Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig in 1788 into a wealthy merchant family; his father, who wanted him to go into business, took him travelling all over Europe. After his father's death he gave up commerce and went to university to study philosophy. His mother was a well-known novelist; their relations were bitter, and in the end they broke off contact. At thirty he published his main work, The World as Will and Representation, which almost no one read. As an unsalaried lecturer at Berlin he deliberately scheduled his lectures at the same hour as Hegel's; only a handful of students came, and he soon gave up teaching. He then lived alone in Frankfurt for nearly thirty years on his father's legacy, with a poodle for company. Only in his sixties, with the publication of his essays Parerga and Paralipomena, did he at last become famous. He held Eastern philosophy, above all Buddhism and the Upanishads, in the highest esteem.