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SCHOPENHAUER


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11
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12923
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
(1788-1860)
BY WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE
CHOPENHAUER enjoys a unique distinction among the great
philosophers of the modern world. Apart from the extraor-
dinary powers of analysis that make him so important a
factor in the development of philosophical thought, he possesses the
literary faculty in a degree quite unexampled among the metaphys-
ical writers of modern times, and must be reckoned with as a man
of letters no less than as a thinker. The world of his thought lies
before the reader as a fair sunlit meadow; and offers an enticing
prospect to the traveler who has been toiling through the rugged
ways of the Kantian categories, or the barren morass of the Hegelian
logic. He not only has a definite set of ideas, deeply conceived and
organically united, to present to his students, but he has clothed them
in a verbal garb that makes metaphysics, for once, easy reading,
and is perhaps too alluring to do the best possible service to exact
thought. His clear, rich, and allusive style makes him one of the
greatest masters of German prose; while of his chief philosophical
work it is hardly too much to say, with Professor Royce, that it "is
in form the most artistic philosophical treatise in existence," unless
we hark back to Plato himself. When we add to these considerations
the breadth of his culture, - which touched upon so many human
concerns, and so adorned whatever it touched that a close acquaint-
ance with the whole of his work is almost a liberal education in itself,
— we may understand why his figure is the most interesting, if not
the most significant, in the history of nineteenth-century thought; and
why his influence, instead of becoming a matter of merely historical
interest, or declining into the cult of a coterie, is now steadily grow-
ing nearly forty years after his death.
Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig, February 22d (Washing-
ton's and Lowell's birthday), 1788. His father was a merchant in
prosperous circumstances; his mother was a brilliant woman, who
afterwards became a novelist of some repute and a leader in the
social life of Weimar. In 1793 Danzig lost its rank as a free city,
being absorbed by Prussia; whereupon the Schopenhauers removed to
Hamburg. At the age of nine Arthur was sent to France for two


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12924
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
years, and at the age of fifteen started upon two years of traveling
with his family, although for a part of the time he was placed in an
English school. He tried to follow the parental wishes in adopting
a mercantile life; but the death of his father in 1805 changed these
plans. The boy then determined to study the classics and work for
a degree. He prepared himself at Gotha and Weimar, and entered
the University of Göttingen in 1809. Here he studied for two years,
then at Berlin; and then, in 1813, seeking to escape from the turmoil
of warfare, he went first to Dresden, and afterwards to Rudolstadt,
where he worked upon the dissertation which obtained for him, in the
autumn of 1813. his degree at the University of Jena. This disserta-
tion which occupies an important place among his writings, because
it contains the germ of his subsequent thinking-was entitled 'Ueber
die Vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom Zureichenden Grunde' (The
Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason). The mind is
constantly asking, Why is this or that thing so? Why does that
stone fall to the earth? Why must a given judgment be either true
or not true? Why are equilateral triangles equiangular? Why do I
raise my hand when threatened by a blow? For each of these things
there is a sufficient reason; but the reasons are not of the same sort.
In the first case there is a physical cause, in the second a logical
consequence, in the third the datum of the problem necessitates the
conclusion, while in the fourth the will offers the immediate explana-
tion. These cases are perhaps but four aspects of one general prin-
ciple; but as Schopenhauer pointed out, much confusion may result
from a failure to distinguish clearly between them, and a "cause"
may be a very different thing from a "because. "
After obtaining his degree, our philosopher in embryo lived with
his mother for a winter in Weimar; but they were separated the fol-
lowing year by incompatibility of temperament, and never met again.
The four years 1814-18 were spent in Dresden, devoted chiefly to the
composition of the philosopher's magnum opus. A pamphlet 'Ueber das
Sehen und die Farben' (Sight and Color), published during this period,
is of historical but hardly of scientific interest. What value it still
has, depends upon the acuteness of many of its observations, and upon
the emphasis which it places upon the subjective aspect of color percep-
tion; but as an attempt to vindicate Goethe's fantastic 'Farbenlehre'
as against Newton's, it was foredoomed to failure. Schopenhauer's
great work, 'Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung' (The World as Will
and Idea), was turned over to his publisher in the spring of 1818,
and without waiting for its appearance the author hastened to Italy,
carrying with him the conviction that he had given to the world its
first true and all-embracing system of philosophy; that he, and he
alone, at the age of thirty, had unraveled "the master-knot of human


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12925
fate," and given their final solution to the problems that had been
attempted by all the long line of philosophers from "Plato the Divine»
to "Kant the Astounding. " Before attempting a characterization of
this masterpiece of philosophical thought, the history of the forty or
more years remaining to him may be briefly set forth. The Italian
journey filled two years. In 1820 he returned to Germany, lectured
at Berlin, and waited in vain for the recognition that he felt to be
his due. Another Italian journey followed; then a period of several
years passed mainly in Berlin, until that city was threatened with
cholera in 1831, and Schopenhauer fled to a safer place. He finally
settled upon Frankfort, where the remainder of his life was spent;
where his temper gradually mellowed as time brought to him his
long-delayed desert of fame; and where he died September 20th, 1860.
His body lies in the Friedhof of the old city on the Main, beneath a
simple block of dark granite, upon which his name alone is engraved.
'Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung' is, as the preface declares, the
expression of a single thought; and it may be added that all of
Schopenhauer's subsequent writings are but further illustrations and
amplifications of that thought. The work is divided into four books.
The first, accepting as irrefragable the essential conclusions of the
Kantian analysis of consciousness, discusses the world as Idea or Rep-
resentation (Vorstellung). It fuses into one transparent whole the body
of ideas that trace their lineage through Hobbes, Locke, and Berke-
ley to Kant; and shows how this so real world that we know, as pre-
sented to our senses, and built up into a self-consistent and harmonious
structure by the acts of perception, conception, and reflection, must be
viewed by the philosophical mind, after all, as but the Object with
which the individual Subject is correlated, and can have no independ-
ent existence of its own in any way resembling the existence which
it appears to have in our consciousness. For it is a world which lies
in space and time, and is bound by the law of causality; and these
things, as Kant once for all demonstrated, are but the forms of the
intellect, the conditions which the Subject imposes upon whatever
existence per se may turn out to be. It will thus be seen that there
is nothing particularly novel in the first book; it is in the second that
Schopenhauer makes his own most significant contribution to philoso-
phy. For in this second book the question becomes, What is the
«< Ding an Sich" (Thing In-Itself) before which the Kantian analysis
halted? What is the world, not as it appears to us, but in its inner-
most essence? It cannot be a world of space and time and causal-
ity, since they are only the forms of thought in which the Subject
clothes the Object. The answer to this deepest of all problems must
be sought by an interrogation of the consciousness. What is, apart
from my sensation and my thinking, the very kernel of my being?


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12926
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Schopenhauer triumphantly replies, "The Will. " Not the will in the
narrow sense,- the mere culmination of the conscious process which
begins with sensation and ends with rational action,- but the will
in the broader sense of a blind striving for existence; the power one
and indivisible which asserts itself in our activity as a whole rather
than in our separate acts, and not only in us, where it is in a measure
lighted up by conscious intelligence, but in all the inanimate world,
made one with ourselves by this transcendental synthesis. The stone
that falls to earth, the crystal that grows from its solution, the flower
that turns toward the sun, and the man who leads an army to vic-
tory, are all manifestations of the world-will; separate manifestations
they seem to us, but in reality the same thing, for the Will knows
nothing of space or time.
In the third book, we return to the World as Idea, led this time
by the guiding hand of Plato. The Will, in its creation of the World
as Idea, objectifies itself in a succession of archetypal forms, ranging
from the lowest, the forms of crude matter, to the highest, man.
Plato discerned this truth, and set it forth in his doctrine of ideas.
If Schopenhauer had lived ten years longer, he would have seen the
new light of Darwin's 'Origin of Species,' and have recognized that
the objectification of the will takes place by a gradual process rather
than by a series of leaps. This doctrine of archetypal forms leads
the way to a philosophy of art, which is indeed the chief subject-
matter of the third book. The artist is the one who perceives the
idea that nature stammers in trying to express, and who holds it up
for the admiration of mankind. Thus art is necessarily ideal in a
literal sense, and an improvement upon nature. Moreover, in man's
contemplation of the eternal idea as revealed by art he finds a tem-
porary escape from the world of will, and knows now and then an
hour of happiness. In the passionless calm of contemplation he for-
gets the miseries to which he is bound as the objectification of will,
and is in a measure freed from the bondage of self. It is the object
of the fourth book to show how this temporary freedom may become
a final release. For the will, unconscious in its lower manifestations,
has provided for itself in man the lamp of intelligence, whereby it
may come to discern its own nature and the hopelessness of its striv-
ings. In man alone the will, having risen to the full height of con-
scious power, is confronted with a momentous choice: it may affirm
itself, may will to go on with the hopeless endeavor to pluck happi-
ness from the tree of life; or it may, recognizing the futility of all
such endeavor, deny itself, as with the Indian ascetic, and sink into
Nirvana. Here we have manifest the powerful influence which the
sacred books of India had upon Schopenhauer's thinking, an influ-
ence as great as that of either Plato or Kant. And allied with this


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12927
doctrine is his theory of ethics, which bases all right conduct upon
the individual's recognition, dim or clear in various degrees, of the
essential oneness of things; which finds in the illusive veil of Maya
a figurative foreshadowing of the Kantian transcendentalism; and
which discovers the deepest word of human wisdom in the reiterated
formula, "Tat twam asi," "This art thou," of the Upanishads. '
A second edition of 'Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung' was
called for in 1844, a third in 1859. In these editions the original
work grew to more than double its earlier dimensions; but the added
matter did not mar the symmetrical structure of the treatise first
published, since it was relegated to a stout supplementary volume.
Schopenhauer's other works, all of which may be regarded as ancil-
lary to this one, include 'Ueber den Willen in der Natur (The
Will in Nature: 1836); 'Die Beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik' (The
Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics: 1841); and the two volumes
of miscellaneous papers pedantically entitled 'Parerga und Parali-
pomena' (1851). The publication of the latter work marked the turn-
ing of the tide in the author's fame, and occasioned an accession of the
popularity which he had so long in vain awaited. The public, which
had fought shy of the systematic exposition of his philosophy, was
attracted by these miscellaneous papers, so piquant, so suggestive, so
reflective of a strong literary personality; and through the side-lights
which the 'Parerga' cast upon the philosopher's more solid works,
were led to take up the latter, and discover what a treasure it was
that had so long been neglected. This tardy recognition was grate-
ful to Schopenhauer, who had never lost faith in the enduring char-
acter of his work, and in the devotion of whose laborious days there
had been mingled not a little of "the last infirmity of noble mind. "
It is pleasant to think of this Indian Summer of fame that came to
the Sage of Frankfort during the last ten years of his life; pleasant
also, to know that when at last his work was finished, he passed pain-
lessly away, assured that the world would not forget what he had
done.
It layer


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12928
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
FROM THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA'
THE
HE final demand I have to make on the reader might indeed
be tacitly assumed, for it is nothing but an acquaintance
with the most important phenomenon that has appeared in
philosophy for two thousand years, and that lies so near to us:
I mean the principal writings of Kant. It seems to me, in fact,—
as indeed has already been said by others,- that the effect these
writings produce in the mind to which they truly speak is very
like that of the operation for cataract on a blind man; and if
we wish to pursue the simile further, the aim of my own work
may be described by saying that I have sought to put into the
hands of those upon whom that operation has been successfully
performed a pair of spectacles suitable to eyes that have recov-
ered their sight,-spectacles of whose use that operation is the
absolutely necessary condition. Starting then, as I do to a large
extent, from what has been accomplished by the great Kant, I
have yet been enabled, just on account of my earnest study of
his writings, to discover important errors in them. These I have
been obliged to separate from the rest and prove to be false, in
order that I might be able to presuppose and apply what is true
and excellent in his doctrine, pure and freed from error. But
not to interrupt and complicate my own exposition by a constant
polemic against Kant, I have relegated this to a special appen-
dix.
The philosophy of Kant, then, is the only philosophy with
which a thorough acquaintance is directly presupposed in what we
have to say here. But if, besides this, the reader has lingered in
the school of the divine Plato, he will be so much the better pre-
pared to hear me, and susceptible to what I say. And if, indeed,
in addition to this he is a partaker of the benefit conferred by
the Vedas (the access to which, opened to us through the Upan-
ishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still
young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that
the influence of the Sanskrit literature will penetrate not less
deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth
century), if, I say, the reader has already received and assimi-
lated the sacred, primitive Indian wisdom, then is he best of all
prepared to hear what I have to say to him. My work will not
speak to him, as to many others, in a strange and even hostile
tongue; for if it does not sound too vain, I might express the


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12929
opinion that each one of the individual and disconnected aphor-
isms which make up the Upanishads may be deduced as a con-
sequence from the thought I am going to impart; though the
converse—that my thought is to be found in the Upanishads—
is by no means the case.
"The world is my idea. " This is a truth which holds good
for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring
it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does
this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes
clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and
an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels
an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as
idea,-i. e. , only in relation to something else, the consciousness
which is in himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is
this, for it is the expression of the most general form of all pos-
sible and thinkable experience, a form which is more general
than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and
each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes
of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular
class of ideas: whereas the antithesis of object and subject is
the common form of all these classes; is that form under which
alone any idea, of whatever kind it may be,-abstract or intui-
tive, pure or empirical,—is possible and thinkable.
·
___
No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all
others, and less in need of proof, than this: that all that exists
for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in
relation to subject, perception of a perceiver,-in a word, idea.
This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of
the present; of what is farthest off, as of what is near: for it
is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these dis-
tinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to
the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and
exists only for the subject. The world is idea.
•
Of all systems of philosophy which start from the object, the
most consistent, and that which may be carried furthest, is simple
materialism. It regards matter-and with it time and space—
as existing absolutely; and ignores the relation to the subject in
which alone all this really exists. It then lays hold of the law
of causality as a guiding principle or clue, regarding it as a self-
existent order or arrangement of things, veritas æterna; and so
fails to take account of the understanding, in which and for which
XXII-809
•


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12930
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
alone causality is. It seeks the primary and most simple state of
matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascend-
ing from mere mechanism to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable
and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have
been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility,
- that is, knowledge,- which would consequently now appear as
a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality.
Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas,
when we reached its highest point we should suddenly be seized
with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As
if waking from a dream, we should all at once become aware that
its final result-knowledge, which it reached so laboriously—was
presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-
point, mere matter: and when we imagine that we thought matter,
we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye
that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows
it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpect-
edly for suddenly the last link is seen to be the starting-point,
the chain a circle; and the materialist is like Baron Munchausen,
who, when swimming in water on horseback, drew the horse into
the air with his legs, and himself also by his cue.
-
As from the direct light of the sun to the borrowed light of
the moon, we pass from the immediate idea of perception-
which stands by itself and is its own warrant - to reflection; to
the abstract, discursive concepts of the reason, which obtain their
whole content from knowledge of perception, and in relation to
it. As long as we continue simply to perceive, all is clear, firm,
and certain. There are neither questions nor doubts nor errors;
we desire to go no further, can go no further; we find rest in
perceiving, and satisfaction in the present. Perception suffices
for itself: and therefore what springs purely from it, and remains
true to it,—for example, a genuine work of art,-can never be
false; nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for
it does not present an opinion, but the thing itself. But with
abstract knowledge, with reason, doubt and error appear in the
theoretical, care and sorrow in the practical. In the idea of per-
ception, illusion may at moments take the place of the real; but
in the sphere of abstract thought, error may reign for a thousand
years, impose its yoke upon whole nations, extend to the noblest
impulses of humanity, and by the help of its slaves and its dupes
may chain and fetter those whom it cannot deceive. It is the


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12931
enemy against which the wisest men of all times have waged
unequal war, and only what they have won from it has become.
the possession of mankind. Therefore it is well to draw atten-
tion to it at once, as we already tread the ground to which its
province belongs. It has often been said that we ought to follow
truth, even although no utility can be seen in it, because it may
have indirect utility which may appear when it is least expected;
and I would add to this, that we ought to be just as anxious to
discover and to root out all' error, even when no harm is antici-
pated from it, because its mischief may be very indirect, and
may suddenly appear when we do not expect it,- for all error
has poison at its heart. If it is mind, if it is knowledge, that
makes man the lord of creation, there can be no such thing as
harmless error; still less venerable and holy error. And for the
consolation of those who in any way and at any time may have
devoted strength and life to the noble and hard battle against
error, I cannot refrain from adding that so long as truth is
absent, error will have free play,-as owls and bats in the
night; but sooner would we expect to see the owls and the bats
drive back the sun in the eastern heavens, than that any truth
which has once been known, and distinctly and fully expressed,
can ever again be so utterly vanquished and overcome that the
old error shall once more reign undisturbed over its wide king-
dom. This is the power of truth: its conquest is slow and labo-
rious, but if once the victory be gained it can never be wrested
back again.
To him who has thoroughly grasped this, and can distinguish
between the will and the Idea, and between the Idea and its
⚫ manifestation, the events of the world will have significance only
so far as they are the letters out of which we may read the
Idea of man, but not in and for themselves. He will not believe
with the vulgar that time may produce something actually new
and significant; that through it, or in it, something absolutely real
may attain to existence, or indeed that it itself as a whole has
beginning and end, plan and development, and in some way has
for its final aim the highest perfection (according to their concep-
tion) of the last generation of man, whose life is a brief thirty
years. Therefore he will just as little, with Homer, people a
whole Olympus with gods to guide the events of time, as with
Ossian he will take the forms of the clouds for individual beings;
for as we have said, both have just as much meaning as regards
·


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12932
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
the Idea which appears in them. In the manifold forms of hu
man life, and in the unceasing change of events, he will regard
the Idea only as the abiding and essential, in which the will
to live has its fullest objectivity, and which shows its different
sides in the capacities, the passions, the errors, and the excel-
lences, of the human race; in self-interest, hatred, love, fear,
boldness, frivolity, stupidity, slyness, wit, genius, and so forth,—
all of which, crowding together and combining in thousands of
forms (individuals), continually create the history of the great
and the little world, in which it is all the same whether they are
set in motion by nuts or by crowns. Finally he will find that
in the world it is the same as in the dramas of Gozzi, in all
of which the same persons appear, with like intention and with a
like fate: the motives and incidents are certainly different in each
piece, but the spirit of the incidents is the same; the actors in
one piece know nothing of the incidents of another, although
they performed in it themselves: therefore after all experience of
former pieces, Pantaloon has become no more agile or generous,
Tartaglia no more conscientious, Brighella no more courageous,
and Columbine no more modest.
Suppose we were allowed for once a clearer glance into the
kingdom of the possible, and over the whole chain of causes and
effects: if the earth-spirit appeared and showed us in a picture
all the greatest men, enlighteners of the world, and heroes, that
chance destroyed before they were ripe for their work; then the
great events that would have changed the history of the world.
and brought in periods of the highest culture and enlightenment,
but which the blindest chance-the most insignificant accident-
hindered at the outset; lastly the splendid powers of great men,
that would have enriched whole ages of the world, but which,
either misled by error or fashion, or compelled by necessity,
they squandered uselessly on unworthy or unfruitful objects, or
even wasted in play. If we saw all this, we should shudder
and lament at the thought of the lost treasures of whole periods
of the world. But the earth-spirit would smile and say, "The
source from which the individuals and their powers proceed is
inexhaustible and unending as time and space; for like these
forms of all phenomena, they also are only phenomena,— visi-
bility of the will. No finite measure can exhaust that infinite
source; therefore an undiminished eternity is always open for the
return of any event or work that was nipped in the bud. In this


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12933
world of phenomena, true loss is just as little possible as true
gain. The will alone is: it is the thing in-itself, and the source
of all these phenomena. Its self-knowledge and its assertion or
denial, which is then decided upon, is the only event in-itself.
All willing arises from want; therefore from deficiency, and
therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet
for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are
denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite:
the satisfaction is short and scantily measured out. But even the
final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at
once makes room for a new one: both are illusions; the one is
known to be so, the other not yet. No attained object of desire
can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification:
it is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive
to-day that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow. There-
fore so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long
as we are given up to the throng of desires with their constant
hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing,- we
can never have lasting happiness nor peace. It is essentially all
the same whether we pursue or flee, fear injury or seek enjoy-
ment: the care for the constant demands of the will, in whatever
form it may be, continually occupies and sways the conscious-
ness; but without peace no true well-being is possible. The
subject of willing is thus constantly stretched on the revolving
wheel of Ixion, pours water into the sieve of the Danaids, is the
ever-longing Tantalus.
But when some external cause or inward disposition lifts us
suddenly out of the endless stream of willing,- delivers knowl-
edge from the slavery of the will,-the attention is no longer
directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free
from their relation to the will; and thus observes them without
personal interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively,-— gives
itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in
so far as they are motives. Then all at once the peace which
we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the
former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord; and
it is well with us. It is the painless state which Epicurus prized
as the highest good and as the state of the gods: for we are for
the moment set free from the miserable striving of the will; we
keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of
Ixion stands still.


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12934
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Tragedy is to be regarded, and is recognized, as the summit
of poetical art, both on account of the greatness of its effect and
the difficulty of its achievement. It is very significant for our
whole system, and well worthy of observation, that the end of
this highest poetical achievement is the representation of the ter-
rible side of life. The unspeakable pain, the wail of humanity,
the triumph of evil, the scornful mastery of chance, and the
irretrievable fall of the just and innocent, is here presented to
us; and in this lies a significant hint of the nature of the world.
and of existence. It is the strife of will with itself, which here,
completely unfolded at the highest grade of its objectivity, comes
into fearful prominence. It becomes visible in the suffering of
men, which is now introduced: partly through chance and error,
which appear as the rulers of the world,-personified as fate on
account of their insidiousness, which even reaches the appearance
of design; partly it proceeds from man himself, through the self-
mortifying efforts of a few, through the wickedness and pervers-
ity of most. It is one and the same will that lives and appears
in them all, but whose phenomena fight against each other and
destroy each other. In one individual it appears powerfully, in
another more weakly; in one more subject to reason and soft-
ened by the light of knowledge, in another less so: till at last,
in some single case, this knowledge, purified and heightened by
suffering itself, reaches the point at which the phenomenon, the
veil of Maya, no longer deceives it. It sees through the form
of the phenomenon the principium individuationis. The egoism
which rests on this perishes with it, so that now the motives that
were so powerful before have lost their might; and instead of
them the complete knowledge of the nature of the world, which
has a quieting effect on the will, produces resignation,—the sur-
render not merely of life, but of the very will to live. Thus
we see in tragedies the noblest men, after long conflict and suf-
fering, at last renounce the ends they have so keenly followed,
and all the pleasures of life forever, or else freely and joyfully
surrender life itself. So is it with Calderon's steadfast prince;
with Gretchen in 'Faust'; with Hamlet, whom his friend Hora-
tio would willingly follow, but is bade remain awhile, and in this
harsh world draw his breath in pain, to tell the story of Hamlet
and clear his memory; so also is it with the Maid of Orleans, the
Bride of Messina: they all die purified by suffering,—i. e. , after
the will to live which was formerly in them is dead. In the


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12935
'Mohammed' of Voltaire this is actually expressed in the con-
cluding words which the dying Pelmira addresses to Moham-
med: "The world is for tyrants: live! " On the other hand,
the demand for so-called poetical justice rests on entire miscon-
ception of the nature of tragedy, and indeed of the nature of
the world itself. It boldly appears in all its dullness in the
criticisms which Dr. Samuel Johnson made on particular plays
of Shakespeare, for he very naïvely laments its entire absence.
And its absence is certainly obvious; for in what has Ophelia,
Desdemona, or Cordelia offended? But only the dull, optimis-
tic, Protestant-rationalistic, or peculiarly Jewish view of life will
make the demand for poetical justice, and find satisfaction in it.
The true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight that it is not his
own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin,-
i. e. , the crime of existence itself:-
<< Pues el delito mayor
Del hombre es haber nacido,”
("For the greatest crime
Of man is that he was born, ")
as Calderon exactly expresses it.
I shall allow myself only one remark more closely concerning
the treatment of tragedy. The representation of a great misfor-
tune is alone essential to tragedy. But the many different ways
in which this is introduced by the poet may be brought under
three specific conceptions. It may happen by means of a char-
acter of extraordinary wickedness, touching the utmost limits of
possibility, who becomes the author of the misfortune: examples
of this kind are Richard III. , Iago in 'Othello,' Shylock in 'The
Merchant of Venice,' Franz Moor [of Schiller's 'Robbers'], the
Phædra of Euripides, Creon in the 'Antigone,' etc. , etc. Secondly,
it may happen through blind fate,—i. e. , chance and error: a true
pattern of this kind is the Edipus Rex of Sophocles, the 'Trachi-
niæ also; and in general most of the tragedies of the ancients
belong to this class. Among modern tragedies, 'Romeo and Juliet,'
Voltaire's Tancred,' and 'The Bride of Messina,' are examples.
Lastly, the misfortune may be brought about by the mere position.
of the dramatis persona with regard to each other, through their
relations, so that there is no need either for a tremendous error
or an unheard-of accident, nor yet for a character whose wicked-
ness reaches the limits of human possibility; but characters of


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12936
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
ordinary morality, under circumstances such as often occur, are
so situated with regard to each other that their position compels
them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do each other the
greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the
wrong.
This last kind of tragedy seems to me far to surpass the
other two; for it shows us the greatest misfortune, not as an
exception, not as something occasioned by way of circumstances
or monstrous characters, but as arising easily and of itself out of
the actions and characters of men,—indeed almost as essential to
them, and thus brings it terribly near to us. In the other two
kinds, we may look on the prodigious fate and the horrible wick-
edness as terrible powers which certainly threaten us, but only
from afar, which we may very well escape without taking refuge in
renunciation. But in this last kind of tragedy, we see that those
powers which destroy happiness and life are such that their path
to us also is open at every moment; we see the greatest suffer-
ings brought about by entanglements that our fate might also
partake of, and through actions that perhaps we also are capable
of performing, and so could not complain of injustice: then,
shuddering, we feel ourselves already in the midst of hell. This
last kind of tragedy is also the most difficult of achievement; for
the greatest effect has to be produced in it with the least use
of means and causes of movement, merely through the position
and distribution of the characters: therefore even in many of the
best tragedies this difficulty is evaded. Yet one tragedy may be
referred to as a perfect model of this kind,—a tragedy which
in other respects is far surpassed by more than one work of the
same great master; it is 'Clavigo. ' 'Hamlet' belongs to a certain
extent to this class, as far as the relation of Hamlet to Laertes
and Ophelia is concerned. 'Wallenstein' has also this excel-
lence. Faust' belongs entirely to this class, if we regard the
events connected with Gretchen and her brother as the principal
action; also the 'Cid' of Corneille, only that it lacks the tragic
conclusion, while on the contrary the analogous relation of Max
to Thecla has it.
―――
Thus between desiring and attaining, all human life flows
on throughout. The wish is, in its nature, pain; the attainment
soon begets satiety, the end was only apparent; possession takes
away the charm: the wish, the need, presents itself under a
new form; when it does not, then follow desolateness, emptiness,


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12937
ennui,― against which the conflict is just as painful as against
want.
That wish and satisfaction should follow each other nei-
ther too quickly nor too slowly, reduces to the smallest amount
the suffering which both occasion, and constitutes the happiest
life. For that which we might otherwise call the most beauti-
ful part of life, its purest joy (if it were only because it lifts us
out of real existence and transforms us into disinterested spec-
tators of it),- that is, pure knowledge, which is foreign to all
willing, the pleasure of the beautiful, the pure delight in art,-
this is granted only to a very few, because it demands rare tal-
ents; and to these few only as a passing dream. And then even
these few, on account of their higher intellectual powers, are
made susceptible of far greater suffering than duller minds can
ever feel, and are also placed in lonely isolation by a nature
which is obviously different from that of others; thus here also
accounts are squared. But to the great majority of men, purely
intellectual pleasures are not accessible. They are almost wholly
incapable of the joys which lie in pure knowledge. They are
entirely given up to willing. If therefore anything is to win
their sympathy, to be interesting to them, it must (as is implied
in the meaning of the word) in some way excite their will, even
if it is only through a distant and merely problematical relation
to it; the will must not be left altogether out of the question,
for their existence lies far more in willing than in knowing:
action and reaction is their one element. We may find in trifles
and every-day occurrences the naïve expressions of this quality.
Thus, for example, at any place worth seeing they may visit,
they write their names, in order thus to react, to affect the place
since it does not affect them. Again, when they see a strange
rare animal, they cannot easily confine themselves to merely
observing it; they must rouse it, tease it, play with it, merely
to experience action and reaction: but this need for excitement
of the will manifests itself very specially in the discovery and
support of card-playing, which is quite peculiarly the expression
of the miserable side of humanity.
As far as the life of the individual is concerned, every biogra-
phy is the history of suffering; for every life is, as a rule, a
continual series of great and small misfortunes, which each one
conceals as much as possible because he knows that others can
seldom feel sympathy or compassion, but almost always satisfac-
tion at the sight of the woes from which they are themselves
-
•


## p. 12938 (#368) ##########################################

12938
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
for the moment exempt. But perhaps at the end of life, if a
man is sincere and in full possession of his faculties, he will
never wish to have it to live over again; but rather than this, he
will much prefer absolute annihilation. The essential content of
the famous soliloquy in 'Hamlet' is briefly this: Our state is so
wretched that absolute annihilation would be decidedly prefer-
able. If suicide really offered us this, so that the alternative
"to be or not to be," in the full sense of the word, was placed
before us, then it would be unconditionally to be chosen as
"a consummation devoutly to be wished. " But there is something
in us which tells us that this is not the case: suicide is not the
end; death is not absolute annihilation. In like manner, what
was said by the Father of History has not since him been con-
tradicted, that no man has ever lived who has not wished more
than once that he had not to live the following day. According
to this, the brevity of life, which is so constantly lamented, may
be the best quality it possesses.
If, finally, we should bring clearly to a man's sight the terri-
ble sufferings and miseries to which his life is constantly exposed,
he would be seized with horror: and if we were to conduct the
confirmed optimist through the hospitals, infirmaries, and surgical
operating-rooms, through the prisons, torture chambers, and slave
kennels, over battle-fields and places of execution; if we were
to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it hides
itself from the glance of cold curiosity, and finally allow him to
glance into Ugolino's dungeon of starvation,- he too would under-
stand at last the nature of this "best of possible worlds. " For
whence did Dante take the materials for his hell, but from this
our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.
And when, on the other hand, he came to the task of describ-
ing heaven and its delights, he had an insurmountable difficulty
before him; for our world affords no materials at all for this.
Therefore there remained nothing for him to do, but, instead
of describing the joys of Paradise, to repeat to us the instruc-
tion given him there by his ancestor, by Beatrice, and by various
saints.
—
-
―
But from this it is sufficiently clear what manner of world it
is. Certainly human life, like all bad ware, is covered over with
a false lustre. What suffers always conceals itself. On the other
hand, whatever pomp or splendor any one can get, he openly
makes a show of: and the more his inner contentment deserts


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12939
him, the more he desires to exist as fortunate in the opinion
of others, to such an extent does folly go; and the opinion of
others is a chief aim of the efforts of every one, although the
utter nothingness of it is expressed in the fact that in almost
all languages vanity, vanitas, originally signifies emptiness and
nothingness. But under all this false show, the miseries of life
can so increase-and this happens every day-that the death
which hitherto has been feared above all things is eagerly seized
upon. Indeed, if fate will show its whole malice, even this refuge
is denied to the sufferer; and in the hands of enraged enemies,
he may remain exposed to terrible and slow tortures without
remedy. In vain the sufferer then calls on his gods for help: he
remains exposed to his fate without grace.
But this irremediableness is only the mirror of the invinci-
ble nature of his will, of which his person is the objectivity. As
little as
an external power can change or suppress this will,
so little can a foreign power deliver it from the miseries which
proceed from the life which is the phenomenal appearance of
that will. In the principal matter, as in everything else, a man
is always thrown back upon himself. In vain does he make to
himself gods, in order to get from them by prayers and flattery
what can only be accomplished by his own will-power. The Old
Testament made the world and man the work of a god; but the
New Testament saw that in order to teach that holiness, and sal-
vation from the sorrows of this world, can only come from the
world itself, it was necessary that this god should become man.
It is and remains the will of man upon which everything depends
for him. Fanatics, martyrs, saints of every faith and name, have
voluntarily and gladly endured every torture, because in them
the will to live had suppressed itself; and then even the slow
destruction of its phenomenon was welcome to them. But I do
not wish to anticipate the later exposition. For the rest, I can-
not here avoid the statement that to me, optimism, when it is not
merely the thoughtless talk of such as harbor nothing but words
under their low foreheads, appears not merely as an absurd, but
also as a really wicked way of thinking; as a bitter mockery of
the unspeakable suffering of humanity. Let no one think that
Christianity is favorable to optimism; for on the contrary, in the
Gospels, "world" and "evil" are used as almost synonymous.
All suffering, since it is a mortification and a call to resigna
tion, has potentially a sanctifying power. This is the explanation


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12940
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
of the fact that every great misfortune or deep pain inspires a
certain awe. But the sufferer only really becomes an object of
reverence, when, surveying the course of his life as a chain of
sorrows, or mourning some great and incurable misfortune, he
does not really look at the special combination of circumstances
which has plunged his own life into suffering, nor stops at the
single great misfortune that has befallen him; - for in so doing,
his knowledge still follows the principle of sufficient reason, and
clings to the particular phenomenon; he still wills life, only not
under the conditions which have happened to him; - but only
then, I say, is he truly worthy of reverence when he raises his
glance from the particular to the universal, when he regards his
suffering as merely an example of the whole, and for him—
since in a moral regard he partakes of genius-one case stands
for a thousand; so that the whole of life, conceived as essentially
suffering, brings him to resignation. Therefore it inspires rever-
ence, when in Goethe's 'Torquato Tasso' the princess speaks of
how her own life and that of her relations has always been sad
and joyless, and yet regards the matter from an entirely univer-
sal point of view.
A very noble character we always imagine with a certain trace
of quiet sadness, which is anything but a constant fretfulness
at daily annoyances (this would be an ignoble trait, and lead us
to fear a bad disposition), but is a consciousness derived from
knowledge of the vanity of all possessions,- of the suffering of
all life, not merely of his own. But such knowledge may pri
marily be awakened by the personal experience of suffering,
especially some one great sorrow; as a single unfulfilled wish
brought Petrarch to that state of resigned sadness concerning the
whole of life which appeals to us so pathetically in his works,—
for the Daphne he pursued had to flee from his hands in order
to leave him, instead of herself, the immortal laurel. When
through some such great and irrevocable denial of fate the will
is to some extent broken, almost nothing else is desired; and the
character shows itself mild, just, noble, and resigned. Finally,
when grief has no definite object, but extends itself over the
whole of life, then it is to a certain extent a going into itself;
a withdrawal, a gradual disappearance of the will, whose visible
manifestation, the body, it imperceptibly but surely undermines,—
so that a man feels a certain loosening of his bonds, a mild fore-
taste of that death which promises to be the abolition at once of


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12941
1
-
the body and of the will. Therefore a secret pleasure accom-
panies this grief; and it is this, as I believe, which the most
melancholy of all nations has called "the joy of grief. " But here
also lies the danger of sentimentality, both in life itself and in
the representation of it in poetry; when a man is always mourn-
ing and lamenting without courageously rising to resignation.
In this way we lose both earth and heaven, and retain merely
a watery sentimentality. Only if suffering assumes the form of
pure knowledge—and this, acting as a quieter of the will, brings
about resignation-is it worthy of reverence.
In this regard, however, we feel a certain respect at the sight
of every great sufferer, which is akin to the feeling excited by
virtue and nobility of character, and also seems like a reproach
of our own happy condition. We cannot help regarding every sor-
row-both our own and those of others as at least a potential
advance towards virtue and holiness; and on the contrary, pleas-
ures and worldly satisfactions as a retrogression from them. This
goes so far that every man who endures a great bodily or mental
suffering, indeed, every one who merely performs some physical
labor which demands the greatest exertion, in the sweat of his
brow and with evident exhaustion, yet with patience and with-
out murmuring,—every such man, I say, if we consider him with
close attention, appears to us like a sick man who tries a pain-
ful cure; and who willingly, and even with satisfaction, endures
the suffering it causes him, because he knows that the more
he suffers the more the cause of his disease is affected, and that
therefore the present suffering is the measure of his cure.
According to what has been said, the denial of the will to
live - which is just what is called absolute, entire resignation, or
holiness always proceeds from that quieter of the will which
the knowledge of its inner conflict and essential vanity, express-
ing themselves in the suffering of all living things, becomes. The
difference which we have represented as two paths consists in
whether that knowledge is called up by suffering which is merely
and purely known, and is freely appropriated by means of the
penetration of the principium individuationis, or by suffering
which is directly felt by a man himself. True salvation — deliv-
erance from life and suffering-cannot even be imagined with-
out complete denial of the will. Till then, every one is simply
this will itself; whose manifestation is an ephemeral existence, a
-
--
-
――――
-


## p. 12942 (#372) ##########################################

12942
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
constantly vain and empty striving, and the world full of suffer-
ing we have represented, to which all irrevocably and in like
manner belong. For we found above that life is always assured
to the will to live; and its one real form is the present, from
which they can never escape, since birth and death reign in the
phenomenal world. The Indian mythus expresses this by saying
"they are born again. " The great ethical difference of character
means this: that the bad man is infinitely far from the attain-
ment of the knowledge from which the denial of the will pro-
ceeds, and therefore he is in truth actually exposed to all the
miseries which appear in life as possible; for even the present
fortunate condition of his personality is merely a phenomenon
produced by the principium individuationis, and a delusion of
Maya,- the happy dream of a beggar. The sufferings which in
the vehemence and ardor of his will he inflicts upon others are
the measure of the suffering, the experience of which in his own.
person cannot break his will, and plainly lead it to the denial
of itself. All true and pure love, on the other hand, and even
all free justice, proceed from the penetration of the principium
individuationis, which, if it appears with its full power, results
in perfect sanctification and salvation,- the phenomenon of which
is the state of resignation described above, the unbroken peace
which accompanies it, and the greatest delight in death.
If, however, it should be absolutely insisted upon that in
some way or other a positive knowledge should be attained of
that which philosophy can only express negatively as the denial
of the will, there would be nothing for it but to refer to that
state which all those who have attained to complete denial of
the will have experienced, and which has been variously denoted
by the names ecstasy, rapture, illumination, union with God,
and so forth; a state, however, which cannot properly be called
knowledge, because it has not the form of subject and object,
and is moreover only attainable in one's own experience and
cannot be further communicated.
We, however, who consistently occupy the standpoint of phi-
losophy, must be satisfied here with negative knowledge,-con-
tent to have reached the utmost limit of the positive. We have
recognized the inmost nature of the world as will, and all its phe-
nomena as only the objectivity of will; and we have followed
this objectivity from the unconscious working of obscure forces


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12943
of nature up to the completely conscious action of man. There-
fore we shall by no means evade the consequence, that with
the free denial, the surrender of the will, all those phenomena
are also abolished: that constant strain and effort, without end
and without rest, at all the grades of objectivity in which and
through which the world consists; the multifarious forms succeed-
ing each other in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will;
and finally also the universal forms of this manifestation, time
and space, and also its last fundamental form, subject and object,
- all are abolished. No will no idea-no world.
Before us there is certainly only nothingness. But that which
resists this passing into nothing-our nature-is indeed just
the will to live which we ourselves are, as it is our world. That
we abhor annihilation so greatly, is simply another expression
of the fact that we so strenuously will life, and are nothing but
this will, and know nothing besides it. But if we turn our glance
from our own needy and embarrassed condition to those who
have overcome the world; in whom the will, having attained to
perfect self-knowledge, found itself again in all, and then freely
denied itself, and who then merely wait to see the last trace
of it vanish with the body which it animates: then instead of
the restless striving and effort, instead of the constant transition
from wish to fruition and from joy to sorrow, instead of the
never-satisfied and never-dying hope which constitutes the life
of the man who wills, we shall see that peace which is above
all reason, that perfect calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that
inviolable confidence and serenity, the mere reflection of which
in the countenance, as Raphael and Correggio have represented it,
is an entire and certain gospel; only knowledge remains, the will
has vanished. We look with deep and painful longing upon this
state, beside which the misery and wretchedness of our own is
brought out clearly by the contrast. Yet this is the only con-
sideration which can afford us lasting consolation, when on the
one hand we have recognized incurable suffering and endless
misery as essential to the manifestation of will, the world; and
on the other hand, see the world pass away with the abolition of
will, and retain before us only empty nothingness. Thus, in this
way, by contemplation of the life and conduct of saints, whom
it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own expe-
rience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written
history, and with the stamp of inner truth, by art,- we must
-
――――――――――


## p. 12944 (#374) ##########################################

12944
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern
behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we
fear as children fear the dark; we must not even evade it like
the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as re-
absorption in Brahma or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Rather
do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abo-
lition of will is, for all those who are still full of will, certainly
nothing; but conversely, to those in whom the will has turned
and has denied itself, this our world which is so real, with all its
suns and Milky Ways, is nothing.
Translation of R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp.
―――
ON BOOKS AND READING
IT
T IS in literature as in life: wherever you turn, you stumble at
once upon the incorrigible mob of humanity, swarming in all
directions, crowding and soiling everything, like flies in sum-
mer. Hence the number, which no man can count, of bad books;
those rank weeds of literature, which draw nourishment from the
corn and choke it. The time, money, and attention of the pub-
lic, which rightfully belong to good books and their noble aims,
they take for themselves: they are written for the mere pur-
pose of making money or procuring places. So they are not only
useless: they do positive mischief. Nine tenths of the whole of
our present literature has no other aim than to get a few shil-
lings out of the pockets of the public; and to this end author,
publisher, and reviewer are in league.
Let me mention a crafty and wicked trick, albeit a profita-
ble and successful one, practiced by littérateurs, hack writers, and
voluminous authors. In complete disregard of good taste and the
true culture of the period, they have succeeded in getting the
whole of the world of fashion into leading-strings, so that they
are all trained to read in time, and all the same thing,—viz. ,
the newest books; and that for the purpose of getting food for
conversation in the circles in which they move. This is the
aim served by bad novels, produced by writers who were once
celebrated, as Spindler, Bulwer-Lytton, Eugene Sue. What can
be more miserable than the lot of a reading public like this,-
always bound to peruse the latest works of extremely common-


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12945
place persons who write for money only, and who are therefore
never few in number? And for this advantage they are content
to know by name only, the works of the few superior minds of
all ages and all countries. Literary newspapers too are a singu-
larly cunning device for robbing the reading public of the time
which, if culture is to be attained, should be devoted to the gen-
uine productions of literature, instead of being occupied by the
daily bungling of commonplace persons.
ence.
Hence, in regard to reading, it is a very important thing to
be able to refrain. Skill in doing so consists in not taking into
one's hands any book merely because at the time it happens
to be extensively read,- such as political or religious pamphlets,
novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise, and may even
attain to several editions in the first and last year of their exist-
Consider, rather, that the man who writes for fools is
always sure of a large audience; be careful to limit your time
for reading, and devote it exclusively to the works of those great
minds of all times and countries who o'ertop the rest of human-
ity,- those whom the voice of fame points to as such. These
alone really educate and instruct. You can never read bad liter-
ature too little, nor good literature too much. Bad books are
intellectual poison: they destroy the mind. Because people
always read what is new instead of the best of all ages, writers
remain in the narrow circle of the ideas which happen to prevail
in their time; and so the period sinks deeper and deeper into its
own mire.
There are at all times two literatures in progress, running
side by side, but little known to each other: the one real, the
other only apparent. The former grows into permanent litera-
ture; it is pursued by those who live for science or poetry: its
course is sober and quiet, but extremely slow, and it produces
in Europe scarcely a dozen works in a century; these, however,
are permanent. The other kind is pursued by people who live
on science or poetry: it goes at a gallop, with much noise and
shouting of partisans; and every twelvemonth puts a thousand
works on the market. But after a few years one asks, Where are
they? where is the glory which came so soon and made so much
clamor? This kind may be called fleeting, and the other perma-
nent literature.
XXII-810
Translation of T. Bailey Saunders.


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12946
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
-
ON CRITICISM
HE source of all pleasure and delight is the feeling of kin-
Tship. Even with the sense of beauty, it is unquestionably
our own species in the animal world, and then again our
own race, that appears to us the fairest. So too in intercourse
with others: every man shows a decided preference for those who
resemble him; and a blockhead will find the society of another
blockhead incomparably more pleasant than that of any number
of great minds put together. Every man must necessarily take
his chief pleasure in his own work, because it is the mirror of
his own mind, the echo of his own thought; and next in order
will come the work of people like him. That is to say, a dull,
shallow, and perverse man, a dealer in mere words, will give his
sincere and hearty applause only to that which is dull, shallow,
perverse, or merely verbose: on the other hand, he will allow
merit to the work of great minds only on the score of authority,
-in other words, because he is ashamed to speak his opinion, for
in reality they give him no pleasure at all; they do not appeal
to him,- nay, they repel him: and he will not confess this even
to himself. The works of genius cannot be fully enjoyed except
by those who are themselves of the privileged order. The first
recognition of them, however, when they exist without authority
to support them, demands considerable superiority of mind.
When the reader takes all this into consideration, he should
be surprised, not that great work is so late in winning reputa-
tion, but that it wins it at all. And as a matter of fact, fame
comes only by a slow and complex process. The stupid person
is by degrees forced, and as it were tamed, into recognizing the
superiority of one who stands immediately above him; this one in
his turn bows before some one else; and so it goes on until the
weight of the votes gradually prevails over their number: and this
is just the condition of all genuine-in other words, deserved-
fame. But until then, the greatest genius, even after he has
passed his time of trial, stands like a king amidst a crowd of his
own subjects who do not know him by sight, and therefore will
not do his behests, unless indeed his chief ministers of State are
in his train. For no subordinate official can be the direct recipi-
ent of the royal commands, as he knows only the signature of
his immediate superior; and this is repeated all the way up into
the highest ranks, where the under-secretary attests the minister's
-


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12947
signature, and the minister that of the king. There are analogous
stages to be passed before a genius can attain wide-spread fame.
This is why his reputation most easily comes to a standstill at
the very outset,- because the highest authorities, of whom there
can be but few, are most frequently not to be found; but the
further down he goes in the scale, the more numerous are those
who take the word from above, so that his fame is no more
arrested.
We must console ourselves for this state of things by reflect-
ing that it is really fortunate that the greater number of men
do not form a judgment on their own responsibility, but merely
take it on authority. For what sort of criticism should we have
on Plato and Kant, Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, if every
man were to form his opinion by what he really has and enjoys
of these writers, instead of being forced by authority to speak of
them in a fit and proper way, however little he may really feel
what he says? Unless something of this kind took place, it
would be impossible for true merit, in any high sphere, to attain
fame at all. At the same time, it is also fortunate that every
man has just so much critical power of his own as is necessary
for recognizing the superiority of those who are placed immedi-
ately over him, and for following their lead. This means that
the many come in the end to submit to the authority of the few;
and there results that hierarchy of critical judgments, on which
is based the possibility of a steady and eventually wide-spreading
fame.
The lowest class in the community is quite impervious to the
merits of a great genius; and for these people there is nothing
left but the monument raised to him, which, by the impression
it produces on their senses, awakens in them a dim idea of the
man's greatness.
Literary journals should be a dam against the unconscionable
scribbling of the age, and the ever-increasing deluge of bad and
useless books. Their judgments should be uncorrupted, just, and
rigorous; and every piece of bad work done by an incapable
person, every device by which the empty head tries to come to
the assistance of the empty purse, that is to say, about nine
tenths of all existing books,- should be mercilessly scourged. Lit-
erary journals would then perform their duty; which is to keep
down the craving for writing, and put a check upon the decep-
tion of the public, instead of furthering these evils by a miserable


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12948
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
toleration which plays into the hands of author and publisher,
and robs the reader of his time and his money.
If there were such a paper as I mean, every bad writer, every
brainless compiler, every plagiarist from others' books, every hol-
low and incapable place-hunter, every sham philosopher, every
vain and languishing poetaster, would shudder at the prospect
of the pillory in which his bad work would inevitably have to
stand soon after publication. This would paralyze his twitching
fingers, to the true welfare of literature; in which what is bad is
not only useless but positively pernicious. Now, most books are
bad and ought to have remained unwritten. Consequently praise
should be as rare as is now the case with blame; which is with-
held under the influence of personal considerations, coupled with
the maxim, "Accedas socius, laudes lauderis ut absens. "*
It is quite wrong to try to introduce into literature the same
toleration as must necessarily prevail in society towards those
stupid, brainless people who everywhere swarm in it. In liter-
ature such people are impudent intruders; and to disparage the
bad is here duty towards the good, for he who thinks nothing
bad will think nothing good either. Politeness, which has its
source in social relations, is in literature an alien and often in-
jurious element; because it exacts that bad work shall be called
good.
In this way the very aim of science and art is directly
frustrated.
This ideal journal could, to be sure, be written only by peo-
ple who joined incorruptible honesty with rare knowledge and
still rarer power of judgment: so that perhaps there could at the
very most be one, and even hardly one, in the whole country;
but there it would stand, like a just Areopagus, every member
of which would have to be elected by all the others. Under the
system that prevails at present, literary journals are carried on
by a clique, and secretly perhaps also by booksellers for the
good of the trade; and they are often nothing but coalitions of
bad heads to prevent the good ones succeeding. As Goethe once
remarked to me, nowhere is there so much dishonesty as in lit-
erature.
But above all, anonymity, that shield of all literary rascality,
would have to disappear. It was introduced under the pretext
of protecting the honest critic, who warned the public, against the
*"Agree as a companion, praise that when absent you may be yourself
praised. »


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12949
resentment of the author and his friends. But where there is
one case of this sort, there will be a hundred where it merely
serves to take all responsibility from the man who cannot stand
by what he has said; or possibly to conceal the shame of one
who has been cowardly and base enough to recommend a book
to the public for the purpose of putting money into his own
pocket. Often enough it is only a cloak for covering the obscur-
ity, incompetence, and insignificance of the critic. It is incredi-
ble what impudence these fellows will show, and what literary
trickery they will venture to commit, as soon as they know they
are safe under the shadow of anonymity. Let me recommend a
general Anticriticism, a universal medicine or panacea, to put a
stop to all anonymous reviewing, whether it praises the bad or
blames the good: Rascal, your name! For a man to wrap himself
up and draw his hat over his face, and then fall upon people
who are walking about without any disguise,- this is not the part
of a gentleman: it is the part of a scoundrel and a knave.
An anonymous review has no more authority than an anony-
mous letter; and one should be received with the same mistrust
as the other. Or shall we take the name of the man who con-
sents to preside over what is, in the strict sense of the word,
une société anonyme, as a guarantee for the veracity of his col-
leagues?
«<
Even Rousseau, in the preface to the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,'
declares, "Tout honnête homme doit avouer les livres qu'il pub-
lie;" which in plain language means that every honorable man
ought to sign his articles, and that no one is honorable who does
not do so. How much truer this is of polemical writing, which
is the general character of reviews! Riemer was quite right in
the opinion he gives in his 'Reminiscences of Goethe': “An
overt enemy," he says, an enemy who meets you face to face,
is an honorable man, who will treat you fairly, and with whom
you can come to terms and be reconciled: but an enemy who
conceals himself is a base, cowardly scoundrel, who has not cour-
age enough to avow his own judgment; it is not his opinion
that he cares about, but only the secret pleasure of wreaking his
anger without being found out or punished. " This must also
have been Goethe's opinion, as he was generally the source from
which Riemer drew his observations. And indeed, Rousseau's
* "Every honest man ought to acknowledge the books he publishes. "


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12950
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
maxim applies to every line that is printed. Would a man in a
mask ever be allowed to harangue a mob, or speak in any assem-
bly, and that too when he was going to attack others and over-
whelm them with abuse?
Anonymity is the refuge for all literary and journalistic ras-
cality. It is a practice which must be completely stopped.
Every article, even in a newspaper, should be accompanied by
the name of its author; and the editor should be made strictly
responsible for the accuracy of the signature. The freedom of
the press should be thus far restricted: so that what a man pub-
licly proclaims through the far-sounding trumpet of the news-
paper, he should be answerable for at any rate with his honor,
if he has any; and if he has none, let his name neutralize the
effect of his words. And since even the most insignificant person
is known in his own circle, the result of such a measure would
be to put an end to two thirds of the newspaper lies, and to
restrain the audacity of many a poisonous tongue.
Translation of T. Bailey Saunders.
―
ON AUTHORSHIP
THE
-
HERE are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write
for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's
sake. While the one have had thoughts or experiences
which seem to them worth communicating, the others want
money; and so they write
- for money. Their thinking is part
of the business of writing. They may be recognized by the way
in which they spin out their thoughts to the greatest possible
length; then too, by the very nature of their thoughts, which are
only half true, perverse, forced, vacillating; again, by the aversion
they generally show to saying anything straight out, so that they
may seem other than they are. Hence their writing is deficient
in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they betray
that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper. This
sometimes happens with the best authors; now and then, for
example, with Lessing in his 'Dramaturgie,' and even in many
of Jean Paul's romances. As soon as the reader perceives this,
let him throw the book away; for time is precious. The truth is
that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering


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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
12951
paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the
pretext that he has something to say.
Writing for money and reservation of copyright are at bot-
tom the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth
writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of lit-
erature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This
can never happen as long as money is to be made by writing.
It seems
as though the money lay under a curse; for every
author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in
any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest
men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing
or for very little. And here too that Spanish proverb holds
good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found
in the same purse,-"Honra y provecho no caben en un saco.
The reason why literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is
simply and solely that people write books to make money. A
man who is in want sits down and writes a book, and the public
is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary effect of this is the
ruin of language.
>>
T
A great many bad writers make their whole living by that
foolish mania of the public for reading nothing but what has just
been printed,—journalists, I mean. Truly, a most appropriate
In plain language it is journeymen, day-laborers!
name.