David Bather Woods. Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist. University of Chicago Press, 2025. $29.99. 296 pp.
Arthur Schopenhauer would have done pretty well on Twitter. He spent his life filling notebooks with his observations and doubtlessly would have broadcast them far and wide had he been given the chance. His caustic wit, his penchant for aphorisms, his enigmatic mixture of views progressive and retrograde, his deep insight, his self-aggrandizing spirit, his anti-Christian tirades, and above all his misanthropy gave him what we might call today Main Character Energy.
In his new biography of Schopenhauer, scholar David Bather Woods refrains for the most part from such present-oriented judgments, but it’s hard to avoid the comparisons as one looks at our social media landscape and sees a crowd of people convinced of their own greatness, turning strife and pessimism into profit. Schopenhauer’s legacy was broad, but the philosophers who could be identified most closely with him today are the anti-natalists like David Benatar, who generally agree with Schopenhauer that life is a misfortune and that we are better off not being born. To counter these sorts of claims, Christians must understand the seductive power of philosophical pessimism and offer a different story in return.
Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in Danzig, Germany, to well-to-do parents. His mother Johanna, a writer and artist, was far more famous and well-regarded than he was during her lifetime, and his grating personality led to a twelve-year estrangement at one point. She wrote to him in 1807: “You are not an evil human [...] but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.” Johanna wrote these words, Woods argues, out of genuine concern for her son's well-being—she foresaw that his disposition and attitude would condemn him to a lonely life of suffering.
His father Heinrich Floris long envisioned that his son would become a merchant and worked diligently to set him up for such a career, even luring young Arthur away from his Latin studies with the promise of a grand family tour of Europe. He might have gone through with his father’s wishes had Heinrich Floris not died when Arthur was seventeen, removing a great deal of pressure to pursue a more lucrative career and leaving an inheritance that allowed Arthur to muddle along for years without engaging in especially remunerative work.
Heinrich Floris’s death was especially tragic—and meaningful for Arthur Schopenhauer’s later work—because his entire family suspected that he committed suicide. While Woods is careful to not overread the implications of this incident in Schopenhauer’s philosophical work, there are hints (in particular Schopenhauer’s insistence that a parent’s duty to their child overrules any right they may have to kill themselves) suggesting that his father’s death was momentous not only in shaping the course of his life but the content of his thought.
“Death,” wrote Schopenhauer, “is the great opportunity not to be I any longer.” Schopenhauer drew on both Western philosophers (especially Plato and Kant) as well as Eastern religious texts to formulate his thoughts on the suffering that life entails and was one of the first Western philosophers to explicitly integrate Hindu and Buddhist beliefs into his writings. He explicitly saw death as something to be embraced with gratitude, since it frees the dead person from the indignities of life. His sister Adele wrote to him once that she would be grateful to cholera if it killed her and implied that he had shared similar thoughts with her. Schopenhauer had two children as the result of affairs, but neither survived infancy; Woods suggests that he “may have regarded the brevity of his own daughter’s life as a kind of mercy or even a sign of nascent wisdom.” He argued that while no aspect of a person’s consciousness or self-aware existence would continue after death, their “will to live” would endure as it was subsumed into the vast darkness of the universe whence it came.
Recognizing that his deeply pessimistic philosophy might lead someone to conclude that suicide was logical, Schopenhauer nonetheless argued against such a choice. The stigma and taboo around suicide was offensive to him and (drawing heavily from Hume) he spared no opportunity in bashing Christians for heaping shame upon the families of those who killed themselves. (He had a particular distaste, it seems, for Anglicans; Woods traces this to a miserable few months he spent at an English boarding school during his family’s grand tour of Europe.) For Schopenhauer, while the despair that leads one to contemplate suicide is in fact a necessary insight, following through with the act is “like a sick person who, having started undergoing a painful operation that could cure him completely, does not allow it to be completed and would rather stay sick.”
He did not have to worry about inspiring a massive wave of self-harm across Germany, however, because hardly anyone read his initial works. His mother’s travelogues outsold the first edition of his masterpiece The World as Will and Representation, leading to no small amount of consternation on his part. When he sought a teaching position in Berlin, he arrogantly attempted to upstage no lesser personality than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (whom Schopenhauer considered an intellectual lightweight) by requesting that his lectures be scheduled at the same time as Hegel’s. Schopenhauer only had five students attend his lectures. He dropped out of teaching, spending the rest of his life wandering and writing.
It was only late in life that he began to find the acclaim that he thought he deserved all along, primarily through a core group of “disciples” who began to publicize his work and respond to it. He submitted essays to both the Norwegian Royal Society of Sciences and the Danish Royal Society of Sciences; he won the former competition but was denied the prize in the latter despite being the only entrant. He later published both essays as The Two Foundational Problems of Ethics and was petty enough to note in the title page of his book that the second essay was not awarded a prize.
In addition to his lack of personal charm, Schopenhauer’s writing was about what you might expect from a man who wrote a book called The Art of Being Right. Despite his opinion that Africans were less intelligent than other races, he found the Atlantic slave trade a damning indictment against Christianity. He held that women were inferior to men in just about every way and suggested a bizarre system of “tetragamy” that involved two men jointly marrying two women (one older, one younger.) He was a passionate advocate for animal rights but believed that widespread animal cruelty was a result of malign Jewish influence in European culture. It is easy to walk away from The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist and conclude that Schopenhauer preferred the company of dogs (in particular, his two poodles) to that of people.
The one drawback of Woods’s book is that he does not ever mention Schopenhauer’s interest in “animal magnetism” or other aspects of parapsychology that were wildly popular in the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer seemed to believe that magical phenomena were explainable as manifestations of a person’s will. In his essay “Animal Magnetism and Magic” he found the Church’s opposition to magic another sign of Christianity’s foolishness.
Schopenhauer influenced philosophers, artists, and physicists alike, but in our time “this misanthropic sage of Frankfort,” as one of his admirers described him, lives on through pessimism both lowbrow and high. While formally antinatalist philosophers are relatively few, at least one terrorist attack has been linked to antinatalism. More important, a growing number of young people are reporting in polls that they are reluctant to have children because of climate change.
The philosopher most closely linked to Schopenhauer, Freidrich Nietzsche, certainly seems to be the inspiration for what feels like a massive army of internet trolls broadcasting their own versions of Schopenhauer’s views on women and other racial groups. In the nineteenth century, you had to be a genius to get away with extreme pessimism; nowadays all you need is an internet connection and a big enough chip on your shoulder.
The ease with which people slide into pessimism on social media is in many ways a function of the technologies to which we have access; in a more just world the people espousing a love for Hitler or Stalin solely for the transgressive vibes would be scribbling in notebooks for decades on end with only a poodle for a companion, like Schopenhauer. The perverse way the attention economy rewards the worst of human behavior suggests that there are ways to keep people from outright nihilism.
Woods gives us plenty of reason to doubt that Schopenhauer ever lived up to the conclusions of his philosophy, and we should find hope in the fact that it is actually quite difficult to truly embrace pessimism. Like flowers growing towards the sun, we cannot help but long for the light no matter what direction it is coming from. Schopenhauer’s comment likening suicide to abandoning a lifesaving surgery halfway through the case points towards the universal truth that after perceiving the emptiness of a world without God’s love and the horror of our own sin, we can be awakened to a new purposefulness when we realize that no amount of philosophical speculation can wrench away our desire to live forever.
In a world where an endless array of pleasures is constantly trying to pull us in—and one of the most tempting is a world where we might think ourselves authorities on the Art of Being Right dozens of times a day—the Bible’s answer to pessimism is simple. Job’s cry of anguish leads us all to say, if we’re being honest, that sometimes it feels like it would be better to die like Schopenhauer’s children than to live a life full of suffering. Yet that suffering can be meaningful to the degree that it is bound up in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The goodness of God is available to us every moment of every day, and we can cooperate with God’s grace to help advance His kingdom through actions large and small.
Arthur Schopenhauer said that simply being transported to a better world would not make us happy: “We would also need to be fundamentally altered so that we would no longer be what we are and would instead become what we are not.” In 1 Corinthians 15:51, Paul says: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” The mystery of our transformation is that those of us who die in Christ will all be fundamentally altered, but we will still each be ourselves in some wonderful continuity that can only be analogized as a tiny seed transforming into a full-grown tree. Our rejection of the fear of death is not based on a monistic will to live, but a power working in us that brings life out of death.