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PHILOSOPHIES ANCIENT AND MODERN
SCHOPENHAUER
NOTE
As a consequence of the success of the series of _Religions Ancient and
Modern_, Messrs. CONSTABLE have decided to issue a set of similar
primers, with brief introductions, lists of dates, and selected
authorities, presenting to the wider public the salient features of the
_Philosophies_ of Greece and Rome and of the Middle Ages, as well as of
modern Europe. They will appear in the same handy Shilling volumes, with
neat cloth bindings and paper envelopes, which have proved so attractive
in the case of the _Religions_. The writing in each case will be
confided to an eminent authority, and one who has already proved himself
capable of scholarly yet popular exposition within a small compass.
Among the first volumes to appear will be:--
=Early Greek Philosophy.= By A. W. BENN, author of _The Philosophy
of Greece, Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century_.
=Stoicism.= By Professor ST. GEORGE STOCK, author of _Deductive
Logic_, editor of the _Apology of Plato_, etc.
=Plato.= By Professor A. E. TAYLOR, St. Andrews University, author
of _The Problem of Conduct_.
=Scholasticism.= By Father RICKABY, S.J.
=Hobbes.= By Professor A. E. TAYLOR.
=Locke.= By Professor ALEXANDER, of Owens College.
=Comte and Mill.= By T. WHITTAKER, author of _The Neoplatonists,
Apollonius of Tyana and other Essays_.
=Herbert Spencer.= By W. H. HUDSON, author of _An Introduction to
Spencer's Philosophy_.
=Schopenhauer.= By T. WHITTAKER.
=Berkeley.= By Professor CAMPBELL FRASER, D.C.L., LL.D.
=Bergsen.= By Father TYRRELL.
SCHOPENHAUER
By
THOMAS WHITTAKER
AUTHOR OF 'COMTE AND MILL,' ETC.
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO LTD
1909
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. LIFE AND WRITINGS, 1
II. THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE, 15
III. METAPHYSICS OF THE WILL, 29
IV. AESTHETICS, 49
V. ETHICS, 65
VI. HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE, 86
SELECTED WORKS, 93
SCHOPENHAUER
CHAPTER I
LIFE AND WRITINGS
Arthur Schopenhauer may be distinctively described as the greatest
philosophic writer of his century. So evident is this that he has
sometimes been regarded as having more importance in literature than in
philosophy; but this is an error. As a metaphysician he is second to no
one since Kant. Others of his age have surpassed him in system and in
comprehensiveness; but no one has had a firmer grasp of the essential
and fundamental problems of philosophy. On the theory of knowledge, the
nature of reality, and the meaning of the beautiful and the good, he has
solutions to offer that are all results of a characteristic and original
way of thinking.
In one respect, as critics have noted, his spirit is different from that
of European philosophy in general. What preoccupies him in a special way
is the question of evil in the world. Like the philosophies of the
East, emerging as they do without break from religion, Schopenhauer's
philosophy is in its outcome a doctrine of redemption from sin. The name
of pessimism commonly applied to it is in some respects misleading,
though it was his own term; but it is correct if understood as he
explained it. As he was accustomed to insist, his final ethical doctrine
coincides with that of all the religions that aim, for their adepts or
their elect, at deliverance from 'this evil world.' But, as the
'world-fleeing' religions have their mitigations and accommodations, so
also has the philosophy of Schopenhauer. At various points indeed it
seems as if a mere change of accent would turn it into optimism.
This preoccupation does not mean indifference to the theoretical
problems of philosophy. No one has insisted more strongly that the end
of philosophy is pure truth, and that only the few who care about pure
truth have any concern with it. But for Schopenhauer the desire for
speculative truth does not by itself suffice to explain the impulse of
philosophical inquiries. On one side of his complex character, he had
more resemblance to the men who turn from the world to religion, like
St. Augustine, than to the normal type of European thinker, represented
pre-eminently by Aristotle. He was a temperamental pessimist, feeling
from the first the trouble of existence; and here he finds the deepest
motive for the desire to become clear about it. He saw in the world,
what he felt in himself, a vain effort after ever new objects of desire
which give no permanent satisfaction; and this view, becoming
predominant, determined, not indeed all the ideas of his philosophy, but
its general complexion as a 'philosophy of redemption.'
With his pessimism, personal misfortunes had nothing to do. He was, and
always recognised that he was, among the most fortunately placed of
mankind. He does not hesitate to speak sometimes of his own happiness in
complete freedom from the need to apply himself to any compulsory
occupation. This freedom, as he has put gratefully on record, he owed to
his father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, who was a rich merchant of
Danzig, where the philosopher was born on the 22nd of February 1788.
Both his parents were of Dutch ancestry. His mother, Johanna
Schopenhauer, won celebrity as a novelist; and his sister, Adele, also
displayed some literary talent. Generalising from his own case,
Schopenhauer holds that men of intelligence derive their character from
their father and their intellect from their mother. With his mother,
however, he was not on sympathetic terms, as may be read in the
biographies. His father intended him for a mercantile career, and with
this view began to prepare him from the first to be a cosmopolitan man
of the world. The name of Arthur was given to him because it is spelt
alike in the leading European languages. He was taken early to France,
where he resided from 1797 to 1799, learning French so well that on his
return he had almost forgotten his German. Portions of the years 1803 to
1804 were spent in England, France, Switzerland, and Austria. In England
he was three months at a Wimbledon boarding-school kept by a clergyman.
This experience he found extremely irksome. He afterwards became highly
proficient in English: was always pleased to be taken for an Englishman,
and regarded both the English character and intelligence as on the whole
the first in Europe; but all the more deplorable did he find the
oppressive pietism which was the special form taken in the England of
that period by the reaction against the French Revolution. He is never
tired of denouncing that phase of 'cold superstition,' the dominance of
which lasted during his lifetime; for the publication of Mill's
_Liberty_ and of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, which may be considered
as marking the close of it, came only the year before his death.
The only real break in the conformity of Schopenhauer's circumstances to
his future career came in 1805, when he was placed in a merchant's
office at Hamburg, whither his father had migrated in disgust at the
annexation of his native Danzig, then under a republican constitution of
its own, by Prussia in 1793. Soon afterwards his father died; but out of
loyalty he tried for some time longer to reconcile himself to commercial
life. Finding this at length impossible, he gained permission from his
mother, in 1807, to leave the office for the gymnasium. At this time he
seems to have begun his classical studies, his education having hitherto
been exclusively modern. They were carried on first at Gotha and then at
Weimar. In 1809 he entered the university of Goettingen as a student of
medicine. This, however, was with a view only to scientific studies, not
to practice; and he transferred himself to the philosophical faculty in
1810. Generally he was little regardful of academical authority. His
father's deliberately adopted plan of letting him mix early with the
world had given him a certain independence of judgment. At Goettingen,
however, he received an important influence from his teacher, G. E.
Schulze (known by the revived scepticism of his _AEnesidemus_), who
advised him to study Plato and Kant before Aristotle and Spinoza. From
1811 to 1813 he was at Berlin, where he heard Fichte, but was not
impressed. In 1813 the degree of Doctor of Philosophy was conferred on
him at Jena for the dissertation _On the Fourfold Root of the Principle
of Sufficient Reason_ (_Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom
zureichenden Grunde_, 2nd ed., 1847). This was the first result of his
Kantian studies. In the same year he began to be acquainted with Goethe
at Weimar, where his mother and sister had gone to reside in 1806. A
consequence of this acquaintance was that he took up and further
developed Goethe's theory of colours. His dissertation _Ueber das Sehen
und die Farben_ was published in 1816. A second edition did not appear
till 1854; but in the meantime he had published a restatement of his
doctrine in Latin, entitled _Theoria Colorum Physiologica_ (1830). This,
however, was an outlying part of his work. He had already been seized by
the impulse to set forth the system of philosophy that took shape in
him, as he says, by some formative process of which he could give no
conscious account. His great work, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_,
was ready for publication before the end of 1818, and was published with
the date 1819. Thus he is one of the most precocious philosophers on
record. For in that single volume, written before he was thirty, the
outlines of his whole system are fixed. There is some development later,
and there are endless new applications and essays towards confirmation
from all sources. His mind never rested, and his literary power gained
by exercise. Still, it has been said with truth, that there never was a
greater illusion than when he thought that he seldom repeated himself.
In reality he did little but repeat his fundamental positions with
infinite variations in expression.
After completing his chief work, Schopenhauer wrote some verses in which
he predicted that posterity would erect a monument to him. This
prediction was fulfilled in 1895; but, for the time, the work which he
never doubted would be his enduring title to fame seemed, like Hume's
_Treatise_, to have fallen 'deadborn from the press.' This he attributed
to the hostility of the academical philosophers; and, in his later
works, attacks on the university professors form a characteristic
feature. The official teachers of the Hegelian school, he declared, were
bent only on obtaining positions for themselves by an appearance of
supporting Christian dogma; and they resented openness on the part of
any one else. Yet on one side he maintained that his own pessimism was
more truly Christian than their optimism. The essential spirit of
Christianity is that of Brahmanism and Buddhism, the great religions
that sprang from India, the first home of our race. He is even inclined
to see in it traces of Indian influence. What vitiates it in his eyes is
the Jewish element, which finds its expression in the flat modern
'Protestant-rationalistic optimism.' As optimistic religions, he groups
together Judaism, Islam, and Graeco-Roman Polytheism. His antipathy,
however, only extends to the two former. He was himself in great part a
child of Humanism and of the eighteenth century, rejoicing over the
approaching downfall of all the faiths, and holding that a weak religion
(entirely different from those he admires) is favourable to
civilisation. Nothing can exceed his scorn for nearly everything that
characterised the Middle Ages. With Catholicism as a political system he
has no sympathy whatever; while on the religious side the Protestant
are as sympathetic to him as the Catholic mystics. What is common to all
priesthoods, he holds, is to exploit the metaphysical need of mankind
(in which he also believes) for the sake of their own power.
Clericalism, 'Pfaffenthum,' whether Catholic or Protestant, is the
object of his unvarying hatred and contempt. If he had cared to
appreciate Hegel, he would have found on this point much community of
spirit; but of course there was a real antithesis between the two as
philosophers. No 'conspiracy' need be invoked to explain the failure of
Schopenhauer to win early recognition. Belief in the State and in
progress was quite alien to him; and Germany was then full of political
hopes, which found nourishment in optimistic pantheism. What at length
gave his philosophy vogue was the collapse of this enthusiasm on the
failure of the revolutionary movement in 1848. Once known, it contained
enough of permanent value to secure it from again passing out of sight
with the next change of fashion.
The rest of Schopenhauer's life in its external relations may be briefly
summed up. For a few years, it was diversified by travels in Italy and
elsewhere, and by an unsuccessful attempt at academical teaching in
Berlin. In 1831 he moved to Frankfort, where he finally settled in
1833. He lived unmarried there till his death on the 21st of September
1860. The monument, already spoken of, was unveiled at Frankfort on the
6th of June 1895.
The almost unbroken silence with which his great work was received,
though it had a distempering effect on the man, did not discourage the
thinker. The whole series of Schopenhauer's works, indeed, was completed
before he attained anything that could be called fame. Constantly on the
alert as he was to seize upon confirmations of his system, he published
in 1836 his short work _On the Will in Nature_, pointing out
verifications of his metaphysics by recent science. In 1839 his prize
essay, _On the Freedom of the Human Will_ (finished in 1837), was
crowned by the Royal Scientific Society of Drontheim in Norway. This and
another essay, _On the Basis of Morality_, _not_ crowned by the Royal
Danish Society of Copenhagen in 1840, he published in 1841, with the
inclusive title, _Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik_. In 1844 appeared
the second edition of his principal work, to which there was added, in
the form of a second volume, a series of elucidations and extensions
larger in bulk than the first. This new volume contains much of his
best and most effective writing. His last work, _Parerga und
Paralipomena_, which appeared in 1851 (2 vols.), is from the literary
point of view the most brilliant. It was only from this time that he
began to be well known among the general public; though the philosophic
'apostolate' of Julius Frauenstaedt, who afterwards edited his works, had
begun in 1840. His activity was henceforth confined to modifying and
extending his works for new editions; an employment in which he was
always assiduous. In consequence of this, all of them, as they stand,
contain references from one to another; but the development of his
thinking, so far as there was such a process after 1818, can be easily
traced without reference to the earlier editions. There is some growth;
but, as has been said, it does not affect many of the chief points. A
brief exposition of his philosophy can on the whole take it as something
fixed. The heads under which it must fall are those assigned to the
original four books of _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_.
Although Schopenhauer discountenanced the attempt to connect a
philosophers biography with his work, something has to be said about his
character, since this has been dwelt on to his disadvantage by
opponents. There is abundant material for a personal estimate in the
correspondence and reminiscences published after his death by his
disciples Julius Frauenstaedt and Wilhelm Gwinner. The apparent
contradiction is at once obvious between the ascetic consummation of his
ethics and his unascetic life, carefully occupied in its latter part
with rules for the preservation of his naturally robust health. He was
quite aware of this, but holds it absurd to require that a moralist
should commend only the virtues which he possesses. It is as if the
requirement were set up that a sculptor is to be himself a model of
beauty. A saint need not be a philosopher, nor a philosopher a saint.
The science of morals is as theoretical as any other branch of
philosophy. Fundamentally character is unmodifiable, though knowledge,
it is allowed, may change the mode of action within the limits of the
particular character. The passage to the state of asceticism cannot be
effected by moral philosophy, but depends on a kind of 'grace.' After
all, it might be replied, philosophers, whether they succeed or not, do
usually make at least an attempt to live in accordance with the moral
ideal they set up. The best apology in Schopenhauer's case is that the
fault may have been as much in his ideal as in his failure to conform
to it. The eloquent pages he has devoted to the subject of holiness only
make manifest the inconsequence (which he admits) in the passage to it.
For, as we shall see, this has nothing in common with the essentially
rational asceticism of the schools of later antiquity; which was a rule
of self-limitation in view of the philosophic life. He did in a way of
his own practise something of this; and, on occasion, he sets forth the
theory of it; but he quite clearly sees the difference. His own ideal,
which he never attempted to practise, is that of the self-torturing
ascetics of the Christian Middle Age. Within the range of properly human
virtue, he can in many respects hold his own, not only as a philosopher
but as a man. If his egoism and vanity are undeniable, he undoubtedly
possessed the virtues of rectitude and compassion. What he would have
especially laid stress on was the conscientious devotion to his work.
With complete singleness of purpose he used for a disinterested end the
leisure which he regarded as the most fortunate of endowments. As he
said near the close of his life, his intellectual conscience was clear.
Of Schopenhauer's expositions of his pessimism it would be true to say,
as Spinoza says of the Book of Job, that the matter, like the style, is
not that of a man sitting among the ashes, but of one meditating in a
library. This of course does not prove that they are not a genuine, if
one-sided, rendering of human experience. All that can be said is that
they did not turn him away from appreciation of the apparent goods of
life. His own practical principle was furnished by what he regarded as a
lower point of view; and this gives its direction to the semi-popular
philosophy of the _Parerga_. From what he takes to be the higher point
of view, the belief that happiness is attainable by man on earth is an
illusion; but he holds that, by keeping steadily in view a kind of
tempered happiness as the end, many mistakes may be avoided in the
conduct of life, provided that each recognises at once the strength and
weakness of his own character, and does not attempt things that, with
the given limitations, are impossible. Of the highest truth, as he
conceived it, he could therefore make no use. Only by means of a truth
that he was bound to hold half-illusory could a working scheme be
constructed for himself and others. This result may give us guidance in
seeking to learn what we can from a thinker who is in reality no
representative of a decadence, but is fundamentally sane and rational,
even in spite of himself.