According to Schopenhauer, we have a birth defect: We all think we were born to be happy. Unless we correct this flaw, the world will appear to us as a place full of contradictions.
He was born on February 22, 1788, in the Union of Lithuania.
Schopenhauer left Danzig, which lost its autonomy with the partition of Poland, in 1793 with his family and settled in Hamburg. They open a business there, and Schopenhauer, with his father's support, is enrolled in a private school in Hamburg. Not content with his education here, Schopenhauer asks his father to urgently send him to a high school with better infrastructure. After his father suggested that he go on a general educational trip to European countries, Arthur went to the Netherlands, England, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Silesia, Prussia, and England.
He returns to Hamburg in 1805 and begins an internship at a company called Jenisch.
In June 1807 he became a student of Carl Ludwig Fernows in the city of Gotha.
In the same year, he transferred to a place near Weimar and met Franz Passow, the most important trainer in his life.
He began studying medicine at the University of Göttingen in 1809 but soon switched to philosophy.
He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena on October 18, 1813. One of its first readers was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In 1815, "On Looking and Color", which he wrote focusing on his own knowledge of color, was published. The book has also been described as a correspondence between him and Goethe.
His most important work, The World as Will and Representation, was published and published at the beginning of 1819.
In the same year, he had to abandon a trip to Italy due to the bankruptcy of the bank in which he deposited all his money.
In 1820 he began teaching at the University of Berlin. It was at this time that his famous quarrel with Hegel broke out.
When the payment he demanded from the bankrupt bank in 1821 was realized, he left the university and continued his travels to Italy. Due to his long-lasting health problems, he returned to Berlin in 1825 and started working as an instructor again without any great expectations.
After a long silence, he would try to exist again in the world of philosophy with his work "On Will in Nature" in 1836.
In 1837 Schopenhauer seized upon the collected writings of Immanuel Kant and supported the first edition of the book "The Critique of the Pure Conception of Reason."
Arthur Schopenhauer, while continuing his philosophical studies, suffered from pneumonia.
He died on September 21, 1860, while looking out of his armchair in his beautiful apartment number 16 in Frankfurt.
Important details from his philosophy
The famous German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, by his own definition, is an enemy of man, his only friend is his dog. For Schopenhauer, happiness and pleasure are an illusion that has never been realized and is always far away.
We are born into this world with a desire to enjoy, whereas pleasure is an illusion, only pain and suffering are real. Instead of living with the expectation of living a happy life, we should get used to living with less pain, because the safest way to be happy is not to want to be too happy.
According to Schopenhauer, we have a birth defect: We all think we were born to be happy. Unless we correct this flaw, the world will appear to us as a place full of contradictions. In every step we take, whether we have done something big or small, we realize that the world and human life is not designed to allow us to live happy life.
That is why it is possible to see the same expression, namely disappointment, on the faces of all elderly people.