Deconstructing Pessimism

by Matthew Loftus

David Bather Woods. Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist. University of Chicago Press, 2025. $29.99. 296 pp.

Arthur Schopenhauer would have done pretty well on Twitter. He spent his life filling notebooks with his observations and doubtlessly would have broadcast them far and wide had he been given the chance. His caustic wit, his penchant for aphorisms, his enigmatic mixture of views progressive and retrograde, his deep insight, his self-aggrandizing spirit, his anti-Christian tirades, and above all his misanthropy gave him what we might call today Main Character Energy.

In his new biography of Schopenhauer, scholar David Bather Woods refrains for the most part from such present-oriented judgments, but it’s hard to avoid the comparisons as one looks at our social media landscape and sees a crowd of people convinced of their own greatness, turning strife and pessimism into profit. Schopenhauer’s legacy was broad, but the philosophers who could be …