SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR. – Philosopher, b. at Danzig on 22 Feb. 1788, d. at Frankfort-on-the-Main on 21 Sept. 1860. Educated in France and England, he spent part of his adolescence travelling with his parents in Europe. At about eighteen he was attached to a commercial house in Hamburg, where his father Heinrich Floris, a well-to-do liberal merchant, had taken up residence since Danzig had passed to the Prussians. After his father’s death (probably by suicide), he was permitted to resume his interrupted studies and, with his mother Johanna Trosiener, a noted writer, he moved to Weimar. Here, through his mother’s social circle, he met Wieland and Goethe, with whom he shared an interest in the theory of colours. At Göttingen and Berlin his philosophical teachers were Schulze (q.v.) and Fichte (q.v.). At this time, both in the Indian sacred texts translated by Anquetil Duperron and in Plato and Kant, he sought grounds for the expression of a pre-existent pessimism (q.v.). He took his doctorate at Jena in 1813 after a period of studious seclusion in the town of Rudolstadt, deliberately chosen for its lack of particular attractions and its pacifist atmosphere; then, for about five years, he devoted himself to his principal work in Dresden. In 1818–19 he travelled in Italy: at Venice, where he stayed longest, he made plans for marriage, but abruptly abandoned them on becoming jealous of G. Byron. Having qualified in philosophy (venia legendi), he attempted to teach in Berlin in rivalry with Hegel (q.v.). He met with no success either as a teacher or as an author, and this was confirmed in the years that followed a further journey to Italy (1822–23). In 1831 he retired to Frankfort, where in his last decade the long-desired fame came to him. He died, unprepared and unwilling, of a sudden chest ailment.
Works: Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichendem Grunde (Rudolstadt 1813; doctoral thesis). Here he distinguishes the principle of cause from the principle of reason, presenting the latter as an a priori norm of our representations, whose connection according to four forms constitutes the world. Fichtean idealism of Kantian doctrine is developed here. Über das Sehen und die Farben (Leipzig 1816): the outcome of S.’s conversations with Goethe on the theory of colours. A physiological explanation is given of these, in which, as in the previous work, the realistic presupposition of an intellect, in Kantian fashion, separated from sensible intuition is excluded. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, with a Kritik der kantischen Philosophie appended (ibid. 1818): his principal work. It consists of four books, the first two expounding S.’s epistemological-metaphysical doctrine and the last two his soteriological doctrine. The world, which is a phenomenon (q.v.) of representational character (Bk. I), is the representation of the blind noumenal Will (Bk. II); it can be transcended, in the order of knowledge, by aesthetic intuition which overleaps its principle (Bk. III), and, in the order of the Will, by the renunciatory conversion of the latter (Bk. IV). This work was enlarged in the 2nd ed. (ibid. 1844) by a volume of Supplements. Über den Willen in der Natur (Frankfort-on-the-Main 1836): here S. expounds his cosmological doctrine, which in part reprises the argument of Bk. II of his principal work, and among other themes also deals with magic. Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (ibid. 1841): a) Preisschrift über die Freiheit des Willens, a vigorous critique of phenomenal human action which, according to S., sequitur esse; b) Über die Grundlage der Moral; in antithesis to Kantian ethical rationalism (which he greatly misunderstood), S. seeks to vindicate the spontaneity of virtuous action by grounding it in the feeling of compassion. Parerga und Paralipomena (2 vols., Berlin 1851): a collection of minor treatises of a popular and expository character. Of a similar kind are the Neue Paralipomena, published after the philosopher’s death by E. Grisebach, who edited the posthumous Schopenhauerian manuscripts: A. S. Handschriftlicher Nachlass (4 vols., 2nd ed., Leipzig 1895–96).
In the conflict he suffered between contemplative vocation and sensual ardor, S. recognizes the very drama of the universe, which is representation and will. Will is a turbid, painful craving; representation, which culminates in philosophy, aesthetically intuitive in the objectivity of the Absolute, is in itself clear light (Die Welt, I, § 15; II, 17, 34). Yet such is not the representation that reveals things and individuals. Discovered through a process of analogy by us, who grasp ourselves in inner experience and immediately as will, they are nothing but the correlate of our constitutive deficit (ibid., I, § 18-19): the knowledge we have of them and of the world in which they belong is therefore mere illusion. By identifying phenomenon with illusion, S. employs, in certain respects, Kantian phenomenalism, which, in full divergence from the idealists Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, he considers founded on the basic certainty of the noumenon (v.). The unknowable noumenon is precisely the being that underlies knowing: it is Will in its original irrational dynamism. Although, thus understood, it is not a subject (v.), S. gives it an object (v.) in presenting it as a will-to-live (Wille zu leben) that contrives the means for its realization (ibid., I, § 35). Here S. follows the schemas of Neoplatonic emanationism, tracing it back to the traditional Plato of archetypal ideas. In these, Will, projecting itself into the many, fixes their models beyond time, and has its first stage of objectification; then comes the passage from typical ideas to individuals (second stage) by virtue of a fourfold principle of sufficient reason: principium essendi (space and time); principium fiendi (cause and effect); principium cognoscendi (principle and consequence); principium agendi (motive. Cf. Über die vierfache Wurzel, § 46). All that falls within this framework, which is like the implication upon which Will builds the edifice of its definitive objectification, is nullifying and inconsistent: a worthy work of blind creation. Naturally, there is no exception for man, who, individuated in space and time, acts on the basis of motives. In conformity with this, S. devalues and denies both history, devoid of true end and progress (Die Welt, I, § 38), and the virtue of works, reducible to far-sighted egoism (ibid., § 70). Value and virtue enter the scene only when the egoistic illusion withdraws and, in withdrawing, brings about the simultaneous disappearance of the individual and action. Indeed, the maxim of right that constitutes for S. the first chapter of morality, reads negatively: neminem laede. The ethical imperative that is added to it, completing and surpassing it—imo omnes quantum potes iuva (Über die Grundl. der Mor., 17)—affirms only the positivity of a feeling that negates reason. This feeling is compassion (Mitleid). In compassion is pity (confused and conflated by S. with the Greek *agápē* due to his inexperience of genuine sociability [ibid., 18]), the man awakened from the deception of individuation lives the pain of others noumenally and precisely as his own. S., however, cannot explain how such an awakening occurs, incompatible as it is with man as such because he is phenomenon; he therefore resorts, in his own way, to another Christian concept: that of Grace. Authentic, non-obligatory virtue is a true miracle of Grace (of Grace that is immanent to us [Die Welt, I, § 70]) and is not the only miracle, nor the last. The principal miracle is asceticism (beyond both good and evil) in life, leading to the conversion of the Will, which, abdicating itself as Noluntas, leaves us clear knowers; free even from the compassion of morality (ibid., 7, § 68; II, § 48). And beyond this miracle, there is holiness, and then, though not lasting, the miracle of aesthetic contemplation (on whose plane the arts arise). In it, the subject crosses beyond phenomenon and, reaching beyond the realm of concepts governed by the principle of reason, participates in the eternal idea (ibid., I, § 36). In this regard, S. speaks of a loss in the object of individuation that reaches it (empirical individuality already given as exclusive), but in effect his Platonism is positively fruitful, in a mystical sense, both from the gnoseological letter that depresses it and from the irrationalism that formally subordinates it, sweeping away concepts and values. S. aspires (and this is his true, though implicit, demand) to found a mysticism within pure reason that provides the measure for judging empirical worldly reason as deceptive and blind. On this basis, S. seeks to reinstate as persons the subjects denied as phenomenal individuals, making idea (v.) in the intelligible world. In restoring freedom and responsibility in this way, he shows, moreover, how above the Brahmanic and Buddhist negations, ascetic Nothingness must be filled with absolute positivity (Die Welt, I, at the end). All this proves how certain contemporary nihilistic metaphysics, clearly inspired by Schopenhauer despite the founder’s disclaimers (Heidegger), is defined within the limits of S. (cf. T. Moretti Costanzi, *L'ascetica di Heidegger*, Rome 1949; id., *Circa un giudizio dello Heidegger sulla mia «Ascetica di Heidegger»*, in *Teoresi*, 6 [1951], pp. 11-17).
S. was awaited but perhaps was not so except in relation to the pre-Christian and anti-Christian God (the “Jewish God,” as he called it) established by worldly humanism. From the intention to condemn this impiety in the name of Christianity, S. was led to contradict it with his pessimistic metaphysics. His thought is substantially a Gnostic heresy (cf. Ch. Renouvier, *Schop. et la métaphysique du pessimisme*, in *L'année phil.*, 1892).
Teodorico Moretti Costanzi
**SCHÖPFER, AEMILIAN.** – Tirolese politician and sociologist, b. April 29, 1858, in Bressanone, d. March 24, 1936, in Innsbruck.
Ordained priest in 1880, from 1887 to 1913 he was professor of Sacred Scripture and Oriental languages at the Bressanone Seminary. As active as he was, he sought to organize various social and cultural works and to spread sound doctrine through the press. In Bressanone he founded the *Brixener Chronik*, then the Catholic-Political Press Association (*Catholic-Polit. Pressverein*), in 1892 the *Tiroler Volksbote* journal, in 1907 the "Tirolia" publishing house with its own printing press in Innsbruck; in 1913 the *Alpen-länderbote* journal and in 1918 the weekly *Neues Reich*. Leader of the Christian Social Party, S. was a member of the Tyrolean Council (*Tiroler Landtag*, 1895–1927), and from 1897 to 1923 also of the Imperial and then National Council of Austria (*Reichsrat*, then *Nationalrat*). He distinguished himself especially in the field of agrarian policy.
Writings: *Geschichte des Alten Testaments* (1893, 6th ed. 1923); *Bibel und Wissenschaft* (1896, 2nd ed. 1932); *Schutz dem Bauernstand* (1898); *Verschuldungsfreiheit oder Schuldenfreiheit* (1904, 2nd ed. 1906); *Monarchie oder Republik* (1919); *Th. V. Aquin als Bahnbrecher der Wissenschaft* (1925).