Arthur Schopenhauer

In many of points Arthur Schopenhauer reminds of England more than of Germany. It was indeed only after a lingering struggle that he reluctantly abandoned all hopes of a University post, and took his place among the five-lances of speculation. If it had been possible, he would have been glad to enter the regular army of philosophic teachers, and work according to its regulations. But there was other work for him to do.

Arthur Schopenhauer was to become an Apostle to the Gentiles, to the uncircumcised heathen, now that the chosen people of culture and learning had refused to hear him. For the work of a systematic teacher he was without the requisite preparation of methodical training, and still more wanting in the regular, precise, and almost prosaic faculty which metes out wisdom in palpable bulks for consumption by audiences, drawn not primarily by philosophic passion, but by the pressure of academic ordinances. But if Schopenhauer was unsuited to be a teacher of that systematic logic and ethics in which he had never been a thorough learner, he was by his very dilettantism, by his literary faculty, by his interest in problems as they strike the natural mind, qualified to stimulate, to guide, perhaps even to fascinate, those who like himself were led by temperament, by situation, by inward troubles, to ask the why and the wherefore of all this unintelligible world.

Arthur Schopenhauer came to his work with other training and prepossessions than the majority of his philosophical rivals or predecessors. In the long list of the more notable teachers of Germany, from Christian Wolff in the end of the seventeeth to Hegel in the end of the eighteenth century, most had, as children of peasants, or artisans, or humble officials, to toil through the dull and steep approaches of tutorial or other drudgery till they received the pittance awarded to the state-paid teachers of philosophy. Instead of the tight and heavy yoke they had to wear, Schopenhauer, after he had picked up easy lessons in the open book of the natural and the social world, was, in the years of opening manhood, with income enough to steer an independent way, left free to form and expound his convictions on the purpose of life and the worth of the universe. It was not altogether gain indeed: his liberty was as the independence of a voice crying in the wilderness: the unlicensed teacher was unregarded; and the official philosophers, if they did not, as he wildly supposed, conspire to ignore him, yet acted on the feeling that it was scarcely within their strict duty to examine into the pretensions of this unaccredited missionary.

As little had Arthur Schopenhauer imbibed much of the historical beliefs, especially in religion, under which their youth had been led. Hence he had to go through hardly any of that disburthening and remodeling by which the great thinkers of his earlier time had sought to transmute into their permanent value, or ideal significance, the theological creeds they had inherited. From Kant to Hegel the theological prepossession dominates their inward reflections. Almost the last work of Kant is to square accounts between his all-unhinging criticism and the religious dogmas of his Evangelical teachers, whose intrinsic truth he still assumes.

Of all this reconciliatory work Arthur Schopenhauer spared himself the trouble. His upbringing had made religion lie very much outside him - a formal thing, which had never appropriated his whole soul. He had not gone through the inward contests of faith: and came to philosophy with only the minimum of an inherited and adopted creed. Hence to him these efforts at reconciliation seemed hypocritical: - as they may naturally do to those who have not grown up under historic influences, or who have not learned how dependent the individual intellect, even the greatest, is on the great historic tradition of faith and knowledge.