.
If you wish to draw pleasure out of life,
You must attach value to the world.
Schopenhauer is unimpressed, and in his notebook beside Goethe’s tip, appends a quotation from Chamfort: ‘Il vaut mieux laisser les hommes pour ce qu’ils sont, que les prendre pour ce qu’ils ne sont pas.’ (Better to accept men for what they are, than to take them to be what they are not.)
1814–15 Schopenhauer moves to Dresden and writes a thesis (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason). He has few friends and enters into conversations with reduced expectations: ‘Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception.’ He becomes a regular in an Italian tavern, which serves his favourite meats – Venetian salami, truffled sausage and Parma ham.
1818 He finishes The World as Will and Representation, which he knows to be a masterpiece. It explains his lack of friends: ‘A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?’
1818–19 To celebrate the completion of his book, Schopenhauer travels to Italy. He delights in art, nature and the climate, though his mood remains fragile: ‘We should always be mindful of the fact that no man is ever very far from the state in which he would readily want to seize a sword or poison in order to bring his existence to an end; and those who are far from believing this could easily be convinced of the opposite by an accident, an illness, a violent change of fortune – or of the weather.’ He visits Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice and meets a number of attractive women at receptions: ‘I was very fond of them – if only they would have had me.’ Rejection helps to inspire a view that: ‘Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex.’
1819 The World as Will and Representation is published. It sells 230 copies. ‘Every life history is a history of suffering’; ‘If only I could get rid of the illusion of regarding the generation of vipers and toads as my equals, it would be a great help to me.’
1820 Schopenhauer attempts to gain a university post in philosophy in Berlin. He offers lectures on ‘The whole of philosophy, i.e. the theory of the essence of the world and of the human mind.’ Five students attend. In a nearby building, his rival, Hegel, can be heard lecturing to an audience of 300. Schopenhauer assesses Hegel’s philosophy: ‘[I]ts fundamental ideas are the absurdest fancy, a world turned upside down, a philosophical buffoonery … its contents being the hollowest and most senseless display of words ever lapped up by blockheads, and its presentation … being the most repulsive and nonsensical gibberish, recalling the rantings of a bedlamite.’ The beginnings of disenchantment with academia: ‘That one can be serious about philosophy has as a rule not occurred to anyone, least of all to a lecturer on philosophy, just as no one as a rule believes less in Christianity than does the Pope.’
1821 Schopenhauer falls in love with Caroline Medon, a nineteen-year-old singer. The relationship lasts intermittently for ten years, but Schopenhauer has no wish to formalize the arrangement: ‘To marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other.’ He nevertheless has fond thoughts of polygamy: ‘Of the many advantages of polygamy, one is that the husband would not come into such close contact with his in-laws, the fear of which at present prevents innumerable marriages. Ten mothers-in-law instead of one!’
1822 Travels to Italy for a second time (Milan, Florence, Venice). Before setting out, he asks his friend Friedrich Osann to look out for ‘any mention of me in books, journals, literary periodicals and such like.’ Osann does not find the task time-consuming.
1825 Having failed as an academic, Schopenhauer attempts to become a translator. But his offers to turn Kant into English and Tristram Shandy into German are rejected by publishers. He confides in a letter a melancholy wish to have ‘a position in bourgeois society’, though will never attain one. ‘If a God has made this world, then I would not like to be the God; its misery and distress would break my heart.’ Fortunately, he can rely on a comfortable sense of his own worth in darker moments: ‘How often must I learn … that in the affairs of everyday life … my spirit and mind are what a telescope is in an opera-house or a cannon at a hare-hunt?’
1828 Turns forty. ‘After his fortieth year,’ he consoles himself, ‘any man of merit … will hardly be free from a certain touch of misanthropy.’
1831 Now forty-three, living in Berlin, Schopenhauer thinks once again of getting married. He turns his attentions to Flora Weiss, a beautiful, spirited girl who has just turned seventeen. During a boating party, in an attempt to charm her, he smiles and offers her a bunch of white grapes. Flora later confides in her diary: ‘I didn’t want them. I felt revolted because old Schopenhauer had touched them, and so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water behind me.’ Schopenhauer leaves Berlin in a hurry: ‘Life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.’
1833 He settles in a modest apartment in Frankfurt am Main, a town of some 50,000 inhabitants. He describes the city, the banking centre of continental Europe, as ‘a small, stiff, internally crude, municipally puffed-up, peasant-proud nation of Abderites, whom I do not like to approach’.
His closest relationships are now with a succession of poodles, who he feels have a gentleness and humility humans lack: ‘The sight of any animal immediately gives me pleasure and gladdens my heart.’ He lavishes affection on these poodles, addressing them as ‘Sir’, and takes a keen interest in animal welfare: ‘The highly intelligent dog, man’s truest and most faithful friend, is put on a chain by him! Never do I see such a dog without feelings of the deepest sympathy for him and of profound indignation against his master. I think with satisfaction of a case, reported some years ago in The Times, where Lord X kept a large dog on a chain. One day as he was walking through the yard, he took it into his head to go and pat the dog, whereupon the animal tore his arm open from top to bottom, and quite right, too! What he meant by this was: “You are not my master, but my devil who makes a hell of my brief existence!” May this happen to all who chain up dogs.’
The philosopher adopts a rigid daily routine. He writes for three hours in the morning, plays the flute (Rossini) for an hour, then dresses in white tie for lunch in the Englischer Hof on the Rossmarkt. He has an enormous appetite, and tucks a large white napkin into his collar. He refuses to acknowledge other diners when eating, but occasionally enters into conversation over coffee. One of them describes him as ‘comically disgruntled, but in fact harmless and good-naturedly gruff’.
(Ill. 19.6)
Another reports that Schopenhauer frequently boasts of the excellent condition of his teeth as evidence that he is superior to other people, or as he puts it, superior to the ‘common biped’.
After lunch, Schopenhauer retires to the library of his club, the nearby Casino Society, where he reads The Times – the newspaper which he feels will best inform him of the miseries of the world. In mid-afternoon, he takes a two-hour walk with his dog along the banks of the Main, muttering under his breath. In the evening, he visits the opera or the theatre, where he is often enraged by the noise of late-comers, shufflers and coughers – and writes to the authorities urging strict measures against them. Though he has read and much admires Seneca, he does not agree with the Roman philosopher’s verdict on noise: ‘I have for a long time been of the opinion that the quantity of noise anyone can comfortably endure is in inverse proportion to his mental powers … The man who habitually slams doors instead of shutting them with the hand … is not merely ill-mannered, but also coarse and narrow-minded … We shall be quite civilized only when … it is no longer anyone’s right to cut through the consciousness of every thinking being … by means of whistling, howling, bellowing, hammering, whip-cracking … and so on.’