Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (b. 22 February 1788 in Danzig; d. 21 September 1860 in Frankfurt-on-Main, German Confederation) was a German philosopher and university teacher. He was among the first 19th century philosophers to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place. He considered that humans are motivated by their own basic desires and that their actions are directionless. According to him, the main problem is the desire which is the root of suffering and pain. He nonetheless considered music, the "answer to the mystery of life", to be the greatest of all art forms, rising head and shoulders above painting, sculpture, and even writing.[2]
Contents
Life
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His parents belonged to the mercantile class - bankers and traders of the Hanseatic City of Danzig, at the time an autonomous city under the crown of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, the youngest of a family to which the mother had brought the germs of mental malady, was a man of strong will and originality. At the time Danzig returned to Prussia, in 1793, Heinrich moved to Hamburg, although his firm continued trading in Danzig. At the age of forty he married Johanna Henrietta Trosiener, then only twenty, but the marriage owing to difference of temperament was unhappy. Johanna (1766-1838) was in her day an 'author of some reputation. Besides editing the memoirs of Fernow, she published Notes on Travels in England, Scotland and Southern France (1813-1817); Johann van Eyck and his Successors (1823); three romances, Gabriele (1819-1820), Die Tante (1823) and Sidonia (1828), besides some shorter tales. These novels teach the moral of renunciation (Entsagung). Her daughter Adele (1796-1849) seems to have had a brave, tender and unsatisfied heart, and lavished on her brother an affection he sorely tried. She also was an authoress, publishing in 1844 a volume of Haus-, Wald-, and Feld-Mdrehen, full of quaint poetical conceits, and in 1845 Anna, a novel, in two volumes.[3]
The two children, Arthur and the abovementioned Adele (born 1796), bore the penalty of their parents' incompatibilities. They were burdened by an abnormal urgency of desire and capacity for suffering, which no doubt took different phases in the man and the woman, but linked them together in a common susceptibility to ideal pain.' In the summer of 1787, a year after the marriage, Heinrich Schopenhauer, whom commercial experiences had made a cosmopolitan in heart, took his young wife on a tour to western Europe. It had been his plan that the expected child, Arthur, should see the light in England, but the intention was frustrated by the state of his wife's health. The name Arthur was chosen because it remains the same in English, French and German.
1793-1805
During the family's twelve years in Hamburg (1793-1805) the Schopenhauers made frequent excursions. From 1797 to 1799 Arthur was a boarder with M. Gregoire, a merchant of Le Havre, France, and friend of the Hamburg house, with whose son Anthime he formed a fast friendship. Returning to Hamburg, for the next four years he had but indifferent training. When he reached the age of fifteen the scholarly and literary instincts began to awaken. But his father, steeped in the spirit of commerce, was unwilling that a son of his should worship knowledge and truth. Accordingly he offered his son the choice between the classical school and an excursion to England. A boy of fifteen could scarcely hesitate. In 1803 the Schopenhauers and their son set out on a lengthened tour, of which Johanna has given an account, to Holland, England, France and Austria. Six months were spent in England. He found English ways dull and precise and the religious observances exacting; and his mother had - not for the last time - to talk seriously with him on his unsocial and willful character. Back in Hamburg at the beginning of 1805 he was placed in a merchant's office. He had only been there for three months when his father, who had shown symptoms of mental alienation, fell or threw himself into a canal.
After his death the young widow (still under forty), leaving Arthur in Hamburg, proceeded with her daughter Adele in the middle of 1806 to Weimar, where she arrived only a fortnight before the tribulation which followed the victory of Napoleon at Jena. At Weimar her talents, hitherto held in check, found an atmosphere to stimulate and foster them, her aesthetic and literary tastes formed themselves under the influence of Goethe and his circle, and her little salon gained a certain celebrity. Arthur, meanwhile, became more and more restless, and his mother allowed him to leave his employment. He resumed his education at Gotha, but a satire on one of the teachers led to his dismissal. He was then placed with the Greek scholar Franz Passow, who superintended his classical studies. This time he made so much progress that in two years he read Greek and Latin with fluency and interest.
Adulthood
In 1809 his mother handed over to him (aged twenty-one) a third part of his paternal estate, which gave him an annual income of 50 marks, and in October 1809 he entered the university of Göttingen. The direction of his philosophical reading was fixed by the advice of G. E. Schulze to study, especially, Plato and Kant. For the former he soon found himself full of reverence, and from the latter he acquired the standpoint of modern philosophy. The names of "Plato the divine and the marvellous Kant" are conjunctly invoked at the beginning of his earliest work. But even at this stage of his career the pessimism of his later writings began to manifest itself, together with a susceptibility to morbid fears which led him to keep loaded weapons always at his bedside. He was a man of few acquaintances, amongst the few being Bunsen, the subsequent scholar-diplomatist, and Bunsen's pupil, W. B. Astor, the son of Washington Irving's millionaire hero. Even then he found his trustiest mate in a poodle, and its bearskin was an institution in his lodging.
Yet, precisely because he met the world so seldom in easy dialogue, he was unnecessarily dogmatic in controversy; and many a bottle of wine went to pay for lost wagers. But he had made up his mind to be not an actor but an onlooker and critic in the battle of life; and when Wieland, whom he met on one of his excursions, suggested doubts as to the wisdom of his choice, Schopenhauer replied, "Life is a ticklish business; I have resolved to spend it in reflecting upon it." After two years at Göttingen he took two years at Berlin. Here also he dipped into divers stores of learning, notably classics under Wolf. In philosophy he studied Fichte and Schleiermacher. Between 1811 and 1813 the lectures of Fichte (subsequently published from his notes in his Nachgelassene Werke) dealt with what he called the "facts of consciousness" and the "theory of science," and struggled to present his final conception of philosophy. These lectures Schopenhauer attended - at first, it is allowed, with interest, but afterwards with a spirit of opposition which is said to have degenerated into contempt, and which in after years never permitted him to refer to Fichte without irritation. Yet the words Schopenhauer then listened to, often with baffled curiosity, certainly influenced his speculation.
Weimar
In Berlin Schopenhauer was lonely and unhappy. One of his interests was to visit the hospital La Charite and study the evidence it afforded of the interdependence of the moral and the physical in man. In the early days of 1813 sympathy with the national enthusiasm against the French carried him so far as to buy a set of arms; but he stopped short of volunteering for active service, reflecting that Napoleon gave after all only concentrated and untrammelled utterance to that self-assertion and lust for more life which weaker mortals feel but must perforce disguise. Leaving the nation and its statesmen to fight out their freedom, he hurried away to Weimar, and thence to the quiet Thuringian town of Rudolstadt, where in the inn "Zum Ritter", out of sight of soldier and sound of drum, he wrote, helped by books from the Weimar library, his essay for the degree of doctor in philosophy. On the 2nd of October 1813 he received his diploma from Jena; and in the same year from the press at Rudolstadt there was published - without winning notice or readers - his first book, Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, trans. in Bohn's Philological Library (1889).
In November 1813 Schopenhauer returned to Weimar, and for a few months boarded with his mother. But the strain of daily association was too much for their antagonistic natures. His splenetic temper and her volatility culminated in an open rupture in May 1814. From that time till her death in 1838 Schopenhauer never saw his mother again. During these few months at Weimar, however, he made some acquaintances destined to influence the subsequent course of his thought. Conversations with the Orientalist F. Mayer directed his studies to the philosophical speculations of ancient India. In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel had in his Language and Wisdom of the Old Hindus brought Brahmanical philosophy within the range of European literature. Still more instructive for Schopenhauer was the imperfect and obscure Latin translation of the Upanishads which in 1801-1802 Anquetil Duperron had published from a Persian version of the Sanskrit original. Another friendship of the same period had more palpable immediate effect, but not so permanent. This was with Goethe, who succeeded in securing his interest for those investigations on colours on which he was himself engaged. Schopenhauer took up the subject in earnest, and the result of his reflexions (and a few elementary observations) soon after appeared (Easter 1816) as a monograph, Über das Sehen and die Farben (ed. Leipzig, 1854). The essay, which must be treated as an episode or digression from the direct path of Schopenhauer's development, due to the potent force of Goethe, was written at Dresden, to which he had transferred his abode after the rupture with his mother. It had been sent in MS. to Goethe in the autumn of 1815, who, finding in it a transformation rather than an expansion of his own ideas, inclined to regard the author as an opponent rather than an adherent.
The pamphlet begins by re-stating with reference to sight the general theory that perception of an objective world rests upon an instinctive causal postulation, which even when it misleads still remains to haunt us (instead of being, like errors of reason, open to extirpation by evidence), and proceeds to deal with physiological colour, i.e. with colours as felt (not perceived) modifications of the action of the retina. First of all, the distinction of white and black, with their mean point in grey, is referred to the activity or inactivity of the total retina in the graduated presence or absence of full light. Further, the eye is endowed with polarity, by which its activity is divided into two parts qualitatively distinct. It is this circumstance which gives rise to the phenomenon of colour. All colours are complementary, or go in pairs; each pair makes up the whole activity of the retina, and so is equivalent to white; and the two partial activities are so connected that when the first is exhausted the other spontaneously succeeds. Such pairs of colour may be regarded as infinite in number; but there are three pairs which stand out prominently, and admit of easy expression for the ratio in which each contributes to the total action. These are red and green (each=), orange and blue (2: I), and yellow and violet (3: 1).' This theory of complementary colours as due to the polarity in the qualitative action of the retina is followed by some criticism of Newton and the seven colours, by an attempt to explain some facts noted by Goethe, and by some reference to the external stimuli which cause colour.
The grand interest of his life at Dresden was the composition of a work which should give expression in all its aspects to the idea of man's nature and destiny which had been gradually forming within him. Without cutting himself altogether either from social pleasures or from art, he read and took notes with regularity. More and.more he learned from Cabanis and Helvetius to see in the will and the passions the determinants of intellectual life, and in the character and the temper the source of theories and beliefs. The conviction was borne in upon him that scientific explanation could never do more than systematize and classify the mass of appearances which to our habit-blinded eyes seem to be the reality. To get at this reality and thus to reach a standpoint higher than that of aetiology was the problem of his as of all philosophy. It is only by such a tower of speculation that an 1 In this doctrine, so far as the facts go, Schopenhauer is indebted to a paper by R. Waring Darwin in vol. lxxvi. of the Transactions of the Philosophical Society. escape is possible from the spectre of materialism, theoretical and practical; and so, says Schopenhauer, "the just and good must all have this creed: I believe in a metaphysic."
Italy
The mere reasonings of theoretical science leave no room for art, and practical prudence usurps the place of morality. The higher life of aesthetic and ethical activity - the beautiful and the good - can only be based upon an intuition which penetrates the heart of reality. Towards the spring of 1818 the work was nearing its end, and Brockhaus of Leipzig had agreed to publish it and pay the author one ducat for every sheet of printed matter. But, as the press loitered, Schopenhauer, suspecting treachery, wrote so rudely and haughtily to the publisher that the latter broke off correspondence with his client. In the end of 1818, however, the book appeared (with the date 1819) as Die Welt als Wille and Vorstellung, in four books, with an appendix containing a criticism of the Kantian philosophy (Eng. trans. by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 1883). Long before the work had come to the hands of the public Schopenhauer had rushed off to Italy. He stayed for a time in Venice, where Byron was then living; but the two did not meet. At Rome he visited the art galleries, the opera, the theatre, and gladly seized every chance of conversing in English with Englishmen. In March 1819 he went as far as Naples and Paestium. About this time the fortunes of his mother and sister and himself were threatened by the failure of the firm in Danzig. His sister accepted a compromise of 70 per cent, but Schopenhauer angrily refused this, and eventually recovered 9400 thalers.
After some stay at Dresden, hesitating between fixing himself as university teacher at Göttingen, Heidelberg or Berlin, he finally chose the last-mentioned. He was, however, not a good lecturer, and his work soon came to an end. His failure he attributed to Hegelian intrigues. Thus, except for some attention to physiology, the first two years at Berlin were wasted. In May 1822 he again set out by way of Switzerland for Italy. After spending the winter at Florence and Rome, he left in the spring of 1823 for Munich, where he stayed for nearly a year, the prey of illness and isolation. When at the end of this wretched time he left for Gastein, in May 1824, he had almost entirely lost the hearing of his right ear. Dresden, which he reached in August, no longer presented the same hospitable aspect as of old, and he was reluctantly drawn onwards to Berlin in May 1825.
Return to Berlin
The six years at Berlin were a dismal period in the life of Schopenhauer. In vain did he watch for any sign of recognition of his philosophic genius. Hegelianism reigned in the schools and in literature and basked in the sunshine of authority. Thus driven back upon himself, Schopenhauer fell into morbid meditations, and the world which he saw, if it was stripped naked of its disguises, lost its proportions in the distorting light. The sexual passion had a strong attraction for him at all times, and, according to his biographers, the notes he set down in English, when he was turned thirty, on marriage and kindred topics are unfit for publication. Yet in the loneliness of life at Berlin the idea of a wife as the comfort of gathering age sometimes rose before his mind - only to be driven away by cautious hesitations as to the capacity of his means, and by the shrinking from the loss of familiar liberties. He wrote nothing material. In 1828 he made inquiries about a chair at Heidelberg; and in 1830 he got a shortened Latin version of his physiological theory of colours inserted in the third volume of the Scriptores ophthalmologici minores (edited by Radius).
Another pathway to reputation was suggested by some remarks he saw in the seventh number of the Foreign Review, in an article on Damiron's French Philosophy. With reference to some statements in the article on the importance of Kant, he sent in very fair English a letter to the writer, offering to translate Kant's principal works into English. He named his wages and enclosed a specimen of his work. His correspondent, Francis Haywood, made a counter-proposal which so disgusted Schopenhauer that he addressed his next letter to the publishers of the review. When they again referred him to Haywood, he applied to Thomas Campbell, then chairman of a company formed for buying up the copyright of meritorious but rejected works. Nothing came of this application.' A translation of selections from the works of Balthazar Gracian, which was published by Frauenstlldt in 1862, seems to have been made about this time.2 In 1833 he settled finally at Frankfurt, gloomily waiting for the recognition of his work, and terrified by fears of assassination and robbery. As the years passed he noted down every confirmation he found of his own opinions in the writings of others, and every instance in which his views appeared to be illustrated by new researches. Full of the conviction of his idea, he saw everything in the light of it, and gave each apercu a place in his alphabetically arranged note-book. Everything he published in later life may be called a commentary, an excursus or a scholium to his main book; and many of them are decidedly of the nature of commonplace books or collectanea of notes. But along with the accumulation of his illustrative and corroborative materials grew the bitterness of heart which found its utterances neglected and other names the oracles of the reading world.
The gathered ill-humour of many years, aggravated by the confident assurance of the Hegelians, found vent at length in the introduction to his next book, where Hegel's works are described as three-quarters utter absurdity and one-quarter mere paradox - a specimen of the language in which during his subsequent career he used to advert to his three predecessors Fichte, Schelling, but above all Hegel. This work, with its wild outcry against the philosophy of the professoriate, was entitled Über den Willen in der Natur, and was published in 1836 (revised and enlarged, 1854; Eng. trans., 1889). In 1837 Schopenhauer sent to the committee entrusted with the execution of the proposed monument to Goethe at Frankfort a long and deliberate expression of his views, in general and particular, on the best mode of carrying out the design. But his fellow-citizens passed by the remarks of the mere writer of books. More weight was naturally attached to the opinion he had advocated in his early criticism of Kant as to the importance, if not the superiority, of the first edition of the Kritik; in the collected issue of Kant's works by Rosenkranz and Schubert in 1838 that edition was put as the substantive text, with supplementary exhibition of the differences of the second.
1841
In 1841 he published under the title Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik two essays which he had sent in 1838-1839 in competition for prizes offered. The first was in answer to the question "Whether man's free will can be proved from self-consciousness," proposed by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences at Drontheim. His essay was awarded the prize, and the author elected a. member of the society. But proportionate to his exultation in this first recognition of his merit was the depth of his mortification and the height of his indignation at the result of the second competition. He had sent to the Danish Academy at Copenhagen in 1839 an essay On the Foundations of Morality in answer to a vaguely worded subject of discussion to which they had invited candidates. His essay, though it was the only one in competition, was refused the prize on the grounds that he had failed to examine the chief problem (i.e. whether the basis of morality was to be sought in an intuitive idea of right), that his explanation was inadequate, and that he had been wanting in due respect to the summi philosophi of the age that was just passing. This last reason, while probably most effective with the judges, only stirred up more furiously the fury in Schopenhauer's breast, and his preface is one long fulmination against the ineptitudes and the charlatanry of his bête noire, Hegel.
1844
In 1844, appeared the second edition of his main work The World as Will and Idea, in two volumes. The first volume was a slightly altered reprint of the earlier issue; the second consisted of a series of chapters forming a commentary parallel to those into which the original work was now first divided. The longest of these new chapters deal with the primacy of the will, with death and with the metaphysics of sexual love. But, though only a small edition was struck off (500 copies of vol. i. and 750 of vol. ii.). It was not till 1841 that a translation of Kant's Kritik in English appeared. He also projected a translation of Hume's Essays and wrote a preface for it.
The report of sales which Brockhaus rendered in 1846 was unfavourable, and the price had afterwards to be reduced. Yet there were faint indications of coming fame, and the eagerness with which each new tribute from critic and admirer was welcomed is both touching and amusing. From 1843 onwards a jurist named F. Dorguth had trumpeted abroad Schopenhauer's name. In 1844 a letter from a Darmstadt lawyer, Johannes August Becker, asking for explanation of some difficulties, began an intimate correspondence which went on for some time (and which was published by Becker's son in 1883). But the chief evangelist (so Schopenhauer styled his literary followers as distinct from the apostles who published not) was Frauenstadt, who made his personal acquaintance in 1846. It was Frauenstalt who succeeded in finding a publisher for the Parerga and Paralipomena, which appeared at Berlin in 1851 (2 vols., pp. 4 6 5, 53 1; sel. trans. by J. B. Saunders, 1889; French by A. Dietrich, 'clog). Yet for this bulky collection of essays, philosophical and others, Schopenhauer received as honorarium only ten free copies of the work. Soon afterwards, Dr E. O. Lindner, assistant editor of the Vossische Zeitung, began a series of Schopenhauerite articles. Amongst them may be reckoned a translation by Mrs Lindner of an article by John Oxenford which appeared in the Westminster Review for April 1853, entitled Iconoclasm in German Philosophy, being an outline of Schopenhauer's system. In 1854 Frauenstadt's Letters on the Schopenhauerean Philosophy showed that the new doctrines were become a subject of discussion – a state of things made still more obvious by the University of Leipzig offering a prize for the best exposition and examination of the principles of Schopenhauer's system. Besides this, the response his ideas gave to popular needs and feelings was evinced by the numerous correspondents who sought his advice in their difficulties. And for the same reason new editions of his works were called for - a second edition of his degree dissertation in 1847, of his Essay on Colours and of The Will in Nature in 1854, a third edition of The World as Will and Idea in 1859, and in 1860 a second edition of The Main Problems of Ethics.
Death
In 1854 Richard Wagner had sent him a copy of the Ring of the Nibelung, with some words of thanks for a theory of music which had fallen in with his own conceptions. Three years later he received a visit from his old college friend Bunsen, who was then staying in Heidelberg. On his seventieth birthday congratulations flowed in from many quarters. In April 1860 he began to be affected by occasional difficulty in breathing and by palpitation of the heart. Another attack came on in autumn (9th September), and again a week later. On the evening of the 18th his friend and subsequent biographer, Dr Gwinner, sat with him and conversed. On the morning of the 21st September he rose and sat down alone to breakfast; shortly afterwards his doctor called and found him dead in his chair. By his will, made in 1852, with a codicil dated February 1859, his property, with the exception of some small bequests, was devised to the above-mentioned institution at Berlin. Gwinner was named executor, and Frauenstalt was entrusted with the care of his manuscripts and other literary remains.
It is often said that a philosophic system cannot be rightly understood without reference to the character and circumstances of the philosopher. The remark finds ample application in the case of Schopenhauer. The conditions of his training, which brought him in contact with the realities of life before he learned the phrases of scholastic language, give to his words the stamp of self-seen truth and the clearness of original conviction. They explain at the same time the naïveté which set a high price on the products his own energies had turned out, and could not see that what was so original to himself might seem less unique to other judges. Preoccupied with his own ideas, he chafed under the indifference of thinkers who had grown blasé in speculation and fancied himself persecuted by a conspiracy of professors of philosophy. It is not so easy to demonstrate the connexion between a man's life and doctrine. But it is at least plain that in the case of any philosopher, what makes him such is the faculty he has, more than other men, to get a clear idea of what he himself is and does. More than others he leads a second life in the spirit or intellect alongside of his life in the flesh - the life of knowledge beside the life of will. It is inevitable that he should be especially struck by the points in which the sensible and temporal life comes in conflict with the intellectual and eternal. It was thus that Schopenhauer by his own experience saw in the primacy of the will the fundamental fact of his philosophy, and found in the engrossing interests of the selfish 'pros the perennial hindrances of the higher life. For his absolute individualism, which recognizes in the state, the church, the family only so many superficial and incidental provisions of human craft, the means of relief was absorption in the intellectual and purely ideal aims which prepare the way for the cessation of temporal individuality altogether. But theory is one thing and practice another; and he will often lay most stress on the theory who is most conscious of defects in the practice. It need not, therefore, surprise us that the man who formulated the sum of virtue in justice and benevolence was unable to be just to his own kinsfolk and reserved his compassion largely for the brutes, and that the delineator of asceticism was more than moderately sensible of the comforts and enjoyments of life.
His philosophy
The philosophy of Schopenhauer, like almost every system of the 19th century, can hardly be understood without reference to the ideas of Kant. Anterior to Kant the gradual advance of idealism had been the most conspicuous feature in philo sophic speculation. That the direct objects of knowledge, the realities of experience, were after all only our ideas or from perceptions was the lesson of every thinker from Descartes to Hume. And this doctrine was generally understood to mean that human thought, limited as it was by its own weakness and acquired habits, could hardly hope to cope successfully with the problem of apprehending the real things. The idealist position Kant seemed at first sight to retain with an even stronger force than ever. But it is darkest just before the dawn; and Kant, the Copernicus of philosophy, had really altered the aspects of the doctrine of ideas. It was his purpose to show that the forms of thought (which he sought to isolate from the peculiarities incident to the organic body) were not merely customary means for licking into convenient shape the data of perception, but entered as underlying elements into the constitution of objects, making experience possible and determining the fundamental structure of nature. In other words, the forms of knowledge were the main factor in making objects. By Kant, however, these forms are generally treated psychologically as the action of the several faculties of a mind. Behind thinking there is the thinker. But in his successors, from Fichte to Hegel, this axiom of the plain man is set aside as antiquated. Thought or conception without a subjectagent appears as the principle - thought or thinking in its universality without any individual substrata in which it is embodied: TO voeav or vona-is is to be substituted for vas.
This is the step of advance which is required alike by Fichte when he asks his reader to rise from the empirical ego to the ego which is subject-object (i.e. neither and both), and by Hegel when he tries to substitute the Begriff or notion for the Vorstellung or pictorial conception. As spiritism asks us to accept such suspension of ordinary mechanics. as permits human bodies to float through the air and part without injury to their members, so the new philosophy of Kant's immediate successors requires from the postulant for initiation willingness to reverse his customary beliefs in quasi-material subjects of thought. But, besides removing the psychological slag which clung to Kant's ideas from their matrix and presenting reason as the active principle in the formation of a universe, his successors carried out with far more detail, and far more enthusiasm and historical scope, his principle that in reason lay the a priori or the anticipation of the world, moral and physical. Not content with the barren assertion that the understanding makes nature, and that we can construct science only on the hypothesis that there is reason in the world, they proceeded to show how the thing was actually done. But to do so they had first to brush away a stone of stumbling which Kant had left in the way. This was the thing as it is by itself and apart from our knowledge of it - the something which we know, when and as we know it not. This somewhat is what Kant calls a limit-concept. It marks only that we feel our knowledge to be inadequate, and for the reason that there may be another species of sensation than ours, that other beings may not be tied by the special laws of our constitution, and may apprehend, as Plato says, by the soul itself apart from the senses. But this limitation, say the successors of Kant, rests upon a misconception. The sense of inadequacy is only a condition of growing knowledge in a being subject to the laws of space and time; and the very feeling is a proof of its implicit removal. Look at reason not in its single temporal manifestations but in its eternal operation, and then this universal thought, which may be called God, as the sense-conditioned reason is called man, becomes the very breath and structure of the world. Thus in the true idea of things there is no irreducible residuum of matter: mind is the Alpha and Omega, at once the initial postulate and the final truth of reality.
In various ways a reaction arose against this absorption of everything in reason. In Fichte himself the source of being is primeval activity, the groundless and incomprehensible deed-action (ThatHandlung) of the absolute ego. The innermost character of that ego is an infinitude in act and effort. "The will is the living principle of reason," he says again. "In the last resort," says Schelling (1809), in his Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, " there is no other being but will. Wollen ist Ursein (will is primal being); and to this alone apply the predicates fathomless, eternal, independent of time, self-affirming." It is unnecessary to multiply instances to prove that idealism was never without a protest that there is a heart of existence, life, will, action, which is presupposed by all knowledge and is not itself amenable to explanation. We may, if we like, call this element, which is assumed as the basis of all scientific method, irrational - will instead of reason, feeling rather than knowledge.
Rationalizing idealism
It is under the banner of this protest against rationalizing idealism that Schopenhauer advances. But what marks out his armament is its pronounced realism. He fights with the weapons of physical doctrine and on the basis of the material earth. He knows no reason but the human, no intelligence save what is exhibited by the animals. He knows that both animals and men have come into existence within assignable limits of time, and that there was an anterior age when no eye or ear gathered the life of the universe into perceptions. Knowledge, therefore, with its vehicle, the intellect, is dependent upon the existence of certain nerve-organs located in an animal system; and its function is originally only to present an image of the interconnexions of the manifestations external to the individual organism, and so to give to the individual in a partial and reflected form that feeling with other things, or innate sympathy, which it loses as organization becomes more complex and characteristic. Knowledge or intellect, therefore, is only the surrogate of that more intimate unity of feeling or will which is the underlying reality - the principle of all existence, the essence of all manifestations, inorganic and organic. And the perfection of reason is attained when man has transcended those limits of individuation in which his knowledge at first presents him to himself, when by art he has risen from single objects to universal types, and by suffering and sacrifice has penetrated to that innermost sanctuary where the euthanasia of consciousness is reached - the blessedness of eternal repose.
In substantials the theory of Schopenhauer may be compared with a more prosaic statement of Herbert Spencer (modernizing Hume). All psychical states may, according to him, be treated as incidents of the correspondence between the organism and its environment. In this adjustment the lowest stage is taken by 'reflex action and instinct, where Spencer the change of the organs is purely automatic. As the external complexity increases, this automatic regularity fails; there is only an incipient excitation of the nerves. This feeble echo of the full response to stimulus is an idea, which is thus only another word for imperfect organization or adjustment. But gradually this imperfect correspondence is improved, and the idea passes over again into the state of unconscious or organic memory. Intellect, in short, is only the consequence of insufficient response between stimulus and action. Where action is entirely automatic, feeling does not exist. It is when the excitation is partial only, when it does not inevitably and immediately appear as action, that we have the appearance of intellect in the gap. The chief and fundamental difference between Schopenhauer and Spencer lies in the refusal of the latter to give this "adjustment" or "automatic action" the name of will. Will, according to Mr Spencer, is only another aspect of what is reason, memory or feeling - the difference lying in the fact that as will the nascent excitation (ideal motion) is conceived as passing into complete or full motion. But he agrees with Schopenhauer in basing consciousness, in all its forms of reason, feeling or will, upon "automatic movement - psychical change," from which consciousness emerges and in which it disappears.
Relativity and limitation of science
What Schopenhauer professed, therefore, is to have dispelled the claims of reason to priority and to demonstrate the relativity and limitation of science. Science, he reminds us, is based on final inexplicabilities; and its attempts by theories of evolution to find an historical origin for humanity in rudimentary matter show a misconception of the problem. In the successions of material states there can nowhere be an absolute first. The true origin of man, as of all else, is to be sought in an action which is everlasting and which is ever present: nec to quaesiveris extra. There is a source of knowledge within us by which we know, and more intimately than we can ever know anything external, that we will and feel. That is the first and the highest knowledge, the only knowledge that can strictly be called immediate; and to ourselves we as the subject of will are truly the "immediate object." It is in this sense of will - of will without motives, but not without consciousness of some sort - that reality is revealed. Analogy and experience make us assume it to be omnipresent. It is a mistake to say will means for Schopenhauer only force. It means a great deal more; and it is his contention that what the scientist calls force is really will.
In so doing he is only following the line predicted by Kant' and anticipated by Leibnitz. If we wish, said Kant, to give a real existence to the thing in itself or the noumenon we can only do so by investing it with the attributes found in our own internal sense, viz. with thinking or something analogous thereto. It is thus that Fechner in his "day-view" of things sees in plants and planets the same fundamental "soul" as in us - that is, "one simple being which appears to none but itself, in us as elsewhere wherever it occurs self-luminous, dark for every other eye, at the least connecting sensations in itself, upon which, as the grade of soul mounts higher and higher, there is constructed the consciousness of higher and still higher relations." 2 It is thus that Lotze declares' that "behind the tranquil surface of matter, behind its rigid and regular habits of behaviour, we are forced to seek the glow of a hidden spiritual activity." So Schopenhauer, but in a way all his own, finds the truth of things in a will which is indeed unaffected by conscious motives and yet cannot be separated from. some faint analogue of non-intellectual consciousness.
Influences to the world
In two ways Schopenhauer has influenced the world. He has. shown with unusual lucidity of expression how feeble is the spontaneity of that intellect which is so highly lauded, and how overpowering the sway of original will in all our action. He thus re- asserted realism, whose gospel reads, "In the beginning was appetite, passion, will," and has discredited the doctrinaire belief that ideas have original force of their own. This creed of naturalism is. dangerous, and it may be true that the pessimism it implies often degenerates into cynicism and a cold-blooded denial that there is any virtue and any truth. But in the crash of established creeds. and the spread of political indifferentism and social disintegration it is probably wise, if not always agreeable, to lay bare the wounds under which humanity suffers, though pride would prompt their concealment. But Schopenhauer's theory has another side. If it is daringly realistic, it is no less audacious in its idealism. The second aspect of his influence is the doctrine of redemption of the soul from its sensual bonds, first by the medium of art and second by the path of renunciation and ascetic life. It may be difficult in each case to draw the line between social duty and individual perfection. But Schopenhauer reminds us that the welfare of society is a temporal and subordinate aim, never to be allowed to dwarf the full realization of our ideal being. Man's duty is undoubtedly to join in the common service of sentient beings; but his final goal is to rise above the toils and comforts of the visible creature into the vast bosom of a peaceful Nirvana.
Quotes
- “The rapid transition from desire to satisfaction and from this to a new desire is what constitutes happiness.” – in: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Volume I, 1819, pp. 307 f. (Volume I, Edition 1859, online)
- "Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see." – On Genius, The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2 (1844)
- They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guiltyof it, and other insipidities of the sam kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong, when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person. – On Suicide, Studies in Pessimism (1851)
- 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. – Our Relation to Ourselves, Counsels and Maxims (1851)
- Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete, devotes his heart entirely to money. – Psychological Observations, Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays (1851)[4]
References
- ↑ Arthur Schopenhauer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- ↑ Why Arthur Schopenhauer thought music was the greatest of all artforms
- ↑ Frost, Laura, Johanna Schopenhauer
- ↑ 75 Quotes from the Genius of Pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer
