It is difficult not to smile at this peculiar philosopher, even though
he has obtained nearly as many admirers as Nietzsche himself, and it is
a dangerous thing to offend a Nietzschian. But let us treat him with the
seriousness that he would have insisted upon as his right.
He was born in Dantzig in 1788; he died in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1860, a
philosopher to whom both Germany and England have laid claim, because
his father wished him to be born in England, and took his mother there
just before the expected birthday, but the good lady suddenly took fright
at the English—is it possible that there can have been anybody on earth
who has not liked the English?—and insisted on going back to Germany for
the confinement. I have actually heard that to this very natural whim of
a pregnant woman is to be attributed Arthur’s detestation of women! In
that idea perhaps we may see the natural thought of all Englishmen that
England is the only fit country for a man to be born in. But his father
had his revenge; for he called the little son “Arthur” and the lady,
being a dutiful German wife, had to submit, consoling herself by the
thought that it was a German as well as an English name. But Arthur’s
detestation of women is probably to be attributed to a more physical
cause, as we shall see.
In 1793 Dantzig was annexed by Prussia, so the Schopenhauers moved to
Hamburg. Later on, when the question of Arthur’s education came to be
settled, they decided to send him to both France and England; and in
London the future pessimist was placed at a boarding-school kept by
a clergyman at Wimbledon—poor little boy. For some reason he found
the life, and more particularly the religious training of the good
schoolmaster, intensely irksome; and long afterwards he referred with
disgust to the atmosphere of cant and hypocrisy which permeated England
at that time. _Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis._
In 1807 his father was found dead in the canal at Hamburg, being
suspected to have thrown himself from an upper story; and Arthur, out
of respect for his father’s wishes, definitely took up his duties in an
office, though personally he longed to be an author. His mother, being
now free from the encumbrance of a husband—at least presumably she found
him an encumbrance—took to literature as a minor novelist at Weimar. When
Arthur went to join her, he found that she seemed to have forgotten the
memory of his father; and before very long they quarrelled. At the age
of twenty-one Arthur determined to enter the university of Göttingen as
a medical student; and later on took to philosophy, and gained his Ph.D.
It was probably while he was at the university that he caught syphilis;
and for long underwent the heroic doses of mercury at intervals that
the nineteenth century thought essential for the cure of that disease.
It was not till the time of Fournier and Sir Jonathan Hutchinson that
it was recognised that, while mercury was essential, it was not so
much the amount of mercury as the faithful years of its intermittent
duration that were really necessary; and Schopenhauer duly went through
the proper course of huge doses accompanied by all the wretchedness
of salivation, depression, and internal pain, that used to be thought
necessary for every syphilitic if he would escape the legendary tortures
of that wonderful disease. He frequently complained to his friends of his
treatment; but, in spite of the sufferings that it caused him, he had in
reality little to complain about, for he lived to seventy years of age
and escaped the graver nervous troubles that often accompany untreated
syphilis. Nowadays, of course, we should put him on injections of one of
the arseno-benzol compounds, accompanied probably with rubbings, pills
or injections of mercury, and insist on his taking moderate exercise
in the fresh air and living a sober, righteous and godly life without
excitement or dissipation. While we should be chary of giving a definite
prognosis we should tell him that probably he would see no more of his
disease either in himself or his children if he took care of himself and
faithfully continued his treatment. But Schopenhauer, while escaping the
more serious nervous, bone and skin manifestation of syphilis, evidently
did not escape the psychasthenic troubles, the obsessions and imperative
ideas—the phobias; and syphilophobia had him in its grip till the end of
his life. In this strange condition the patient becomes possessed by an
undue terror of syphilis and its results; and often the fear of syphilis
becomes transferred to the fear of every other infectious disease until
his life becomes a burden to him as he walks perpetually in the presence
of evil spirits which ache to devour him. Probably it was to these
phobias that he owed his unnatural hatred of women, and his hatred
of the lower side of man’s nature. He knew that these “under-sized,
short-legged, long-haired creatures who were not really beautiful,” went
about the world simply for the purpose of spreading syphilis—made a trade
of it, in short; and that he, being a man of strongly sexual impulses,
could not resist their embrace, though he knew it to be death. He had
no wax wherewith he might shut his ears to their siren songs, while his
sturdy rowers propelled his boat beside their lair; he could not leave
his house without knowing that some of them would lure him with their
dreadful charms; how different the miserable creatures were from the
proper form of a human being, which should be, like Arthur Schopenhauer
himself, a rather short, square, blue-eyed, sturdy North German. And so
his miserable life went on, carrying its own torture with it, and daily
his thoughts turned more and more to the utter wretchedness of life, and
the stupidity of those followers of Fichte and Hegel who simply _would_
not see the truth. Probably his pessimism was a direct result of his
syphilophobia.
He kept a diary in accordance with his plan of absolute self-confession;
and there are many thoughts on love and marriage, written during the
years 1819-22 and 1825-31, which his modest English biographer describes
as being quite too frank for publication. These thoughts were written
down in English; probably Schopenhauer doubted whether the Deity
understood that language, just as we nowadays are quite certain that He
does not understand French or Latin. But we can leave them unread, in the
certain surety that they were completely coarse.
He now fell into a quarrel with Hegel, for, as he thought, purposely
setting the world against the mighty Arthur Schopenhauer, of whom
probably Hegel at that time had never heard in his life. He now began
to indulge in that most expensive and unsatisfactory of all amusements,
lawsuits.
In 1821 he found three women gossiping on the landing outside his door;
so naturally he complained to his landlady, who assured him that such
a thing would not happen again. Alas! a few days later there they were
again, still cackling. Schopenhauer warned them to be off, and not to
disturb his lordly self. Two of them, being meek and as he thought
women really should be, departed, but the third was of sterner stuff
and refused. She was a maiden sempstress of fifty who lived in the room
higher up. Schopenhauer incontinently took her by the waist and threw
her downstairs[24] with a coarse description of her character to boot;
and after her flung her sewing and the tools of her trade. Heard a body
ever the like? She took him to court, as no proper woman should do, and
the philosopher defended his own case. An ungallant judge decided in his
favour, and naturally the aggrieved lady appealed. This short-legged,
long-haired female actually appealed against the decision given in favour
of the Right, in favour of the great pessimist philosopher, of the
Neo-Buddhist who just then wanted to get away to Italy for a holiday!
And will it be believed that an unjust, nay, an inhuman, judge would
not postpone the hearing of the appeal, so that once more Schopenhauer
should be able to air his eloquence. In Schopenhauer’s absence in the
sunny south the case was decided against him, and he was sentenced to pay
the long-haired, etc., creature damages. Three years later the spinster
renewed her assaults upon him, having discovered that he had injured her
so severely that she was unable to earn her living; and this time the
court ordered Schopenhauer to pay her a pension of £9 a year for the rest
of her life. This was really getting beyond a joke, and Schopenhauer
appealed; but unsuccessfully. Therefore he was faced with the prospect of
paying the damsel this pension until the Greek calends; for it is well
known that women are very hard to kill, and when they are in receipt of
a pension they will live for ever out of sheer spite. But unfortunately
for her she died of cholera some time afterwards; and Schopenhauer,
receiving notice that he was relieved of pensioning her, showed his joy
by scrawling upon the paper the appropriate—and obscene—words: “Obit
anus—abit onus.” Thus it was proved that from woman came all man’s woes;
but few men have the chance to revenge themselves on the sex by an
epigram. As a rule, woman gets her epigram in first, owing to her agile
tongue.
The last few years of his life were spent at Frankfurt-am-Main, where his
was the most perfect instance of a quiet and philosophic life of which I
have any knowledge, except Spinoza’s. The fires of his youth and middle
age had died down, and the ashes took a long while to become stone-cold.
At half-past seven every morning he rose and took a bath, taking
particular care to wash his eyes very thoroughly.[25] Then, having
ordered his housekeeper strictly to keep to her kitchen, he made himself
coffee, and settled down to work for three or four hours; this being
in his opinion the utmost that the human brain could stand at severe
intellectual labour, in which he was probably right. At noon she came and
timidly knocked at his door, whereupon he left his books and began to
play upon his flute. At 1 p.m. he went to the Englischer Hof for dinner;
and there he ate in silence with a gold coin displayed ostentatiously
beside his plate. After this had gone on for some years he explained to
a friend that he had kept the coin as a wager to himself that he should
present it to the poor-box if anybody should start a discussion about
any single subject under the sun but women, wine, and horses. After
dinner, with the faithful coin still unused in his pocket, he went home,
read light literature for a couple of hours, and at four o’clock went
for a brisk walk into the suburbs. His only companion was a poodle-dog,
and “Schopenhauer with his dog” has become a legend; the local children
used to call it “young Schopenhauer.” After two hours of walking at his
utmost speed, summer or winter, he went to the reading-room, and read
_The Times_. This literature predisposing him for sleep, he went home,
ate a very light supper, got out his long pipe, smoked for an hour, “and
so to bed.”
And this went on for about ten years, until, one day he noticed that
he could not walk quite so fast as usual, and that he was beginning to
get breathless when he was going uphill. By this time he had become
more egotistical than ever; his chief pleasure was in reading laudatory
comments in the newspapers upon Herr Doktor Arthur Schopenhauer
_hochwohlgeboren_ and his wonderful philosophy. Gradually praise and
public fame began to come to him. A steady stream of people came to
see him, among them many women attracted by the thought of the great
woman-hater.[26] As his heart began slowly to fail his doctor visited him
every day; until one day the philosopher was laid up with a slight attack
of pneumonia. Recovering from this, he tried to resume his invariable
routine; but on September 20th he had another bad attack. On the morning
of the 21st he rose as usual. A few minutes after his housekeeper had
left him, his doctor called and found him lying dead on his sofa. The
Goddess Luetina, assuming her least terrible appearance, had carried him
to the Nirvana where no women could trouble him.
It is one thing to write a witty essay against women, just to annoy the
feminists, who, poor ladies, have such quaint ideas about men and are,
in physiological language so excessively ready to react to stimuli.
But Schopenhauer’s case was far otherwise; with him it was a matter of
coarseness in his mind and sheer lust in his body. No wonder he despised
the animal in man. In hating woman he was really hating himself because
he could not resist them.
And it was probably well for him that he had to complain of his gigantic
doses of mercury, for, with his family history of a father who committed
suicide and his own worrying and neurotic mind, he was just the sort
of man to get cerebral syphilis or general paralysis. I have read many
attempts to explain Schopenhauer’s misogyny, but I rather fancy we can
detect the real reason for it in his own syphilophobia. Some critics
have tried to explain it by slandering his mother and sister, on the
assumption that every man can only judge woman by the women he knows; and
that Joanna Schopenhauer and Adele Schopenhauer must therefore have been
of bad character. Possibly! But he was full of phobias and obsessions.
And the best thing we read about him was his genuine love for Beethoven.
Often he would sit and listen to a symphony, dreaming with his eyes shut;
and, the last divine chords sounded, he would leave his seat rudely, lest
some lesser music should blur the impression.
I have often thought of writing a history of the effect of syphilis upon
the history of the world; but the difficulties appal me. We now know that
syphilis is less a disease of skin and bone, than a very grim disease
of the nervous system; and so secretive is it, so it loves to conceal
itself under other names, that even to-day, though every doctor is
acutely on the lookout for it, it would be impossible from the mortality
returns to pick out which man or woman died of syphilis and which of some
apparently quite distinct affection. All that is safe to say is that the
very flower of the human race, the greatest artists, poets, musicians and
philosophers, have all rested under a strong suspicion of having fought
against the spirochæte before it killed them. Too likely such a history
as passes through my mind would degenerate into a mere _chronique
scandaleuse_, and nobody would believe it.
So long as there is this horrible and disgusting prudery about syphilis,
so long will it continue to lay waste the fairest part of the human
race; and few doctors will disagree with Schopenhauer, the poor hopeless
syphilophobe, when he said that war and syphilis are the two greatest
foes to humanity.
The great effect of the philosophy of Schopenhauer has probably been
indirect. When the young undergraduate of Oxford enunciated the belief
that there is nothing new and nothing true, and no matter, he probably
thought that he was quoting the beliefs of the great woman-hater; but it
was reserved for a mind far nobler and more truly poetical to see the
real inner meaning of Schopenhauer’s thoughts. The great discovery of
Schopenhauer was that the evil in man has quite as much to do with his
character as the good. Thomas Hardy, in writing the _Woodlanders_ and
_Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, was really transfiguring Schopenhauer’s
somewhat arid philosophy until it became a beautiful truth. Hardy, in a
sense, was simply a reaction from the foolish optimism of the Victorians;
from the cheerful caricaturing of human nature by Charles Dickens;
from the mock cynicism of Thackeray. That some people still say that
his novels are grey and unduly pessimistic simply means that they have
not yet grasped the full truth about human nature. And surely Hardy’s
“Immanent Will” was truly Schopenhaueresque.
Healthy minds have converted Schopenhauer’s pessimism into the gentle
pessimism of the present day, which may be rather beautiful and poetical
than hideous. That Schopenhauer could be so vulgarly insulting to women
was simply the index of his own diseased mind.
His opinions about women were merely an instance of the utterly degrading
effect of syphilis upon the human brain and soul.