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 str ...