Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is a contrarian: he says the opposite of what one would like a philosopher to say, which makes him an enduring, even endearing, source of fascination. His principal contrarian message is ‘pessimism’. Among major Western philosophers, he is the only self-declared pessimist. Life, he argues, is a kind of ‘error or mistake’, the world is something which ‘ought not to exist’ (WR II, pp. 576, 605). Given such an outlook, it is no surprise that he has quite a lot to say about tragedy.

Schopenhauer wrote only one major book: The World as Will and Representation, which appeared in 1818. In 1844 he produced a second edition, doubling the size of the work by adding a second volume comprising four supplements to each of the four books of the first edition. I shall refer to the 1818 version (i.e., Volume I of the 1844 edition) as ‘the main work’.

SCHOPENHAUER’S GENERAL PHILOSOPHY

The first sentence of Book I of the main work claims that ‘[t]he world is my representation’. With, in fact, considerable justification, Schopenhauer believed that he was the only one of the post-Kantian German philosophers who had remained true to the metaphysics of Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’. Following Kant, Schopenhauer argues that the natural world, the world of space and time, is ‘ideal’, a mere construction of the human mind. Metaphysically speaking, it is a ‘dream’ (WR I, pp. 11, 314, 390, 411).