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I need hardly remark in the presence of this audience that the name of Schopenhauer is better known to most general readers, in our day, than is that of any other modern Continental metaphysician, except Kant. The reputed heretic has in this field the reward of his dangerous reputation, and I scarcely know whether to fear or to rejoice, as I now approach the treatment of so noteworthy and significant a man, at the position in which Schopenhauer’s fame puts his expositor. In one respect, of course, my task is rendered easier by all this popular repute of my hero. Of his doctrine most of us have heard a good deal, and many of us may have followed to a considerable extent his reasoning; at all events we have become acquainted, at least by hearsay, with the fact that his outcome was something called Pessimism. And thus, in dealing with him, I am not voyaging with you in seas unknown to all but the technical students of philosophy, as was last time the case, when I told you of Hegel. On the other hand, the kind of reputation that his writings have very naturally won is decidedly against me when I undertake to treat him with genuinely philosophical fairness. It is so much easier to be edifying than to face with courage certain serious and decidedly tragic realities! Let me be frank with you, then, at the outset about my difficulty. It is, plainly stated, simply this: You have heard that Schopenhauer is a pessimist. You, meanwhile, are surely for the most part no pessimists. Therefore, as we approach Schopenhauer, you want me, in your secret hearts. ​if not in your expressed wishes, to refute Schopenhauer. Now refutation is, as I have already tried to maintain, a thing of only very moderate service in the study of philosophy. We may refute a great thinker’s accidental misjudgments; we can seldom refute his deeper insights. And as I must forthwith assure you, and shall very soon show you, Schopenhauer’s pessimism is actually expressive of a very deep insight into life. This insight is indeed not a final one. We must transcend it. But surely you would justly discover me in a very unphilosophical, and in fact very unworthily self-contradictory, attitude if now, after all these successive efforts to show you a continuity and a common body of truth in the modern philosophers, I should suddenly, at this point of my discourse, assume the airs of a champion of the faith against the infidels, and should fall to hewing and hacking at Schopenhauer with genuinely crusading zeal. In fact it is not my calling to do anything of the sort. I always admire the crusaders, but my admiration is due rather to their enthusiasm than to their philosophical many-sidedness; rather to the vitality of their faith than to the universality of their comprehension. I fear that if I should try to join myself unto them they would not accept me without reserve. I cannot therefore treat Schopenhauer as a crusader would treat him. He is to me a philosopher of considerable dignity, whom we could ill spare from the roll of modern thinkers; whom I do not by any means follow as disciple, but to whom I owe, in common with other philosophical students, a great deal, for his skillful analysis and for his fearlessly clear assertion of his own significant temperament.

But as to pessimism itself, Schopenhauer’s famous doctrine, as to this terrible view that life is through and through tragic and evil, what is my attitude towards that? I must, you will probably say, either accept it, and then ​must avow it in manly fashion, or I must reject it. And if I reject it, then I am bound to refute it. My answer to the question is not far to seek. As an actual fact I do accept, and avow with perfect freedom, what to many gentle minds seems, as I am aware, a pessimistic view of life; namely, precisely the view that at the last time we found Hegel maintaining and expanding into his marvelously ingenious and technical doctrine of what he called Negativität as the very essence of the passionate spiritual existence. The spiritual life isn’t a gentle or an easy thing. It is indeed through and through and forever paradoxical, earnest, enduring, toilsome; yes, if you like, painfully tragic. Whoever hopes to find it anything else, either now or in some far-off heaven, hopes unquestionably in vain. If that is pessimism, — and in one sense, namely, in the sense in which many tender but thoughtless souls have used the phrase, it is pessimism, being opposed to the gentle and optimistic hopes of such, — then I am now, and always shall be, in that very sense no optimist, but a maintainer of the sterner view that life is forever tragic. In so far as Schopenhauer has sought to make this plain, I follow him unhesitatingly, and honor him for his mercilessness. Why I do so I shall try to make plain before this lecture is done. In so far, however, as Schopenhauer held that the tragedy of life disheartens every spirit that has once come to know the truth, I as plainly and absolutely reject so much of his outcome. The world is, on the whole, very nearly as tragic as Schopenhauer represents it to be. Only spirituality consists in being heroic enough to accept the tragedy of existence, and to glory in the strength wherewith it is given to the true lords of life to conquer this tragedy, and to make their world after all divine. The way to meet Schopenhauer’s pessimism is, not to refute its assertions, but to grapple practically with its truths. And if you do so, you will find as the real heart and significance of Schopenhauer’s own gloomy ​thought, a vital, yes, even a religious assurance, which will make you thank God, that, as we tried to suggest by a phrase quoted in an earlier lecture, the very ice and cold, the very frost and snow, of philosophy praise and magnify him forever. In short, my attitude towards pessimism is one that, some years ago, in an article written for a Harvard College journal, I tried to express in words suggested by the then current accusation that too many Harvard students of ability were accustomed to pose as pessimists. If I quote now my former words, it is only because the right bearing towards such matters seems to me so simple that when I try to express it, I am troubled with a poverty of phrases, and have to fall back on oft repeated formulae, for which perhaps some defiant interjection, hurled into the face of our common enemy, namely, the inner spiritual sluggishness wherewith a man is so easily beset, would be the best embodiment. But, at all events, these were my poor words: —

“One hears nowadays, very often, of youthful pessimism, prevalent, for instance, among certain clever college students. When I hear of these things, I do not always regret them. On the contrary, I think that the best man is the one who can see the truth of pessimism, can absorb and transcend that truth, and can be nevertheless an optimist, not by virtue of his failure to recognize the evil of life, but by virtue of his readiness to take part in the struggle against this evil. Therefore, I am often glad when I hear of this spread of pessimistic ideas among studious but undeveloped youth. For, I say to myself, if these men are brave men, their sense of the evil that hinders our human life will some day arouse them to fight this evil in dead earnest, while if they are not brave men, optimism can be of no service to cowards. But in any case I like to suggest to such brave and pessimistic youth where the solution of their problem must lie. It surely cannot lie in any romantic dream of a pure and innocent world, ​far off somewhere, in the future, in heaven or in the isles of the blessed. These things are not for us. We are born for the world of manly business, and if we are worthy of our destiny, we may possibly have some good part in the wars of the Lord. For nothing better have we any right to hope, and for an honest man that is enough.”

If these words which I have quoted seem to you rather unfeeling in their hardness, I beseech you to wait until I am done, not merely with to-day’s exposition of Schopenhauer, but with my whole course, before you judge them. As for living up to this obvious, but tremendously difficult kind of courage, of course you will not need to hear me say that a student of philosophy finds that quite as hard a task as do any of his neighbors. I am only stating the doctrine. A coward is not an admirable person, but it is only too easy to be one.

Thus, then, forsaking for the moment my position as chronicler, I try to tell you, in this wholly unoriginal fashion, what, to be sure, has always been the creed of brave men ever since our remote ancestors, or their cousins, struggled with the climate of the glacial period. And having thus freed my mind and defined my attitude towards pessimism, I can venture to assume once more the position of the historical student, and to set forth something of Schopenhauer’s contribution to the great philosophic task of modern humanity.

The general character and worth of this contribution I must first describe, and in doing so I shall follow in the main the view of a recent German writer on the history of philosophy, namely. Professor Windelband, to whose well-known book, “Die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie,” these lectures have owed throughout not a little. Modern idealism, as it developed since Kant, was from the first an effort to discover the rationality of our world through an ​analysis of the nature of consciousness. Such analysis was the problem that Kant bequeathed to his successors. For Kant showed that we know the world only in terms of consciousness and its laws, so that the understanding is the creator of the show nature that stands before our senses. Fichte tried to solve this Kantian problem by proving that it is the moral law which is the very heart and essence of our consciousness, so that our seemingly outer world is there as a means whereby we can do our work and win our deeper self. The romanticists, however, felt that consciousness was no more exhaustively expressed by the moral will than by any other humane interest of the self. Thus, there entered into philosophy a reign of caprice, to which even Hegel did not put an end. Once understand the nature of this caprice, and you will see the place which Schopenhauer’s system is to hold in the development of doctrine.

Were it not, says all idealism, were it not that I am just such a conscious being as I am, my world would be a wholly different one from the world that I see. To know the real nature of my world I must therefore understand my own deeper self. Is there anything fixed, stable, necessary, about my nature? If so, then I am necessarily forced to exist in just this sort of world. Bat if I am essentially of no one fixed and necessary nature, then at any moment my whole world might alter. The ordinary realism of common sense doesn’t fear this, doesn’t feel the necessity of an ultimate appeal to anything stable or fixed about me as the real source of truth, because ordinary realism holds that the truth is there beyond me, as something knowable to all people of good intelligence, in the hard and fast matter of the world of sense. There is the moon yonder. For ordinary realism, the moon is as permanent as nature makes it, and stays there whether any one knows it or not. Hence, in order to ask whether there is anything stable about the world, ​ordinary realism has to put no questions to the inner life. But the very essence of idealism it is to say, My moon, the moon that I see and talk about, the moon of my own world of outer show and of empirical knowledge, is just one of my ideas. You see the same moon only in so far as in your world, in your inner life, there is a fact truly corresponding to what I call the moon in my inner life. Therefore, if you and I are to continue to see the same moon, that must be because both of us have some common and necessary deeper nature, a true and abiding oneness of spirit, that forces us to agree in this respect as to our inner life. Hence, not the abiding matter of the moon, as something that should stay there when you and I had both departed, but some common law that holds for your spirit as for mine, is the basis for the seeming permanence and common outer reality of the moon for us. The moon has the same sort of objective existence that, for instance, at this moment, my lecture has. The lecture exists as thought in me, and as experience in you. But because of a certain community of our thoughts, we all of us have the same lecture more or less present to us. We all of us, moreover, regard the lecture as an outer reality, and we therefore seem to be as much in presence of an objective fact as if the lecture were made of real atoms, instead of ideas. Or again, for the idealistic view, the existence of the events in matter, or of any other external events, resembles the existence at any instant of the price of a stock in the stock-market, or the credit of a great firm in the commercial world. A consensus of the thoughts of the buyer and sellers exists at any moment, which, however well founded, or again however arbitrary and changing this consensus may be, is expressed for the instant as if it were a hard and fast material thing in a genuinely outer world. In fact, prices and credits are ideas, and exist in the show-world of market values and of commercial securities, being but the projections of the various ​ideas of people as these at any moment agree to express themselves. Even so, then, just as this lecture is at this instant a fact because our minds agree in making it so, and just as the price of the stock, or the credit of the great firm, is an often irresistible fact, to which the individual dealer must yield in so far as his own financial might isn’t equal to altering it, even so the moon yonder is likewise for us all an outer fact, because we are forced to agree in regarding it as outer. But our agreement itself is a fact of the deeper life of our common selfhood.

Such common ideas being, then, the idealist's true world, his problem it is to determine whether there is any deeper and impersonally human necessity which guarantees that our ideas shall thus in any wise agree. This necessity must be sought, if at all, in our own hidden nature. Constructive idealists have always sought it in that common band of rationality which, as they conceive, so links us all together that we are organically related parts or moments of one deeper self. This self, which shall express itself in you, in me, in everybody, is to link your experience to mine in such fashion that we shall see related outer worlds. Because this self in you constructs a show-space in three dimensions, and does a similar thing for me, therefore we alike look out into the depths of space, where the same stars seem to glitter for us all. Unity, fixity, assurance, we get, if we get such prizes at all, only by virtue of that rational and spiritual unity that is beneath our lives. Can the philosopher find the true heart and essence of this our common selfhood? If he can, then idealism becomes a system. We are, then, all in one world of truth. The outer world is indeed show, but no illusion; and our life has an organic fixity, a lawful completeness about it, such as every philosophy longs for.

But now, unfortunately, when idealists set about deducing this unity and consistency of the spiritual world from some deep inner principle, their reflection always leaves us ​in one great respect dissatisfied. We very certainly, namely, can never deduce from the idea of our common spirituality the idea of any particular sense thing, such as the moon. Or, to repeat one of my former illustrations, idealists can’t tell us why we are spiritually or rationally bound all alike to perceive a starry world, wherein there shall be a belt of telescopic asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Such facts idealists get, like their neighbors, from daily experience or from science. Ideal- ists may say in general, as Fichte said, that the moral law needs a world of outer experience as the material for its embodiment. They cannot show why just this material is needed. There remains, then, an element of brute fact, a residuum, if you choose, of spiritual caprice, in their world of the all-embracing self. Perhaps we have, as they say, the one deeper self in common, perhaps this deeper self has rational grounds for building in us all alike just this world of sense, of moons, of asteroids, of comets, of jelly-fish, and of all the rest, only there is still, from our finite point of view, a vast element of at least apparent caprice about the entire universe of the spirit as thus built. And all idealists have to recognize this fact of the seeming capriciousness of the external order. The universal reason builds the world, says idealism; but then does not the universal reason seem to build many irrational facts into its world? You see then the difficulty. Our common spiritual nature is to guarantee the truth of our common experience. Unless this nature has some hard and fast necessity in it, of which we can form an adequate conception, there is no satisfaction in our philosophy. But when we try to develop this idea of the universal necessity of the world of our common selfhood, we come once more against an element of the most stubborn caprice. Idealism seems to be an insight as suggestive and inspiring as it is limited. The nature of this divine self has something seemingly irrational about it. Our ​attempted account of the world in terms of the universal reason therefore remains so far a mere programme, a postulate, almost a dogma. And yet dogmas were just what our philosophy had all along been trying to reduce and to rationalize.

In view of this common perplexity of all the idealistic systems, there were certain to arise, upon the historical basis of the Kantian theory, philosophies that not only accepted the perplexity, but that magnified it, that referred it to the very nature of the quasi-mental reality behind the world of sense, and that declared: “Deeper than reason, in this world of the ideal existence, is the caprice which once for all expresses itself in the wealth of nature’s facts.” Of such systebas Schopenhauer’s philosophy is the classic representative. Not that Schopenhauer was in this general tendency alone. Windelband very properly classes under the same head Schelling’s later theologico-philosophical speculations (not studied in these lectures) along with two or three other doctrines. Windelband calls them all by the common name Irrationalismus, A doctrine of this sort, upon a Kantian basis, must run somewhat as follows: The world as we see it exists only in our ideas. We all have a common outer show-world because we all possess a common deeper nature, wherein we are one. You are essentially the same ultimate being that I am. Otherwise we should not have in common this outer projected world of seeming sea waves, star clusters, and city streets. For, as ideas, those things have no outer basis. As common to us all, they must have a deep inner basis. Yet this their basis can’t be anything ultimately and universally rational. For in so far as we actually have reason in common, we think necessary, clearly coherent, exactly interrelated groups of ideas, such, for instance, as the multiplication table. But about the star clusters and the sea waves there is no such ultimate rational unity and coherency. ​Natural laws only bind such tilings together, in the fashion that Kant so prettily explained, in case the phenomena to be bound together are once for all there. Why, given sea waves and star clusters and city streets, we should be bound to think them as in some sort of interconnection, Kant has told us. Only no such laws of nature can explain why there shoidd be the phenomena there that are thus to conform to law. This is capricious. This is due to our common but irrational nature. The world of the true idealism isn’t so much the world of the rational and divine self, as it is the world of the deep unreason that lies at the very basis of all of our natures, of all our common selfhood. Why should there be any world at all for us? Isn’t it just because we are all actually minded to see one? And isn’t this being minded to see a world as ultimately and brutally unreasonable a fact as you could name? Let us find for this fact, then, a name not so exalted as Fichte’s high-sounding speech would love. Let us call this ultimate nature of ours, which forces us all alike to see a woild of phenomena in the show forms of space and time, simply our own deep common Will. Let us drop the divine name for it. Will, merely as such, isn’t precisely a rational thing; it’s capricious. It wills because it does will; and if it wills in us all to be of such nature as to see just these stars and houses, then see them we must, and there is the end of it.

Thus stated, you have an irrationalism on an idealistic basis, a doctrine that may be summed up in three propositions; —

1. The world has existence only as we see it.

2. What facts we are to see can only be learned from experience, and cannot be found a priori through any absurd transcendental deductions of the so-called essence of any absolute spirit.

3. The deepest ground, however, for all these seen facts, and for the community of our various visible worlds, ​is the common and single World-Will, which, expressed in all of us equally, forces us to see alike, but does so simply because this is the particular caprice that it happens to have, so that it embodies itself for us and in us as just this show-world, rather than any other, because such is its fashion of willing.

The obvious value of such a theory is that it is at once idealistic in its analysis of the presuppositions of life, just to the direct and irresistible reality of the facts of experience, and disposed, after all, to go deeper than experience in its search for the ultimate truth of the world. Final it certainly is not in this form. But it has an obvious advantage over the sort of caprice that, as we saw, was characteristic of the philosophy of the romantic school. Their caprice was the fickleness of private and individual choice. For them you can change, as it were, at any moment of time, your show-world. For them the man of genius makes whatever world he chooses. But for this theory of Schopenhauer’s there is but one caprice, and that is the caprice of the World-Will itself, which once for all has hit upon this particular world of facts in time and in space. For us, in our individual capacity, there is no further caprice. We are in presence of this world now, because we ourselves are embodiments of the world-will. We cannot help the fact any longer. Experience is experience; fact is fact; the show is going on for us all alike; the world-will has chosen; but it has not chosen at any point in time. Hence in the world, as it is in time, there is no further caprice, only fact. Time itself is indeed not any ultimate reality. Time belongs to the show-world, and is there like any other fact or form of things, because the world-will fancies such a form for the things of sense. But just for this very reason, we, as individuals, are just where we are, and the realities of sense and of science, although susceptible of so deep and mysterious an interpretation as this, are as inevitable and as objective for us ​as ever the most naive and unreflectively superficial realism made them. As against such realism our doctrine possesses depth, philosophical keenness of analysis, idealistic insight. As against the romantic idealism, our doctrine has the advantage of objectivity and fixity. Just because our common temporal existence is part of the caprice of the World-Will, this temporal existence itself has for us individuals reality and fixity.

So much for the theoretical side of our author’s doctrine. On the practical side, in respect, namely, of his pessimism, we shall find Schopenhauer in a very interesting historical relation to Hegel. In fact, as we shall learn, our author’s pessimism is but another aspect of the same insight into the paradoxical logic of passion which we have discovered at the heart of Hegel’s doctrine. It is true that Schopenhauer’s World-Will, this blind power that, according to him, embodies itself in our universe, appears in his account, at first, as something that might be said to possess passion without logic. Yet this first view of the World-Will soon turns out to be inadequate. The very caprice of the terrible principle is seen, as we go on, to involve a sort of secondary rationality, a logic, fatal and gloomy, as well as deeply paradoxical, but still none the less truly rational for all that. Schopenhauer’s world is, in fact, tragic in much the same sense as Hegel’s. Only, for Schopenhauer the tragedy is hopeless, blind, undivine; while for Hegel it is the divine tragedy of the much-tried Logos, whose joy is above all the sorrows of his world. Were this difference between these two thinkers merely one of personal and speculative opinion, it might have little significance. But since it involves, as we shall find, one of the most truly vital problems of our modern life, one which meets us at every step in our literature and in our ethical controversies, we shall find it well worth our while to study the contrast more closely. First, then, here, let us see something of the man Schopenhauer, and afterwards we may estimate the doctrine. ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/265 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/266 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/267 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/268 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/269 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/270 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/271 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/272 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/273 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/274 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/275 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/276 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/277 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/278 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/279 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/280 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/281 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/282 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/283 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/284 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/285 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/286 ​Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/287 ​pessimism he gives us an universal expression for the whole negative side of life. If you will let me speak of private experience, I myself have often found it deeply comforting, in the most bitter moments, to have discounted, so to speak, all the petty tragedies of experience, all my own weakness and caprice and foolishness and ill fortune, by one such absolute formula for evil as Schopenhauer’s doctrine gives me. It is the fate of life to be restless, capricious, and therefore tragic. Happiness comes, indeed, but by all sorts of accidents; and it flies as it comes. One thing only that is greater than this fate endures in us if we are wise of heart; and this one thing endures forever in the heart of the great World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection. This one thing, as I hold, is the eternal resolution that if the world will be tragic, it shall still, in Satan’s despite, be spiritual. And this resolution is, I think, the very essence of the Spirit’s own eternal joy.