Meanwhile Schopenhauer had gone through “gymnasium” and university, and had learned more than was on their schedules. He had his fling at love and the world, with results that affected his character and his philosophy.4 He became gloomy, cynical, and suspicious; he was obsessed with fears and evil fancies; he kept his pipes under lock and key, and never trusted his neck to a barber’s razor; and he slept with loaded pistols at his bedside—presumably for the convenience of the burglar. He could not bear noise: “I have long held the opinion,” he writes, “that the amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity, and may therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it . . . . Noise is a torture to all intellectual people . . . . The superabundant display of vitality which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long.”5 He had an almost paranoiac sense of unrecognized greatness; missing success and fame, he turned within and gnawed at his own soul.
He had no mother, no wife, no child, no family, no country. “He was absolutely alone, with not a single friend; and between one and none there lies an infinity.”6 Even more than Goethe he was immune to the nationalistic fevers of his age. In 1813 he so far fell under the sway of Fichte’s enthusiasm for a war of liberation against Napoleon, that he thought of volunteering, and actually bought a set of arms. But prudence seized him in time; he argued that “Napoleon gave after all only concentrated and untrammeled utterance to that self-assertion and lust for more life which weaker mortals feel but must perforce disguise.”7 Instead of going to war he went to the country and wrote a doctor’s thesis in philosophy.
After this dissertation On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason (1813),8 Schopenhauer gave all his time, and devoted all his power, to the work which was to be his masterpiece—The World as Will and Idea. He sent the MS. to the publisher magna cum laude; here, he said, was no mere rehash of old ideas, but a highly coherent structure of original thought, “clearly intelligible, vigorous, and not without beauty”; a book “which would hereafter be the source and occasion of a hundred other books.”9 All of which was outrageously egotistic, and absolutely true. Many years later Schopenhauer was so sure of having solved the chief problems of philosophy that he thought of having his signet ring carved with an image of the Sphinx throwing herself down the abyss, as she had promised to do on having her riddles answered.
Nevertheless, the book attracted hardly any attention; the world was too poor and exhausted to read about its poverty and exhaustion. Sixteen years after publication Schopenhauer was informed that the greater part of the edition had been sold as waste paper. In his essay on Fame, in “The Wisdom of Life,” he quotes, with evident allusion to his masterpiece, two remarks of Lichtenberger’s: “Works like this are as a mirror: if an ass looks in you cannot expect an angel to look out”; and “when a head and a book come into collision, and one sounds hollow, is it always the book?” Schopenhauer goes on, with the voice of wounded vanity: “The more a man belongs to posterity—in other words, to humanity in general—so much the more is he an alien to his contemporaries; for since his work is not meant for them as such, but only in so far as they form part of mankind at large, there is none of that familiar local color about his productions which would appeal to them.” And then he becomes as eloquent as the fox in the fable: “Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf, and that to conceal their infirmity he saw one or two persons applauding? And what would he say if he discovered that those one or two persons had often taken bribes to secure the loudest applause for the poorest player?”—In some men egotism is a compensation for the absence of fame; in others, egotism lends a generous coöperation to its presence.
So completely did Schopenhauer put himself into this book that his later works are but commentaries on it; he became Talmudist to his own Torah, exegete to his own Jeremiads. In 1836 he published an essay On the Will in Nature, which was to some degree incorporated into the enlarged edition of The World as Will and Idea which appeared in 1844. In 1841 came The Two Ground-Problems of Ethics, and in 1851 two substantial volumes of Parerga et Parliapomena—literally, “By-products and Leavings”—which have been translated into English as the Essays. For this, the most readable of his works, and replete with wisdom and wit, Schopenhauer received, as his total remuneration, ten free copies. Optimism is difficult under such circumstances.
Only one adventure disturbed the monotony of his studious seclusion after leaving Weimar. He had hoped for a chance to present his philosophy at one of the great universities of Germany; the chance came in 1822, when he was invited to Berlin as privat-docent. He deliberately chose for his lectures the very hours at which the then mighty Hegel was scheduled to teach; Schopenhauer trusted that the students would view him and Hegel with the eyes of posterity. But the students could not so far anticipate, and Schopenhauer found himself talking to empty seats. He resigned, and revenged himself by those bitter diatribes against Hegel which mar the later editions of his chef-d’œuvre. In 1831 a cholera epidemic broke out in Berlin; both Hegel and Schopenhauer fled; but Hegel returned prematurely, caught the infection, and died in a few days. Schopenhauer never stopped until he reached Frankfort, where he spent the remainder of his seventy-two years.
Like a sensible pessimist, he had avoided that pitfall of optimists—the attempt to make a living with the pen. He had inherited an interest in his father’s firm, and lived in modest comfort on the revenue which this brought him. He invested his money with a wisdom unbecoming a philosopher. When a company in which he had taken shares failed, and the other creditors agreed to a 70% settlement, Schopenhauer fought for full payment, and won. He had enough to engage two rooms in a boarding-house; there he lived the last thirty years of his life, with no comrade but a dog. He called the little poodle Atma (the Brahmins’ term for the World-Soul), but the wags of the town called it “Young Schopenhauer.” He ate his dinners, usually, at the Englischer Hof. At the beginning of each meal he would put a gold coin upon the table before him; and at the end of each meal he would put the coin back into his pocket. It was, no doubt, an indignant waiter who at last asked him the meaning of this invariable ceremony. Schopenhauer answered that it was his silent wager to drop the coin into the poor-box on the first day that the English officers dining there should talk of anything else than horses, women, or dogs.10
The universities ignored him and his books, as if to substantiate his claim that all advances in philosophy are made outside of academic walls. “Nothing,” says Nietzsche, “so offended the German savants as Schopenhauer’s unlikeness to them.” But he had learned some patience; he was confident that, however belated, recognition would come. And at last, slowly, it came. Men of the middle classes—lawyers, physicians, merchants—found in him a philosopher who offered them no mere pretentious jargon of metaphysical unrealities, but an intelligible survey of the phenomena of actual life. A Europe disillusioned with the ideals and efforts of 1848 turned almost with acclamation to this philosophy that had voiced the despair of 1815. The attack of science upon theology, the socialist indictment of poverty and war, the biological stress on the struggle for existence,—all these factors helped to lift Schopenhauer finally to fame.