Schopenhauer on Solitude and Freedom

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free. — Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, Ch. 8

Historical Context

Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) — the title translates roughly to "Appendices and Omissions" — was Schopenhauer's final major publication, a two-volume collection of essays, aphorisms, and reflections accumulated over decades. After the commercial failure of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer spent more than three decades in near-total obscurity, living as a private scholar in Frankfurt am Main. The Parerga was his last attempt to reach a broader audience, and unlike his dense systematic works, it was written in an accessible, aphoristic style. The strategy worked: the collection became Schopenhauer's breakthrough to fame, and the chapter "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life" became one of the most widely read philosophical texts of the nineteenth century.

Volume 2, Chapter 8 addresses the individual's relationship to society and solitude. Schopenhauer wrote these reflections during his long years of isolation in Frankfurt, where he lived alone with a succession of poodles, maintaining a rigid daily routine of reading, writing, and walking. His defence of solitude was not merely theoretical but biographical: Schopenhauer viewed his own isolation as both a consequence of his philosophy and a condition of his intellectual productivity. The Parerga's commercial success finally brought him the recognition he had sought his entire life, though it came only in his final decade, and the reflections on solitude in Chapter 8 stand as both a personal credo and a philosophical argument about the conditions under which genuine individuality can flourish.

Meaning

The quote establishes a triadic connection between solitude, selfhood, and freedom. Schopenhauer's claim rests on the observation that in society, the individual is constantly pressured to conform — to modulate behaviour, speech, and even thought to meet social expectations. This conformity erodes the authentic self, replacing genuine individuality with a social persona designed to appease others. Only in solitude, Schopenhauer argues, does this pressure lift. When alone, one is freed from the need to perform, to please, to defer; one can think one's own thoughts and feel one's own feelings without the distorting lens of social judgement.

The link to freedom is crucial: Schopenhauer does not mean freedom in the political sense but in the existential sense — freedom to be who one truly is. If one cannot tolerate solitude, he suggests, it is because one has no self to return to — one's identity is entirely invested in the social world, and without an audience, one feels empty. To love solitude, then, is to love the condition under which genuine selfhood is possible, and to love that condition is to love the freedom that makes selfhood real. The argument inverts the common assumption that freedom is found in society and constraint in isolation: for Schopenhauer, it is society that constrains and solitude that liberates.

Philosophical Interpretation

Schopenhauer's defence of solitude is a radical anti-conformism that places him in a tradition running from the ancient Cynics through Renaissance individualism to modern existentialism. His view of society as fundamentally hostile to the individual anticipates Nietzsche's distinction between the "herd" and the free spirit. Nietzsche, who read Schopenhauer as his primary philosophical influence in his youth, adopted and intensified this theme: the genuine creator must withdraw from the crowd to cultivate their own values, and the "last man" — Nietzsche's image of decadence — is precisely the one who cannot bear solitude, who flees into the comfort of collective opinion.

Schopenhauer's argument also resonates with Kierkegaard's contemporaneous critique of "the public" as an abstraction that dissolves individual responsibility. For all three thinkers, the crowd is not merely a social inconvenience but an existential threat: it tempts the individual to abandon the difficult task of becoming oneself in favour of the easier path of conforming. Schopenhauer's specific contribution is to link solitude not just to selfhood but to freedom — suggesting that freedom is not a political status granted by institutions but an interior condition that can only be accessed when the social world's demands are suspended. This conception of freedom as interior and solitary rather than political and collective represents a significant departure from Enlightenment liberalism and anticipates the existentialist understanding of freedom as radical self-determination. The quote also carries echoes of the Stoic tradition, particularly Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, for whom inner autonomy was the only true freedom — though Schopenhauer's version is more psychological and less rationalist, rooted in his metaphysics of the will rather than in the Stoic cosmology of reason.

Related Concepts

• Individuality (Individualität): the authentic self distinct from social roles and personas
• Freedom (Freiheit): existential freedom to be oneself, not merely political liberty
• Conformism: the social pressure that erodes genuine individuality
• The Crowd (die Menge): Schopenhauer's term for the collectivity that threatens the individual
• Authenticity: living in accordance with one's own nature rather than social expectation

Related Learning

• Arthur Schopenhauer — Explore the life and philosophy of Schopenhauer
• Solitude — The philosophical significance of being alone
• Freedom — Freedom across philosophical traditions

Sources

• Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Chapter 8. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
• "Arthur Schopenhauer." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed July 30, 2026. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/