Schopenhauer’s devoted disciples

Few philosophers have endured so long a wait between the production of their greatest work and its recognition as Arthur Schopenhauer. By the concluding decades of the 19th century, the influence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy was extensive. Philosophers and physicists paid tribute to him. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein were both launched onto their philosophical enterprises by the insights they derived from him. Einstein kept his portrait on his wall, alongside those of Faraday and Maxwell, and described his works as ‘a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, an unfailing wellspring of tolerance’. The work of the physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s refers back consistently to Schopenhauer. His philosophy affected the development of novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Ivan Turgenev, Émile Zola, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust and Thomas Hardy, as well as composers such as Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg. Yet during his life his work was almost entirely unknown and unread: he was producing masterpieces in his twenties which almost no-one read until his sixties. Only very late in life did his works finally make the impact he had always anticipated.

Part of the explanation for this delay is that Schopenhauer consciously rejected the fashionable philosophies of his day, which he believed derived from the narrowness of formal education. By contrast with his philosophical contemporaries, Schopenhauer’s education was unconventional. Born in 1788, the son of a cosmopolitan merchant, he spent much of his youth travelling in Europe while being prepared for a mercantile career. Fluent in French and English, he had already acquired a phenomenal knowledge of European culture, art, and commercial life by his 17th year. Yet he was deficient in much formal education outside of modern languages, and found himself intellectually restless once he settled down to his apprenticeship aged 17.

Bored of his commercial life, he was liberated from his drudgery in a particularly brutal fashion: his father, always a depressive, was found dead in a nearby canal. Much like Dr Johnson, who once stated that ‘I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life’, Schopenhauer too would be plagued by the black dog of depression. But alongside his psychological travails, he also inherited a third portion of his father’s estate, which enabled him to abandon his career, and throw himself – at the age of 18 – into full-time education.

After studying with private tutors, Schopenhauer enrolled in the University of Göttingen aged 19, and devoted himself, night and day, to the study of Latin, Greek and the natural sciences. By 21 he was studying philosophy and four years later he had produced his doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813). After publishing a short book on Goethe’s colour theory, he settled down to produce his philosophical masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation.

Released in November 1818, when the author was just 30 years old, The World as Will and Representation attempted to solve the fundamental problems of philosophy. Divided into four sections, covering epistemology, ontology, aesthetics and ethics, the work took Kant’s demarcation of phenomena and noumena and used it to provide a comprehensive explanation of all forms of life. Much like Wittgenstein in the preface to his Tractatus – ‘the truth of the thoughts that are here set forth seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems’ – Schopenhauer genuinely believed that The World as Will and Representation provided the definitive solution to all man’s intellectual, moral, and aesthetic problems. Through his insights, he believed he had elucidated the works of all the great philosophers, artists, scientists and mystics of both the western and the eastern traditions.

Alongside George Berkeley and David Hume, Schopenhauer was one of those rare thinkers who were able to produce their masterpiece while still in their twenties. Yet, just as Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) fell ‘dead-born from the press’, so, too, did The World as Will and Representation. It received almost no attention – what notice it did receive was typically hostile. Determined to correct this, Schopenhauer enrolled at the University of Berlin as a lecturer. Dominated by his hostility to Hegel, whom he regarded as a debaucher of Kant’s intellectual legacy and of German prose, he arranged to have his lectures scheduled for the same time as those of his antagonist. When almost no-one showed up, he was obliged to abandon his course.

From this point on, Schopenhauer descended into an ever deepening pit of depression. He believed himself to have completed the greatest work a man could perform, and yet no-one seemed to have noticed. What else was he to do with his life? He spent many years wandering around Europe, before settling in Berlin between the ages of 37 and 42, the lowest point of his life. He became increasingly bitter toward the school of post-Kantian Idealists – Schelling, Fichte and Hegel – and came to believe that what distinguished their errors was that they were interested in philosophy for ulterior, ‘material’ motives. Seeking preferment in universities, they were more concerned with promoting doctrines that were favourable to the political and religious authorities. Their interaction with philosophical questions was a primarily verbal and conceptual one. By contrast, Schopenhauer believed that his wider experience as a youth, prior to much of his formal education, had provided him with the correct sequence of life, from experience that is later abstracted into theory rather than abstract theory that is later applied to experience.

His personal life, too, was in a miserable condition. Deeply misogynistic, he had a terrible relationship with his mother. Unwilling to see her during the last 24 years of her life, he refused to even attend her funeral. His romantic relationships were often shallow and unsatisfying; in his youth he frequented prostitutes and, later in life, his sexual adventures were primarily with servants. On two occasions – aged 21 and 47 – he became the father to illegitimate children, both of whom died soon after. He is often erroneously alleged to have ‘pushed an old woman down the stairs’ – though he was found guilty of assault on appeal and obliged to pay compensation to the victim for the remaining 21 years of her life. When she finally died, he exulted with a Latin pun: Obit anus, abit onus: ‘the old woman dies, the burden is lifted’.

He reached his nadir in his early 40s, when, for several weeks, he was almost non-verbal. Yet from this moment his life seemed slowly to improve. Relocating to Frankfurt, he gradually returned to writing, following a gap of almost two decades. Still convinced, despite muted reception, that The World as Will and Representation was the great philosophical masterpiece, he began work on a series of supplements to that volume. On the Will in Nature  (1836) was the first of these, attempting to demonstrate that the natural sciences endorsed his ontology. In 1839 his essay On the Freedom of the Will  won a competition launched by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences, though a similar competition the following year was less successful. The Royal Danish Society of Sciences refused to award his On the Basis of Morality their prize despite it being the only entrant, due to the abuse he had heaped upon Hegel and his works.

In 1844 came the second edition of The World as Will and Representation. This two-volume work consisted of the first edition, followed by an entirely new second volume containing a chapter-by-chapter commentary on the first. Finally, in 1851, aged 63, he published a series of essays titled Parerga and Paralipomena, which he knew to be his last major contribution. ‘I am deeply glad to see the birth of my last child, which completes my mission in this world,’ he wrote. ‘I really feel as if a load, that I have borne since my 24th year, and that has weighed heavily upon me, has been lifted from my shoulders. No-one can imagine what that means.’

Neglected throughout his period of intellectual fecundity, it was only in his twilight years that Schopenhauer’s contributions began to attract any attention. John Oxenford, the English translator of Goethe’s autobiography, published a short review of Parerga and Paralipomena in 1852. The following year, in an edition of the Westminster Review edited by the Germanophile novelist George Eliot, Oxenford published a much larger appreciation of Schopenhauer’s work: Iconoclasm in German Philosophy.

Oxenford’s review was the stone that precipitated the avalanche. It was translated into German and published in the Vossische Zeitung, bringing Schopenhauer’s work to the height of intellectual fashion. Within a year, Wagner had become a devoted disciple, even at the cost of repudiating his own theoretical contributions to aesthetic theory. Schopenhauer’s works were swiftly translated into French and Italian – with Kierkegaard remarking in 1854 that ‘all the literary gossips, journalists and authorlings have begun to busy themselves with S’.

Schopenhauer affected to be somewhat jaded by this attention: ‘After one has spent a long life in insignificance and disregard they come at the end with drums and trumpets and think that is something.’ Yet for all that, Schopenhauer was deeply gratified by the reception his works had belatedly achieved. Despite his native pessimism he had always believed that, in the long run, truth will out; he died in 1860 aged 72 a (comparatively) happy man. In his introduction to the third edition of The World as Will and Representation, in 1859, he quoted his beloved Petrarch as a summary of his feelings: ‘If someone who has been running all day arrives in the evening, it is enough.’