The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

For this, the most readable of his works, and replete with wisdom and wit, Schopenhauer received, as his total remuneration, ten free copies. Optimism is difficult under such circumstances.

He deliberately chose for his lectures the very hours at which the then mighty Hegel was scheduled to teach; Schopenhauer trusted that the students would view him and Hegel with the eyes of posterity. But the students could not so far anticipate, and Schopenhauer found himself talking to empty seats. He resigned, and revenged himself by those bitter diatribes against Hegel which mar the later editions of his chef-d’œuvre.

In 1831 a cholera epidemic broke out in Berlin; both Hegel and Schopenhauer fled; but Hegel returned prematurely, caught the infection, and died in a few days. Schopenhauer never stopped until he reached Frankfort, where he spent the remainder of his seventy-two years.

He had enough to engage two rooms in a boarding-house; there he lived the last thirty years of his life, with no comrade but a dog. He called the little poodle Atma (the Brahmins’ term for the World-Soul), but the wags of the town called it “Young Schopenhauer.”

At the beginning of each meal he would put a gold coin upon the table before him; and at the end of each meal he would put the coin back into his pocket. It was, no doubt, an indignant waiter who at last asked him the meaning of this invariable ceremony. Schopenhauer answered that it was his silent wager to drop the coin into the poor-box on the first day that the English officers dining there should talk of anything else than horses, women, or dogs.

In 1854 Wagner sent him a copy of Der Ring der Nibelugen, with a word in appreciation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music. So the great pessimist became almost an optimist in his old age; he played the flute assiduously after dinner, and thanked Time for ridding him of the fires of youth.

What strikes the reader at once upon opening The World as Will and Idea is its style. Here is no Chinese puzzle of Kantian terminology, no Hegelian obfuscation, no Spinozist geometry; everything is clarity and order; and all is admirably centered about the leading conception of the world as will, and therefore strife, and therefore misery. What blunt honesty, what refreshing vigor, what uncompromising directness!

Where his predecessors are abstract to the point of invisibility, with theories that give out few windows of illustration upon the actual world, Schopenhauer, like the son of a business man, is rich in the concrete, in examples, in applications, even in humor.

Hegel was philosophic dictator of Germany in 1818; yet Schopenhauer loses no time in assailing him.

. The rule, “I sing the song of him whose bread I eat,” has always held good; the making of money by philosophy was regarded by the ancients as the characteristic of the sophists... Nothing is to be had for gold but mediocrity... It is impossible that an age which for twenty years has applauded a Hegel—that intellectual Caliban—as the greatest of the philosophers,... could make him who has looked on at that desirous of its approbation...

These last words are nobly spoken; but there is something of sour grapes in it all; no man was ever more anxious for approbation than Schopenhauer.