My body is the phenomenal form of my will, my will is the noumenal form of my body: my body is ‘appearance’, my will ‘thing in itself’.

Now if this is true of my body, it is true of every other body, consequently of every other phenomenon. I am aware of myself as will and idea, a block of stone is not aware at all: but that is the only difference between us in regard to the point under discussion: the block of stone is also noumenon and phenomenon, thing in itself and appearance, will and idea: its body and its will are one, only its will has not attained to consciousness. Furthermore, since Kant had proved that space and time, the spatial and temporal fragmentation of the world, belonged as forms of perception only to the plane of phenomena, the noumenal plane, the ‘real world’ of the thing in itself, must be one and indivisible: consequently the will in the stone and the will in me is the same will. Thus the world is a duality: the ‘world as idea’ is the outer, physical world, the realm of time, space and causation, ‘appearance’, Kant's phenomenal world; the ‘world as will’ is the inner, subjective world, not subject to the forms of space and time, a unity, ‘reality’, Kant's noumenal world or thing in itself.

This, I think, is all it is necessary to say about the metaphysical basis of Schopenhauer's philosophy: to say more would be to anticipate what he himself says in the essays and aphorisms which follow. But that the world is a duality of will and idea is the minimum the reader has to bear in mind, because Schopenhauer assumes it as a given fact and unless the reader does so too (for the purpose of reading him) he will often fail to see what Schopenhauer is driving at.

The Pessimistic Outlook

 

So much, then, for the metaphysical background to Schopenhauer's writings: ‘the world as will and idea’ is not an eccentricity but simply a new content for an old form. Now for the real novelty, the decisive element deriving from the philosopher's personality. For a while metaphysics seems to be Schopenhauer's whole or main concern: it comes as a surprise therefore to discover that the elaborate metaphysical structure has been brought into existence not for its own sake but for the sake of something else, something much more personal than an abstract account of the nature of reality. We learn that this extraordinary man has created a new metaphysic and constructed a new model of the universe simply in order to understand and justify his own pessimistic disposition. There have been great pessimists before: we have our own great pessimist, whose last word to us was that we are such stuff as dreams are made on: but there has been none who tried with so great a show of learning to demonstrate that the pessimistic outlook is justified, that life itself really is bad. It is to this end that Schopenhauer's metaphysic of will and idea exists: the hinge of his philosophy is the ethical assertion that will is evil and must be ‘denied’.

Every individual is embodied will, and the nature of will is to strive to live – will is ‘will to live’. This means that fundamentally every individual is an ego whose interest in staying alive overrides every other, including of course the life-interest of every other individual. The outcome is universal conflict. The suffering engendered by this conflict is the normal and inescapable condition of life, and happiness means merely the diminution of suffering, i.e. happiness is negative. The way out of this circle of suffering lies in denial of the will, refusal to enter the contest: the power to do so is provided by the conscious intellect, which is capable of understanding the nature of the will and its effects and thus of striving to set them aside. Ultimately the only real good is extinction: the realization that the perceived universe – the ‘world as idea’ – is as nothing, the conscious acceptance of the need for annihilation as the only true cure for the sickness of life, and finally the acceptance of annihilation itself.

This very brief outline of Schopenhauer's ethics is likely to raise more questions than it answers: but, again, to explain in greater detail would be to anticipate the body of the book. It is enough here to grasp that the idealist metaphysics exists in order to serve the pessimistic outlook.

Now just as it was, in my opinion, necessary to show that Schopenhauer's metaphysic is not an oddity or aberration, so in order to try to discover the origin and meaning of his pessimistic ethic we ought now to examine his life, since the ethic is very clearly the subjective element in his philosophy, as well as being the decisive element. What kind of life was it that produced, that made necessary, so pessimistic a response in him who suffered it?

An Immovable Mind

 

Let us go straightaway to the heart of the man, to his most pronounced and enduring characteristic. Here, with all possible brevity, are five details from his biography which, I believe, all exhibit the same tendency, are all obviously the acts of the same man.

1. Schopenhauer's philosophy is stated, complete in all its details, in The World as Will and Idea. The book was published at the end of 1818 but its fundamental ideas had been in Schopenhauer's head for about four years and can be said to have been fully formed by 1816 at the latest. In 1816 Schopenhauer was 28. Now everything he subsequently wrote was elaboration or confirmation of or comment on the philosophy of The World as Will and Idea: he adds nothing and subtracts nothing. The mind of the man of 70 is wholly occupied with the ideas of the man of 28: he has acquired more knowledge but nothing he has subsequently learned has induced him to change his mind in any particular.

2. In May 1819 Schopenhauer learned that the Danzig business house in which his mother and sister had most of their money invested had gone bankrupt. He himself also had a small amount invested. The company offered to pay 30 per cent; when Schopenhauer was told his mother and sister were going to accept this offer he wrote demanding 70 per cent of what was owed to him, and that if this should not be forthcoming instantly he would demand 100 per cent. He then fought a two-year legal battle to get his money back: his claim amounted to about one-fiftieth of the total liabilities of the bankrupt house, but while every other creditor finally settled for 30 per cent he persisted in refusing to do so and at length received back the full amount due to him, plus the accumulated interest.

3. Schopenhauer decided to become a university lecturer in philosophy. He opened his course at Berlin in the summer of 1820 and chose as his lecture time the precise hours at which Hegel, who was also at Berlin, delivered his principal course.