He was not too old to enjoy his popularity: he read with avidity all the articles that appeared about him; he asked his friends to send him every bit of printed comment they could find—he would pay the postage. In 1854 Wagner sent him a copy of Der Ring der Nibelugen, with a word in appreciation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music. So the great pessimist became almost an optimist in his old age; he played the flute assiduously after dinner, and thanked Time for ridding him of the fires of youth. People came from all over the world to see him; and on his seventieth birthday, in 1858, congratulations poured in upon him from all quarters and every continent.
It was not too soon; he had but two more years to live. On September 21, 1860, he sat down alone to breakfast, apparently well. An hour later his landlady found him still seated at the table, dead.
III. The World as Idea
What strikes the reader at once upon opening The World as Will and Idea is its style. Here is no Chinese puzzle of Kantian terminology, no Hegelian obfuscation, no Spinozist geometry; everything is clarity and order; and all is admirably centered about the leading conception of the world as will, and therefore strife, and therefore misery. What blunt honesty, what refreshing vigor, what uncompromising directness! Where his predecessors are abstract to the point of invisibility, with theories that give out few windows of illustration upon the actual world, Schopenhauer, like the son of a business man, is rich in the concrete, in examples, in applications, even in humor.11 After Kant, humor in philosophy was a startling innovation.
But why was the book rejected? Partly because it attacked just those who could have given it publicity—the university teachers. Hegel was philosophic dictator of Germany in 1818; yet Schopenhauer loses no time in assailing him. In the preface to the second edition he writes:
No time can be more unfavorable to philosophy than that in which it is shamefully misused on the one hand to further political objects, on the other as a means of livelihood . . . . Is there then nothing to oppose to the maxim, Primum vivere, deinde philosophari?12 These gentlemen desire to live, and indeed to live by philosophy. To philosophy they are assigned, with their wives and children . . . . The rule, “I sing the song of him whose bread I eat,” has always held good; the making of money by philosophy was regarded by the ancients as the characteristic of the sophists . . . . Nothing is to be had for gold but mediocrity . . . . It is impossible that an age which for twenty years has applauded a Hegel—that intellectual Caliban—as the greatest of the philosophers, . . . could make him who has looked on at that desirous of its approbation . . . . But rather, truth will always be paucorum hominum,13 and must therefore quietly and modestly wait for the few whose unusual mode of thought may find it enjoyable . . . . Life is short, but truth works far and lives long; let us speak the truth.
These last words are nobly spoken; but there is something of sour grapes in it all; no man was ever more anxious for approbation than Schopenhauer. It would have been nobler still to say nothing ill of Hegel; de vivis nil nisi bonum—of the living let us say nothing but good. And as for modestly awaiting recognition,—“I cannot see,” says Schopenhauer, “that between Kant and myself anything has been done in philosophy.”14 “I hold this thought—that the world is will—to be that which has long been sought for under the name of philosophy, and the discovery of which is therefore regarded, by those who are familiar with history, as quite as impossible as the discovery of the philosopher’s stone.”15 “I only intend to impart a single thought. Yet, notwithstanding all my endeavors, I could find no shorter way of imparting it than this whole book . . . . Read the book twice, and the first time with great patience.”16 So much for modesty! “What is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with envy, a man seeks to obtain pardon for excellences and merits from those who have none.”17 “No doubt, when modesty was made a virtue, it was a very advantageous thing for the fools; for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.”18
There was no humility about the first sentence of Schopenhauer’s book. “The world,” it begins, “is my idea.” When Fichte had uttered a similar proposition even the metaphysically sophisticated Germans had asked,—“What does his wife say about this?” But Schopenhauer had no wife. His meaning, of course, was simple enough: he wished to accept at the outset the Kantian position that the external world is known to us only through our sensations and ideas. There follows an exposition of idealism which is clear and forceful enough, but which constitutes the least original part of the book, and might better have come last than first. The world took a generation to discover Schopenhauer because he put his worst foot forward, and hid his own thought behind a two-hundred-page barrier of second-hand idealism.19
The most vital part of the first section is an attack on materialism. How can we explain mind as matter, when we know matter only through mind?
If we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its fatal result—knowledge—which it had reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point. Mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter: the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly; for suddenly the last link is seen to be the starting-point, the chain of a circle; and the materialist is like Baron Münchausen, who, when swimming on horseback, drew the horse into the air with his legs, and himself by his queue.20 . . . The crude materialism which even now, in the middle of the nineteenth century,21 has been served up again under the ignorant delusion that it is original, . . . stupidity denies vital force, and first of all tries to explain the phenomena of life from physical and chemical forces, and those again from the mechanical effects of matter.22 . . . But I will never believe that even the simplest chemical combination will ever admit of mechanical explanation; much less the properties of light, heat, and electricity. These will always require a dynamical explanation.23
No: it is impossible to solve the metaphysical puzzle, to discover the secret essence of reality; by examining matter first, and then proceeding to examine thought: we must begin with that which we know directly and intimately—ourselves. “We can never arrive at the real nature of things from without. However much we may investigate, we can never reach anything but images and names. We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the façades.”24 Let us enter within. If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own minds we shall perhaps have the key to the external world.
IV. The World as Will
1. THE WILL TO LIVE
Almost without exception, philosophers have placed the essence of mind in thought and consciousness; man was the knowing animal, the animal rationale. “This ancient and universal radical error, this enormous proton pseudos,25 . . . must before everything be set aside.”26 “Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside but only the crust.”27 Under the conscious intellect is the conscious or unconscious will, a striving, persistent vital force, a spontaneous activity, a will of imperious desire. The intellect may seem at times to lead the will, but only as a guide leads his master; the will “is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see.”28 We do not want a thing because we have found reasons for it, we find reasons for it because we want it; we even elaborate philosophies and theologies to cloak our desires.29 Hence Schopenhauer calls man the “metaphysical animal”: other animals desire without metaphysics. “Nothing is more provoking, when we are arguing against a man with reasons and explanations, and taking all pains to convince him, than to discover at last that he will not understand, that we have to do with his will.”30 Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic; and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will. Observe how long we remember our victories, and how soon we forget our defeats; memory is the menial of will.31 “In doing accounts we make mistakes much oftener in our own favor than to our disadvantage; and this without the slightest dishonest intention.”32 “On the other hand, the understanding of the stupidest man becomes keen when objects are in question that closely concern his wishes”;33 in general, the intellect is developed by danger, as in the fox, or by want, as in the criminal. But always it seems subordinate and instrumental to desire; when it attempts to displace the will, confusion follows. No one is more liable to mistakes than he who acts only on reflection.34