Arthur Schopenhauer slept with loaded pistols beside his bed, feuded for decades with his bestselling-author mother, torpedoed his own academic career out of spite, and spent his final years in Frankfurt talking mostly to a series of poodles named Atman. This episode walks chronologically through the life of the philosopher of pessimism, from his privileged birth in Danzig in 1788 and his father’s suspected suicide in 1805 to the inheritance that let him live off interest and never work a day in his life.

We examine his ruinous relationship with Johanna Schopenhauer in Weimar, his bridge-burning encounters with Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Goethe, and the introduction to the Upanishads and Buddhism that fused with Kant’s philosophy to produce The World as Will and Representation. The conversation explains the will as a blind, purposeless striving beneath all appearances, the pendulum between pain and boredom, and the two escape routes of asceticism and aesthetic contemplation, especially music. We then cover the humiliating showdown with Hegel in Berlin, the lawsuit from a seamstress that cost him a twenty-year pension, his late fame after Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851, and his influence on Wagner, Tolstoy, Freud, and Schrodinger.

• How Kant’s phenomenal and noumenal worlds work as a virtual reality headset, and what Schopenhauer said powers the simulation
• Why scheduling his lectures opposite Hegel’s drew only five students and ended his academic career
• Music as the direct voice of the will and art as a pause button on desire
• Schopenhauer’s early and forceful case for animal compassion, derived from the unity of the will
• Why the failed revolutions of 1848 finally made Europe ready for his pessimism, and whether that pessimism leads to radical empathy