Arthur Schopenhauer, born in Danzig, Germany in 1788, is the philosopher who first introduced the supremacy of the will over the intellect, indirectly challenging all manifestations of idealist philosophy since the time of Plato and decisively influencing thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud, yet he became famous mainly because of his pessimism.
“Our life is an episode that needlessly disturbs the blessedness and tranquility of nothingness,” he writes. A student of Eastern philosophies from a young age and notorious for the uncompromising, even aphoristic, style of his writing and behavior, after years of traveling in many European countries, he spent the last three decades of his life in Frankfurt, in the company of his pistols and his dog, until his death in 1860.
