# The Spirit of Modern Philosophy/Lecture 8

LECTURE VIII SCHOPENHAUER
I need hardly remark in the presence of this audience that the name of Schopenhauer is better known to most general readers, in our day, than is that of any other modern Continental metaphysician, except Kant. The reputed heretic has in this field the reward of his dangerous reputation, and I scarcely know whether to fear or to rejoice, as I now approach the treatment of so noteworthy and significant a man, at the position in which Schopenhauer’s fame puts his expositor. In one respect, of course, my task is rendered easier by all this popular repute of my hero. Of his doctrine most of us have heard a good deal, and many of us may have followed to a considerable extent his reasoning; at all events we have become acquainted, at least by hearsay, with the fact that his outcome was something called Pessimism. And thus, in dealing with him, I am not voyaging with you in seas unknown to all but the technical students of philosophy, as was last time the case, when I told you of Hegel. On the other hand, the kind of reputation that his writings have very naturally won is decidedly against me when I undertake to treat him with genuinely philosophical fairness. It is so much easier to be edifying than to face with courage certain serious and decidedly tragic realities! Let me be frank with you, then, at the outset about my difficulty. It is, plainly stated, simply this: You have heard that Schopenhauer is a pessimist. You, meanwhile, are surely for the most part no pessimists. Therefore, as we approach Schopenhauer, you want me, in your secret hearts. ​if not in your expressed wishes, to refute Schopenhauer. Now refutation is, as I have already tried to maintain, a thing of only very moderate service in the study of philosophy. We may refute a great thinker’s accidental misjudgments; we can seldom refute his deeper insights. And as I must forthwith assure you, and shall very soon show you, Schopenhauer’s pessimism is actually expressive of a very deep insight into life. This insight is indeed not a final one. We must transcend it. But surely you would justly discover me in a very unphilosophical, and in fact very unworthily self-contradictory, attitude if now, after all these successive efforts to show you a continuity and a common body of truth in the modern philosophers, I should suddenly, at this point of my discourse, assume the airs of a champion of the faith against the infidels, and should fall to hewing and hacking at Schopenhauer with genuinely crusading zeal. In fact it is not my calling to do anything of the sort. I always admire the crusaders, but my admiration is due rather to their enthusiasm than to their philosophical many-sidedness; rather to the vitality of their faith than to the universality of their comprehension. I fear that if I should try to join myself unto them they would not accept me without reserve. I cannot therefore treat Schopenhauer as a crusader would treat him. He is to me a philosopher of considerable dignity, whom we could ill spare from the roll of modern thinkers; whom I do not by any means follow as disciple, but to whom I owe, in common with other philosophical students, a great deal, for his skillful analysis and for his fearlessly clear assertion of his own significant temperament.
I.
But as to pessimism itself, Schopenhauer’s famous doctrine, as to this terrible view that life is through and through tragic and evil, what is my attitude towards that? I must, you will probably say, either accept it, and then ​must avow it in manly fashion, or I must reject it. And if I reject it, then I am bound to refute it. My answer to the question is not far to seek. As an actual fact I do accept, and avow with perfect freedom, what to many gentle minds seems, as I am aware, a pessimistic view of life; namely, precisely the view that at the last time we found Hegel maintaining and expanding into his marvelously ingenious and technical doctrine of what he called Negativität as the very essence of the passionate spiritual existence. The spiritual life isn’t a gentle or an easy thing. It is indeed through and through and forever paradoxical, earnest, enduring, toilsome; yes, if you like, painfully tragic. Whoever hopes to find it anything else, either now or in some far-off heaven, hopes unquestionably in vain. If that is pessimism, — and in one sense, namely, in the sense in which many tender but thoughtless souls have used the phrase, it is pessimism, being opposed to the gentle and optimistic hopes of such, — then I am now, and always shall be, in that very sense no optimist, but a maintainer of the sterner view that life is forever tragic. In so far as Schopenhauer has sought to make this plain, I follow him unhesitatingly, and honor him for his mercilessness. Why I do so I shall try to make plain before this lecture is done. In so far, however, as Schopenhauer held that the tragedy of life disheartens every spirit that has once come to know the truth, I as plainly and absolutely reject so much of his outcome. The world is, on the whole, very nearly as tragic as Schopenhauer represents it to be. Only spirituality consists in being heroic enough to accept the tragedy of existence, and to glory in the strength wherewith it is given to the true lords of life to conquer this tragedy, and to make their world after all divine. The way to meet Schopenhauer’s pessimism is, not to refute its assertions, but to grapple practically with its truths. And if you do so, you will find as the real heart and significance of Schopenhauer’s own gloomy ​thought, a vital, yes, even a religious assurance, which will make you thank God, that, as we tried to suggest by a phrase quoted in an earlier lecture, the very ice and cold, the very frost and snow, of philosophy praise and magnify him forever. In short, my attitude towards pessimism is one that, some years ago, in an article written for a Harvard College journal, I tried to express in words suggested by the then current accusation that too many Harvard students of ability were accustomed to pose as pessimists. If I quote now my former words, it is only because the right bearing towards such matters seems to me so simple that when I try to express it, I am troubled with a poverty of phrases, and have to fall back on oft repeated formulae, for which perhaps some defiant interjection, hurled into the face of our common enemy, namely, the inner spiritual sluggishness wherewith a man is so easily beset, would be the best embodiment. But, at all events, these were my poor words: —
“One hears nowadays, very often, of youthful pessimism, prevalent, for instance, among certain clever college students. When I hear of these things, I do not always regret them. On the contrary, I think that the best man is the one who can see the truth of pessimism, can absorb and transcend that truth, and can be nevertheless an optimist, not by virtue of his failure to recognize the evil of life, but by virtue of his readiness to take part in the struggle against this evil. Therefore, I am often glad when I hear of this spread of pessimistic ideas among studious but undeveloped youth. For, I say to myself, if these men are brave men, their sense of the evil that hinders our human life will some day arouse them to fight this evil in dead earnest, while if they are not brave men, optimism can be of no service to cowards. But in any case I like to suggest to such brave and pessimistic youth where the solution of their problem must lie. It surely cannot lie in any romantic dream of a pure and innocent world, ​far off somewhere, in the future, in heaven or in the isles of the blessed. These things are not for us. We are born for the world of manly business, and if we are worthy of our destiny, we may possibly have some good part in the wars of the Lord. For nothing better have we any right to hope, and for an honest man that is enough.”
If these words which I have quoted seem to you rather unfeeling in their hardness, I beseech you to wait until I am done, not merely with to-day’s exposition of Schopenhauer, but with my whole course, before you judge them. As for living up to this obvious, but tremendously difficult kind of courage, of course you will not need to hear me say that a student of philosophy finds that quite as hard a task as do any of his neighbors. I am only stating the doctrine. A coward is not an admirable person, but it is only too easy to be one.
Thus, then, forsaking for the moment my position as chronicler, I try to tell you, in this wholly unoriginal fashion, what, to be sure, has always been the creed of brave men ever since our remote ancestors, or their cousins, struggled with the climate of the glacial period. And having thus freed my mind and defined my attitude towards pessimism, I can venture to assume once more the position of the historical student, and to set forth something of Schopenhauer’s contribution to the great philosophic task of modern humanity.
II.
The general character and worth of this contribution I must first describe, and in doing so I shall follow in the main the view of a recent German writer on the history of philosophy, namely. Professor Windelband, to whose well-known book, “Die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie,” these lectures have owed throughout not a little. Modern idealism, as it developed since Kant, was from the first an effort to discover the rationality of our world through an ​analysis of the nature of consciousness. Such analysis was the problem that Kant bequeathed to his successors. For Kant showed that we know the world only in terms of consciousness and its laws, so that the understanding is the creator of the show nature that stands before our senses. Fichte tried to solve this Kantian problem by proving that it is the moral law which is the very heart and essence of our consciousness, so that our seemingly outer world is there as a means whereby we can do our work and win our deeper self. The romanticists, however, felt that consciousness was no more exhaustively expressed by the moral will than by any other humane interest of the self. Thus, there entered into philosophy a reign of caprice, to which even Hegel did not put an end. Once understand the nature of this caprice, and you will see the place which Schopenhauer’s system is to hold in the development of doctrine.
Were it not, says all idealism, were it not that I am just such a conscious being as I am, my world would be a wholly different one from the world that I see. To know the real nature of my world I must therefore understand my own deeper self. Is there anything fixed, stable, necessary, about my nature? If so, then I am necessarily forced to exist in just this sort of world. Bat if I am essentially of no one fixed and necessary nature, then at any moment my whole world might alter. The ordinary realism of common sense doesn’t fear this, doesn’t feel the necessity of an ultimate appeal to anything stable or fixed about me as the real source of truth, because ordinary realism holds that the truth is there beyond me, as something knowable to all people of good intelligence, in the hard and fast matter of the world of sense. There is the moon yonder. For ordinary realism, the moon is as permanent as nature makes it, and stays there whether any one knows it or not. Hence, in order to ask whether there is anything stable about the world, ​ordinary realism has to put no questions to the inner life. But the very essence of idealism it is to say, My moon, the moon that I see and talk about, the moon of my own world of outer show and of empirical knowledge, is just one of my ideas. You see the same moon only in so far as in your world, in your inner life, there is a fact truly corresponding to what I call the moon in my inner life. Therefore, if you and I are to continue to see the same moon, that must be because both of us have some common and necessary deeper nature, a true and abiding oneness of spirit, that forces us to agree in this respect as to our inner life. Hence, not the abiding matter of the moon, as something that should stay there when you and I had both departed, but some common law that holds for your spirit as for mine, is the basis for the seeming permanence and common outer reality of the moon for us. The moon has the same sort of objective existence that, for instance, at this moment, my lecture has. The lecture exists as thought in me, and as experience in you. But because of a certain community of our thoughts, we all of us have the same lecture more or less present to us. We all of us, moreover, regard the lecture as an outer reality, and we therefore seem to be as much in presence of an objective fact as if the lecture were made of real atoms, instead of ideas. Or again, for the idealistic view, the existence of the events in matter, or of any other external events, resembles the existence at any instant of the price of a stock in the stock-market, or the credit of a great firm in the commercial world. A consensus of the thoughts of the buyer and sellers exists at any moment, which, however well founded, or again however arbitrary and changing this consensus may be, is expressed for the instant as if it were a hard and fast material thing in a genuinely outer world. In fact, prices and credits are ideas, and exist in the show-world of market values and of commercial securities, being but the projections of the various ​ideas of people as these at any moment agree to express themselves. Even so, then, just as this lecture is at this instant a fact because our minds agree in making it so, and just as the price of the stock, or the credit of the great firm, is an often irresistible fact, to which the individual dealer must yield in so far as his own financial might isn’t equal to altering it, even so the moon yonder is likewise for us all an outer fact, because we are forced to agree in regarding it as outer. But our agreement itself is a fact of the deeper life of our common selfhood.
Such common ideas being, then, the idealist's true world, his problem it is to determine whether there is any deeper and impersonally human necessity which guarantees that our ideas shall thus in any wise agree. This necessity must be sought, if at all, in our own hidden nature. Constructive idealists have always sought it in that common band of rationality which, as they conceive, so links us all together that we are organically related parts or moments of one deeper self. This self, which shall express itself in you, in me, in everybody, is to link your experience to mine in such fashion that we shall see related outer worlds. Because this self in you constructs a show-space in three dimensions, and does a similar thing for me, therefore we alike look out into the depths of space, where the same stars seem to glitter for us all. Unity, fixity, assurance, we get, if we get such prizes at all, only by virtue of that rational and spiritual unity that is beneath our lives. Can the philosopher find the true heart and essence of this our common selfhood? If he can, then idealism becomes a system. We are, then, all in one world of truth. The outer world is indeed show, but no illusion; and our life has an organic fixity, a lawful completeness about it, such as every philosophy longs for.
But now, unfortunately, when idealists set about deducing this unity and consistency of the spiritual world from some deep inner principle, their reflection always leaves us ​in one great respect dissatisfied. We very certainly, namely, can never deduce from the idea of our common spirituality the idea of any particular sense thing, such as the moon. Or, to repeat one of my former illustrations, idealists can’t tell us why we are spiritually or rationally bound all alike to perceive a starry world, wherein there shall be a belt of telescopic asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Such facts idealists get, like their neighbors, from daily experience or from science. Ideal- ists may say in general, as Fichte said, that the moral law needs a world of outer experience as the material for its embodiment. They cannot show why just this material is needed. There remains, then, an element of brute fact, a residuum, if you choose, of spiritual caprice, in their world of the all-embracing self. Perhaps we have, as they say, the one deeper self in common, perhaps this deeper self has rational grounds for building in us all alike just this world of sense, of moons, of asteroids, of comets, of jelly-fish, and of all the rest, only there is still, from our finite point of view, a vast element of at least apparent caprice about the entire universe of the spirit as thus built. And all idealists have to recognize this fact of the seeming capriciousness of the external order. The universal reason builds the world, says idealism; but then does not the universal reason seem to build many irrational facts into its world? You see then the difficulty. Our common spiritual nature is to guarantee the truth of our common experience. Unless this nature has some hard and fast necessity in it, of which we can form an adequate conception, there is no satisfaction in our philosophy. But when we try to develop this idea of the universal necessity of the world of our common selfhood, we come once more against an element of the most stubborn caprice. Idealism seems to be an insight as suggestive and inspiring as it is limited. The nature of this divine self has something seemingly irrational about it. Our ​attempted account of the world in terms of the universal reason therefore remains so far a mere programme, a postulate, almost a dogma. And yet dogmas were just what our philosophy had all along been trying to reduce and to rationalize.
In view of this common perplexity of all the idealistic systems, there were certain to arise, upon the historical basis of the Kantian theory, philosophies that not only accepted the perplexity, but that magnified it, that referred it to the very nature of the quasi-mental reality behind the world of sense, and that declared: “Deeper than reason, in this world of the ideal existence, is the caprice which once for all expresses itself in the wealth of nature’s facts.” Of such systebas Schopenhauer’s philosophy is the classic representative. Not that Schopenhauer was in this general tendency alone. Windelband very properly classes under the same head Schelling’s later theologico-philosophical speculations (not studied in these lectures) along with two or three other doctrines. Windelband calls them all by the common name Irrationalismus, A doctrine of this sort, upon a Kantian basis, must run somewhat as follows: The world as we see it exists only in our ideas. We all have a common outer show-world because we all possess a common deeper nature, wherein we are one. You are essentially the same ultimate being that I am. Otherwise we should not have in common this outer projected world of seeming sea waves, star clusters, and city streets. For, as ideas, those things have no outer basis. As common to us all, they must have a deep inner basis. Yet this their basis can’t be anything ultimately and universally rational. For in so far as we actually have reason in common, we think necessary, clearly coherent, exactly interrelated groups of ideas, such, for instance, as the multiplication table. But about the star clusters and the sea waves there is no such ultimate rational unity and coherency. ​Natural laws only bind such tilings together, in the fashion that Kant so prettily explained, in case the phenomena to be bound together are once for all there. Why, given sea waves and star clusters and city streets, we should be bound to think them as in some sort of interconnection, Kant has told us. Only no such laws of nature can explain why there shoidd be the phenomena there that are thus to conform to law. This is capricious. This is due to our common but irrational nature. The world of the true idealism isn’t so much the world of the rational and divine self, as it is the world of the deep unreason that lies at the very basis of all of our natures, of all our common selfhood. Why should there be any world at all for us? Isn’t it just because we are all actually minded to see one? And isn’t this being minded to see a world as ultimately and brutally unreasonable a fact as you could name? Let us find for this fact, then, a name not so exalted as Fichte’s high-sounding speech would love. Let us call this ultimate nature of ours, which forces us all alike to see a woild of phenomena in the show forms of space and time, simply our own deep common Will. Let us drop the divine name for it. Will, merely as such, isn’t precisely a rational thing; it’s capricious. It wills because it does will; and if it wills in us all to be of such nature as to see just these stars and houses, then see them we must, and there is the end of it.
Thus stated, you have an irrationalism on an idealistic basis, a doctrine that may be summed up in three propositions; —
1. The world has existence only as we see it.
2. What facts we are to see can only be learned from experience, and cannot be found a priori through any absurd transcendental deductions of the so-called essence of any absolute spirit.
3. The deepest ground, however, for all these seen facts, and for the community of our various visible worlds, ​is the common and single World-Will, which, expressed in all of us equally, forces us to see alike, but does so simply because this is the particular caprice that it happens to have, so that it embodies itself for us and in us as just this show-world, rather than any other, because such is its fashion of willing.
The obvious value of such a theory is that it is at once idealistic in its analysis of the presuppositions of life, just to the direct and irresistible reality of the facts of experience, and disposed, after all, to go deeper than experience in its search for the ultimate truth of the world. Final it certainly is not in this form. But it has an obvious advantage over the sort of caprice that, as we saw, was characteristic of the philosophy of the romantic school. Their caprice was the fickleness of private and individual choice. For them you can change, as it were, at any moment of time, your show-world. For them the man of genius makes whatever world he chooses. But for this theory of Schopenhauer’s there is but one caprice, and that is the caprice of the World-Will itself, which once for all has hit upon this particular world of facts in time and in space. For us, in our individual capacity, there is no further caprice. We are in presence of this world now, because we ourselves are embodiments of the world-will. We cannot help the fact any longer. Experience is experience; fact is fact; the show is going on for us all alike; the world-will has chosen; but it has not chosen at any point in time. Hence in the world, as it is in time, there is no further caprice, only fact. Time itself is indeed not any ultimate reality. Time belongs to the show-world, and is there like any other fact or form of things, because the world-will fancies such a form for the things of sense. But just for this very reason, we, as individuals, are just where we are, and the realities of sense and of science, although susceptible of so deep and mysterious an interpretation as this, are as inevitable and as objective for us ​as ever the most naive and unreflectively superficial realism made them. As against such realism our doctrine possesses depth, philosophical keenness of analysis, idealistic insight. As against the romantic idealism, our doctrine has the advantage of objectivity and fixity. Just because our common temporal existence is part of the caprice of the World-Will, this temporal existence itself has for us individuals reality and fixity.
So much for the theoretical side of our author’s doctrine. On the practical side, in respect, namely, of his pessimism, we shall find Schopenhauer in a very interesting historical relation to Hegel. In fact, as we shall learn, our author’s pessimism is but another aspect of the same insight into the paradoxical logic of passion which we have discovered at the heart of Hegel’s doctrine. It is true that Schopenhauer’s World-Will, this blind power that, according to him, embodies itself in our universe, appears in his account, at first, as something that might be said to possess passion without logic. Yet this first view of the World-Will soon turns out to be inadequate. The very caprice of the terrible principle is seen, as we go on, to involve a sort of secondary rationality, a logic, fatal and gloomy, as well as deeply paradoxical, but still none the less truly rational for all that. Schopenhauer’s world is, in fact, tragic in much the same sense as Hegel’s. Only, for Schopenhauer the tragedy is hopeless, blind, undivine; while for Hegel it is the divine tragedy of the much-tried Logos, whose joy is above all the sorrows of his world. Were this difference between these two thinkers merely one of personal and speculative opinion, it might have little significance. But since it involves, as we shall find, one of the most truly vital problems of our modern life, one which meets us at every step in our literature and in our ethical controversies, we shall find it well worth our while to study the contrast more closely. First, then, here, let us see something of the man Schopenhauer, and afterwards we may estimate the doctrine. ​
III.
Arthur Schopenhauer, born in 1788, was probably descended, on the father's side, from a Dutch family. He was the son of a wealthy merchant of Danzig. His mother, the once noted Johanna Schopenhauer, brilliant novelist, and in her later years ambitious hostess in the literary circles at Weimar, had married, as she very frankly tells us, not from love, but for position. On both sides, Schopenhauer’s ancestry was somewhat burdened, as we should say, in respect of nerves, although this fact is decidedly more marked on the father's side. The philosopher's paternal grandmother was declared insane during the latter years of her life; and of his uncles, on the same side, one was idiotic, and one was given to excesses of the neurotic type. Schopenhauer’s father, a busy and uncommonly intelligent man, many-sided and successful, still suffered, towards the last, froui the family trouble. He showed at fifty-eight years of age occasional but acute symptoms of an excited form of derangement, lost, meanwhile, his memory for well-known persons, and very soon died under mysterious circumstances that strongly indicated an insane suicide. Johanna herself wa3 indeed personally quite free from noteworthy nervous defect, unless heartlessness be reckoned as such. The philosopher himself, as is well known, lived in excellent general health until past seventy, dying in 1860, of a cause having no apparent relation to nervous difficulties. Still, especially in youth, he was vexed by his hereditary burden enough to enable us without question to associate his pessimism in some measure with his temperament. Several neurasthenic symptoms are reported, showing themselves in sporadic but decided forms, — night-terrors, of a known pathological type; causeless depressions; a persistent dread of possible misfortunes; a complaining and frequently unbearable ill humor, with attendant crises of violent temper. ​A troublesome and slowly growing deafness, similar to one manifest in his father, is referred to the same cause. Against these stood always a very fine general constitution and a rather over-anxiously guarded fashion of life. The question suggested by all these facts, — the well-known question whether Schopenhauer’s pessimism was mainly due to mere morbidness of temperament, was in short mere Stimmungspessimismus, — is not so easy to decide as some of his critics fancy. In fact, the man was unquestionably incapable of a permanently cheerful view of life, — was a born outcast, doomed to hide and to be lonely. Unquestionably, moreover, he was given to pettiness in the minor relations of life, was vain, uncompanionable, and bitter. But then, many clever men have had all these burdens to bear, without being able to see the tragedy of life as wisely and deeply as Schopenhauer saw it. He would have said of his own unhappy temper very much what he once said of the crimes of Napoleon’s career, namely, that there are conditions which make manifest the latent evil of human selfishness, the dangers of the restless will that is in us all alike, better than do other conditions, but which do not therefore create their latent evil. It will not do in any case to state the case against Schopenhauer’s pessimism in such shallow fashion as to make it appear that, whilst all pessimism is mere pettiness, all optimism is prima facie noble-mindedness. Optimists also can be selfish and even intolerable. In fine, then, I am disposed to say, as a matter of mere historical judgment, that Schopenhauer's nervous burdens unquestionably opened his eyes to the particular aspect of life which he found so tragic, but that meanwhile the fact of such burdens is of positively no service to us in forming our estimate of the ultimate significance of our philosopher's insight, — an insight which, for my part, I find as deep as it was partial.
The Italian psychologist, Lombroso, in his well-known ​work on the relations of genius and insanity, makes use of course of Schopenhauer in his catalogue of pathological geniuses. The only value which such observations have, in the present chaotic condition of our knowledge upon the subject, is to remind us that we cannot dispose of a man’s intellectual rank, or of his doctrine, by merely observing that he was weighted with morbid tendencies of mind. Genius has often, although by no means always, a background of a pathological sort; while, on the other hand, the nervously burdened, whether geniuses or not, actually do a great part of the world’s work and of the world's thinking, and may be all the wiser by reason of the depth of their nervous experiences. Specially interesting, however, in Schopenhauer’s case, is the relation of contrast between the peevishness of his private temper and the self-controlled calm and clearness of his literary style. To such a man intellectual work is a blessed relief from the storms of trivial but violent emotion. His reflective thought stands off, as it were, on one side, and surveys with a melancholy freedom his daily life of care and of bondage. His thinking rejoices in the wondrous craft whereby it has outwitted passion. His reflection, therefore, throughout, is a negative self-criticism, a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the tempestuous natural man. It does not embody the peevishness of this natural man, but rather scorns the vanity of his unwisdom. As Schopenhauer himself says: “Since all grief, because it is a mortification, a call to resignation, has in it the possibility of rendering one holy, therefore it is that great sorrow, deep pangs, arouse in us a certain reverence for the sufferer; but the sufferer becomes wholly venerable only when, seeing his whole life as one chain of sorrow, he yet does not dwell on the enchainment of circumstances that brought grief to just his life; . . . for then he would still be longing for life, only under other conditions. But he is truly venerable only when his look is ​turned from the petty to the universal; when he becomes, as it were, a genius in respect of ethical insight; when he sees a thousand cases in one, so that life seen as one whole . . . moves him to resignation. . . A very noble character,” continues Schopenhauer, “we always conceive with a certain tinge of melancholy in it, — a melancholy that is anything but a continual peevishness in view of the daily vexations of life (for such peevishness is an ignoble trait, and arouses suspicions of maliciousness), but rather a melancholy that comes from an insight into the vanity of all joys, and the sorrowfubiess of all living, not alone of one’s own fortune.” Thus, as we see, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is not founded upon any summing up of the malicious judgments of his natural peevishness, but is an expression of a calm and relatively external survey and confession of his temperament in its wholeness. This it is that is expressed in the lucidity of his style, and that gives permanent value to his insight. The strong opposition between will and contemplation is one of the chief features of his doctrine.
As for this style in itself, it suggested Jean Paul’s famous characterization of the first edition of Schopenhauer’s “Welt als Wille und Vorstellung”: “A book of philosophical genius, bold, many-sided, full of skill and depth, — but of a depth often hopeless and bottomless, akin to that melancholy lake in Norway, in whose deep waters, beneath the steep rock-walls, one never sees the sun, but only the stars reflected; and no bird and no wave ever flies over its surface.” Just this calm of Schopenhauer’s intellect is the characteristic thing about his writing; and no one who knows the highly intellectual and reflective type of the nervously burdened genius will fail to comprehend the meaning of the contrast between the man’s peevishness, which tortured him, and his thinking, wherein he found rest. More cheerful spirits may think and will in the same moment, may reflect with vigorous ​vitality and work with keen reflection. But for men of Schopenhauer’s type there is a profound contrast between their contemplative and their passionate life, precisely the same contrast that the ascetic mystics, with whom, once more, like Spinoza, Schopenhauer as philosopher had many things in common, have always loved to dwell upon and to exaggerate. Do you give yourself over to passion? Then, as they will have it, you may be clever, well informed, ingenious; in short, as all the ascetic mystics would say, you may be as wily as you are worldly; but through it all you will be essentially ignorant, thoughtless, irrational. Do you attain the true enlightenment, even for a moment? Then you stand aside from passion; its whirlwind goes by, and you remain undisturbed; your thought, to use an old comparison that was a favorite of Schopenhauer’s, pierces through passion as the sunlight through the wind. You see it all, but it moves you not.
Such mysticism is essentially pessimistic; we find it so even in Spinoza, or in the “Imitation of Christ;” only, in the “Imitation,” contemplation has the glory of God to turn to above and beyond the storm of sense and of vanity. A formula for Schopenhauer is that his pessimism is simply the doctrine of the “Imitation” with the glory of God omitted; but as the glory of God in the latter book is described in purely abstract, mystical, and essentially unreal terms, one may see at once that the road from the mediæval mystic to Schopenhauer’s outcome is not so long as some people imagine. “I saw in my dream,” says Bunyan, at the end of his “Pilgrim’s Progress,” when the angels carry off poor Ignorance to the pit, — “I saw in my dream that there was a way to the bottomless pit from the very gate of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction.” Now, Schopenhauer’s mission it was to explore this highly interesting way with considerable speculative skill. The mystic who forsakes the world because of its vanity finds his comfort in a ​dream of something called the divine perfection, — something pure, abstract, extra-mundane. He comes on “that which is,” and catches, like Tennyson in the famous night vision on the lawn, in the “In Memoriam,” “the deep pulsation of the world.” Only by and by morning comes. Your mystic must awake; his vision must vanish, “stricken through with doubt.” Tennyson seems to have endured the waking better than others. But, generally speaking, the pessimist of Schopenhauer’s type is simply the mystic of the type of the “Imitation,” at the moment when he has awakened from the false glory of this religious intoxication.
The events of our hero’s life may be briefly disposed of. His father took or sent him on long travels during his early youth, made him well acquainted with both French and English, and insisted that he should in due time learn the mercantile business, and train himself to be a busy, intelligent, and many-sided man of the world. Scholarship and the university formed no part in the father’s plans. The boy spent also considerable time on his father's country estate, loved nature, but was always a lonely child. As youth waxed, moodiness tormented him; he already showed also the metaphysical turn. His father’s death, in 1805, left him free to follow his own plans. He forsook the hated counting-house, where he had already set about his work, and began to study for the university; making rapid progress in Latin, quarrelling with his elders, and writing rhetorically gloomy letters to his mother, who had now entered on her Weimar career. The son’s native pessimism was still far, of course, from the later philosophical formulation, but he already perceived that one great evil about the world is its endless change, which dooms all ideal interests and moods to alteration and defeat. “Everything,” he writes to his mother, “is washed away in time’s stream. The minutes, the numberless atoms of pettiness into which ​every deed is dissolved, are the worms that gnaw at everything great and noble, to destroy it.” His mother found this sort of thing rather tedious, and especially inconsistent with her son’s social success as an occasional inmate of her house at Weimar. There already a most brilliant company often gathered, Goethe at the head. A youth of twenty or thereabouts could not add grace to such a scene so long as he could talk of nothing but time and worms. She wrote him plainly, being a woman as clear-headed as she was charming: “When you get older, dear Arthur, and see things more clearly, perhaps we shall agree better. Till then let us see that our thousand little quarrels shall not hunt love out of our hearts. To that end we must keep well apart. You have your lodgings; as for my house, whenever you come you are a guest, well received, of course, only you mustn’t interfere. I can’t bear objections. Days when I receive, you may take supper with me, if you’ll only be so good as to refrain from your painful disputations, which make me angry, too, and from all your lamentations over the stupid world and the sorrows of mankind; for all that always gives me a bad night and horrid dreams, and I do so like a sound sleep.”
In 1809, Schopenhauer began his university studies at Göttingen, devoted himself to Kant and Plato, and rapidly acquired the type of erudition which he kept to the end, an erudition vast rather than technical, the learning of one who saw swiftly rather than studied exhaustively, remembered rather than systematized, enjoyed manifold labors rather than professional completeness. He was always a marvelous reader, of wide literary sympathies, especially fond of the satirists, the mystics, and the keen observers of all ages. For the processes of the exact sciences he had a poor comprehension; for natural phenomena of a suggestive sort his eye was always very wide open; he longed to catch the restless World- Will in the ​very act of its struggle and sorrow. He loved books of travel, energetic stories, strongly written historical sketches, tragic as well as satirical dramas, and books of well-described natural history. In nature itself, he was very fond of observing flowers, while, after his fashion, he loved animals passionately. They show the will naked, in all its naive cruelty, guilt, and innocence.
Edifying literature of all but the purely mystical type, most systematic schemes of constructive thought, all merely sentimental poetry, and above all such moralizing poetry as Schiller’s “Don Carlos,” he in general bitterly despised. These things seemed to him to hover above life. He wanted to contemplate the longing of life in itself. His critical and historical judgments are deep and yet wayward. He is once more on the lookout for types, not for connections; he had, for so learned a man, a poor eye for detecting unscholarly and fantastic theories, and frequently accepts such when they relate to topics beyond his immediate control. His literary sense was after all his best safeguard in scholarship. Here his fine contemplative intellect guided him. He could not make a bad blunder as to a purely linguistic question; but where his taste and instinct for the immediate inner life of things and of people were unable to guide him, he wandered too often in the dark. On all matters of learning his judgment remains, therefore, largely that of the sensitive man of the world. His sense of humor was of the keenest. The will is once for all as comic in its irrationalities as it is deep in its unrest. A distinguishing feature of his style is due to this wide reading, namely, his skill in metaphor and in other forms of comparison. In this respect he rivals those wonderful masters of comparison, the Hindoo metaphysicians, whom he knew through translations, and admired much. One further trait may yet be mentioned as pervading his study and his whole view of life. He was an intense admirer of the English temperament, just ​as he was an intense hater of many English institutions. Not, of course, the English Philistine, but the English man of the world, attracted him, by that clear-headedness and that freedom from systematic delusions which are so characteristic of the stock. To sum all up in a word, the maxim of his whole life as a learner was, See and record the vital struggles and longings of the will wherever they appear.
Such scholarship as this was ill-fitted to prepare Schopenhauer for an academic life. In 1813, he printed his dissertation for the doctor’s degree, on the “Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.” It is his most technical book, with least of his genius in it. In 1818 was published the first edition of his “Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.” In 1820, he entered on his work as Privat-Docent at the university of Berlin, and immediately made a sufficiently complete academic failure to discourage him from any serious effort to continue. Embittered by the indifference with which both his books and his attempts as a teacher were received, he gradually acquired that intense hatred of all professors of philosophy, and of the whole post-Kantian speculative movement in Germany, which he expressed more than once in a furious form, and which wholly misled him as to his own historical relations. After 1831, he retired to Frankfort-on-the-Main, and lived upon his little fortune until the close of his life. How he came slowly to be publicly known, in spite of the indifference with which academic circles treated him; how in old age there gathered round him a little circle of well-received flatterers; how young Russians used to come and stare at the wise man; how he loved the attentions of all such people, and better still the more intelligent understanding of two or three faithful disciples, but best of all his dinner and his dog; how he died at last suddenly, when he was quite alone, — are not all these things written in the books of modern literary ​gossip? I need not dwell upon them further; nor need I repeat how Schopenhauer had only to die to acquire general fame, until now his name is everywhere a symbol for all that is most dark and deep and sad and dangerous about the philosophy of our time. Of the pettier incidents of his life, of his quarrels, of his one or two outbursts of temper which led to public scandals, of his other eccentricities numberless, I have no time to speak further.
IV.
Schopenhauer’s principal work, “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” is in form the most artistic philosophical treatise in existence, if one excepts the best of Plato’s “Dialogues.” In its first edition it was divided into four books; a later edition added in a second volume comments upon all four. Of these books, the first summarizes the Kantian basis of Schopenhauer’s own doctrine. The world is, first of all, for each and for all of us, just our Vorstellung, our Idea. It is there because and while we see it; it consists in its detail of facts of experience. These, however, are, for our consciousness, always interpreted facts, seen in the sense forms of space and of time, and within these forms, perceived through and by virtue of our universal form of comprehension, namely, the principle of causation. When I experience anything, I inevitably seek for a cause in space and in time for this experience. When I find such a cause, I localize the experience as an event manifesting some change in something there in space and in time; but these forms of space and of time, as well as this principle of causation, are all alike simply formal ideas in me. Kant’s great service lay, in fact, in his proving the subjectivity, the purely mental nature, of such forms. The space and time worlds, with all that they contain, exist accordingly for the knowing subject. No subject without an object, and no object without a subject. I know in so far as there is a ​world to know; and the world yonder exists in so far as I know it. In vain, moreover, would one seek for any thing in itself really outside of me as the cause of my experiences. For cause is just an idea of mine, useful and valid for the events of the show world, but wholly inapplicable to anything else. Within experience the law of causation is absolute, because such is my fashion of thinking experience and of perceiving the localized things of sense. But beyond experience what validity, what application, can one give to the principle of causation? None. There is no cause to be sought beyond my own true nature for my own experiences.
But what is this my nature? The second book answers the question. My nature, you must observe, is something very wealthy. It does not indeed cause my experiences, in any proper sense; for cause means only an event that in time or in space brings another event to pass; and there is nothing that, in time or in space, brings to pass my own deepest, timeless, and spaceless nature. As phenomenon in time, my body may move or die, as other events determine; but my deepest nature is so superior to space and time that, as we have just shown, space and time are in fact in me, in so far as they are my forms of seeing and of knowing. Therefore my true nature neither causes, nor is caused; but, as one now sees, it in truth is, comprises, embodies itself in, all my world of phenomena. Hence you see how wealthy my true nature must be in its implications. Yes, in a deeper sense, you also, in so far as you truly exist, must have the same deepest nature that I have. Only in space and in time do we seem to be separate beings. Space and time form, as Schopenhauer says, the dividing principle of things. In an illusory way they seem to distinguish us all from one another; but abstract space and time, with all their manifold and illusory distinctions of places and moments, and the real world collapses into one immanent nature of things. ​Since my own deepest nature is beneath and behind the time form of the apparent world, it follows that, in an essential and deep sense, I am one with all that ever has been or that ever will be, either millions of ages ago or millions of ages to come. And as for space, there is no star so remote but that the same essential nature of things which is manifest in that star is also manifest in my own body. Space and time are, as the Hindoos declared, the veil of Maya or Illusion, wherewith the hidden unity of things is covered, so that, through such illusion, the world appears manifold, although it is but one.
To answer, therefore, the question. What is the nature of things? I have only to find what, apart from my senses and my thought, is my own deepest essence. And of this I have a direct, an indescribable, but an unquestionable awareness. My whole inner life is, namely, essentially my will. I long, I desire, I move, I act, I feel, I strive, I lament, I assert myself. The common name for all this is my will. By will, of course, Schopenhauer does not merely mean the highest form of my conscious choice, as some people do. He means simply the active nature of me, the wanting, longing, self-asserting part. This, in truth, as even the romantic idealists felt, lies deeper than my intellect, is at the basis of all my seeing and knowing. Why do I see and acknowledge the world in space and in time? Why do I believe in matter, or recognize the existence of my fellow-men, or exercise my reason? Is not all this just my actual fashion of behavior? In vain, however, do I seek, as the idealists of Fichte’s type often pretended to seek, for an ultimate reason why I should have this fashion of behavior. That is a mere fact. Deeper than reason is the inexplicable caprice of the inner life. We want to exist; we long to know; we make our world because we are just striving to come into being. Our whole life is as ultimate and inexplicable an activity as are our particular fashions of loving and of ​hating. So I am; this is the nature of me, — to strive, to long, to will; and I cannot rest in this striving. My life is a longing to be somewhere else in life than here, where I am.
Here, then, is the solution of our mystery in so far as it can have a solution. The world is the Will. In time and space I see only the behavior of phenomena. I never get at things in themselves; but I, in my timeless and spaceless inner nature, in the very heart, in the very germ, of my being, am not a mere outward succession of jihe- nomena. I am a Will, — a will which is not there for the sake of something else, but which exists solely because it desires to exist. Here is the true thing in itself. The whole world, owing to the utter illusoriness of time and space, has collapsed into one single and ultimate nature of things. This nature, immediately experienced in the inner life, is the Will. This Will, then, is that which is so wealthy that the whole show world is needed to express its caprice. Look, then, on the whole world in its infinite complication of living creatures and of material processes. These, indeed, are remote enough from your body. Seen in space and time, you are a mere fragment in the endless world of phenomena, a mere drop in the ocean, a link in an endless chain. But look at the whole world otherwise. In its inmost life and truth it must be one, for space and time are the mere forms in which the one interest of the observer is pleased to express itself. Look upon all things, then, and it can be said of you as, once more, the Hindoos loved to say, “The life of all these things, — That art Thou.”
Schopenhauer himself was fond of quoting this well-known phrase of the Hindoo philosophy as expressing the kernel of his own doctrine. New about his philosophy was, he felt, the synthesis that he had made of Kant’s thought and the Hindoo insight; but with this insight itself he essentially agreed. “The inmost life of things is one. ​and that life art thou.” This sentence expresses to his mind the substance of the true thought about the world. Let us, then, quote a paragraph or two from one of the Hindoo philosophic classics called the “Upanishads,” much read and loved by Schopenhauer, to illustrate his view. In the passage in question a teacher is represented as in conversation with his pupil, who is also his son. “‘Bring me,’ says the father, ‘a fruit of yonder tree.’ ‘Here it is, O Venerable One.’ ‘Cut it open.’ ‘It is done.’ ‘What seest thou therein?’ ‘I see, O Venerable One, very little seeds.’ ‘Cut one of them open.’ ‘It is done. Venerable One.’ ‘What seest thou therein?’ ‘Nothing, Venerable One.’ Then spake he: ‘That fine thing which thou seest not, my well beloved, from that fine thing (that life) is, in truth, this mighty tree grown. Believe me, my well beloved, what this fine (substance) is, of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, that is the Soul, — That art Thou, O Çvetaketu.’”
“‘This bit of salt, lay it in the (vessel of) water, and come again to-morrow to me.’ This did he. Then spake (the teacher): ‘Bring me that salt which yesterday even thou didst lay in the water.’ He sought it and found it not, for it was melted. ‘Taste the water here. How tastes it?’ ‘Salt.’ ‘Taste it there. How tastes it?’ ‘Salt.’ ‘Leave the vessel and sit at my feet.’ So did he, and said, ‘(The salt) is still there.’ Then spake the teacher: ‘Verily, so seest thou the truly Existent not in bodies, yet is it truly therein. What this fine substance is of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, that is the Soul, — That art Thou, O Çvetaketu.’”
“‘Just as, O my well beloved, a man whom they have led away out of the land of the Gandharis with eyes blindfolded, and have loosed him in the wilderness, — just as he wanders eastwards or westwards, southwards or northwards, because he has been led hither blindfolded and ​loosed blindfolded, but after some one has taken off the blind from his eyes, and has said, “Yonder lies the land of the Gandharis; yonder go,” he, asking the way in village after village, instructed and understanding, comes home at last to the Gandharis, — even so, too, is the man who here in the world has found a teacher; for he knows “to this (world) I belong only until I am delivered; then shall I come to my home.” What this fine (substance) is, of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, that is the Soul, — That art Thou, O Çvetaketu.’”
Here, one sees, is the Hindoo way of getting at the substance. It is also Schopenhauer’s way. Look for the substance within, in your own nature. You will not see it without. It is the life of your own life, the soul of your own soul. When you find it, you will come home from the confusing world of sense-things to the heart and essence of the world, to the reality. That art Thou.
Since for Schopenhauer this soul of your soul is the capricious inner will, there is no reason to speak of it as God or as Spirit; for these words imply rationality and conscious intelligence. And intelligence, whose presence in the world is merely one of the caprices of this will itself, finds itself always in sharp contrast to the will, which it can contemplate, but which it can never explain. However, of contemplation there are various stages, determined in us phenomenal individuals by the various sizes and powers of our purely phenomenal brains. Why any intelligence exists at all, and why it is phenomenally associated with a brain, nobody can explain. The will thus likes to express itself. That is the whole story. However, once given the expression, this intelligence reaches its highest perfection in that power to contemplate the whole world of the will with a certain supreme and lofty calm, which, combined with an accurate insight into the truth of the will, is characteristic of the temperament of the productive artist. Art is, namely, the embodiment of ​the essence of the will as the contemplative intelligence sees it. And to art Schopenhauer devotes his third book. The will has certain ultimate fashions of expressing itself, certain stages of self-objectification, as Schopenhauer calls them. These, in so far as contemplation can seize them, are the ultimate types, the Platonic ideas, of things, all endlessly exemplified in space and time by individual objects, but, as types, eternal, time-transcending, immortal. They are the ultimate embodiments of passion, the eternal forms of longing that exist in our world. Art grasps these types and exhibits them. Architecture, for instance, portrays the blind nature-forces, or longings, of weight and resistance. Art is, then, the universal appreciation of the essence of the will from the point of view of a contemplative onlooker. Art is, therefore, disinterested, embodying passion, but itself not the victim of passion. Of all the arts, according to Schopenhauer, Music most universally and many-sidedly portrays the very essence of the will, the very soul of passion, the very heart of this capricious, world-making, and incomprehensible inner nature of ours. Hence music is in some respects Schopenhauer’s favorite art. Music shows us just what the will is, — eternally moving, striving, changing, flying, struggling, wandering, returning to itself, and then beginning afresh, — all with no deeper purpose than just life in all its endlessness, motion, onward-flying, conflict, fullness of power, even though that shall mean fullness of sorrow and anguish. Music never rests, never is content; repeats its conflicts and wanderings over and over; leads them up, indeed, to mighty climaxes, but is great and strong never by virtue of abstract ideas, but only by the might of the will that it embodies. Listen to these cries and strivings, to this infinite wealth of flowing passion, to this infinite restlessness, and then reflect, — That art Thou; just that unreposing vigor, longing, majesty, and — caprice. ​
Of all Schopenhauer’s theories, except his pessimism itself, this theory of art has become the most widely known and influential. As he stated it, it was, indeed, evidently the notion, not of the systematic student of any art, but of the observant amateur of genius and sensibility. It lacks the professional tone altogether. Its illustrations are chosen whimsically from all sorts of directions. The opposition between will and contemplation reaches for the first time its height at this point in the system. On one side, the world of passion, throbbing, sorrowing, longing, hoping, toiling, above all, forever fleeing from the moment, whatever it be; on the other side, the majesty of artistic contemplation, looking in sacred calm upon all this world, seeing all things, but itself unmoved. Plainly, in this contemplative intellect the will has capriciously created for itself a dangerous enemy, who will discover its deep irrationality.
This enemy is none other than that Wagnerian Brünhilde, who is destined to see, through and through, the vanity of the world of the will, and who, not indeed without the connivance of the high gods of the will themselves, is minded to destroy the whole vain show in one final act of resignation. There arise from time to time in the world, thinks Schopenhauer, holy men, full of sympathy and pity for all their kind, full of a sense of the unity of all life, and of the vanity of this our common and endless paradox of the finite world. These men are called, in the speech of all the religions, saints. Whatever their land or creed, their thought is the same. Not the particular griefs of life, not the pangs of cold and hunger and of disease, not the horrors of the baseness that runs riot in humanity, — not these things do they weigh in the balance with any sort of precision or particularity, although these things, too, they see and pity. No, the source of all these griefs, the will itself, its paradox, its contradictory longing to be forever longing, its irrational striving to be forever ​ever as one that suffers lack, — this they condemn, compassionate, and — resign. They do not strive or cry. They simply forsake the will. Life, they say, must be evil, for life is desire, and desire is essentially tragic, since it flees endlessly and restlessly from all that it has; makes perfection impossible by always despising whatever it happens to possess, and by longing for more; lives in an eternal wilderness of its own creation; is tossed fitfully in the waves of its own dark ocean of passion; knows no peace; finds in itself no outcome, — nothing that can finish the longing and the strife.
And this hopelessly struggling desire, — so the saints teach to each one of us in our blindness, — That art Thou. The saints pity us all. Their very existence is compassion. They absent them from felicity awhile, that they may teach us the way of peace. And this way is what? Suicide? No, indeed. Schopenhauer quite consistently condemns suicide. The suicide desires bliss, and flees only from circumstance. He wills life. He hates only this life which he happens to have. No, this is not what the saints teach. One and all they counsel, as the path of perfection, the hard and steep road of Resignation. That alone leads to blessedness, to escape from the world. Deny the will to live. Forsake the power that builds the world. Deny the flesh. While you live be pitiful, merciful, kindly, dispassionate, resisting no evil, turning away from all good fortune, thinking of all things as of vanity and illusion. The whole world, after all, is an evil dream. Deny the will that dreams, and the vision is ended. As for the result, “we confess freely,” says Schopenhauer, in the famous concluding words of the fourth book of his first volume, “what remains, after the entire annulling of the will, is, for all those who are yet full of the will, indeed nothing. But, on the other hand, for those in whom the will has turned again, and has denied itself, this our own so very real world, with all her suns and Milky Ways, is — Nothing.” ​
V.
The estimate of the doctrine which we now have before us will be greatly aided if we bear in mind the nature of its historic genesis. The problem bequeathed by Kant to his successors was, as we have seen throughout both this and the preceding discussion, the problem of the relation of the empirical self of each moment to the total or universal self. This problem exists alike for Hegel and for Schopenhauer. Hegel undertakes to solve it by examining the process of self-consciousness. This process, developed according to his peculiar and paradoxical logic, which we have ventured to call the Logic of Passion, shows him that in the last analysis there is and can be but one self, the absolute spirit, the triumphant solver of paradoxes. Sure of his process, Hegel despises every such mystical and immediate seizing of the Universal as had been characteristic of the romanticists. With just these romanticists, however, Schopenhauer has in common the immediate intuition whereby he seizes, not so much the universal self as, in his opinion, the universal and irrational essence or nature that is at the heart of each finite self, and of all things, namely, the Will. Yet when he describes this will, after his intuition has come to grasp it, he finds in it just the paradox that Hegel had logically developed. For Hegel, self-consciousness is, as even Fichte already had taught, essentially the longing to be more of a self than you are. Just so, for Schopenhauer, if you exist you will, and if you will you are striving to escape from your present nature. It is of the essence of will to be always desiring a change. If the Will makes a world, the Will as such will be sure, then, thinks Schopenhauer, to be endlessly dissatisfied with its world. For, once more, when you will, the very essence of such will is discontentment with what is yours now. I no longer make that an object of desire which I already ​possess. I will what I have not yet, but hope to get, as a poor man wills wealth, but a rich man more wealth. I will the future, the distant, the unpossessed, the victory that I have not yet won, the defeat of the enemy who still faces me in arms, the cessation of the tedium or of the pain that besets me. Do I attain my desire, my will ceases, or, which is the same thing, turns elsewhere for food. Curiously enough, this, which is precisely the thought that led Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit, appears to Schopenhauer the proof of the totally evil nature of things. Striving might be bearable were there a highest good, to which, by willing, I could attain, and if, when I once attained that good, I could rest. But if will makes the world and is the whole life and essence of it, then there is nothing in the world deeper than the longing, the unrest, which is the very heart of all willing. Doesn’t this unrest seem tragic? Is there to be no end of longing in the world? If not, how can mere striving, mere willing, come to seem bearable? Here is the question which leads Schopenhauer to his pessimism. Precisely the same problem made Hegel, with all his appreciation of the tragedy of life, an optimist. Hegel’s Absolute, namely, is dissatisfied everywhere in his finite world, but is triumphantly content with the whole of it, just because his wealth is complete.
An historical lecture like the present one has not to decide between the metaphysical claims and rights of the Schopenhauerian immediate intuition of the Universal and the Hegelian logic. As theories of the absolute, these two doctrines represent conflicting philosophical interests whose discussion would belong elsewhere. Our present concern is the more directly human one. Of the two attitudes towards the great spiritual interests of man which these systems embody, which is the deeper? To be sure, even this question cannot be answered without making a confession of philosophical faith, but that I must here do in merely dogmatic form. ​
For my part, I deeply respect both doctrines. Both are essentially modern views of life, modern in their universality of expression, in their keen diagnosis of human nature, in their merciless criticism of our consciousness, in their thorough familiarity with the waywardness of the inner life. The century of nerves and of spiritual sorrows has philosophized with characteristic ingenuity in the persons of these thinkers, — the one the inexorable and fairly Mephistophelian critic of the paradoxes of passion, the other the nervous invalid of brilliant insight. We are here speaking only of this one side of their doctrines, namely, their diagnosis of the heart and of the issues of life. How much of the truth there is in both, every knowing man ought to see. Capricious is the will of man, thinks Schopenhauer, and therefore endlessly paradoxical and irrational. Paradoxical is the very consciousness, and therefore the very reason, of man, finds Hegel; and therefore, where there is this paradox, there is not unreason, but the manifestation of a part of the true spiritual life, — a life which could not be spiritual were it not full of conflict. Hegel thus absorbs, as it were, the pessimism of Schopenhauer; while Schopenhauer illustrates the paradox of Hegel.
But if both doctrines stand as significant expressions of the modern spirit, a glance at our more recent literature — at the despairing resignation of Tolstoi, with its flavor of mysticism, and at the triumphant joy in the paradoxes of passion which Browning kept to the end — will show us how far our romancers and poets still are from having made an end of the inquiry as to which doctrine is the right one. My own notion about the matter, such as it is, would indeed need for its full development the context of just such a philosophical argument as I have declined to introduce at the present stage of this course. As constructive idealist, regarding the absolute as indeed a spirit, I am in sympathy with Hegel’s sense ​of the triumphant rationality that reigns above all the conflicts of the spiritual world. But as to Schopenhauer’s own account of life, I find indeed that his pessimism is usually wholly misunderstood and unappreciated, as well by those who pretend to accept as Weil by those who condemn it. What people fail to comprehend concerning these deep and partial insights which are so characteristic of great philosophers is that the proper way to treat them is neither to scorn nor to bow down, but to experience, and then to get our freedom in presence of all such insights even by the very wealth of our experience. We are often so slavish in our relations with doctrines of this kind! Are they expressed in traditional, in essentially clerical language, as in the “Imitation” or in some other devotional book, then the form deceives us often into accepting mystical resignation as if it were the whole of spirituality, instead of bearing, as it does bear, much the same relation to the better life that sculptured marble bears to breathing flesh. But if it is a Schopenhauer, a notorious heretic, who uses much the same speech, then we can find no refuge save in hating him and his gloom. In fact, pessimism, in its deeper sense, is merely an ideal and abstract expression of one very deep and sacred element of the total religious consciousness of humanity. In fact, finite life is tragic, very nearly as much so as Schopenhauer represented, and tragic for the very reason that Schopenhauer and all the counselors of resignation are never weary of expressing, in so far, namely, as it is at once deep and restless. This is its paradox, that it is always unfinished, that it never attains, that it throbs as the heart does, and ends one pulsation only to begin an- other. This is what Hegel saw. This is what all the great poets depict, from Homer’s wanderings of the much tossed and tried Odysseus down to “In Memoriam” of Tennyson, or the “Dramatic Lyrics” of Browning. Not only is this so, but it must be so. The only refuge from ​spiritual restlessness is spiritual sluggishness; and that, as everybody is aware, is as tedious a thing as it is insipid. For the individual the lesson of this tragedy is always hard; and he learns it first in a religious form in the mood of pure resignation. “I cannot be happy; I must resign happiness.” This is what all the Imitations and the Schopenhauers are forever and very justly teaching to the individual. Schopenhauer’s special reason for this view is, however, the deep and philosophical one that at the heart of the world there seems to be an element of capricious conflict. That fact was what drove him to reject the World Spirit of the constructive idealists, and to speak only of a World-Will. But is this the whole story? No; if we ever get our spiritual freedom, we shall, I think, not neglecting this caprice which Schopenhauer found at the heart of things, still see that the world is divine and spiritual, not so much in spite of this capriciousness, as just because of it. Caprice isn’t all of reason; but reason needs facts and passions to conquer and to rationalize, in order to become triumphantly rational. The spirit exists by accepting and by triumphing over the tragedy of the world. Restlessness, longing, grief, — these are evils, fatal evils, and they are everywhere in the world; but the spirit must be strong enough to endure them. In this strength is the solution. And, after all, it is just endurance that is the essence of spirituality. Resignation, then, is indeed part of the truth, — resignation, that is, of any hope of a final and private happiness. We resign in order to be ready to endure. But courage is the rest of the truth, — a hearty defiance of the whole hateful pang and agony of the will, a binding of the strong man by being stronger than he, a making of life once for all our divine game, where the passions are the mere chessmen that we move in carrying out our plan, and where the plan is a spiritual victory over Satan. Let us thank Schopenhauer, then, for at least this, that in his ​pessimism he gives us an universal expression for the whole negative side of life. If you will let me speak of private experience, I myself have often found it deeply comforting, in the most bitter moments, to have discounted, so to speak, all the petty tragedies of experience, all my own weakness and caprice and foolishness and ill fortune, by one such absolute formula for evil as Schopenhauer’s doctrine gives me. It is the fate of life to be restless, capricious, and therefore tragic. Happiness comes, indeed, but by all sorts of accidents; and it flies as it comes. One thing only that is greater than this fate endures in us if we are wise of heart; and this one thing endures forever in the heart of the great World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection. This one thing, as I hold, is the eternal resolution that if the world will be tragic, it shall still, in Satan’s despite, be spiritual. And this resolution is, I think, the very essence of the Spirit’s own eternal joy.