Schopenhauer: The Philosopher of Pessimism and Humor |
Schopenhauer is the greatest pessimist in the history of philosophy.
Yet, he was a very funny man, because he understood what makes us laugh.
He also understood why we need to laugh, and, sometimes also, cry.
Whereas Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel could count as optimists, Schopenhauer is the first (and last) thinker in all Western philosophy to have constructed a complete and systematic pessimism.
But he is interesting for other reasons too. For his Great Philosophers series (1987), Bryan Magee, who wrote a thick book on Schopenhauer, introduced him as “the only major Western philosopher to draw serious and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought.”
Magee continues: “He was the first major Western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and had more to say about them than any other important philosopher … He was himself among the supreme writers of German prose. Many of his sentences are so brilliantly aphoristic that they’ve been torn out of context and published separately in little books of epigrams.”
Schopenhauer’s humorous epigrams
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