Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher, born in 1788 in Danzig into a wealthy merchant family. In his central work, The World as Will and Representation (1819), he argued that the world is driven by a blind, striving force he called "will," and that ordinary experience is our mental "representation" of it. He held that this striving produces suffering, and pointed to aesthetic contemplation and ascetic self-denial as forms of relief—ideas shaped by his reading of Hindu and Buddhist texts. Largely ignored during much of his life, he gained wide recognition in his final years and influenced later thinkers, composers, and writers. He died in Frankfurt in 1860.