The philosophy of Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is known as Pessimistic Voluntaristic Idealism; Pessimistic because he regarded the world as irrational, Voluntaristic because for him the ontologically real substance of the world is Will (driving force), Idealism because the metaphysically real substance is of the nature of mind.
The philosophy of Schopenhauer emphasized these concepts: metaphysical reality, the ontologically real, is a blind irrational force, called will, which manifests itself in man as the will to live (drive of self-preservation), but life is essentially a mistake, an evil which man strives to overcome by conquering the will to live.
"The world is my idea," wrote Schopenhauer, and such is the basis of his Idealism. The world which man knows, experiences, feels, understands, senses, is always in the form of an idea. "No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perciever, in a word, idea" [1]. Thus for the subject, the perciever, the stuff of which the world is made is idea.
In actuality, whatever exists must exist solely for the subject, since only the subject possesses experiences; consequently idea and the object of one's idea are identical. "The whole world of objects is and remains idea." Schopenhauerian Idealism is not a dream world, nor Solipsism, an imaginary world, for he distinguishes the real world from dreams, ascribing to the real world continuity of experience and rational cohesion.
In Schopenhauer's view, then, the phenomenal world consists of idea, but the ontologically real world consists of will. He believed that will is force, the fundamental reality in all objects; that, in man, it is chiefly identified with body instincts of self-preservation and sex, and elsewhere in nature as gravitational forces. "Besides will and idea nothing is known to us or thinkable." A person's "will is the real inner nature of his phenomenal being, which manifests itself to him as idea.... Phenomenal existence is idea and nothing more. All idea, of whatever kind it may be, all object, is phenomenal existence, but the will alone is a thing in itself." The will, as the Kantian thing-in-itself, is not phenomenal but ultimate reality itself, the stuff of which the world is made.
The nature of the ontologically real, the will, is a blind, irrational, indestructible, driving force. Because the will rampages incoherantly on its way, without regard for what is intelligent and wise, the philosopher can only be pessimistic about the fate of man and the universe. The will has no regard for individual human life and happiness; consequently, due to the capricious nature of the will, human life regularly encounters misery.
Pain and misery in the world are not accidents, but a positive integral aspect of the nature of reality. Pain and misery are positive, while happiness is negative (in the sense that the period of relief experienced during the cessation or temporary let-up of pain is a state of happiness). For Schopenhauer, "life must be some kind of mistake," and "it is a sin to be born."
Death is no escape from the tyrannous will, for the will is everlasting, and it will prevail in this or any other life; thus, suicide is of no avail. Furthermore, suicide is a cowardly approach, and a clumsy experiment; moreover, if it is proved to be a blunder, the individual would have no opportunity to correct it.
Salvation is achieved through annihilation of striving, rejecting desire for life, but not life itself. It is partially attained through art, that is, contemplating the eternal abiding Platonic Ideas, but the fuller form of salvation is the achievement of the greatest good, the highest ideal. Nirvana, which requires extinction of all impulses, or at least an attitude of indifference toward them. Thus it is an ideal of nothingness.
The highest morality is one of compassion toward our fellow man; since we are all suffering in this present world, it is better not to condemn fellow creatures, but to pity and sympathize with them. This highest morality requires mankind to repress and eliminate all forms of egoistic self-assertion and aggresive competitive striving.