In December 1813 the orientalist Friedrich Majer put the Bhagavad Gita in front of a young man with an inheritance and no profession, and the Upanishads, in a Latin translation, followed the next March. At Göttingen his teacher G. E. Schulze had already told him to read Plato and Kant before anyone else. Kant's distinction between appearance and the thing in itself, and the Indian teaching that the visible world is a veil, arrived together and never came apart again.
What Kant had left German philosophy was a locked door: reality as it is in itself lies permanently behind the way the mind is built to receive it, and what remains are appearances and nothing else. Fichte, Schelling and above all Hegel, the German idealists who came after Kant, picked the lock, filling the world's interior with mind, spirit and reason unfolding through history toward its own goal, and from the Berlin chair Hegel taught that the deepest thing in the world was something like thought. Schopenhauer answered that the door opens onto the opposite: the inner nature of the world is not reason but blind, aimless, insatiable wanting, and everything that exists — a falling stone, a growing root, a human life — is that wanting taking a shape.
The freedom to say so came from a death and an inheritance. His father, a Danzig merchant, was found dead in a Hamburg canal in April 1805, probably by his own hand, and the seventeen-year-old was already bound to the commercial career his father had planned for him. He served out two more years, then broke off in 1807 for the gymnasium at Gotha, a classical secondary school, and private study in Weimar, and reached the university on the money that had come to him. He never afterwards held a job or a chair — only, from 1820, permission to lecture at Berlin.
The argument he built runs like this. Everything perceived is representation, assembled by the perceiver's own mind in space, time and causation — the world as it appears. But one object is known from the inside as well as the outside: one's own body. From inside, an act of will and a movement of the body are one event met from two directions. Extend that identification outward and the whole of nature is will. And a will that wants without ever wanting anything in particular can never be satisfied, which makes existence a chain of lack, brief relief and fresh lack. His pessimism is therefore a conclusion rather than a temperament.
He allowed three ways out, and ranked them. Art suspends the wanting by lifting perception clear of what things are wanted for — music most completely, because music copies the will directly rather than picturing anything. Morality begins where the boundary between one person and another thins, so that another's suffering acts on one as one's own: the ground of ethics is compassion rather than duty or calculation. Beyond both lies the saint's route, the will turning and refusing itself. He argued all of it without a God, and said so at a time when saying so cost something.
The World as Will and Representation appeared in December 1818 and sank. In 1820 he scheduled his Berlin lectures against Hegel's and drew five students. The second edition of 1844 was ignored too. What finally worked was a book of essays, Parerga and Paralipomena, in 1851; an anonymous English review of it in 1852; and the essay that followed in 1853, Iconoclasm in German Philosophy, translated into German at once. After that, visitors came to Frankfurt for the last seven years of his life.
The influence outran the doctrine. Few philosophers today defend a single world-will, though his account of desire as structurally unsatisfiable, his case for compassion as the root of morals, and his insistence that whether life is worth living is a real question rather than a mood are all still argued. Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Freud, Wittgenstein, Thomas Mann, Beckett and Borges worked in his light or against it.