Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer (Артур Шопенгауэр; 1788–1860) was a German philosopher.¹

In A Confession

Schopenhauer is named thirteen times in A Confession (Исповедь, 1879–82). The plan on the cover of the first draft already has him: “I look round at my contemporaries. Solomon, Schopenhauer.”²

• Chapter VI. True philosophy, “not that which Schopenhauer calls ‘professorial philosophy’”, gives one answer to the question of life, the answer given by Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon and the Buddha (VI.10).³ Tolstoy then quotes each of them. The long Schopenhauer passage (VI.13) is from the closing section, § 71, of The World as Will and Representation; Tolstoy read the book in German and the translation is his own.⁴ A shorter saying follows in VI.23: “Life is that which should not be — an evil; and the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life.”⁵
• Chapter VII. People who live in ignorance “have not yet understood that question of life which presented itself to Schopenhauer, Solomon, and Buddha” (VII.4). The fourth of the four ways out is “to live like Solomon and Schopenhauer”: to know that life is a stupid joke and still go on living (VII.11). Tolstoy places himself there.⁶
• Chapter VIII. Looking back: “in the delusion of my pride of intellect it seemed to me so indubitable that I and Solomon and Schopenhauer had stated the question so truly and exactly that nothing else was possible” (VIII.3).⁷
• Chapter IX. At first knowledge seemed to give a positive reply, “the reply of Schopenhauer: that life has no meaning and is an evil”. Strictly expressed, as by the Brahmins, Solomon and Schopenhauer, the reply is only “indefinite, or an identity: 0 equals 0” (IX.7).⁸ His position “with Schopenhauer and Solomon” was stupid: they understood life to be an evil and went on living (IX.22).
• Chapter X. It was not that he, Solomon and Schopenhauer had not killed themselves that convinced him faith exists, but that the milliards of ordinary people lived (X.8).
• Chapter XII. He “went over in [his] mind the arguments of Kant and Schopenhauer showing the impossibility of proving the existence of a God”, and began to refute them (XII.4).⁹ See On proving God below, and Immanuel Kant.

Will to live

Wille zum Leben, “will to live”, is the term Tolstoy keeps in German inside his own translation in VI.13. In that passage it is what resists the passage into nothingness: “our nature, is only that same wish to live — Wille zum Leben — which forms ourselves as well as our world.”¹⁰

On proving God

The PSS commentary to XII.4 points to the places where Schopenhauer examines the proofs of God’s existence: On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, chapter 2, §§ 7–8, and chapter 4, § 20.¹¹ In outline (general scholarship, not from these sources): he argues that the proofs misuse the principle that everything has a reason or cause, by applying it until it reaches a first cause and then dropping it there.

Open questions

• In VII.18 the Russian has “Nobody prevents us, with Schopenhauer, from denying life”.¹² Both Wiener and Maude leave out “with Schopenhauer”. Whether their Russian text lacked the words, as at other places where they agree against the PSS, is not checked.
• The PSS commentary to VI.10 cites Fet’s Russian translation of The World as Will and Representation for the preface on professorial philosophy, but says that Tolstoy read the book in the original.¹³ When he first read it is not shown by these sources.
• The outline in On proving God is general scholarship and should be checked against the Fourfold Root before the page goes live.

Dive provenance

• 1879-1882-a-confession — the text of A Confession (PSS 23:1–59) and its commentary (PSS 23:515–537); Johan’s reader notes of 10 October 2026 asked for this page.