To begin with, the pessimism itself struck a responsive chord. Many found it a great relief to cast off for once the obbligato optimism of our culture and to face the possibility that things may not be all for the best. That was one element. Another was his freedom from conventional religious sentiment. All previous German philosophers had set out from Christianity and had endeavoured in some way to justify its fundamental assumptions: Schopenhauer reinterpreted Christianity in a pessimistic sense, and then assimilated it to the religions of the East, in order to draw it into the orbit of his own philosophy: but this philosophy itself was atheist. The ‘will’ is not God: there is no God in Schopenhauer's world of will and idea. Not to have to reconcile the evil of the world with the existence of God – that was another great relief.

A third reason for Schopenhauer's ultimate success was his thesis that will is primary, intellect secondary. It cannot be truly said that he himself is ‘anti-rationalist’; I do not see how any reader of the following pieces could consider him anything but a close reasoner; but if intellect is the ‘tool’ of the will, as he says it is, then human actions are determined not by ‘reason’ but by ‘will’. Eduard von Hartmann translated Schopenhauer's ‘will’ into ‘the unconscious’ (The Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869, eight editions by 1879), and it is unnecessary to elaborate on what Freud subsequently made of ‘the unconscious’. We are now so used to the notion that the springs of human conduct are to be sought not in the mind but in the ‘will’ that we have forgotten that this notion had to be invented, and consequently that it was Schopenhauer who invented it.

A fourth reason was the relative simplicity of his fundamental ideas. What chiefly contributed to the inaccessibility of philosophy was its historical method – its building on the philosophical past and its consequent demand for a great deal of knowledge of what had been thought and written before. The dominant philosophy during Schopenhauer's lifetime, that of Hegel, was especially exacting in this respect. Schopenhauer considered history of any kind unnecessary. ‘To have read Herodotus is, from a philosophical point of view, to have studied enough history,’ he wrote; and again, in direct riposte to Hegel: ‘The true philosophy of history lies in perceiving that, in all the endless changes and motley complexity of events, it is only the self-same unchangeable being which is before us.’ Instead of to history, Schopenhauer appealed to immediate experience, to the feelings and needs common to everyone, and it is about these that he is constantly writing. One result of this is that no German philosopher except Nietzsche employs less jargon: a few unavoidable and irreplaceable technical expressions whose meaning is easily learned suffice him.

Fifthly, there is the fact that Schopenhauer's literary style is a model of nineteenth-century German. No German philosopher had written so well or so readably before: he was not an innovator, but his manner was a faultless employment of the current idiom and demonstrated that the problems of metaphysics could be discussed in German in a way comprehensible to the non-specialist reader. Probably he was the first German philosopher to be read as ‘literature’ by a public not primarily interested in reading philosophy.

The ultimate ground of Schopenhauer's success, however, is that for many people he articulated a feeling hitherto inarticulate and therefore only half conscious that nineteenth-century progress was somehow not going to lead to the millennium. One has to try to think back to the time before the definitive collapse of that optimistic outlook which equated technological advance with human progress. No one with any sense will want to belittle the advantages of swift transportation, painless dentistry, refuse collection and all the other incalculably beneficial innovations of the nineteenth century; nor is it reasonable to expect of an age so incredibly prolific in practical inventions that it should have had a bad conscience about it. But we must also acknowledge that our civilization has now undergone a period of severe correction, so that optimism in nineteenth-century style would now be a kind of idiocy. Technological progress may still be going to lead to the millennium, but it could equally well lead to hell on earth. In 1818 however, and especially in Germany in 1818, the way things were going was hardly perceptible. Germany's advance into the industrial era was slow, a good generation behind that of England: early mercantile capitalism persisted well into the middle of the century. This explains why recognition of Schopenhauer was so long delayed: it came with the German rush into industrialization of the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. The inauguration of the Reich was the beginning of an era of manic self-confidence which, by a natural process, produced its own antithesis: and it was only then that the great exponent and justifier of pessimism found his audience.

Publications

 

It will be convenient here to list the six books Schopenhauer published.

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, 1813; revised edition 1847. This is his doctoral thesis, later promoted to the ‘first stage’ of his philosophy.

On Vision and Colours, 1816; Latin version 1830. Goethe's largest scientific work was his three-volume Zur Farbenlehre, in which he expounded a theory of chromatics and polemicized against Newton's theory. Schopenhauer took sides with Goethe and published his own speculations on the subject. Characteristically, he preserved his support for Goethe and the enmity towards Newton he had learned from him until his last years.

The World as Will and Idea, 1818, dated 1819; second, much expanded edition 1844; third edition 1859.

On the Will in Nature, 1836; second edition 1854.

The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, 1841; second edition 1860.

Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851; various posthumous editions including additional notes and aphorisms.

Note on this Selection

 

The selection which follows is taken from the second volume of Parerga and Paralipomena, that is to say from the volume of aphorisms. The word is to be taken in the German sense, as meaning sometimes a single sentence but much more often a miniature essay on a single point.