There are no doubt other reasons for this, but one reason is certainly the overwhelming presence of Goethe. A dictum of Shaw's which seems to me obviously true is that the first great artist of any cultural epoch ‘reaps the whole harvest and reduces those who come after to the rank of mere gleaners, or, worse than that, fools who go laboriously through all the motions of the reaper and binder in an empty field’ (Preface to Three Plays for Puritans). The history of German literature in the nineteenth century is indeed only an exemplification of the truth of this dictum. The middle decades of the preceding century had been barren, but only in the way a field in spring is barren: the seed is down but it is not yet time for the harvest. In due course the harvest appeared, and Goethe reaped it all. In every category of ‘literature’ as usually understood he supplied the model instance: Wilhelm Meister was the model novel, the first part of Faust the model play, Dichtung und Wahrheit the model autobiography, the Italienische Reise the model travel book; Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe – the ‘best German book’ in Nietzsche's opinion – is the German equivalent of Boswell's Johnson; the collected letters, which number over 13,000, is incomparably the greatest collection of its kind; and in poetry the comprehensiveness and size of his achievement threatened literally to exhaust the capacities of the German language, leaving nothing more to be done. One effect of all this was to drive original intellects out of the conventional literary categories into other fields, especially the field of philosophy, which Goethe had not harvested; and so it is that the world figures of German literature in the age after Goethe are not to be found among novelists or poets or dramatists, but among philosophers: Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche are the German peers of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Flaubert, Dickens and Mark Twain. The technical vocabulary they employ makes them harder to understand until that vocabulary is understood, and their employment of it often produces an atmosphere of impersonality and objectivity foreign to the world of the novel or the poem. A very intimate knowledge of Hegel, for example, is required to penetrate the ‘scientific’ outworks and gain the personality within: yet that personality determines the structure and nature of The Phenomenology of the Spirit just as surely as the personality of Dickens determines the structure and nature of Our Mutual Friend. But not every German metaphysician conceals himself so thoroughly as Hegel, who in any case suffered from genuine difficulty in expressing himself and who struggled consciously but in vain against an inadequate literary technique: the philosophy of Schelling is already more obviously the outcome of subjective attitudes in the individual who has framed it, and that of Schopenhauer is very clearly so. An individuality which under different circumstances might have expressed itself in fiction or poetry or autobiography here does so in the language of metaphysics and in terms of the perennial problems of metaphysics. The metaphysical problems dealt with are the common property of mankind, the individual subjectivity which deals with them produces a particular ‘philosophy’. A necessary background for an easy and enjoyable reading of Schopenhauer's philosophical essays and aphorisms is, therefore, a knowledge of the fundamental problems he deals with – what he is writing about – and a knowledge of those elements in his personality and background which lead him to deal with these problems in just the way he does. Given this knowledge, Schopenhauer is as easy as Orwell (and Orwell is easy precisely because we know as soon as we start reading him what his problems are and against what background he is writing about them).1

Two Worlds

 

Let us begin with the metaphysical problem and let us try to make clear that it is a real problem and not something dreamed up by an idle or an over-refined mind. Let us go back to the beginning of philosophy and science, back to Thales, traditionally the first philosopher and scientist, because we shall find already in Thales the basic metaphysical problem Schopenhauer seeks to solve.

Thales is credited with the theory that everything is ‘really’ water. What does such an assertion mean? Why should it ever have occurred to anyone to say that everything was ‘really’ water? On the face of it, the theory is a statement about the physical world as conceived by the Greeks of the sixth century B.C.: it means that, of the four ‘elements’, three are forms of the fourth: earth is solidified water, air rarefied water, fire (aether, the hot sky of the eastern Mediterranean) rarefied air or twicerarefied water. But merely in these physical terms the statement is inexplicable: for not only does it contradict the evidence of the five senses, it also seems to lack any necessity. Why should earth not be earth, air air and fire fire, as they seem to be? Now the inexplicability is in the idiom; the novelty is the language of physics, and in order to see what is meant we have to translate it back into its original language, that of metaphysics. Translated into the language of metaphysics, ‘Everything is really water’ reads: The world we perceive is characterized by great diversity, but this diversity is not fundamental; fundamentally the world is a unity. But notice that this unity is precisely what is not apparent; what is apparent is the reverse, the diversity of the world, and the object of the hypothesis is to assert the apparitional nature of this diversity. In its last significance, therefore, ‘Everything is water’ means: The world of diversity is an apparent world; in reality the world is one. Thus we find at the very beginning of philosophy the assertion that there exist two worlds, the ‘real’ and the ‘apparent’, that everything is ‘really’ something else and not what it ‘appears’ to be. If we are willing to call the language of physics employed by Thales the content of the thought, and the metaphysical basis of this language the form of the thought, we can say that the difference between scientific and pre-scientific thought is not so great a gulf as it is often supposed to be: the content of the thought is new, but its form remains the same, namely that there are two worlds, the one perceived, the other a mystery. Only if Thales had said ‘Everything is really what it appears to be’ would the form of the thought have changed.

This bifurcation of the world into the mundane world perceived and the transcendent, ‘more real’ world revealed by thinking is very probably an essential consequence of thinking as such, of the existence in the human head of a ‘world of thought’. The most primitive men known to us already inhabit these two worlds. The fundamental idea is: I am and I think. From this idea there follows a second, derivative idea: there exists another world, the world I inhabit in my thinking. This ‘other world’ is there, exists, as an immediate consequence of the existence of thought in the human head: and as the race accumulates experience this world of thinking becomes massively enriched, especially by comparison with the almost static state of the world of perception, the outer, physical world. The earth consists once and for all of stones and plants and other animals; the sun rises and sets every day, summer and winter come round every year; the sea ebbs and flows, eternally the same; even men do not change very much, the new generation is much like the old: nature, in short, is the realm of the known, nature springs no surprises. But the world of thought and imagination is incredibly dynamic; it is continually expanding and changing and adding to itself new shapes and colours.