summa3 » APPENDIX Z30: Schopenhauer v. Birnbaum

APPENDIX Z30: Schopenhauer v. Birnbaum

APPENDIX Z30:

Schopenhauer v. Birnbaum

from Wikipedia*

“Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September

1860) was a German
philosopher known for his pessimism

and philosophical clarity.
At age 25, he published his

doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the

Principle of Sufcient Reason, which examined the four

separate manifestations of reason in the
phenomenal

world.

Schopenhauer’s most
inuential work, The World as Will

and Representation, claimed that the world is fundamentally

what humans recognize in themselves as their will.
His

analysis of will led him to the conclusion that
emotional,

physical, and sexual desires can never be fully
satised.

The corollary of this is an ultimately painful
human

condition. Consequently,
he considered that a lifestyle

of negating desires, similar to the ascetic
teachings of

Vedanta, Buddhism and the
Church Fathers of early

Christianity, was the only
way to attain liberation.

Schopenhauer’s
metaphysical analysis of will, his views

on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic

writing style inuenced many well-known thinkers,

including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig

Wittgenstein, Erwin
Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund

Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo

Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges….”

from the author –

So Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation

posits that the world is
fundamentally ‘will’; and ‘pessimist–

school’ Schopenhauer comes to the conclusion that

negating ‘will’ is the ‘route to liberation.’

Birnbaum’s Summa Metaphysica posits that the world

is essentially ‘potential’; and, to continue
counterposing

Schpenhauer,
‘optimist-school’ Birnbaum comes to the

(quick) conclusion that proactive ‘Quest for Potential’ is

the true ‘route to liberation.’

*Wikipedia Online, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer (accessed May 21, 2012)

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