Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was the son of a Danzig merchant who left him independent, and he spent his life in lodgings in Frankfurt with a poodle, writing against Hegel, whom he scheduled his Berlin lectures to compete with and lost to. The World as Will and Representation of 1818 holds that the thing in itself behind appearances is a blind, striving will, that life is therefore suffering, and that art, compassion and ascetic denial are the only escapes; it was ignored for thirty years and then made him famous. Studies in Pessimism is the selection of the late essays that Bailey Saunders made for English readers. Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Freud and Wittgenstein all read him.