Most people think of philosophy as a dusty collection of ideas floating in a vacuum. It’s not. To really get why someone like Immanuel Kant or Friedrich Nietzsche thought the way they did, you have to look at their actual lives. Their weird habits. Their failures. The way they treated their neighbors. When you dig into the lives and opinions of eminent philosophers, you realize pretty quickly that these weren't just "brains in a jar." They were messy humans.
Take Arthur Schopenhauer. He’s famous for being the ultimate pessimist. He basically thought existence was a mistake driven by a blind, irrational "Will." But did he live like a monk? Nope. He played the flute, dined at the best hotels in Frankfurt, and had a very complicated relationship with his poodle, Atman. If you only read his books, you'd think he was miserable 24/7. In reality, he was just a guy who found the world exhausting but still enjoyed a good meal.
The Strange Daily Routines That Shaped Great Minds
You can’t talk about the lives and opinions of eminent philosophers without mentioning their routines. Routine is where the magic happens—or where the madness starts. Immanuel Kant was so predictable that the citizens of Königsberg literally set their watches by his afternoon walks. He lived a life of rigid, mathematical precision. He never traveled more than a few miles from his birthplace. This hyper-local, hyper-structured existence is exactly why his philosophy is so obsessed with universal laws and categorical imperatives. He wanted the universe to be as orderly as his dining room.
Then you have someone like Jean-Paul Sartre. Total opposite. Sartre lived in cafes. He wrote Being and Nothingness while sitting at the Les Deux Magots in Paris, surrounded by smoke, chatter, and the clinking of glasses. His philosophy of radical freedom and "existence preceding essence" wasn't born in a quiet library. It was born in the chaos of mid-century France, fueled by copious amounts of caffeine and, later in life, some pretty heavy amphetamine use. He lived the "contingency" he wrote about.
When Opinions Clashed With Reality
It’s easy to preach virtue when nobody is watching. It’s harder when you’re actually in the thick of it. Seneca is the classic example here. He’s one of the pillars of Stoicism, telling us to remain indifferent to wealth and power. Yet, he was one of the richest men in Rome and served as an advisor to Nero. Yeah, that Nero. Critics at the time—and historians today—often call him a hypocrite. How can you write about the vanity of riches while owning half of Britain’s local economy through usury?
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The nuance, though, is in his struggle. Seneca’s letters aren't just lectures; they’re often him trying to convince himself to be better. He knew he was compromised. That tension between his lived experience in a bloody, opulent imperial court and his desire for Stoic calm is what makes his writing actually useful. It’s not "perfect" advice. It’s "triage" advice.
Why We Get Nietzsche So Wrong
Friedrich Nietzsche is arguably the most misunderstood figure in the history of the lives and opinions of eminent philosophers. People see the mustache and the talk of the "Übermensch" and assume he was some kind of aggressive, proto-fascist alpha male. Honestly? He was a frail, sickly former professor who lived in cheap boarding houses and suffered from agonizing migraines.
His "will to power" wasn't a call for political conquest. It was a personal, psychological scream against his own physical weakness. He was lonely. He spent his summers in the Swiss Alps because the air helped his lungs, and his winters in Italy seeking the sun. When he wrote about overcoming oneself, he was talking about getting out of bed when your head feels like it's being split by a hatchet.
- The Sils Maria period: This is where he had the idea for Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He walked for hours every day.
- The breakdown: In 1889, he saw a horse being whipped in Turin and collapsed, hugging its neck. He never recovered his sanity.
- The sister problem: His sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, was a nationalist who edited his notebooks to make him sound like a German supremacist. This ruined his reputation for decades.
The Existential Weight of Lifestyle Choices
The way these thinkers lived often dictated the shelf-life of their ideas. Look at Diogenes the Cynic. He lived in a ceramic jar (often mistranslated as a barrel) in the middle of Athens. He owned nothing but a cloak and a staff. He once saw a child drinking water with his hands and threw away his only cup, realizing it was an unnecessary luxury.
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Diogenes didn't write books. His "philosophy" was his life. He performed "street theater" to shock people out of their social conditioning. When Alexander the Great came to see him and asked if he could do him any favor, Diogenes just said, "Yeah, move a little to the side, you’re blocking my sun." That’s a powerful opinion, but it’s only powerful because he actually lived in that jar. If a billionaire said that, it would just be a quirky tweet. When a guy with zero possessions says it to the most powerful man on earth, it’s a revolution.
The Problem With "Professional" Philosophers
By the time we get to the 20th century, philosophy moved into the university. This changed everything. The lives and opinions of eminent philosophers became less about wandering the streets of Athens and more about tenure tracks and peer-reviewed journals.
Ludwig Wittgenstein is the outlier here. He was born into one of the wealthiest families in Europe (think the Rothschilds of Austria) and gave it all away. Every penny. He went to teach elementary school in a tiny mountain village, worked as a gardener, and lived in a hut he built himself in Norway. He thought academic philosophy was mostly a bunch of people getting "bewitched" by language. He didn't just have opinions on language; he felt the weight of it so heavily that he often went years without publishing a single word.
Putting the Ideas to Work
If you're looking to actually use these insights, don't just memorize their "greatest hits." That's boring and mostly useless for your day-to-day life. Instead, look at the why behind the what.
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- Analyze your environment like Sartre. Are you choosing your life, or are you just "playing the role" of a worker, a student, or a parent? Sartre called this "Bad Faith." If you feel stuck, ask yourself if you’re pretending you don't have a choice when you actually do.
- Audit your "must-haves" like Diogenes. We’re all buried under "needs" that are actually just social pressures. Next time you want to buy something to "keep up," imagine Diogenes barking at you from his jar. It helps.
- Practice "Premeditatio Malorum" like the Stoics. This is the "premeditation of evils." Don't just visualize success. Spend five minutes imagining what happens if things go wrong. Not to be a downer, but to realize that you can probably handle it.
- Embrace the walk. Almost every philosopher mentioned—Kant, Nietzsche, Rousseau—walked miles every day. There’s a direct link between physical movement and the ability to untangle complex problems. If you're stuck on a project, leave your phone at home and walk until your legs get tired.
The lives and opinions of eminent philosophers shouldn't be treated like museum exhibits. They are more like field notes from people who were trying to figure out the same things we are: how to be happy, how to be "good," and how to deal with the fact that we’re all going to die.
What to Read Next
If you want to go deeper, skip the textbooks. Read the primary sources that feel personal.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: It’s literally his private diary. He never meant for you to read it. That’s why it’s so good.
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins: It’s a novel, but it captures the lived reality of the existentialist circle in Paris better than any essay.
- Michel de Montaigne, Essays: He basically invented the blog post. He writes about his kidney stones, his sex life, and his cat. He’s the most "human" of the bunch.
Start by picking one philosopher whose lifestyle actually appeals to you—or even one that repulses you. Read about their childhood, their failures, and their weirdest quirks. You’ll find that their "opinions" start to make a lot more sense when you see the person behind the prose.
Take a walk. Question a social norm. Stop "performing" your life for a second. That's where real philosophy starts. It's not in the books; it's in the way you decide to spend your Tuesday afternoon.