A quick glance over the philosophy section of the local bookstore will reveal the prominence of books about stoicism. This is, I think, a sign of the times; volumes like The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living and Lessons in Stoicism: What Ancient Philosophers Teach Us about How to Live cherrypick Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus for nuggets of wisdom that will somehow make us all more “resilient,” that awful word that’s become a 2026 catchphrase, like “boots on the ground.” On the flip side of all the positive qualities associated with the word is a certain emotional coldness to the slings and arrows of the world that dissuades us from acting on the desire to change it. “Life sucks, get a helmet,” stoicism distilled into a nutshell, is one of the more cynical approaches to experience, whether it’s from the stoics or anyone else.
“There is a popular style of philosophical biography that presents the philosopher’s life as a model for how to live well,” writes David Bather Woods on the first page of his biography Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist, out just a few months ago from the University of Chicago Press, citing Sarah Bakewell’s 2011 life of Montaigne. “Introducing Schopenhauer to this genre faces a major obstacle, and not just because of his many personal flaws.” What Bather Woods does not mention here, in the first chapter of his very fine biography of the Sage of Frankfurt-am-Main, is that Schopenhauer’s already written his own self-help book, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, which appears in the first volume of Parerga and Paralipomena.
This is not that. It’s fair to be leery of the biographical approach to any writer, and kudos to Bather Woods for admitting it. He has produced a swiftly and gracefully readable book about Schopenhauer which doesn’t stint on explication (though because Schopenhauer wrote for a general public rather than an academic audience there are fewer knotty interpretive problems than you might expect). Divided into ten chapters, the book focuses on the philosopher’s life, then the issues that arise from it: his father’s early death introduces a discussion of Schopenhauer’s attitudes towards suicide; his early travels in Europe provide a ground for explicating Schopenhauer’s approach to madness and punishment; his often misogynistic conception of women is clarified through a survey of Schopenhauer’s relationship with his sister and mother; and the last chapter, of course, focuses on death, from both the biographical and metaphysical stances. I should note here that Bather Woods is especially good on Fichte’s influence on Schopenhauer, and that a chapter on Schopenhauer and photographic portraiture is a new contribution to a consideration of Schopenhauer’s thinking on aesthetics. (I admit I was a little disappointed that Bather Woods gives Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory short shrift, but this is a quibble; certainly that ground has been covered quite comprehensively in the past; aesthetic experience, and especially music, is where the Veil of Maya may be at its thinnest, though, and I would have liked to see Bather Woods’s two cents on this issue.)
Schopenhauer rarely wrote about his personal life, leaving any biographer somewhat at a loss. Also new in this book, though, is Bather Woods’s adept and insightful use of a trove of letters written by the philosopher’s sister Adele. Here we have a few tantalizing hints, too, of Schopenhauer as lover and as father (he sired two daughters who died in infancy).
What differentiates Schopenhauer from the Stoics is that the Stoics counselled an active participation in political and social activities of the day, anathema to a man like Schopenhauer who believed the solution of the world’s most important problems did not inhere in political or cultural action. Schopenhauer instead counselled, ideally, ascetic resignation, but he knew it was impossible for most men and women to achieve that resignation; next best, as Bather Woods concludes, was compassion for the suffering of one’s fellow men and women and the alleviation of their pain. I doubt that Schopenhauer would have considered this a definition of hope, since the conflict of will and world is violent, dark, and eternal. The highest form of self-help is helping others: this doesn’t call for resilience, which is aimed inward. It is a sort of love, Bather Woods muses. He’ll get no argument from me. I’ll raise a glass to him and the Sage of Frankfurt-am-Main at the Cafe Schopenhauer in March.
Cheers to that!!