Influence on Modern Thought

Schopenhauer reached far beyond philosophy. Freud credited him with anticipating the idea of the unconscious — that hidden drives govern behavior while consciousness invents reasons afterward.

Wagner called him his greatest intellectual influence, and Nietzsche began as a devoted follower before rebelling against his pessimism. Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Borges all drew on him, and modern evolutionary psychology echoes his view that organisms are vehicles for blind biological drives.