A Schopenhauer Cheat Sheet

Handy conceptual shortcuts (+ a few comic touches)

Courtesy of Corey Mohler, Existential Comics: Schopenhauer at the Market

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) may be the most interesting of all modern philosophers. He is widely credited as the father of modern pessimistic philosophy, and a major influence in key 20th-century developments such as:

• symbolist, absurdist and postmodern literature
• post-Romantic music
• post-Newtonian physics
• psychology of the unconscious and the irrational

Schopenhauer was among the first to combine aspects of Eastern thought with elements drawn from the whole history of Western philosophy. And he was an eccentric character in the bargain.

A few of his fans, from various fields and for various reasons:

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Richard Wagner, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Ivan Turgenev, W. B. Yeats, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell

In case you want to add something about Schopenhauer to your knowledge portfolio (in four minutes flat), here’s a miniature overview of his key insight, followed quickly by a set of handy shortcuts for relating his philosophical project…