Arthur Schopenhauer on ageing and isolation

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland).

Arthur’s father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg, where Arthur’s sister, Adèle, was born.

Arthur’s French brother, Jean Anthime

1797, the nine-year-old Arthur was sent from Hamburg to Le Havre, in France, to live with the family of his father’s business associate, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age.

The two years that Arthur spent in Le Havre were, Schopenhauer claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learned to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

From these common beginnings, the lives of Arthur and Jean Anthime would diverge, with Jean Anthime becoming a successful merchant and family man and Arthur growing into a philosopher (“the Sage of Frankfurt”) and celibate recluse.

When Arthur and Jean Anthime met for the last time

In 1845, a lifetime later, Jean Anthime travelled to Frankfurt and met his “German brother” for the last time.

In Frankfurt, Arthur took all his meals at the Englischer Hof. He sat alone, dressed in white tie, at a large common table. At every meal, he would place a gold coin on the table. When a waiter enquired into this practice, he replied that he had vowed to himself to give the coin to charity on the first occasion that the other diners discussed something more substantial than “horses, women, or dogs.” In thirty years, he never lost his coin.

When Arthur received news of Jean Anthime’s visit, he booked two rooms at the Englisher Hof, one for Jean Anthime and another for Jean Anthime’s daughter by his second marriage.

But Arthur arrived late and in a foul mood to their dinner meeting. In his travel diary, Jean Anthime wrote: “He is of such disagreeable character that we quarrelled quite seriously. He professes, he says, the religion of the Hindu. It’s an eccentricity to add to all the others. He is considered mad, and indeed he must be.”

The Hedgehog Dilemma

A few years later, in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Schopenhauer would reflect upon the increasing isolation that accompanies old age, positing that the older we become, the more we diverge from others, and the less we need, or think we need, from them.

This is most true of the genius or man of intellect, who finds his own thoughts a lot more interesting and fulfilling than “the fuss created by fools.” If we must mingle with fools, we should carry our solitude inside us so as to be “not quite in their company, though in their midst.” “To be alone” he wrote, “is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.”

He famously compared humans to hedgehogs who huddle for warmth, but in so doing prick one another with their quills. Thus, the hedgehogs need to find just the right degree of closeness between feeling warm and being injured. But in old age, aided by a waning of the Will (the primitive life force in Schopenhauer’s philosophy), we finally have a coat thick enough to keep us warm:

Profound peace of heart and perfect peace of mind, these highest earthly goods after health, are to be found in solitude alone, and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion. And if our own self is great and rich, we enjoys the happiest state that can be found on this miserable earth.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.