Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods; University of Chicago Press, 296 pp., $30

A little more than 200 years ago, Arthur Schopenhauer arrived at the University of Berlin to offer a course on philosophy—his own philosophy, to be precise, based on a book he had just published, The World as Will and Representation. The class was a miserable flop, drawing fewer than half a dozen students. In part, this was because the book—to cite what one of Schopenhauer’s heroes, David Hume, said about his own first book—fell stillborn from the press. But it was also because the 30-something philosopher decided to offer his course at the same place, day, and time as G. W. F. Hegel, the superstar of German philosophy, had scheduled his class.

What was Schopenhauer thinking?

One of the many merits of David Bather Woods’s new biography is his superb effort to convey exactly what Schopenhauer was thinking in his challenge to Hegel. In a (German) word, it was Selbstdenken: thinking for oneself, and not simply agreeing with what a professor tells you to think. In his portrayal of this famously prickly, private, and pessimistic man, Woods presents a thinker committed to the daunting vocation of pondering the human situation, and he does so with compassion and an appreciation for the comic.

Woods is not alone in this regard. Schopenhauer’s life and thought have made him an inviting target for comedians. In an iconic Monty Python sketch, Schopenhauer plays on the German philosophers’ football club in its epic battle against the Greeks. (Spoiler: Socrates heads the winning goal past Leibniz, who is pacing absent-mindedly in front of the net.) The dour German also makes a cameo in Woody Allen’s short story “My Philosophy,” in which a doctor diagnoses Schopenhauer’s will to live as nothing more than a case of hay fever.

Not surprisingly, humor seems the best response to a thinker who concludes that life—an unrelenting experience of disappointment and despair, which “swings like a pendulum back and forth between pain and boredom”—is a business “that does not cover its costs.” Moreover, Schopenhauer was the rare thinker who insisted on living his philosophy. Inevitably, perhaps, this led to a life of self-imposed solitude. Schopenhauer was a lifelong bachelor who had few friends and many enemies, who preferred the company of dogs to that of his fellow men and women, and whose own mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, broke off ties with him, telling him in a letter, “I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.”

Tellingly, Johanna’s son had yet to turn 20 years old. Teenagers can be difficult, but Schopenhauer was a case apart. Solitary by disposition at an early age, he became even more so as he grew older, driven by the belief that solitude was the price of telling the rest of humankind two unbearable truths. First, that it is better never to have been born; second, for those of us unfortunate enough to exist, to expect nothing but suffering and sorrow. As he wrote in one of his later works, Parerga and Paralipomena, “If suffering is not the first and immediate object of our life, then our existence is the most inexpedient and inappropriate thing in the world.”

Solitary by disposition at an early age, Schopenhauer became even more so as he grew older, driven by the belief that solitude was the price of telling humankind unbearable truths.

As Woods suggests, this assertion is not as dark as we might otherwise conclude. One reason Schopenhauer railed against his arch-foe Hegel was that he believed the older man’s Idealism—the contention that knowledge is based not on the material world but on an “ideal” or thought-dependent one—set us at a remove from concrete, everyday experiences. (Another reason, of course, is that Hegel drew hundreds of students to his classes whereas Schopenhauer could not field a football team with his own.) A self-styled empiricist, Schopenhauer insisted that our reasoning be based on our rootedness in the world. Not only will such rootedness constantly and forcibly remind us that the world is a harsh place, but it also teaches us to think for ourselves: “One can only think through what one knows, which is why we should learn something; but one also knows only what has been thought through.”

This insistence on thinking for oneself—issued in the previous century by Immanuel Kant, the thinker from whom Schopenhauer most struggled to free himself—is central to Schopenhauer’s contention that this practice entails a solitary life. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? The tired slogan “no pain, no gain” takes on fresh meaning when applied to the task of challenging all forms of inherited wisdom. This way of thinking comes most easily to the young, and it is telling that Schopenhauer was himself scarcely 30 when he wrote The World as Will and Representation.

Such independent thinking reveals that the world and everything in that world, including us, are subject to what Schopenhauer calls the “will to live.” This notion, which Friedrich Nietzsche later adapted as the “will to power,” can mean a variety of things—not just for scholars but for Schopenhauer himself. Moreover, Schopenhauer locates this will as the starting point of his metaphysics and ethics. We experience it every moment of our lives as the force that fuels our never-ending struggle for self-preservation and reproduction. (In anticipation of Freud, Schopenhauer described “the sexual organs as the true center of the world”—an assertion he proved by fathering two children out of wedlock, neither of whom he acknowledged as his own.)

But what experience also teaches us is that we feel compassion for the suffering and afflictions of our fellow human beings, enmeshed with us in this unceasing struggle for being. Woods stresses that for Schopenhauer, the existence of compassion is proved not by abstract theorizing but by living. We know compassion because we feel it in ourselves, but also because we know it when we see and feel it in others. From this vast pile of empirical data, Schopenhauer drew a simple maxim: “Do no harm; and help others to the extent you can.”

This conviction led Schopenhauer to be an ardent abolitionist, a keen advocate of prison and asylum reform, and a fierce opponent of animal cruelty. It is curious to think that his beloved standard poodle, Atma, knew what men and women did not know: that his master believed in the care and concern for all living beings. At Schopenhauer’s funeral in 1860, his first biographer, Wilhelm Gwinner, suggested that “ordinary people saw the misanthrope in him,” but Schopenhauer “was full of compassion” for them. This may have been difficult for Schopenhauer’s contemporaries to perceive. Readers today, however, who have ample reason to be pessimistic, might find it a bit easier.