200th birthday of Arthur Schoppenhauer - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1988 - 80 Pfennig

His philosophy, writes Schopenhauer in retrospect of his life's work, "never speaks of cloud cuckoo's home but of this world" (1852). This worldlyness guarantees Schopenhauer's thinking a lasting topicality: problems from all spheres of life, from society, science, religion, but above all from the field of art, can be shed in the light of Schopenhauer's philosophy. It is no coincidence that artists and artistically inspired philosophers have just joined in. Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Busch, Thomas Mann. Art and philosophiefreudig is the epoch from which he comes. Born on February 22, 1788 in Gdansk, he enters an epoch marked by the names of Kant and Goethe. Both become the guiding stars of his own development. Of course, this is not as straightforward as he himself wishes. The father, a wealthy merchant, leaves his hometown in 1793 because of the annexation of Danzig by Prussia and settles in Hamburg. Arthur Schopenhauer is to become a merchant: proficient and knowledgable, that's what the father wants. A two-year stay in France and a trip to Europe serve the purpose of having the son read in The Book of the World. Fortunately, the agony of Hamburg's apprenticeship does not last too long. Two years after his father's death (1805), Schopenhauer began attending grammar school. In 1809 he moved to the University of Göttingen. In 1811 he moved to the newly founded University of Berlin, where he heard Fichte and Schleiermacher - but without a positive, positive impression. From the beginning his studies are thematically broad. His interest belongs to the natural sciences as well as philosophy and history. The astonishing wealth of real knowledge that emerges in his later works, he acquires to a large extent already in his student days. In 1813 he completed his studies with a dissertation "On the fourfold root of the sentence of sufficient reason," a work that will be of fundamental importance for the design of his major philosophical work. The years 1814 - 1818 belong to the elaboration of this work. In December 1818 Brockhaus publishes (with date of 1819) "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung". Everything philosophically important that Schopenhauer has to say stands in this work. He regards later writings and expansions of the main work as supplements and explanations of the thoughts he gained in the period between 1814 and 1818. Filled with the conviction that he has delivered an entirely new, true philosophy, he awaits the reactions of his colleagues. To his disappointment and bitterness, the work is largely ignored. Only at the end of the forties does a broader interest in the metaphysics of the will, which is presented in the main work, gradually emerge: one becomes attentive to a doctrine which no longer places the essence of the world in the self-conscious mind, but in the instinct-dumb will At the same time, however, the liberation from this principle through pure knowledge - in aesthetics and ethics - promises. Schopenhauer owed his brilliant breakthrough to great European fame to his brilliantly written "Parerga and Paralipomena" (1851), intended for a larger audience. After publication of the main work Schopenhauer leaves as a university lecturer in Berlin, in the early 30s in Frankfurt. He lives here for almost three decades as a private scholar, wholly devoted to the completion and clarification of his philosophical life's work. On September 21, 1860, he dies in Frankfurt, knowing that his work has finally arrived. (Text: Professor Dr. Rudolf Malter, President of the Schopenhauer Society eV, Frankfurt am Main)