the pure intuitions and the categories, and the Critique of Judgment, he
rejects, and with full consciousness, just those parts of Kant on which the
Fichtean school had built further. Finally, Herbart's method of thought,
his impersonality, the at times anxious caution of his inquiry, and the
neatness of his conceptions, are somewhat akin to Kant's, only that he
lacked the gift of combination to a much greater degree than his great
predecessor on the Königsberg rostrum. His remarkable acuteness is busier
in loosening than in binding; it is more happy in the discovery of
contradictions than in their resolution. Therefore he does not belong to
the kings who have decided the fate of philosophy for long periods of time;
he stands to one side, though it is true he is the most important figure
among these who occupy such a position.
The first to give his adherence to Herbart in essential positions, and so
to furnish occasion for the formation of an Herbartian school, was Drobisch
(born 1802), in two critiques which appeared in 1828 and 1830. Besides
Drobisch, from whom we have valuable discussions of Logic (1836, 5th ed.,
1887) and Empirical Psychology (1842), and an interesting essay on _Moral
Statistics and the Freedom of the Will_ (1867), L.
Strümpell (born 1812;
_The Principal Points in Herbart's Metaphysics Critically Examined_, 1840),
is a professor in Leipsic. The organ of the school, the _Zeitschrift
für exakte Philosophie_, now edited by Flügel (the first volume, 1860,
contained a survey of the literature of the school), was at first issued
by T. Ziller, the pedagogical thinker, and Allihn. The _Zeitschrift für
Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft_, from 1859, edited by M. Lazarus
(born 1824; _The Life of the Soul_, 3 vols., 1856
_seq_., 3d ed., 1883
_seq_.) and H. Steinthal (born 1823; _The Origin of Language_, 4th ed.,
1888; _Sketch of the Science of Language_, part i. 2d ed., 1881; _General
Ethics_, 1885) of Berlin, also belongs to the Herbartian movement.
Distinguished service has been done in psychology by Nahlowsky (_The Life
of Feeling_, 1862, 2d. ed., 1884), Theodor Waitz in Marburg (1821-84;
_Foundation of Psychology_, 1846; _Text-book of Psychology_, 1849), and
Volkmann in Prague (1822-77; _Text-book of Psychology_, 3d. ed., by
Cornelius, 1884 and 1885); while Friedrich Exner (died 1853) was formerly
much spoken of as an opponent of the Hegelian psychology (1843-44). Robert
Zimmermann in Vienna (born 1824) represents an extreme formalistic tendency
in aesthetics (_History of Aesthetics_, 1858; _General Esthetics as Science
of Form_, 1865; further, a series of thorough essays on subjects in the
history of philosophy). Among historians of philosophy Thilo has given a
rather one-sided representation of the Herbartian standpoint. The school's
philosophers of religion have been mentioned above (p.
532). Beneke, whom
we have joined with Fries on account of his anthropological standpoint,
stands about midway between Herbart and Schopenhauer. He shares in the
former's interest in psychology, in the latter's foundation of metaphysical
knowledge on inner experience, and in the dislike felt by both for Hegel;
while, on the other hand, he differs from Herbart in his empirical method,
and from Schopenhauer in the priority ascribed to representation over
effort.
%3. Pessimism: Schopenhauer.%
Schopenhauer is in all respects the antipodes of Herbart. If in Herbart
philosophy breaks up into a number of distinct special inquiries,
Schopenhauer has but one fundamental thought to communicate, in the
carrying out of which, as he is convinced, each part implies the whole and
is implied by the whole. The former operates with sober concepts where the
latter follows the lead of gifted intuition. The one is cool, thorough,
cautious, methodical to the point of pedantry; the other is passionate,
ingenious, unmethodical to the point of capricious dilettantism. In the one
case, philosophy is as far as possible exact science, in which the person
of the thinker entirely retires behind the substance of the inquiry; in the
other, philosophy consists in a sum of artistic conceptions, which derive
their content and value chiefly from the individuality of the author. The
history of philosophy has no other system to show which to the same
degree expresses and reflects the personality of the philosopher as
Schopenhauer's. This personality, notwithstanding its limitations and its
whims, was important enough to give interest to Schopenhauer's views, even
apart from the relative truth which they contain.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the son of a merchant in Dantzic and
his wife Johanna, _née_ Trosiener, who subsequently became known as a
novelist. His early training was gained from foreign travel, but after the
death of his father he exchanged the mercantile career, which he had begun
at his father's request, for that of a scholar, studying under G.E. Schulze
in Göttingen, and under Fichte at Berlin. In 1813 he gained his doctor's
degree in Jena with a dissertation _On the Fourfold Root of the Principle
of Sufficient Reason_. Then he moved from Weimar, the residence of his
mother, where he had associated considerably with Goethe and had been
introduced to Indian philosophy by Fr. Mayer, to Dresden (1814-18). In the
latter place he wrote the essay _On Sight and Colors_
(1816; subsequently
published by the author in Latin), and his chief work, _The World as Will
and Idea_ (1819; new edition, with a second volume, 1844). After the
completion of the latter he began his first Italian journey, while his
second tour fell in the interval between his two quite unsuccessful
attempts (in Berlin 1820 and 1825) to propagate his philosophy from the
professor's desk. From 1831 until his death he lived in learned retirement
in Frankfort-on-the-Main. Here he composed the opuscule _On Will in
Nature_, 1836, the prize treatises _On the Freedom of the Human Will_ and
_On the Foundation of Ethics_ (together, _The Two Fundamental Problems
of Ethics_, 1841), and the collection of minor treatises _Parerga and
Paralipomena_, 2 vols., 1851 (including an essay "On Religion").
J. Frauenstädt has published a considerable amount of posthumous material
(among other things the translation, _B. Gracians Handorakel der
Weltklugheit_); the _Collected Works_ (6 vols., 1873-74, 2d ed., 1877, with
a biographical notice); _Lichtstrahlen aus Schopenhauers Werken_, 1861, 5th
ed. 1885; and a _Schopenhauer Lexicon_, 2 vols., 1871.[1]
[Footnote 1: From the remaining Schopenhauer literature (F. Laban has
published a chronological survey of it, 1880) we may call attention to the
critiques of the first edition of the chief work by Herbart and Beneke, and
that of the second edition by Fortlage (_Jenaische Litteratur Zeitung_,
1845, Nos. 146-151); J.E. Erdmann _Herbart und Schopenhauer, eine Antithese
(Zeitschrift für Philosophie_, 1851); Wilh. Gwinner, _Schopenhauers
Leben_, 1878 (the second edition of _Schopenhauer aus persönlichem
Umgang dargestellt_, 1862); Fr. Nietzsche, _Schopenhauer als Erzieher
(Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Stück iii_., 1874); O.
Busch, _A.
Schopenhauer_, 2d. ed., 1878; K. Peters, _Schopenhauer als Philosoph und
Schriftsteller_, 1880; R. Koeber, _Die Philosophie A.
Schopenhauers_, 1888.
[The English reader may be referred to Haldane and Kemp's translation of
_The World as Will and Idea_, 3 vols., 1883-86; the translation of _The
Fourfold Root_ and the _Will in Nature_ in Bohn's Philosophical Library,
1889; Saunders's translations from the _Parerga and Paralipomena_, 1889
_seq_.; Helen Zimmern's _Arthur Schopenhauer, his Life and his Philosophy_,
1876; W. Wallace's _Schopenhauer_, Great Writers Series, 1890 (with a
bibliography by Anderson, including references to numerous magazine
articles, etc.); Sully's _Pessimism_, 2d ed., 1882, chap. iv.; and Royce's
_Spirit of Modern Philosophy_, chap, viii., 1892.--TR.]]
In regard to subjective idealism Schopenhauer confesses himself a
thoroughgoing Kantian. That sensations are merely states in us has long
been known; Kant opened the eyes of the world to the fact that the forms of
knowledge are also the property of the subject. I know things only as they
appear to me, as I represent them in virtue of the constitution of my
intellect; the world is my idea. The Kantian theory, however, is capable of
simplification, the various forms of cognition may be reduced to a single
one, to the category of causality or principle of sufficient reason--which
was preferred by Kant himself--as the general expression of the regular
connection of our representations. This principle, in correspondence with
the several classes of objects, or rather of representations--viz., pure
(merely formal) intuitions, empirical (complete) intuitions, acts of will,
abstract concepts--has four forms: it is the _principium rationis essendi,
rationis fiendi, rationis agendi, rationis cognoscendi_.
The _ratio
essendi_ is the law which regulates the coexistence of the parts of space
and the succession of the divisions of time. The _ratio fiendi_ demands for
every change of state another from which it regularly follows as from its
cause, and a substance as its unchangeable substratum--
matter. All changes
take place necessarily, all that is real is material; the law of causality
is valid for phenomena alone, not beyond them, and holds only for the
states of substances, not for substances themselves. In inorganic nature
causes work mechanically, in organic nature as stimuli (in which the
reaction is not equal to the action), and in animated nature as motives.
A motive is a conscious (but not therefore a free) cause; the law of
motivation is the _ratio agendi_. This serial order,
"mechanical cause,
stimulus, and motive," denotes only distinctions in the mode of action, not
in the necessity of action. Man's actions follow as inevitably from his
character and the motives which influence him as a clock strikes the hours;
the freedom of the will is a chimera. Finally, the _ratio cognoscendi_
determines that a judgment must have a sufficient ground in order to be
true. Judgment or the connection of concepts is the chief activity of the
reason, which, as the faculty of abstract thought and the organ of science,
constitutes the difference between man and the brute, while the possession
of the understanding with its intuition of objects is common to both. In
opposition to the customary overestimation of this gift of mediate
representations, of language, and of reflection, Schopenhauer gives
prominence to the fact that the reason is not a creative faculty like the
understanding, but only a receptive power, that it clarifies and transforms
the content furnished by intuition without increasing it by new
representations.
Objective cognition is confined within the circle of our representations;
all that is knowable is phenomenon. Space, time, and causality spread out
like a triple veil between us and the _per se_ of things, and prevent a
vision of the true nature of the world. There is one point, however, at
which we know more than mere phenomena, where of these three disturbing
media only one, time-form, separates us from the thing in itself. This
point is the consciousness of ourselves.
On the one hand, I appear to myself as body. My body is a temporal,
spatial, material object, an object like all others, and with them subject
to the laws of objectivity. But besides this objective cognition, I have,
further, an immediate consciousness of myself, through which I apprehend
my true being--I know myself as willing. My will is more than a mere
representation, it is the original element in me, the truly real which
appears to me as body. The will is related to the intellect as the primary
to the secondary, as substance to accident; it is related to the body
as the inner to the outer, as reality to phenomenon. The act of will is
followed at once and inevitably by the movement of the body willed, nay,
the two are one and the same, only given in different ways: will is the
body seen from within, body the will seen from without, the will become
visible, objectified. After the analogy of ourselves, again, who appear to
ourselves as material objects but in truth are will, all existence is to
be judged. The universe is the _mac-anthropos_; the knowledge of our own
essence, the key to the knowledge of the essence of the world. Like our
body, the whole world is the visibility of will. The human will is the
highest stage in the development of the same principle which manifests its
activity in the various forces of nature, and which properly takes its name
from the highest species. To penetrate further into the inner nature of
things than this is impossible. What that which presents itself as will
and which still remains after the negation of the latter (see below) is in
itself, is for us absolutely unknowable.
The world is _per se_ will. None of the predicates are to be attributed to
the primal will which we ascribe to things in consequence of our subjective
forms of thought--neither determination by causes or ends, nor plurality:
it stands outside the law of causality, as also outside space and time,
which form the _principium individuationis_. The primal will is groundless,
blind stress, unconscious impulse toward existence; it is one, the one
and all, [Greek: en nai pan]. That which manifests itself as gravity, as
magnetic force, as the impulse to growth, as the _vis medicatrix naturae_,
is only this one world-will, whose unity (not conscious character!) shows
itself in the purposiveness of its embodiments. The essence of each thing,
its hidden quality, at which empirical explanation finds its limit, is its
will: the essence of the stone is its will to fall; that of the lungs is
the will to breathe; teeth, throat, and bowels are hunger objectified.
Those qualities in which the universal will gives itself material
manifestation form a series with grades of increasing perfection, a realm
of unchangeable specific forms or eternal Ideas, which (with a real value
difficult to determine) stand midway between the one primal will and
the numberless individual beings. That the organic individual does not
perfectly correspond to the ideal of its species, but only approximates
this more or less closely, is grounded in the fact that the stadia in the
objectification of the will, or the Ideas, contend, as it were, for matter;
and whatever of force is used up in the victory of the higher Ideas over
the lower is lost for the development of the examples of the former. The
higher the level on which a being stands the clearer the expression of its
individuality. The most general forces of nature, which constitute the raw
mass, play the fundamental bass in the world-symphony, the higher stages
of inorganic nature, with the vegetable and animal worlds, the harmonious
middle parts, and man the guiding treble, the significant melody. With the
human brain the world as idea is given at a stroke; in this organ the will
has kindled a torch in order to throw light upon itself and to carry out
its designs with careful deliberation; it has brought forth the intellect
as its instrument, which, with the great majority of men, remains in a
position of subservience to the will. Brain and thought are the same; the
former is nothing other than the will to know, as the stomach is will
to digest. Those only talk of an immaterial soul who import into
philosophy--where such ideas do not belong--concepts taught them when they
were confirmed.
Schopenhauer's philosophy is as rich in inconsistencies as his personality
was self-willed and unharmonious. "He carries into his system all the
contradictions and whims of his capricious nature," says Zeller. From the
most radical idealism (the objective world a product of representation) he
makes a sharp transition to the crassest materialism (thought a function of
the brain); first matter is to be a mere idea, now thought is to be merely
a material phenomenon! The third and fourth books of _The World as Will and
Idea_, which develop the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of their author,
stand in as sharp a contradiction to the first (poëtical) and the second
(metaphysical) books as these to each other. While at first it was
maintained that all representation is subject to the principle of
sufficient reason, we are now told that, besides causal cognition, there is
a higher knowledge, one which is free from the control of this principle,
viz., aesthetic and philosophical intuition. If, before, it was said that
the intellect is the creature and servant of the will, we now learn that in
favored individuals it gains the power to throw off the yoke of slavery,
and not only to raise itself to the blessedness of contemplation free from
all desire, but even to enter on a victorious conflict with the tyrant,
to slay the will. The source of this power--is not revealed. R. Haym _(A.
Schopenhauer_, 1864, reprinted from the _Preussische Jahrbücher_) was not
far wrong in characterizing Schopenhauer's philosophy as a clever novel,
which entertains the reader by its rapid vicissitudes.
The contemplation which is free from causality and will is the essence of
aesthetic life; the partial and total sublation, the quieting and negation
of the will, that of ethical life. It is but seldom, and only in the
artistic and philosophical genius, that the intellect succeeds in freeing
itself from the supremacy of the will, and, laying aside the question of
the _why_ and _wherefore_, _where_ and _when_, in sinking itself completely
in the pure _what_ of things. While with the majority of mankind, as with
animals, the intellect always remains a prisoner in the service of the will
to live, of self-preservation, of personal interests, in gifted men,
in artists and thinkers, it strips off all that is individual, and, in
disinterested vision of the Ideas, becomes pure, timeless subject, freed
from the will. Art removes individuality from the subject as well as from
the object; its comforting and cheering influence depends on the fact that
it elevates those enjoying it to the stand-point--raised above all pain
of desire--of a fixed, calm, completely objective contemplation of the
unchangeable essence, of the eternal types of things.
For aesthetic
intuition the object is not a thing under relations of space, time, and
cause, but only an expression, an exemplification, a representative of
the Idea. Poetry, which presents--most perfectly in tragedy--the Idea of
humanity, stands higher than the plastic arts. The highest rank, however,
belongs to music, since it does not, like the other arts, represent single
Ideas, but--as an unconscious metaphysic, nay, a second, ideal world above
the material world--the will itself. In view of this high appreciation
of their art, it is not surprising that musicians have contributed a
considerable contingent to the band of Schopenhauer worshipers. A different
source of attraction for the wider circle of readers was supplied by the
piquant spice of pessimism.
If the purposiveness of the phenomena of nature points to the unity of the
primal will, the unspeakable misery of life, which Schopenhauer sets forth
with no less of eloquence, proves the blindness and irrationality of the
world-ground. To live is to suffer; the world contains incomparably more
pain than pleasure; it is the worst possible world. In the world of
sub-animal nature aimless striving; in the animal world an insatiable
impulse after enjoyment--while the will, deceiving itself with fancied
happiness to come, which always remains denied it, and continually
tossed to and fro between necessity and _ennui_, never attains complete
satisfaction. The pleasure which it pursues is nothing but the removal of
a dissatisfaction, and vanishes at once when the longing is stilled, to
be replaced by fresh wants, that is, by new pains. In view of the
indescribable misery in the world, to favor optimism is evidence not so
much of folly and blindness as of a wanton disposition.
The old saying is
true: Non-existence is better than existence. The misery, however, is the
just punishment for the original sin of the individual, which gave itself
its particular existence by an act of intelligible freedom. Redemption from
the sin and misery of existence is possible only through a second act
of transcendental freedom, which, since it consists in the complete
transformation of our being, and since it is supernatural in its origin,
the Church is right in describing as a new birth and work of grace.
Morality presupposes pessimistic insight into the badness of the world and
the fruitlessness of all desire, and pantheistic discernment of the untruth
of individual existence and the identity in essence of all individuals
from a metaphysical standpoint. Man is able to free himself from egoistic
self-affirmation only when he perceives the two truths, that all striving
is vain and the longed-for pleasure unattainable, and that all individuals
are at bottom one, viz. manifestations of the same primal will. This is
temporarily effected in sympathy, which, as the only counterpoise to
natural selfishness, is the true moral motive and the source of all love
and justice. The sympathizer sees himself in others and feels their
suffering as his own. The entire negation of the will, however, inspiring
examples of which have been furnished by the Christian ascetics and
Oriental penitents, stands higher than the vulgar virtue of sympathy with
the sufferings of others. Here knowledge, turned away from the individual
and vain to the whole and genuine, ceases to be a motive for the will and
becomes a means of stilling it; the intellect is transformed from a motive
into a quietive, and brings him who gives himself up to the All safely
out from the storm of the passions into the peace of deliverance from
existence. Absence of will, resignation, is holiness and blessedness in
one. For him who has slain the will in himself the motley deceptive dream
of phenomena has vanished, he lives in the ether of true reality, which for
our knowledge is an empty nothingness ("Nirvana"), yet (as the ultimate,
incomprehensible _per se_, which remains after the annulling of the will)
only a relative nothingness--relative to the phenomenon.
Schopenhauer disposes of the sense of responsibility and the reproofs of
conscience, which are inconvenient facts for his determinism, by making
them both refer, not to single deeds and the empirical character, but to
the indivisible act of the intelligible character.
Conscience does not
blame me because I have acted as I must act with my character and the
motives given, but for being what in these actions I reveal myself to be.
_Operari sequitur esse_. My action follows from my being, my being was my
own free choice, and a new act of freedom is alone capable of transforming
it.
If Schopenhauer is fond of referring to the agreement of his views with the
oldest and most perfect religions, the idea lies in the background that
religion,--which springs from the same metaphysical needs as philosophy,
and, for the great multitude, who lack the leisure and the capacity for
philosophical thought, takes the place of the former,--
as the metaphysics
of the people, clothes the same fundamental truths which the philosopher
offers in conceptual form and supports by rational grounds in the garb of
myth and allegory, and places them under the protection of an external
authority. When this character of religion is overlooked, and that which
is intended to be symb