A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories)

by Nigel Warburton

No other philosopher has given such a central place to the arts, so it is not surprising that Schopenhauer is popular with creative people of various kinds. Composers and musicians love him because he believed that music was the most important of all the arts. His ideas have also appealed to novelists including Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy. Dylan Thomas even wrote a poem ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ which was inspired by Schopenhauer's description of the World as Will. Schopenhauer didn't just describe reality and our relation to it. He also had views about how we should live. Once you realize that we are all part of one energy force, and that individual people exist only at the level of the World as Representation, this should change what you do. For Schopenhauer, harming other people is a kind of self-injury. This is the foundation of all morality. If I kill you, I destroy a part of the life force that joins us all together. When someone harms another person it is like a snake biting its tail without knowing that it is sinking its fangs into its own flesh. So the basic morality that Schopenhauer taught was one of compassion. Properly understood, other people aren't external to me. I care what happens to you because in a way you are part of what we are all part of: the World as Will. That's Schopenhauer's official moral position. It is questionable, though, whether he achieved anything like this degree of concern fo...