Schopenhauer. ARTHUR, the founder of systematic modern Pessimism (q.v.), was born at Danzig, 22d February 1788. His father was a banker; his mother, Johanna Trosina (1766-1838), wrote twenty-four volumes of novels and novelettes, and on her husband's death settled in 1806 at Weimar, where she saw much of Goethe. Schopenhauer, after resigning the business career for which his father had trained him by travel and residence in foreign countries (France, England), acquired a classical education at the schools of Gotha and Weimar; and having after his father's death inherited a patrimony of £150 a year, entered the university of Göttingen in 1809, heard later Fichte and Schleiermacher, and devoted much attention to physical and medical science in Berlin. He graduated at Jena with his first work, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, a treatise in which he seeks to classify the principles which determine respectively the provinces of Physics, Logic, Mathematics, and Ethics. Schopenhauer's philosophy, although not devoid of elements of objective value, is a perfect expression of his most unique personality, and cannot be fully understood save in connection with his character. He inherited from his father an unbreakable energy of character (some friends of his youth called him a Jupiter Tonans) and cosmopolitan, freethinking sympathies, and from his mother a brilliant polish of mind and facility of literary expression. His mind was not formed by years of patient acquisition but by the society of his seniors and by a congeries of vivid sights and experiences of travel, and retained to the end its habit of seizing at a conclusion through the force of intuition or apprehension rather than of reasoning. Inner discord was the keynote of his life in that in him the subjective and the objective, feeling and reason, were in perpetual conflict; he believed the tendency of life to be to separate more and more the heart and the head. His disposition was heavy and severe, dark, mistrustful and suspicious, preventing him from entering into permanent trustful relations with men or women: his mother desired him to live apart from her after the death of her husband, and he could hardly think seriously of marriage as he saw only in woman a wayward, mindless animal—ugly too he said—existing solely for the propagation of the species, an end which perpetuated the woe of the world. Lastly he believed that he had brought to the birth a philosophy which made himself the successor of Socrates, since whose time nothing had been done in philosophy save Kant's undoing of the mass of traditional error; and he saw himself and his thinking passed over until he was sixty, and what he regarded as fatuous ravings (the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel philosophy) praised as the highest wisdom, so that he was tempted to believe there was a conspiracy of professors of philosophy against him and his truth. The cardinal articles of his philosophical creed, which he seized as it were by intuition early in life, were: first, Idealism (Idealism is of course more likely to lead to Pessimism than Realism, as it believes the world to be illusory)—Subjective Idealism—i.e. that the world is my idea, a mere phantasmagoria of my brain, and therefore in itself nothing; secondly, that the way of knowledge or speculation to the centre of things, to the 'thing-in-itself,' was demolished for ever by the immortal criticism of Kant (it simply galled him to fury to hear Schelling talking of knowing God by 'Intellectual Intuition'); and thirdly, that there was accessible to the mind, to the intuition of genius, the contemplation of the Platonic ideas—that is, the ideas of Art, the only knowledge not subservient to the Will and to the needs of practical life.
His own contribution to the sum of human knowledge, as he thought, was the truth that Will, the active side of our nature, or Impulse, was the key to the one thing we did know directly and from the inside—i.e. the self (all else of course we know from without and through the self), and therefore the key to the understanding of all things from the atom up through plants and animals to the starry systems. His philosophy thus is, as he puts it, that the world is through and through Will, and also (but secondarily) through and through Idea: Will is the creative, the primary, while Idea is the secondary, the receptive factor in things—a mere offshoot from the brain. There is thus a pronounced Materialistic side to Schopenhauer's philosophy which is inconsistent with his Idealism; he always taught too the descent of man from some lower form of life—the basis of his theory that what animals wanted from man was not compassion but justice and equality, although of course as a metaphysician he deprecates a natural as opposed to a philosophical explanation of the world. Time, as he said, is only in us a form of our thought; and Schopenhauer had no sense for history. His chief book, The World as Will and Idea (1819), expounds in four books the Logic, the Metaphysic, the Aesthetic, and the Ethic of his view; it teaches a pantheism of the Will (Pantheismus), and defends the extension of the word Will as blind irresistible energy or impulse (it is essential to remember the irrationality of the Will in Schopenhauer) to include all processes from attraction and gravitation to motivation, which last is simply 'causality seen from within.' He collected in the Will in Nature what he deemed the scientific confirmations of his doctrine. The first meed of praise which fell to him was the crowning by the Norwegian Academy in 1839 of his prize essay on the Freedom of the Will, in which he defends the phenomenal necessity or determinism of the Will and its supra-sensible freedom. His ethical theory rests on sympathy, the treatment of self and others as not two or many but as one and the same, as both the manifestation of the All-Will which rises to a feeling of hunger in the stomach, gnawing in the teeth, thinking in the brain, &c. Sympathy, however, is only a 'civic virtue;' the highest virtue is asceticism, the denial of the Will to live, in which the Intellect through contemplation of the idea of Art frees itself from desire and willing and pierces the 'Veil of Mâyâ' (Illusion) which hides from us the supra-sensible, and the Will is reduced to its original state of quiescence or potency. Remove the Will from life and there is no more: 'before us there is certainly Nothing.' Schopenhauer preferred Buddhism and Mysticism and Anchoretic Christianity to the reigning forms of religion and to Rationalistic Theism. He gave out his occasional papers in the Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), which more than the other works express the man himself, illustrate the eloquence of his pen, and perhaps have led people to his shrine who know next to nothing of his strict theory. In an appendix to The World as Will and Idea he criticises the Kantian theory of knowledge as laying too much weight on the Reflective or Indirect Method as opposed to the Intuitive or Direct. His essay on Seeing and Colours (1816) contains practically Goethe's theory of colours; Goethe had been pleased to get Schopenhauer's help in his optical researches, and had predicted for Schopenhauer a hearing in the world. From Weimar and university circles Schopenhauer had gone to Dresden (1814-18) for the writing of The World as Will and Idea; thence he had gone to Italy; his unsuccessful attempt as lecturer in Berlin University was made in 1820. Of two lawsuits one concerning money matters was settled in his favour through his own legal acumen; the other ended in his having to pay £9 a year to a seamstress as compensation for injuries received by her when the irate philosopher ejected her with violence from his rooms as an intruder. After renewed travel and residence in the south he finally in 1831 left Berlin for Frankfurt-on-the-Main, where he chose to live as an isolated thinker until his death there, 21st September 1860. Frauenstädt, his literary executor, was the chief of his 'evangelists' and 'apostles'—as he called the most enthusiastic of his admirers.
The complete works, edited by Frauenstädt, appeared in 6 vols. in 1876. There is an English translation of The World as Will and Idea, by Haldane and Kemp (1883-86), and of the Fourfold Root and Will in Nature (1888); and a volume of Selected Essays, by E. B. Bax, appeared in 1891. Mr Saunders in his Schopenhauer series has translated somewhat from the Parerga, &c. The first magazine article on Schopenhauer which drew attention to him abroad was in the Westminster Review (vol. iii. new series, 1853, pp. 388-407). The best Life is by Gwinner (Leip. 1862; new ed. 1878). Frauenstädt writes on Schopenhauer's life and philosophy in an introduction in vol. i. of the Works. See also his Letters on the Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Leip. 1854), &c. Miss Zimmermann's Life (1876) and that of Professor Wallace (1890, with bibliography) are both very good. See also the larger histories of philosophy; German works by Hayn (1864), Busch (1878), and Koeber (1888); the bibliographies by Laban (1880) and Hertslet (1896); the Shaw Lectures on Schopenhauer by the present writer (1896); and works cited at the article PESSIMISM.