The great philosopher of pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer, did not believe in the afterlife. If he is installed on a plush cloud, glass of ambrosia in hand, however, watching the unfolding drama of human suffering, then he has had plenty to amuse him in recent decades. Not least that moment when – with the collapse of the Berlin Wall – we proclaimed the end of history. How he must have laughed. As Schopenhauer would have seen from his celestial perch, we had yet to experience the worldwide banking crisis, the rise of religious extremism, the erosion of truth and the inescapable effects of climate change. Hegel, his intellectual adversary, and the man who gave us the idea that our long march culminates in freedom, had duped us. Schopenhauer’s own philosophy – premised on the idea that to live is to suffer – would soon have its day.

David Bather Woods’ new biography of Schopenhauer, then, comes at a time when we find ourselves especially receptive to pessimism. Ours is an age in which time no longer feels like an arrow shooting forward, and the buffer between us and the vast, indifferent cosmos feels terrifyingly thin. So you might be forgiven for thinking that the last thing we need is a philosophy that pokes the wound; but that would be to profoundly misunderstand Schopenhauer’s teaching. As Bather Woods demonstrates in his thorough and sensitive book, the philosopher who ‘composed […] in a minor key’ was no sadistic misanthrope. It is precisely because his ideas look squarely and without illusion at suffering that, in the words of Max Horkheimer, they ‘know more than any others of hope’.

‘Philosophers’, according to Isaiah Berlin, ‘are adults who persist in asking childish questions.’ More specifically, they are people who continue to ask ‘why?’ long after most of us have tired of the word. Bather Woods, Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University, brings just such a mind to the task of biography. Before he can tell us who Schopenhauer was, he wants us to understand why he was in the first place. Had his father not committed suicide when Schopenhauer just eighteen; had his mother been kinder; had he secured a university job, he might not, Bather Woods suggests, have become a philosopher at all – let alone one who thought that ‘life is a business that does not cover its costs’.

If one is not born but becomes a pessimist, then Schopenhauer began his evolution early. Even before his father’s suicide, he witnessed things that would scar the mature optimist, to say nothing of an impressionable adolescent. At 16, on a tour of Europe with his parents, young Arthur visited a slave labour prison in France where he saw men ‘permanently shackled to benches’, from which, as he wrote in his diary, ‘nothing but death’ could separate them. And in London, he watched from a pub window as three people were hanged outside Newgate Prison. ‘Later in life’, Bather Woods writes:

Schopenhauer would compare this period of his youth to the story of the Buddha’s awakening, when, as the young Nepalese prince Siddhartha Guatama, he first ventured out into the world only to be confronted everywhere by sickness, pain, and death.

Schopenhauer was no prince, but he was an heir of sorts. Descended from a long line of merchants, he was expected to take over the family business, even though his talents were clearly more of the scholarly kind. It is a story partially echoed in Buddenbrooks – a novel by Thomas Mann, who read works by Schopenhauer while writing it and found him intoxicating. Like Schopenhauer, young Hanno Buddenbrook is heir to many generations of mercantile prosperity but is more interested in music than trade. Hanno only escapes his fate through death. In Schopenhauer’s case, it was his father’s suicide that freed him from the apprenticeship he had dutifully endured, allowing him at last to pursue philosophy.

But even this, as Bather Woods explains, was no easy journey. As it turns out, the world of 19^th century philosophy – dominated by Hegel, whose idea of history spoke to the ‘cherished doctrine. . . of boundless progress’ – was not very receptive to a man who thought that ‘life swings like a pendulum back and forth between pain and boredom’. There is a strong argument to be made, in fact, that it is only now, over 200 years after Schopenhauer published his primary work, The World as Will and Representation – when progress no longer feels like a given – that his philosophy can be truly appreciated. Bather Woods’ book, then, is an important one, and we are fortunate that in unfailingly lucid prose, he does such an excellent job of explaining Schopenhauer’s thought to the contemporary reader.

Like many of the young and plucky philosophers of his time, Schopenhauer saw himself as the heir of Immanuel Kant. For Schopenhauer, Kantianism was an unresolved philosophy. While he accepted Kant’s argument that we experience the world as representations shaped by the mind, he rejected the claim that we cannot know what the world is like beyond these representations. In Schopenhauer’s view, it is because we are not merely detached Kantian knowers but embodied creatures, ‘rooted in this world’, that we possess an insight into what life is like beyond appearances. Yes, we experience the world as representation – and know that our own bodies appear as such to others – but we also have an inner experience of life which is more immediate. This inner essence – the striving, desiring part of us that constitutes what it feels like to be the thing that lives and moves – is what Schopenhauer called the Will.

As Bather Woods explains, our embodied experience provides Schopenhauer with ‘an indispensable metaphysical insight’– meaning an understanding of the nature of reality beyond appearances. Just as we manifest as objects in the world but also move through it as will, so all other objects must be related to ‘the same inner essence’. In other words, as Bather Woods writes, ‘with some deep reflection we can come to know the whole world as will and representation’. Best thought of as equivalent to force or energy, the will is the blind impulse that animates all life without either purpose or goal, condemning everything that lives to endless striving and thus, inevitably, to suffering.

So far so bleak. But he does not stop there. As Bather Woods writes, for Schopenhauer the idea that ‘we are all manifestations of one and the same thing’ means that there is a ‘metaphysical basis for […] ethics’. If we are all expressions of the same underlying Will, then the suffering of others is, at the deepest level, our own suffering – making compassion the only appropriate moral response. To borrow a description often applied to the work of a later philosopher, Iris Murdoch, what Schopenhauer offers us is a reason to be ‘good without God’. His ethics are not based on transcendent moral laws, as they are in Kant’s, but on the immanent idea that we are all one; that compassion arises not from duty or divine command but from the recognition of our fundamentally shared state of suffering.

There are further parallels between Schopenhauer and Murdoch, in that both philosophers saw art as a source of temporary salvation. For Murdoch, in contemplating art, humans practice what she called ‘unselfing’ (an escape from the narrowness of ego); for Schopenhauer, when we experience art – especially music – the demands of the will are temporarily forgotten. The only permanent escape in life, according to Schopenhauer, however, was asceticism: ‘the deliberate breaking of the will by forgoing what is pleasant and seeking out what is unpleasant.’ Ultimately, it is death – what Schopenhauer called ‘the lost paradise of non-being’ – that brings lasting peace. For the pessimist, then, our demise is not something to be feared but welcomed as ‘friend death.’ In reality, as Schopenhauer himself understood, such stoicism is impossible. ‘Fear of death,’ he wrote, ‘is independent of all cognition’; it is ‘rooted in our blind desire to exist.’

It is religion, of course, that provides many people with a consolation for death, largely by denying its inevitability with the promise of an afterlife. For Schopenhauer there can be no individual immortality. What we can prove, however, is the ‘imperishability of our true essence’: the will to life. ‘Death’, as Bather Woods explains, ‘may totally annihilate the individual being, but it does not, in Schopenhauer’s view, annihilate the animating principle of life’. Pearly gates and a palace with many rooms is obviously an easier sell, but as Bather Woods puts it ‘there is something noble and even marvellous about the basic stuff of life from whence we came and to which we shall return.’ And if this is still not enough to placate us, then Schopenhauer offers an uncharacteristically upbeat concession: ‘The spirit of love that would lead someone to spare his enemy or someone else to risk his life to befriend a person he has never seen, can never pass away and come to nothing’. Or as the poet Phillip Larkin wrote: ‘What will survive of us is love’.

Like Larkin (another great pessimist, of course) Schopenhauer was someone who always wanted to be ‘the less deceived’, and Bather Woods never loses sight of this. Throughout the book, he builds an image of a man who refused to settle for easy consolations or comforting illusions. Unconvinced by the claim made by his lecturer, Johann Fichte, that madmen are more animal than human, Schopenhauer began visiting patients on a psychiatric ward to prove him wrong. When he was interviewed by Hegel for a lecturing post, he argued with him over the idea that animals possess the faculty of understanding, even though it might have cost him the job. He was a man who lived alone all his life, so never had the consolation of children, or romantic love; he did not even have the support of his mother, who found him ‘deeply annoying’. So, when he tells us that there is hope amid suffering, through our shared solidarity, we can be sure it is no glib reassurance.

The word solidarity is in heavy circulation today, but it has never sounded more hollow. All too often it is used by those anxious to signal their ideological credentials, not least in extending it only to those they deem morally pure. To read Schopenhauer is to grasp the paltriness of this state of affairs. His philosophy reminds us that suffering is not exclusive to any group, nor does it respect borders; it is as pervasive as oxygen and as inevitable as the one thing that delivers us from it – death. It follows that the most transformative expression of solidarity is the kind that encompasses all of humanity. If we can learn to see every person as a ‘fellow sufferer’, and thus extend our compassion without discrimination, then there are, even in these hard times, genuine grounds for hope.