Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860)

German philosopher. His The World as Will and Idea (1818), inspired by Immanuel Kant and ancient Hindu philosophy, expounded an atheistic and pessimistic world view: an irrational will is considered as the inner principle of the world, producing an ever-frustrated cycle of desire, of which the only escape is aesthetic contemplation or absorption into nothingness.

Having postulated a world of suffering and disappointment, he based his ethics on compassion. His notion of an irrational force at work in humans strongly influenced both the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the founder of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud. The theory also struck a responsive chord in the composer Richard Wagner, the German novelist Thomas Mann, and the English writer Thomas Hardy.