But setting aside all thoughts of any educational revolution in the
distant future;--what provision is required _now_, that our future
philosopher may have the best chance of opening his eyes to a life
like Schopenhauer's--hard as it is, yet still livable? What, further,
must be discovered that may make his influence on his contemporaries
more certain? And what obstacles must be removed before his example
can have its full effect and the philosopher train another
philosopher? Here we descend to be practical.
Nature always desires the greatest utility, but does not understand
how to find the best and handiest means to her end; that is her great
sorrow, and the cause of her melancholy. The impulse towards her own
redemption shows clearly her wish to give men a significant existence
by the generation of the philosopher and the artist: but how unclear
and weak is the effect she generally obtains with her artists and
philosophers, and how seldom is there any effect at all! She is
especially perplexed in her efforts to make the philosopher useful;
her methods are casual and tentative, her failures innumerable; most
of her philosophers never touch the common good of mankind at all.
Her actions seem those of a spendthrift; but the cause lies in no
prodigal luxury, but in her inexperience. Were she human, she would
probably never cease to be dissatisfied with herself and her
bungling. Nature shoots the philosopher at mankind like an arrow; she
does not aim, but hopes that the arrow will stick somewhere. She
makes countless mistakes that give her pain. She is as extravagant in
the sphere of culture as in her planting and sowing. She fulfils her
ends in a large and clumsy fashion, using up far too much of her
strength. The artist has the same relation to the connoisseurs and
lovers of his art as a piece of heavy artillery to a flock of
sparrows. It is a fool's part to use a great avalanche to sweep away
a little snow, to kill a man in order to strike the fly on his nose.
The artist and the philosopher are witnesses against Nature's
adaptation of her means, however well they may show the wisdom of her
ends. They only reach a few and should reach all--and even these few
are not struck with the strength they used when they shot. It is sad
to have to value art so differently as cause and effect; how huge in
its inception, how faint the echo afterwards! The artist does his
work as Nature bids him, for the benefit of other men--no doubt of
it; but he knows that none of those men will understand and love his
work as he understands and loves it himself. That lonely height of
love and understanding is necessary, by Nature's clumsy law, to
produce a lower type; the great and noble are used as the means to
the small and ignoble. Nature is a bad manager; her expenses are far
greater than her profits: for all her riches she must one day go
bankrupt. She would have acted more reasonably to make the rule of
her household--small expense and hundredfold profit; if there had
been, for example, only a few artists with moderate powers, but an
immense number of hearers to appreciate them, stronger and more
powerful characters than the artists themselves; then the effect of
the art-work, in comparison with the cause, might be a hundred-tongued
echo. One might at least expect cause and effect to be of equal power;
but Nature lags infinitely behind this consummation. An artist, and
especially a philosopher, seems often to have dropped by chance into his
age, as a wandering hermit or straggler cut off from the main body.
Think how utterly great Schopenhauer is, and what a small and absurd
effect he has had! An honest man can feel no greater shame at the
present time than at the thought of the casual treatment Schopenhauer
has received and the evil powers that have up to now killed his effect
among men. First there was the want of readers,--to the eternal shame of
our cultivated age;--then the inadequacy of his first public adherents,
as soon as he had any; further, I think, the crassness of the modern man
towards books, which he will no longer take seriously. As an outcome of
many attempts to adapt Schopenhauer to this enervated age, the new
danger has gradually arisen of regarding him as an odd kind of pungent
herb, of taking him in grains, as a sort of metaphysical pepper. In this
way he has gradually become famous, and I should think more have heard
his name than Hegel's; and, for all that, he is still a solitary being,
who has failed of his effect.--Though the honour of causing the failure
belongs least of all to the barking of his literary antagonists; first
because there are few men with the patience to read them, and secondly,
because any one who does, is sent immediately to Schopenhauer himself;
for who will let a donkey-driver prevent him from mounting a fine horse,
however much he praise his donkey?
Whoever has recognised Nature's unreason in our time, will have to
consider some means to help her; his task will be to bring the free
spirits and the sufferers from this age to know Schopenhauer; and
make them tributaries to the flood that is to overbear all the clumsy
uses to which Nature even now is accustomed to put her philosophers.
Such men will see that the identical obstacles hinder the effect of a
great philosophy and the production of the great philosopher; and so
will direct their aims to prepare the regeneration of Schopenhauer,
which means that of the philosophical genius. The real opposition to
the further spread of his doctrine in the past, and the regeneration
of the philosopher in the future, is the perversity of human nature
as it is; and all the great men that are to be must spend infinite
pains in freeing themselves from it. The world they enter is
plastered over with pretence,--including not merely religious dogmas,
but such juggling conceptions as "progress," "universal education,"
"nationalism," "the modern state"; practically all our general terms
have an artificial veneer over them that will bring a clearer-sighted
posterity to reproach our age bitterly for its warped and stunted
growth, however loudly we may boast of our "health." The beauty of
the antique vases, says Schopenhauer, lies in the simplicity with
which they express their meaning and object; it is so with all the
ancient implements; if Nature produced amphoræ, lamps, tables,
chairs, helmets, shields, breastplates and the like, they would
resemble these. And, as a corollary, whoever considers how we all
manage our art, politics, religion and education--to say nothing of
our vases!--will find in them a barbaric exaggeration and
arbitrariness of expression. Nothing is more unfavourable to
the rise of genius than such monstrosities. They are unseen and
undiscoverable, the leaden weights on his hand when he will set it to
the plough; the weights are only shaken off with violence, and his
highest work must to an extent always bear the mark of it.
In considering the conditions that, at best, keep the born
philosopher from being oppressed by the perversity of the age, I am
surprised to find they are partly those in which Schopenhauer himself
grew up. True, there was no lack of opposing influences; the evil
time drew perilously near him in the person of a vain and pretentious
mother. But the proud republican character of his father rescued him
from her and gave him the first quality of a philosopher--a rude and
strong virility. His father was neither an official nor a savant; he
travelled much abroad with his son,--a great help to one who must
know men rather than books, and worship truth before the state. In
time he got accustomed to national peculiarities: he made England,
France and Italy equally his home, and felt no little sympathy with
the Spanish character. On the whole, he did not think it an honour to
be born in Germany, and I am not sure that the new political
conditions would have made him change his mind. He held quite openly
the opinion that the state's one object was to give protection at
home and abroad, and even protection against its "protectors," and to
attribute any other object to it was to endanger its true end. And
so, to the consternation of all the so-called liberals, he left his
property to the survivors of the Prussian soldiers who fell in 1848
in the fight for order. To understand the state and its duties in
this single sense may seem more and more henceforth the sign of
intellectual superiority; for the man with the _furor philosophicus_
in him will no longer have time for the _furor politicus_, and will
wisely keep from reading the newspapers or serving a party; though he
will not hesitate a moment to take his place in the ranks if his
country be in real need. All states are badly managed, when other men
than politicians busy themselves with politics; and they deserve to
be ruined by their political amateurs.
Schopenhauer had another great advantage--that he had never been
educated for a professor, but worked for some time (though against
his will) as a merchant's clerk, and through all his early years
breathed the freer air of a great commercial house. A savant can
never become a philosopher: Kant himself could not, but remained in a
chrysalis stage to the end, in spite of the innate force of his
genius. Any one who thinks I do Kant wrong in saying this does not
know what a philosopher is--not only a great thinker, but also a real
man; and how could a real man have sprung from a savant? He who lets
conceptions, opinions, events, books come between himself and things,
and is born for history (in the widest sense), will never see
anything at once, and never be himself a thing to be "seen at once";
though both these powers should be in the philosopher, as he must
take most of his doctrine from himself and be himself the copy and
compendium of the whole world. If a man look at himself through a
veil of other people's opinions, no wonder he sees nothing but--those
opinions. And it is thus that the professors see and live. But
Schopenhauer had the rare happiness of seeing the genius not only in
himself, but also outside himself--in Goethe; and this double
reflection taught him everything about the aims and culture of the
learned. He knew by this experience how the free strong man, to whom
all artistic culture was looking, must come to be born; and could he,
after this vision, have much desire to busy himself with the
so-called "art," in the learned, hypocritical manner of the moderns?
He had seen something higher than that--an awful unearthly
judgment-scene in which all life, even the highest and completest,
was weighed and found too light; he had beheld the saint as the judge
of existence. We cannot tell how early Schopenhauer reached this view
of life, and came to hold it with such intensity as to make all his
writings an attempt to mirror it; we know that the youth had this
great vision, and can well believe it of the child. Everything that
he gained later from life and books, from all the realms of
knowledge, was only a means of colour and expression to him; the
Kantian philosophy itself was to him an extraordinary rhetorical
instrument for making the utterance of his vision, as he thought,
clearer; the Buddhist and Christian mythologies occasionally served
the same end. He had one task and a thousand means to execute it; one
meaning, and innumerable hieroglyphs to express it.
It was one of the high conditions of his existence that he really
could live for such a task--according to his motto _vitam impendere
vero_--and none of life's material needs could shake his resolution;
and we know the splendid return he made his father for this. The
contemplative man in Germany usually pursues his scientific studies
to the detriment of his sincerity, as a "considerate fool," in search
of place and honour, circumspect and obsequious, and fawning on his
influential superiors. Nothing offended the savants more than
Schopenhauer's unlikeness to them.