Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist

by David Bather Woods

An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more.
 
A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. In this engaging philosophical biography, David Bather Woods reevaluates Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher’s relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. Bather Woods weaves together Schopenhauer’s ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. In doing so, this book answers some of life’s most challenging questions about how to deal with pain and loss, and how to live with ourselves and each other.
 
Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn’t give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer’s life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography, Nonfiction

296 pages, Hardcover

Published November 18, 2025

Reviews

[ritareadthat · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Ordinary people saw the misanthrope in him. But, however little he thought of people, he felt for them; he was full of compassion.'

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher best known for his book The World as Will and Representation(1818). His pessimistic approach to philosophy, based on the insatiable power of "will," has been the foundation for innumerable philosophers' theories and inspiration for artists that followed in his wake. His writings were shunned, unprofitable, and ignored for the majority of his lifetime; fame found him as his days on this earth were drawing to a close.

David Bather Woods, a Schopenhauer scholar, utilizes an exhaustive amalgamation of historical texts and resources to compile Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist. His expertise on Schopenhauer is unquestionable.

This book is so extensive and thorough that I actually read it twice, once in December and then a second time, slowly, throughout January. The first read-through I highlighted quotes and meaningful passages; the second read was for full comprehension. That second time is key. I could meditatively quote this book for the rest of my days and not grow weary of it.

This book resonated with me in many ways. I ask you to return to the quote from the beginning of this book review and think this: aren't we all misunderstood? Isn't it possible for us to be multiple things at once? I, like Schopenhauer, am not a fan of other human beings. Call me an introvert, neurodivergent (the verdict is still out on this one), or what you will, but it's my truth. I enjoy solitude. However, I, also like Schopenhauer, have great compassion for my fellow humans. In concise terms, Schopenhauer may have been a cranky old bastard, but he still had love and compassion for his fellow man and animal. This is evident in his desire to understand the minds of others that walked alongside him on this earth.

There isn't any criticism of this book. David's research is impeccable, and his intricate way of devising each chapter is admirable. David constructs each chapter by depicting a portion of Schopenhauer's life, expressing a topic central to that time period, and then explicitly exploring that topic, citing various examples in both Schopenhauer's beliefs and life and of other philosophers from history. It is masterfully executed.

Some of these topics include:
- Schopenhauer's desire for solitude and his conflict with worldliness.
- His witness of human punishment via imprisonment and execution, and his own punishment at school—the effects of solitary confinement he witnessed in prison systems.
- Su*cide - shame and blame. How a family member's death shaped his life to come.
- Madness, depression, paranoia, asylums—he visited psychiatric hospitals to better understand
- His world of philosophical ideas and asceticism; his experiments as a lecturer.
- Familial love, romantic love, sexual desire, and friendship
- His views on the opposite sex
- Ethics
- Photography and art, fame
- Death

And trust me, even if you aren't well-versed in deep philosophy, you will still benefit from this if you have any interest in the topic. I had only heard of Schopenhauer in passing prior to this, and my journey into philosophy is only a few years old, but there is definitely meaning and understanding to be acquired here for the newcomer and expert alike.

"Death is not something that happens to us, but rather the end of all our happenings."

[Brock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philosophers are rarely regarded as desirable house guests or sought-after company. Few find overt erudition, naval-gazing, and ceaseless pontificating on death attractive qualities in someone they would call a companion. Perhaps the quintessential example of such an unpleasant, yet world-class thinker is the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Branded as “The Great Pessimist,” Schopenhauer’s unsettling, bleak ideas came packaged with a haggard physiognomy and an infamously anti-social temperament. But beyond his bitter reputation lies an immense, enduring legacy of theories, concepts, and universal advice that influenced literary giants such as Leo Tolstoy and Samuel Beckett, the iconic composer Richard Wagner, and philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche.

Fighting for attention within a crowded Germanic tradition full of heavyweight thinkers, Schopenhauer has long been overdue for a biography that revisits the complexities of his life, as well as the enduring relevance of his often misunderstood ideas. In just under 300 pages, David Bather Woods delivers precisely that in his latest book, "Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist". In contrast to the pessimist’s cantankerous, nihilistic reputation, Woods presents Schopenhauer in a new light, exploring his compassion, clairvoyance, and surprising sensitivity. Adequately paced and brimming with insightful, lucid explanations, his biography offers a valuable, entertaining introduction for curious readers.

Woods opens with a thoughtful introduction, making light of why Schopenhauer’s epigrams often provoke laughter. In fact, much of the pessimist’s essays are filled with sardonic quotes, such as “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom,” that provoke nervous laughter at the audacity and accuracy of the statement. Wood assures readers that despite Schopenhauer’s unsettling comedic comments, we are sure to find a recurring theme of love—in various forms—within his writings.

Arthur Schopenhauer was raised in a wealthy, cultured family led by polyglot, highly educated parents. Following in the mercantile footsteps of his father, Schopenhauer’s direction and perspective were irrevocably altered by his father’s sudden suicide. Woods uses this event as a vantage point for exploring several of the German’s positions regarding suicide, sympathy, and punishment. This tragedy dissolved the burden of his father’s vocational demands, granting Schopenhauer the freedom to pursue academic study. His exceptionally educated mother also took the opportunity to pivot and launch a successful literary career—an early example of the many complex relationships Schopenhauer would have with women throughout his life.

Woods’ biography runs the gamut—from Schopenhauer’s disputed views on homosexuality, to his degrading essay on women, to his wacky proposal for regulating polyamory—astutely exposing the contradictions and contentious positions that permeated his worldview. This includes his reluctant reverence for the precocious sculptor Elisabet Ney, whose skilled bust of Schopenhauer astonished him and prompted a backhanded compliment: “It seems to me more and more unbelievable that you are a woman every day.” It’s hard to believe that the same man who compassionately condemned the slave trade and cruel American prison systems could simultaneously hold misogynistic views toward women, in spite of having an esteemed mother; but much of Schopenhauer’s compassion was grounded in his metaphysics rather than in ethical reasoning.

Schopenhauer unabashedly held contempt for society, making him an unlikable and complicated candidate for sympathy, but it was this innate disposition toward solitude that led to his most universally beneficial principle: a staunch advocacy for thinking for oneself—or Selbstdenken in German. He believed that true knowledge lies not in books or in the passive consumption of others’ ideas, but in personal experience followed by cognitive digestion and contemplation. As Woods explains: “Thinking for yourself produces the best-quality knowledge, Schopenhauer argued, because true wisdom is not simply a matter of possessing all the correct facts.”

Woods’ biography is a delightful read that peels back the layers of the German philosopher’s tangled life, revealing his humanity with each anecdote and intellectual digression. He anchors each chapter with a particular area of focus before effortlessly floating across timelines, momentous relationships, and chance encounters that helped shape Schopenhauer’s influential theories. Condensed to an approachable length, his work serves both to entice new learners and to inform loyal Schopenhauerians of the relevant, enduring ideas of The Great Pessimist.

[Doctor Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schopenhauer is one of the odd figures out in a lot of Anglo-American philosophy departments. If he’s taught at all, it’s usually as one figure in nineteenth century German philosophy, and not one whose influence is strongly felt past that century. The analytical tradition has no room for him, and the phenomenology/existentialism branch doesn’t either. He’s a post-Kantian, but those are often recognized only if they have a place in one of those two main strands.

He’s also a “big thinker.” Despite himself, he thought in terms of a system of philosophy, one encompassing epistemology, metaphysics, morality, religion, and art. His two-volume World as Will and Representation is a remarkably readable presentation of that system. Besides that major work, he authored any number of aphoristic writings (Parerga and Paralipomena being the largest and maybe best known during his own time) and shorter philosophical essays.

David Bather Woods’ book is an intellectual biography of Schopenhauer. I think its strong points are how Woods weaves together elements of Schopenhauer’s philosophical work with themes and incidents in his life. Schopenhauer led a cringingly fascinating life.

He seems to have been born with a massive, immovable chip on his shoulder. Even as a child and in his teenage years his sense of superiority, his competitive ego, and his impatience with others who didn’t recognize his superiority presented such obstacles that even his mother found him too rude and impolite to be around. Woods quotes a devastating letter she wrote to him when he was just seventeen years old, “If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.”

Schopenhauer’s rudeness and his resentment at not achieving the recognition he thought he deserved joined hands in a vicious circle throughout his life. Woods recounts Schopenhauer’s essay on the basis of morality submitted for a prize contest with the Danish Society of Sciences. Despite being the only entry, Schopenhauer’s essay was not awarded the prize because of his rude criticisms of other philosophers in the essay.

Schopenhauer was famously resentful of Hegel’s recognition in Berlin. He scheduled his own lectures there purposely at the same time as Hegel’s lectures. Only a few people showed up, fueling Schopenhauer’s further attacks on Hegel and his own sense of mistreatment by the world at large.

All of this, in Woods’ account serves as background, and maybe inspiration, for Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism. Schopenhauer characterizes life as an endless, futile struggle of desires in search of satisfaction. But satisfactions last only moments before being supplanted by new desires, so that life is just a string of successive, relentless wants, never reaching a rest in satisfaction.

Woods emphasizes Schopenhauer’s pessimism as the dominant flavor of his philosophy. But there is another dimension to Schopenhauer’s thought that Woods certainly recognizes and that may deserve more focus. Schopenhauer was the first western philosopher to study and take Buddhist thought seriously. He cooked Kantian critical idealism together with Buddhist doctrines to produce a unique picture of the familiar world, with all its suffering, as illusory, and with compassion for all under that illusion as moral enlightenment.

The argument (I’ll try to make this quick) is derived from Kant’s “two standpoints” argument, that we can (must) regard ourselves as both natural (phenomenal) and free (noumenal).  Regarded as natural, we are objects/bodies, determined by the natural interactions among objects. Regarded as free, we are wills, free agents authoring our own actions.  When we regard ourselves from the standpoint of will, we are seeing inside ourselves, as we are “in ourselves,” the only instance in which we access the world of things-in-themselves.

This is stretching Kant to fit Schopenhauer’s purposes, but it’s not that bad.  Schopenhauer then extends the argument by saying that, if we apply the same standpoints to the things that make up the world altogether and not just ourselves (and there’s no reason not to do that), we conclude that all things are both object (“representation") and will.

The difference between ourselves and other objects is a matter of awareness or consciousness.  We are wills that are aware/conscious of ourselves and the world.  Stones are wills that are unaware/nonconscious.  So will is the thing-in-itself behind all things.  

And since the Kantian categories only apply to phenomena, not noumena (not things-in-themselves), they don’t apply to will.  Without the categories, there is no differentiation of things into individual things (no categories of quantity, number, causal relations, etc.).  So the world as will is undivided.  When we apprehend ourselves as will, we are really apprehending the one will that stands behind the entire world of appearances. It’s only through the mistake that Kant identified as attempting to apply the categories to the thing-in-itself that we mistake ourselves for individuals.  That gets Schopenhauer to his version of Buddhism.  

Okay, that’s the two-volume World as Will and Representation in a few paragraphs, at the cost of a lot of argument and detail. Once we pierce the illusion of individuation and see ourselves as the one will, compassion follows along as the requisite moral attitude. Individuality is illusory, and self-interest no longer makes sense, or, maybe better said, what was self-interest becomes compassion in the dissolution of the individual self into the one will. What was self-interest becomes the interest of all and everything.

I’m going too long. And I haven't said anything about Schopenhauer's misogyny, or his love of dogs.

I’m glad Woods’ book reawakened my own interest in Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer does have influence within the history of philosophy, extending pointedly to Nietzsche and later to Wittgenstein. But I think his own thought deserves attention for its own sake. He offers a true "philosophy of life" in systematic form. And he is one of the most readable of modern philosophers.

[Alaka Halder]

Excellent, engaging read even if you've never read Schopenhauer or haven't read him in a long time (a decade plus, in my case). Bather Woods deftly balances extensive research, biographical detail and Schopenhauer's philosophy. He connects life and work without holding Schopenhauer up as a model of how to live, a pitfall that many philosophical biographies fall into.

[Matthew Loftus · Rating 4 out of 5]

full review here: https://mereorthodoxy.com/deconstruct...

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating biography of (one of) the greatest pessimistic philosophers. (It's debatable whether Schopenhauer is the greatest; he's the most well-known and influential, definitely, but there are maybe 'more pessimistic' philosophers, such as Cioran or Zapffe.)

While I already knew about and appreciated some of Schopenhauer's thoughts and interests (pessimism, Buddhism, compassion, and animal ethics), I learnt more about some of his other views, which I could also relate to. What he had to say about solitude stood out in particular, which he had conflicting thoughts about. Like what he had to say about other areas of life, I felt he had some very wise thoughts about solitude, such as when you have too much of it:

"our mind becomes so sensitive due to its constant seclusion and loneliness that we feel worried or insulted or hurt by the most insignificant incidents, word, or even mere facial expressions, whereas those who are constantly in the thick of the fray do not even notice such things."

I also found Schopenhauer's theory of crying and his thoughts on madness interesting. But it became clearer, too, how many of Schopenhauer's strong generalisations were based on his own personal experience, often consisting of a few isolated incidents. This doesn't necessarily make those generalisations wrong, but when they do seem too strong, lacking in nuance, or just easy to find counterexamples to, it does make me think Schopenhauer was not as self-aware or wise as I imagined him to be. Woods brings these flaws to the surface by continually comparing Schopenhauer's personal experiences with his philosophical statements. Having said that, I never saw Schopenhauer as an extremely wise person anyway, given the many flaws of his I was already aware of, such as his personal resentments and attacks towards other philosophers, and his extreme misogyny.

As a biography, I was a big fan of how much detail Woods went into about Schopenhauer's life, which included dispelling a myth I didn't know was a myth (the grumpy philosopher didn't push his landlady down the stairs, but he did push another tenant, a seamstress, causing her injury, which led to a lengthy legal battle).

I also liked Woods' style of writing; it seems to have a stylistic flair to it similar to Schopenhauer's, which is a compliment, as I find Schopenhauer one of the most enjoyable philosophers to read. His writing is very clear and readable (but nothing is dumbed down).

In short, I'd say this is a great intro to the complex person that Schopenhauer was, who had a unique mix of virtues and vices, and whose personal life mixed with his philosophical views in all sorts of unique ways as well.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

The necessity of defining "will as world and representation" as translated by Jessie Taylor in the late 19c to avoid confusion of the third titular noun with the Platonic "idea" accounts for the drive that impels us to procreate. Despite the fact its pleasure's brief, its drawbacks evident as we strain to repopulate our earth, and further our own mortal limitations to yet another generation which never asked to be born. Woods treats this central concern briefly but clearly, setting Schopenhauer in his German framework after his hated Hegel, before Marxists or existentialists, if nearing Nietzsche.

Woods avoids score-settling, jargon, or (with a few finger-wagging moments as his subject was not free of racist asides, or anti-Semitic jibes: his position on women themselves needs a lot of room to unpack, as it's crucial to his life and his theories alike, for better or worse) indignation. Instead, it's an accessible if uneven performance. Sections on themes, he admits early on, are "linear and looping" and this juxtaposition conveys the somewhat oddly paced coverage of this complicated thinker if not, in his career, a very exciting (what'd you expect, as he's not Goethe) everyday chronicle, fitting his uneasy temperament and his preference from his youth (father committed suicide; mother published 24 novels while castigating her "annoying" teenager) for his own company rather than mediocrities.

And anyone who championed animal rights, a pioneer for compassion, even if meted out rationally, who loved his two poodles sequentially named Atma, and who befriended a neighbor girl during his crotchety later years can't be all that bad. And he took advantage of the new invention of the camera to promote himself and ensure he wasn't forgotten. Which remains the case, although one suspects outside of academia he may continue to pop up most regularly in pop culture in crossword puzzles.

[Will White · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd love to review this book on its own merits, but I'll admit that I can't help but judge it against Bryan Magee's biography of Schopenhauer, and in that comparison, I'm afraid it falls short. That's not to say it's bad though.

Woods' biography is rather slight, which was somewhat surprising given the capaciousness of Schopenhauer's thought. But that's the thing — this book does not delve deeply into the philosophy. Of course, it gives you a glance at it, but no more. And for some people, that will be exactly what they want. Perhaps you're a person who's interested in philosophy, and you consider Schopenhauer a little off the beaten path, but you'd like to get a basic familiarity with who he was and what he was about. This book could certainly fulfill that wish. I doubt that the hardcore Schopenhauerian will come away from this book having gained any new insights.

I also feel — and this is common in the Schopenhauer literature that I've read — that Woods is not quite sympathetic enough to Schopenhauer's thought. Few are.

So in the end, I've given this book four stars, because (1) it's a biography of Schopenhauer that (2) is quite readable and goes down easy. But I'd still recommend Magee, and — of course — reading the original Schopenhauer works themselves.

[Nathan Waddell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliantly judged account of Schopenhauer in his time, placing his life and thought in the context of a range of political and cultural questions. Very readable and a great starting point for learning about what motivated Schopenhauer's philosophy, and why his philosophy took the surprising shapes it did.

[Rod · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable look at Schopenhauer's life while providing a topical sample of his philosophical thought. The very last chapter seemed a bit of a strange tangent (e.g. what circumstances made Schopenhauer Schopenhauer? what if those things had not happened?), but I was engaged throughout.