page_title: Arthur Schopenhauer
section_title: Politics
hierarchical_section_title: Arthur Schopenhauer / Philosophy / Political and social thought / Politics
caption_attribution_description: English: Frankfurt/M., Germany: Monument with bust of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) in the city’s Wallanlagen park Deutsch: Frankfurt am Main, Wallanlagen/Obermainanlage: Das Schopenhauer-Denkmal wurde im Jahr 1895 nach einem Entwurf des Frankfurter Bildhauers Friedrich Schierholz (1840–1894) geschaffen. Es erinnert an den deutschen Philosophen Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), der von 1833 bis zu seinem Tod in Frankfurt gelebt hatte. Das Denkmal besteht aus einem etwa zwei Meter hohen, rechteckigen Sockel aus anthrazitfarbenem Granit mit eingemeißeltem Schopenhauer-Namensschriftzug auf der Vorderseite, auf dem Sockel eine über-lebensgroße Bronzebüste des Philosophen.
context_page_description: Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, which characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable metaphysical will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.
  Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, Schopenhauer had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science. His writing on aesthetics, morality, and psychology have influenced many thinkers and artists.
context_section_description: Schopenhauer's politics were an echo of his system of ethics, which he elucidated in detail in his Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (the two essays On the Freedom of the Will and On the Basis of Morality).
  In occasional political comments in his Parerga and Paralipomena and Manuscript Remains, Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government. Schopenhauer shared the view of Thomas Hobbes on the necessity of the state and state action to check our species' innate destructive tendencies. He also defended the independence of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power, and a monarch as an impartial element able to practise justice (in a practical and everyday sense, not a cosmological one).
  He declared that monarchy is "natural to man in almost the same way as it is to bees and ants, to cranes in flight, to wandering elephants, to wolves in a pack in search of prey, and to other animals." Intellect in monarchies, he writes, always has "much better chances against stupidity, its implacable and ever-present foe, than it has in republics; but this is a great advantage." On the other hand, Schopenhauer disparaged republicanism as being "as unnatural to man as it is unfavorable to higher intellectual life and thus to the arts and sciences."
  Schopenhauer, by his own admission, did not give much thought to politics, and several times he wrote proudly of how little attention he paid "to political affairs of [his] day".  In a life that spanned several revolutions in French and German government, and a few continent-shaking wars, he did indeed maintain his position of "minding not the times but the eternities".  He wrote many disparaging remarks about Germany and the Germans. A typical example is, "For a German it is even good to have somewhat lengthy words in his mouth, for he thinks slowly, and they give him time to reflect."
caption: Bust in Frankfurt am Main
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