In this sense it may be called a revelation. It is inspired by the spirit of truth: in the fourth book there are even some paragraphs which may be considered to be dictated by the Holy Ghost.’ Such was his self-confidence, and he certainly needed some during the coming decades: the book, when it appeared at the end of 1818, was an utter failure: nobody bought it, nobody read it, nobody reviewed it. But until it began to be noticed in the 1850s, Schopenhauer survived virtually on his confidence that it would one day find its public and that one day he would be famous: for his desire for fame amounted almost to a mania – in later years, when he had acquired ‘disciples’, he employed them in combing the newspapers and periodicals of Europe for references to himself and his work. Moreover, in The World as Will and Idea he had expressed himself so completely that he published nothing further for 18 years.

Later Life

 

In the summer of 1831 cholera attacked Berlin. Among those who died was Hegel, among those who fled Schopenhauer. He went to Frankfurt-am-Main, in the following summer transferred to Mannheim but returned to Frankfurt at the beginning of June 1833. He lived in Frankfurt in the manner described until his death from a heart attack on 21 September 1860. Since the publication of The World as Will and Idea his ‘work’ had consisted chiefly of seeking out confirmations of the thesis there expounded. In 1836 he published On the Will in Nature, designed to show that scientific knowledge corroborated his metaphysics. In 1838 the Scientific Society of Drontheim, Norway, offered a prize for an essay on ‘whether free will could be proved from the evidence of consciousness’. Schopenhauer's essay, ready by February 1839, won the prize, and he subsequently entered a further essay for a prize offered by the Royal Danish Academy of the Sciences for a discussion of the source or foundation of morality: in this case, however, his essay, the only one submitted, was rejected. He published them both in 1841 under the title The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. All three works are no more than footnotes to The World as Will and Idea.

But he had also by this time begun writing what was finally to amount to a very large quantity of essays, aphorisms and reflexions, some bearing directly on his philosophy, others only obliquely. Despite its continuing lack of success, he persuaded its publisher, Brockhaus of Leipzig, to bring out a second edition of The World as Will and Idea: the large amount of additional material incorporated was in the nature of expansion of and comment on the existing book. After the appearance of this new edition he began to attract some little attention, but it was still not for another seven years that he published his second, and last, major book, Parerga and Paralipomena, which appeared in 1851. It was this very large but loosely assembled collection which first gained him wide popularity. It was declined by three publishers and finally brought out by Hayn of Berlin, at the prompting of Julius Frauenstädt, his first genuine follower: the only payment he received was ten free copies. During the 1850s he was able to savour something of the fame he desired; but nothing short of universal acclaim could have satisfied him, and death denied him anything he could have considered a triumph: it was not until the succeeding decades that his philosophy made its real mark.

The older Schopenhauer, who is the author of the present book, is much the same man who wept tears of joy at being freed from Jenisch's office. His mental life is devoted to reflexion: the outer world is chiefly material for reflexion. This is already true of the notes he made during his English tour of 1803–5, and is true of those he made during a tour of Italy in 1818: they consist almost always of the reflexions to which impressions give rise, hardly ever of the impressions themselves. He told the ageing Wieland when he met him in Weimar: ‘Life is a missliche Sache – a disagreeable thing –: I have determined to spend it in reflecting on it.’ This was not idle chatter: it describes what he actually did. There are gaping lacunae in his biography, especially in the 1820s, during which nothing worthy of note happened to him at all: objectively he was merely idling his years away, actually his love of reflecting and brooding was during these periods absorbing all his time.

Or almost all: like many very intellectual men he had a strongly sensual side to his nature, and his sexual interest was very strong. He had many erotic affairs, none of them lasting: indeed, ‘affairs’ is probably the wrong word, since it implies attachments of longer duration than most of Schopenhauer's – in his own day his sexual activity would have been called philandering when it involved women of his own class, whoring when it involved those of a lower class. In politics he was a believer in monarchy and rule from above, but in sex he was a perfect democrat: he considered all women equal. The position of sexuality in his philosophy is a direct reflexion of his personal situation. His famous misogyny is really his reaction to the way his mother was able to find a new and more satisfying life after his father's death – another instance of the retention of an attitude adopted in early life: without overdriving the comparison one could say that his was the reaction of Hamlet. His ‘affairs’ might then be seen as a meting-out of punishment to the female sex. On the other hand, the strength of his sexual drive was certainly considerable in itself, and when he condemns it as the actual centre and intensest point of the ‘will to live’ he speaks from experience: his fundamental feeling towards it was undoubtedly that he was its victim, that he was ‘in thrall’ to it. In his best recorded moments Schopenhauer understands more vividly than anyone the suffering involved in life and the need felt by all created things for love and sympathy: at these moments he knew and hated the coldness and egoism of his own sensuality.

Grounds of His Success

 

We have looked, as briefly as possible, at the source of Schopenhauer's metaphysics and then at that of his pessimism. It remains to indicate the source of his success.