"1788 Arthur Schopenhauer is born in Danzig. In later years, he looks back on the event with regret: ‘We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.’ ‘Human existence must be a kind of error,’ he specifies, ‘it may be said of it, “It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.” ’ Schopenhauer’s father Heinrich, a wealthy merchant, and his mother Johanna, a dizzy socialite twenty years her husband’s junior, take little interest in their son, who grows into one of the greatest pessimists in the history of philosophy: ‘Even as a child of six, my parents, returning from a walk one evening, found me in deep despair.’
1803–5... Schopenhauer travels through France, he visits the city of Nîmes, to which, 1,800 or so years before, Roman engineers had piped water across the majestic Pont du Gard to ensure that citizens would always have enough water to bathe in. Schopenhauer is unimpressed by what he sees of the Roman remains: ‘These traces soon lead one’s thoughts to the thousands of long-decomposed humans.’
Schopenhauer’s mother complains of her son’s passion for ‘pondering on human misery’.
1809–1811 Schopenhauer studies at the university of Göttingen and decides to become a philosopher: ‘Life is a sorry business, I have resolved to spend it reflecting upon it.’
On an excursion to the countryside, a male friend suggests they should attempt to meet women. Schopenhauer quashes the plan, arguing that ‘life is so short, questionable and evanescent that it is not worth the trouble of major effort.’...
1818 He finishes The World as Will and Representation, which he knows to be a masterpiece. It explains his lack of friends: ‘A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?’
1818–19 To celebrate the completion of his book, Schopenhauer travels to Italy. He delights in art, nature and the climate, though his mood remains fragile: ‘We should always be mindful of the fact that no man is ever very far from the state in which he would readily want to seize a sword or poison in order to bring his existence to an end; and those who are far from believing this could easily be convinced of the opposite by an accident, an illness, a violent change of fortune – or of the weather.’ He visits Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice and meets a number of attractive women at receptions: ‘I was very fond of them – if only they would have had me.’ Rejection helps to inspire a view that: ‘Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex.’...
1820 Schopenhauer attempts to gain a university post in philosophy in Berlin. He offers lectures on ‘The whole of philosophy, i.e. the theory of the essence of the world and of the human mind.’ Five students attend. In a nearby building, his rival, Hegel, can be heard lecturing to an audience of 300...
1821 Schopenhauer falls in love with Caroline Medon, a nineteen-year-old singer. The relationship lasts intermittently for ten years, but Schopenhauer has no wish to formalize the arrangement: ‘To marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other.’ He nevertheless has fond thoughts of polygamy: ‘Of the many advantages of polygamy, one is that the husband would not come into such close contact with his in-laws, the fear of which at present prevents innumerable marriages. Ten mothers-in-law instead of one!’...
1828 Turns forty. ‘After his fortieth year,’ he consoles himself, ‘any man of merit … will hardly be free from a certain touch of misanthropy.’
1831 Now forty-three, living in Berlin, Schopenhauer thinks once again of getting married. He turns his attentions to Flora Weiss, a beautiful, spirited girl who has just turned seventeen. During a boating party, in an attempt to charm her, he smiles and offers her a bunch of white grapes. Flora later confides in her diary: ‘I didn’t want them. I felt revolted because old Schopenhauer had touched them, and so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water behind me.’ Schopenhauer leaves Berlin in a hurry: ‘Life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.’
1833 He settles in a modest apartment in Frankfurt am Main, a town of some 50,000 inhabitants. He describes the city, the banking centre of continental Europe, as ‘a small, stiff, internally crude, municipally puffed-up, peasant-proud nation of Abderites, whom I do not like to approach’.
His closest relationships are now with a succession of poodles, who he feels have a gentleness and humility humans lack...
1859 As fame brings more attention from women, his views on them soften. From having thought them ‘suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word, big-children, their whole lives long’, he now judges that they are capable of selfiessness and insight. An attractive sculptress and an admirer of his philosophy, Elizabeth Ney (a descendant of Napoleon’s Maréchal), comes to Frankfurt in October and stays in his apartment for a month making a bust of him.
‘She works all day at my place. When I get back from luncheon we have coffee together, we sit together on the sofa and I feel as if I were married.’...
1860 Increasing ill-health suggests the end is near: ‘I can bear the thought that in a short time worms will eat away my body; but the idea of philosophy professors nibbling at my philosophy makes me shudder.’ At the end of September, after a walk by the banks of the Main, he returns home, complains of breathlessness and dies, still convinced that ‘human existence must be a kind of error.’"
--- The Consolations of Philosophy / Alain de Botton
