextualizing Schopenhauer's dispersed comments on political matters, this book reveals that he developed a distinct conception of politics. In opposition to rising ideological movements such as nationalism or socialism, Schopenhauer denied that politics can ever bring about universal emancipation or fraternal unity. Instead, he viewed politics as a tool for mitigating rather than resolving the conflicts of a fundamentally imperfect world. Jakob Norberg's fascinating book reconstructs Schopenhauer's political ideas and shows how they relate to the dominant debates and trends during the period in which he lived. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.