I get profit from a philosopher, just so far as he can be an example
to me. There is no doubt that a man can draw whole nations after him
by his example; as is shown by Indian history, which is practically
the history of Indian philosophy. But this example must exist in his
outward life, not merely in his books; it must follow the way of the
Grecian philosophers, whose doctrine was in their dress and bearing
and general manner of life rather than in their speech or writing. We
have nothing yet of this "breathing testimony" in German
philosophical life; the spirit has, apparently, long completed its
emancipation, while the flesh has hardly begun; yet it is foolish to
think that the spirit can be really free and independent when this
victory over limitation--which is ultimately a formative limiting of
one's self--is not embodied anew in every look and movement. Kant
held to his university, submitted to its regulations, and belonged,
as his colleagues and students thought, to a definite religious
faith: and naturally his example has produced, above all, University
professors of philosophy. Schopenhauer makes small account of the
learned tribe, keeps himself exclusive, and cultivates an
independence from state and society as his ideal, to escape the
chains of circumstance here: that is his value to us. Many steps in
the enfranchisement of the philosopher are unknown in Germany; they
cannot always remain so. Our artists live more bravely and honourably
than our philosophers; and Richard Wagner, the best example of all,
shows how genius need not fear a fight to the death with the
established forms and ordinances, if we wish to bring the higher
truth and order, that lives in him, to the light. The "truth,"
however, of which we hear so much from our professors, seems to be a
far more modest being, and no kind of disturbance is to be feared
from her; she is an easy-going and pleasant creature, who is
continually assuring the powers that be that no one need fear any
trouble from her quarter: for man is only "pure reason." And
therefore I will say, that philosophy in Germany has more and more to
learn not to be "pure reason": and it may well take as its model
"Schopenhauer the man."
It is no less than a marvel that he should have come to be this human
kind of example: for he was beset, within and without, by the most
frightful dangers, that would have crushed and broken a weaker
nature. I think there was a strong likelihood of Schopenhauer the man
going under, and leaving at best a residue of "pure reason": and only
"at best"--it was more probable that neither man nor reason would
survive.
A modern Englishman sketches the most usual danger to extraordinary
men who live in a society that worships the ordinary, in this
manner:--"Such uncommon characters are first cowed, then become sick
and melancholy, and then die. A Shelley could never have lived in
England: a race of Shelleys would have been impossible." Our
Hölderlins and Kleists were undone by their unconventionality, and
were not strong enough for the climate of the so-called German
culture; and only iron natures like Beethoven, Goethe, Schopenhauer
and Wagner could hold out against it. Even in them the effect of this
weary toiling and moiling is seen in many lines and wrinkles; their
breathing is harder and their voice is forced. The old diplomatist
who had only just seen and spoken to Goethe, said to a friend--"Voilà
un homme qui a eu de grands chagrins!" which Goethe translated to
mean "That is a man who has taken great pains in his life." And he
adds, "If the trace of the sorrow and activity we have gone through
cannot be wiped from our features, it is no wonder that all that
survives of us and our struggles should bear the same impress." And
this is the Goethe to whom our cultured Philistines point as the
happiest of Germans, that they may prove their thesis, that it must
be possible to be happy among them--with the unexpressed corollary
that no one can be pardoned for feeling unhappy and lonely among
them. Hence they push their doctrine, in practice, to its merciless
conclusion, that there is always a secret guilt in isolation. Poor
Schopenhauer had this secret guilt too in his heart, the guilt of
cherishing his philosophy more than his fellow-men; and he was so
unhappy as to have learnt from Goethe that he must defend his
philosophy at all costs from the neglect of his contemporaries, to
save its very existence: for there is a kind of Grand Inquisitor's
Censure in which the Germans, according to Goethe, are great adepts:
it is called--inviolable silence. This much at least was accomplished
by it;--the greater part of the first edition of Schopenhauer's
masterpiece had to be turned into waste paper. The imminent risk that
his great work would be undone, merely by neglect, bred in him a
state of unrest--perilous and uncontrollable;--for no single adherent
of any note presented himself. It is tragic to watch his search for
any evidence of recognition: and his piercing cry of triumph at last,
that he would now really be read (_legor et legar_), touches us with
a thrill of pain. All the traits in which we do not see the great
philosopher show us the suffering man, anxious for his noblest
possessions; he was tortured by the fear of losing his little
property, and perhaps of no longer being able to maintain in its
purity his truly antique attitude towards philosophy. He often chose
falsely in his desire to find real trust and compassion in men, only
to return with a heavy heart to his faithful dog again. He was
absolutely alone, with no single friend of his own kind to comfort
him; and between one and none there lies an infinity--as ever between
something and nothing. No one who has true friends knows what real
loneliness means, though he may have the whole world in antagonism
round him. Ah, I see well ye do not know what isolation is! Whenever
there are great societies with governments and religions and public
opinions--where there is a tyranny, in short, there will the lonely
philosopher be hated: for philosophy offers an asylum to mankind
where no tyranny can penetrate, the inner sanctuary, the centre of
the heart's labyrinth: and the tyrants are galled at it. Here do the
lonely men lie hid: but here too lurks their greatest danger. These
men who have saved their inner freedom, must also live and be seen in
the outer world: they stand in countless human relations by their
birth, position, education and country, their own circumstances and
the importunity of others: and so they are presumed to hold an
immense number of opinions, simply because these happen to prevail:
every look that is not a denial counts as an assent, every motion of
the hand that does not destroy is regarded as an aid. These free and
lonely men know that they perpetually seem other than they are. While
they wish for nothing but truth and honesty, they are in a net of
misunderstanding; and that ardent desire cannot prevent a mist of
false opinions, of adaptations and wrong conclusions, of partial
misapprehension and intentional reticence, from gathering round their
actions. And there settles a cloud of melancholy on their brows: for
such natures hate the necessity of pretence worse than death: and the
continual bitterness gives them a threatening and volcanic character.
They take revenge from time to time for their forced concealment and
self-restraint: they issue from their dens with lowering looks: their
words and deeds are explosive, and may lead to their own destruction.
Schopenhauer lived amid dangers of this sort. Such lonely men need
love, and friends, to whom they can be as open and sincere as to
themselves, and in whose presence the deadening silence and hypocrisy
may cease. Take their friends away, and there is left an increasing
peril; Heinrich von Kleist was broken by the lack of love, and the
most terrible weapon against unusual men is to drive them into
themselves; and then their issuing forth again is a volcanic
eruption. Yet there are always some demi-gods who can bear life under
these fearful conditions and can be their conquerors: and if you
would hear their lonely chant, listen to the music of Beethoven.
So the first danger in whose shadow Schopenhauer lived was--
isolation. The second is called--doubting of the truth. To this every
thinker is liable who sets out from the philosophy of Kant, provided
he be strong and sincere in his sorrows and his desires, and not a
mere tinkling thought-box or calculating machine. We all know the
shameful state of things implied by this last reservation, and I
believe it is only a very few men that Kant has so vitally affected
as to change the current of their blood. To judge from what one
reads, there must have been a revolution in every domain of thought
since the work of this unobtrusive professor: I cannot believe it
myself. For I see men, though darkly, as themselves needing to be
revolutionised, before any "domains of thought" can be so. In fact,
we find the first mark of any influence Kant may have had on the
popular mind, in a corrosive scepticism and relativity. But it is
only in noble and active spirits who could never rest in doubt that
the shattering despair of truth itself could take the place of doubt.
This was, for example, the effect of the Kantian philosophy on
Heinrich von Kleist. "It was only a short time ago," he writes in his
poignant way, "that I became acquainted with the Kantian philosophy;
and I will tell you my thought, though I cannot fear that it will
rack you to your inmost soul, as it did me.--We cannot decide,
whether what we call truth is really truth, or whether it only seems
so to us. If the latter, the truth that we amass here does not exist
after death, and all our struggle to gain a possession that may
follow us even to the grave is in vain. If the blade of this thought
do not cut your heart, yet laugh not at another who feels himself
wounded by it in his Holy of Holies. My one highest aim has vanished,
and I have no more." Yes, when will men feel again deeply as Kleist
did, and learn to measure a philosophy by what it means to the "Holy
of Holies"? And yet we must make this estimate of what Schopenhauer
can mean to us, after Kant, as the first pioneer to bring us from the
heights of sceptical disillusionment or "critical" renunciation, to
the greater height of tragic contemplation, the nocturnal heaven with
its endless crown of stars. His greatness is that he can stand
opposite the picture of life, and interpret it to us as a whole:
while all the clever people cannot escape the error of thinking one
comes nearer to the interpretation by a laborious analysis of the
colours and material of the picture; with the confession, probably,
that the texture of the canvas is very complicated, and the chemical
composition of the colours undiscoverable. Schopenhauer knew that one
must guess the painter in order to understand the picture. But now
the whole learned fraternity is engaged on understanding the colours
and canvas, and not the picture: and only he who has kept the
universal panorama of life and being firmly before his eyes, will use
the individual sciences without harm to himself; for, without this
general view as a norm, they are threads that lead nowhere and only
confuse still more the maze of our existence. Here we see, as I said,
the greatness of Schopenhauer, that he follows up every idea, as
Hamlet follows the Ghost, without allowing himself to turn aside for
a learned digression, or be drawn away by the scholastic abstractions
of a rabid dialectic. The study of the minute philosophers is only
interesting for the recognition that they have reached those stages
in the great edifice of philosophy where learned disquisitions for
and against, where hair-splitting objections and counter-objections
are the rule: and for that reason they evade the demand of every
great philosophy to speak _sub specie æternitatis_--"this is the
picture of the whole of life: learn thence the meaning of thine own
life." And the converse: "read thine own life, and understand thence
the hieroglyphs of the universal life." In this way must
Schopenhauer's philosophy always be interpreted; as an individualist
philosophy, starting from the single man, in his own nature, to gain
an insight into his personal miseries, and needs, and limitations,
and find out the remedies that will console them: namely, the
sacrifice of the ego, and its submission to the nobler ends,
especially those of justice and mercy. He teaches us to distinguish
between the true and the apparent furtherance of man's happiness: how
neither the attainment of riches, nor honour, nor learning, can raise
the individual from his deep despair at his unworthiness; and how the
quest for these good things can only have meaning through a universal
end that transcends and explains them;--the gaining of power to aid
our physical nature by them and, as far as may be, correct its folly
and awkwardness. For one's self only, in the first instance: and
finally, through one's self, for all. It is a task that leads to
scepticism: for there is so much to be made better yet, in one and
all!
Applying this to Schopenhauer himself, we come to the third and most
intimate danger in which he lived, and which lay deep in the marrow
of his being. Every one is apt to discover a limitation in himself,
in his gifts of intellect as well as his moral will, that fills him
with yearning and melancholy; and as he strives after holiness
through a consciousness of sin, so, as an intellectual being, he has
a deep longing after the "genius" in himself. This is the root of all
true culture; and if we say this means the aspiration of man to be
"born again" as saint and genius, I know that one need not be a
Buddhist to understand the myth. We feel a strong loathing when we
find talent without such aspiration, in the circle of the learned, or
among the so-called educated; for we see that such men, with all
their cleverness, are no aid but a hindrance to the beginnings of
culture, and the blossoming of genius, the aim of all culture. There
is a rigidity in them, parallel to the cold arrogance of conventional
virtue, which also remains at the opposite pole to true holiness.
Schopenhauer's nature contained an extraordinarily dangerous dualism.
Few thinkers have felt as he did the complete and unmistakable
certainty of genius within them; and his genius made him the highest
of all promises,--that there could be no deeper furrow than that
which he was ploughing in the ground of the modern world. He knew one
half of his being to be fulfilled according to its strength, with no
other need; and he followed with greatness and dignity his vocation
of consolidating his victory. In the other half there was a gnawing
aspiration, which we can understand, when we hear that he turned away
with a sad look from the picture of Rancé, the founder of the
Trappists, with the words: "That is a matter of grace." For genius
evermore yearns after holiness as it sees further and more clearly
from its watch-tower than other men, deep into the reconciliation of
Thought and Being, the kingdom of peace and the denial of the will,
and up to that other shore, of which the Indians speak. The wonder
is, that Schopenhauer's nature should have been so inconceivably
stable and unshakable that it could neither be destroyed nor
petrified by this yearning. Every one will understand this after the
measure of his own character and greatness: none of us will
understand it in the fulness of its meaning.
The more one considers these three dangers, the more extraordinary
will appear his vigour in opposing them and his safety after the
battle. True, he gained many scars and open wounds: and a cast of
mind that may seem somewhat too bitter and pugnacious. But his single
ideal transcends the highest humanity in him. Schopenhauer stands as
a pattern to men, in spite of all those scars and scratches. We may
even say, that what was imperfect and "all too human" in him, brings
us nearer to him as a man, for we see a sufferer and a kinsman to
suffering, not merely a dweller on the unattainable heights of
genius.
These three constitutional dangers that threatened Schopenhauer,
threaten us all. Each one of us bears a creative solitude within
himself and his consciousness of it forms an exotic aura of
strangeness round him. Most men cannot endure it, because they are
slothful, as I said, and because their solitude hangs round them a
chain of troubles and burdens. No doubt, for the man with this heavy
chain, life loses almost everything that one desires from it in
youth--joy, safety, honour: his fellow-men pay him his due
of--isolation! The wilderness and the cave are about him, wherever he
may live. He must look to it that he be not enslaved and oppressed,
and become melancholy thereby. And let him surround himself with the
pictures of good and brave fighters such as Schopenhauer.
The second danger, too, is not rare. Here and there we find one
dowered by nature with a keen vision; his thoughts dance gladly in
the witches' Sabbath of dialectic; and if he uncautiously give his
talent the rein, it is easy to lose all humanity and live a ghostly
life in the realm of "pure reason": or through the constant search
for the "pros and cons" of things, he may go astray from the truth
and live without courage or confidence, in doubt, denial and
discontent, and the slender hope that waits on disillusion: "No dog
could live long thus!"
The third danger is a moral or intellectual hardening: man breaks the
bond that united him to his ideal: he ceases to be fruitful and
reproduce himself in this or that province, and becomes an enemy or a
parasite of culture. The solitude of his being has become an
indivisible, unrelated atom, an icy stone. And one can perish of this
solitude as well as of the fear of it, of one's self as well as one's
self-sacrifice, of both aspiration and petrifaction: and to live is
ever to be in danger.
Beside these dangers to which Schopenhauer would have been
constitutionally liable, in whatever century he had lived, there were
also some produced by his own time; and it is essential to
distinguish between these two kinds, in order to grasp the typical
and formative elements in his nature. The philosopher casts his eye
over existence, and wishes to give it a new standard value; for it
has been the peculiar task of all great thinkers to be law-givers for
the weight and stamp in the mint of reality. And his task will be
hindered if the men he sees near him be a weakly and worm-eaten
growth. To be correct in his calculation of existence, the
unworthiness of the present time must be a very small item in the
addition. The study of ancient or foreign history is valuable, if at
all, for a correct judgment on the whole destiny of man; which must
be drawn not only from an average estimate but from a comparison of
the highest destinies that can befall individuals or nations. The
present is too much with us; it directs the vision even against the
philosopher's will: and it will inevitably be reckoned too high in
the final sum. And so he must put a low figure on his own time as
against others, and suppress the present in his picture of life, as
well as in himself; must put it into the background or paint it over;
a difficult, and almost impossible task. The judgment of the ancient
Greek philosophers on the value of existence means so much more than
our own, because they had the full bloom of life itself before them,
and their vision was untroubled by any felt dualism between their
wish for freedom and beauty on the grand scale, and their search
after truth, with its single question "What is the real _worth_ of
life?" Empedocles lived when Greek culture was full to overflowing
with the joy of life, and all ages may take profit from his words;
especially as no other great philosopher of that great time ventured
to contradict them. Empedocles is only the clearest voice among
them--they all say the same thing, if a man will but open his ears. A
modern thinker is always in the throes of an unfulfilled desire; he
is looking for life,--warm, red life,--that he may pass judgment on
it: at any rate he will think it necessary to be a living man
himself, before he can believe in his power of judging. And this is
the title of the modern philosophers to sit among the great aiders of
Life (or rather of the will to live), and the reason why they can
look from their own out-wearied time and aspire to a truer culture,
and a clearer explanation. Their yearning is, however, their danger;
the reformer in them struggles with the critical philosopher. And
whichever way the victory incline, it also implies a defeat. How was
Schopenhauer to escape this danger?
We like to consider the great man as the noble child of his age, who
feels its defects more strongly and intimately than the smaller men:
and therefore the struggle of the great man _against_ his age is
apparently nothing but a mad fight to the death with himself. Only
apparently, however: he only fights the elements in his time that
hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and
sincerity. And so, at bottom, he is only an enemy to that element
which is not truly himself, the irreconcilable antagonism of the
temporal and eternal in him. The supposed "child of his age" proves
to be but a step-child. From boyhood Schopenhauer strove with his
time, a false and unworthy mother to him, and as soon as he had
banished her, he could bring back his being to its native health and
purity. For this very reason we can use his writings as mirrors of
his time; it is no fault of the mirror if everything contemporary
appear in it stricken by a ravaging disease, pale and thin, with
tired looks and hollow eyes,--the step-child's sorrow made visible.
The yearning for natural strength, for a healthy and simple humanity,
was a yearning for himself: and as soon as he had conquered his time
within him, he was face to face with his own genius. The secret of
nature's being and his own lay open, the step-mother's plot to
conceal his genius from him was foiled. And now he could turn a
fearless eye towards the question, "What is the real worth of life?"
without having any more to weigh a bloodless and chaotic age of doubt
and hypocrisy. He knew that there was something higher and purer to
be won on this earth than the life of his time, and a man does bitter
wrong to existence who only knows it and criticises it in this
hateful form. Genius, itself the highest product of life, is now
summoned to justify life, if it can: the noble creative soul must
answer the question:--"Dost thou in thy heart say 'Yea!' unto this
existence? Is it enough for thee? Wilt thou be its advocate and its
redeemer? One true 'Yea!' from thy lips, and the sorely accused life
shall go free." How shall he answer? In the words of Empedocles.