Arthur Schopenhauer: New Material by Him and about Him by Dr. David Asher : New Material by Him and about Him by Dr. David Asher [1 ed.] 9781443876674, 9781443874359

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Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer New Material by Him and about Him by Dr. David Asher Edited and Translated by

Dan Farrelly

Arthur Schopenhauer: New Material by Him and about Him by Dr. David Asher Edited and Translated by Dan Farrelly This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Dan Farrelly All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7435-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7435-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Translator/Editor’s Preface and Notes ........................................................ ix David Asher’s Preface .............................................................................. xiii Arthur Schopenhauer’s Letters to the Editor in the Years 1855-1860 ....... xv Schopenhauer’s Letters to Dr. David Asher ................................................ 1 Appendix ................................................................................................... 37 Supplement A ............................................................................................ 41 Arthur Schopenhauer’s Views on Music Particular points about Schopenhauer’s views on music Supplement B ............................................................................................ 59 Salomon Ibn-Gebirol and Arthur Schopenhauer Supplement C ............................................................................................ 65 About Individual Character Recent Schopenhauer Reception ............................................................... 79 I. French II. English III. Recent German Voices Endnotes .................................................................................................... 95

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Ilse Nagelschmidt for her collaboration and advice, from which I benefited greatly in the course of preparing this translation. Claus Canisius and Lorraine Byrne Bodley were helpful with information on numerous points, and my colleagues Eamonn Jordan, Lilian Chambers, and Rachael Kilgallon encouraged me with their warm enthusiasm. Una, patient and positive as always, contributed with her translator’s eye and ear for correct “collocations” and with her understanding of the rigours of the translator’s trade.

TRANSLATOR/EDITOR’S PREFACE AND NOTES

Of the c. 500 letters written by Schopenhauer, those written to David Asher are of considerable importance and are certainly worth making available to an English-speaking readership. Asher’s own letters to Schopenhauer are not extant, as is the case with many of Schopenhauer’s other correspondents. Asher received the first letter from the philosopher on 16 June 1855 and was in correspondence with him until Schopenhauer’s death in 1860. Asher’s prowess as a linguist was much admired by Schopenhauer, who even sought (without success) to have him translate his major philosophical work into English. He realized that he had in this “apostle” someone who was not only dedicated to him but who was, more importantly, a man with a profound understanding of his thought. It is disturbing to read of Schopenhauer’s reference to Asher’s first communication as coming to him from the “tribe of Israel”. If not exactly contemptuous, this expression was certainly derogatory and reflected the anti-Jewish attitude which was prevalent at the time. In later letters to Asher, Schopenhauer made it clear that he detested the optimism of the Jewish religion – as well as that of Islam. But he could not be labelled anti-Semitic and he tolerated this younger man’s daring criticism, according to which Schopenhauer’s premises were fundamentally correct but from which, with his insistence on pessimism, he was drawing the wrong conclusions. Schopenhauer admired Asher’s assiduity (in promoting the philosopher’s work) and intellectual gifts. However, in the thirty years following Schopenhauer’s death, Asher’s intellectual productivity developed much further. Along with his prowess as a language teacher, he achieved distinction as a scholar way beyond Schopenhauer’s expectations. The article cited below summarizes the life and achievements of this dedicated “apostle” of Schopenhauer.

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Translator/Editor’s Preface and Notes

[From The 1901 Jewish Encyclopedia] Asher, David “German educationist and philosophical writer born at Dresden Dec. 8, 1818 died in Leipsic Dec. 2, 1890. He received his early education at the Jewish school of his native city, and subsequently entered the gymnasium there, being one of the first Jews admitted to the institution. As his mother was unable to support him, his stay there was short. Asher then learned the trade of carving and gilding, thereby supporting himself as a journeyman artisan during his travels to various cities of Germany and Austria. On the invitation of a wealthy relative he went to London, where he learned English at a private school— subsequently becoming assistant teacher there— and at the same time assiduously studied philosophy, philology, Hebrew, and modern languages. Later, Asher held various offices in the Jewish congregation and was tutor to the children of the chief rabbi of England. Upon his return to Germany he obtained the degree of doctor of philosophy at the Berlin University. Settling in Leipsic, he soon acquired reputation as an English instructor, having among his pupils many persons of high rank. For seven years he held the post of English master at the Commercial School and for eight years that of examiner of candidates for higher schools at the university. He was also a member of the Academy for Modern Languages, in Berlin, and official interpreter to the Royal Law Courts of Leipsic. A linguist of the first order, he was engaged in literary work of varied character, and diligently contributed to most of the leading German journals, as well as to the English periodicals the Times, Athenæum, Academy, and Jewish Chronicle. For the last he translated Dr. Döllinger's Address on the History of the Jews of Europe. Asher distinguished himself as an interpreter of the philosophy of Schopenhauer and as an ardent champion of his own coreligionists, energetically combating anti-Semitic attacks. The more important of his numerous works and articles, original and translated, are: Outlines of the Jewish Religion; England's Dichter und Prosaiker der Neuzeit; A Manual on the Study of Modern Languages in General, and of the English Language in Particular with a preface by Dean French; Offenes Sendschreiben an Arthur Schopenhauer; Arthur Schopenhauer als Interpret des Göthe'schen Faust; Der Religiöse Glaube. Eine Psychologische Studie; Arthur Schopenhauer. Neues von Ihm und über Ihn; Das Endergebniss der Schopenhauer'schen Philosophie; Exercises on the Habitual Mistakes of Germans in English Conversation, etc., 3 vols.; Die Wichtigsten Regeln der Englischen Syntax; Entertaining Library for

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the Young, with Explanatory Notes and Complete Vocabularies, etc., 2 vols.; Ueber den Unterricht in den ۩eueren Sprachen; Die Grundzüge der Verfassung Englands; Die Kunst zu Lesen; Selichot, with a new English Translation; Büdinger’s ‘Way of Faith, ’ or the Abridged Bible, translated from the German; Buckle’s Essays, translated into German; Contributions to the History of the Development of the Human Race, by Lazarus Geiger, translated from the German; Das Naturgesetz in der Geisterwelt, by Henry Drummond, translated into German.” Bibliography : Jew. Chron. Dec. 5, 1890, p. 8 Dec. 12, 1890, p. 9.

Notes Double inverted commas are used throughout, except for quotations within quotations. Where Schopenhauer himself writes English phrases or sentences, these are in included in double inverted commas. Square brackets in the main text are, generally, those used by Asher himself. Round brackets are insertions in the text by the editor/translator. Footnotes: Asher’s footnotes and editorial footnotes are merged, with the result that the numbers do not reflect Asher’s original numbering. Editorial footnotes are in square brackets. Titles of books are italicized and titles of essays are in double inverted commas.

DAVID ASHER’S PREFACE

Repeated inquiries about Schopenhauer’s letters to me which were published in the now extinct Deutsches Museum have moved me to publish them as a separate book, accompanied, of course, as they must be, by the same Introduction, which I think is essential. The aim is to make them more accessible to the public and to give them an independent existence. I believed I might use this occasion to include, in an appendix, the articles of mine which were mentioned in the letters and were scattered around in different journals and have been honoured by the attention given them in Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy.1 A further appendix would also include and give at least some account of the newer voices which have been heard, foreign and German, relating to Schopenhauer. May this little book be kindly received by his friends and devotees as a contribution to knowledge about himself and his philosophy. Leipzig, September 1871.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER’S LETTERS TO THE EDITOR IN THE YEARS 1855-1860

Introduction Repeatedly encouraged by followers and admirers of Schopenhauer who have read some of the letters appearing below, I have at last decided to publish all of the letters he wrote to me. I should long since have done this for my own sake, because the letters of Schopenhauer published in 1863 by Lindner and Frauenstädt have shown my relationship to him in a light which does not reflect the truth. See letters 482 and 683 in: Arthur Schopenhauer. Von ihm. Über ihn (Berlin, 1863, Hayn). Out of the ‘little apostle’, as will be seen in the following letters, later became the ‘active apostle whom the departed honoured with our correspondence until the end of his life. Should one find that Schopenhauer was only interested in pandering to his own vanity, that the letters are full of invective against others and praise of himself, and that the request to communicate to him everything written about him is repeated in them with the constancy of a refrain, this is no fault of mine. For my own part, I felt very honoured by the correspondence with him and have always thought of these letters as my most precious treasure, as warming and cheering sun rays falling into a life visited by difficult trials. But why conceal it? First Gwinner’s biography, but especially the letters published by Frauenstädt, have disappointed me and taught me the sad lesson that with Schopenhauer the man has to be separated from the ingenious philosopher. This is not to contest the recent claim, made with such insight and presented so brilliantly, that the system stemmed from his subjectivity, 4 but it will not be possible to deny that the ethical part of his system bears little relation to its author’s way of living.5 Still, the following letters will be welcome to the master’s followers, since they show him in the period when his philosophy was achieving ever greater recognition and when, after such a long period of neglect, he intoned a hymn of jubilation and his prophecies seemed to be fulfilled. At the same time they fill a gap which was left by the break with Frauenstädt, which occurred in 1856. From that time until his death in September 1860 he wrote to him on one single occasion (l.c.

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Arthur Schopenhauer’s Letters to the Editor in the Years 1855-1860

page 711), whereas precisely in this period, to my pleasure, he wrote most frequently to me. Naturally, the letters had to be published with diplomatic exactness. With regard to the offence given to many of the persons mentioned in the letters, what Lindner and Frauenstädt had already published removed all worry from me, since the same and similar invectives are already present in the letters to these gentlemen. The persons concerned will, under the circumstances, easily know how to cope. Of course, anything that constituted an affront had to be omitted. I would also like to have left out the passages concerning myself so as to avoid being accused of vanity; but since, along with the praise, I did not withhold passages in which he criticizes me, one balances the other. Besides, no one shrinks from displaying any distinction shown him by a prince, and if I have deserved even a small part of his sometimes lavish praise, who could blame me if I decorate myself with it as with an order conferred by an intellectual prince? Also the letters I am publishing which were sent to me by Baron von Quandt will doubtless be read with great satisfaction by devotees of Schopenhauer. I have not seen anything in writing that speaks more favourably for Schopenhauer as a person. The warmth with which his friend speaks of him is the finest – because the most disinterested – testimony that has been accorded him. It expresses the love that passes over all failings. To emulate such an example has to be the task of everyone to whom the memory of Schopenhauer is dear no matter what.

Notes 1

Friedrich Ueberweg, Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie, I-III, 1863-1866. [Schopenhauer wrote: “Einliegend ein Huldigungsschreiben vom Stamm Israel, welches mir gelegentlich zurück erbitte. Wenn das hebräische Zeug auch seine Richtigkeit hätte, so ist es ja gar nicht zur Sache. Gedenke Dem nicht zu antworten.” I am including a written tribute from the tribe of Israel which I would like you to return to me some time. If this Hebrew stuff is right in some respects it is not really to the point. I do not intend to reply.] 3 [“Statt zu warten, dass aus Leipzig Ihnen die Lerchen gebraten in’s Maul flögen, habe sogleich an das neue Apöstelchen daselbst geschrieben und sende Ihnen anbei dessen Antwort, die Ihnen interessant seyn wird, und welche auch sowohl von seiner Rechtgläubigkeit als seinem apostolischen Eifer erfreuliches Zeugnis liefert.” 2

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Instead of waiting for a response from Leipzig I wrote immediately to my new little apostle and am sending you herewith his answer, which will be of interest to you and bears gratifying witness both to his orthodoxy and to his apostolic zeal.] 4 This refers to the book published by R. Hayn, Berlin, 1684 [This has to be A.W. Hayn, 1863.] 5 [This is contested by Hübscher in the Introduction to his Arthur Schopenhauer Gesammelte Briefe (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1978), p.iv.]

SCHOPENHAUER’S LETTERS TO DR. DAVID ASHER

1 Dear Doctor, Please accept my warmest thanks for your well thought out Open Letter1 which is so favourable to me. It is more a letter of praise than an attack. But do not expect me to engage in a controversy, which is something I do not do. I prefer to leave it to my system to justify itself and find its way in the world as best it can. But, of course, my followers can be of assistance. Furthermore, I shy away from all letter-writing. But I want to draw your attention to an error you made on page 12 in the footnote: the passage you refer to is not that of a scholastic philosopher but of Cicero.2 I will be very pleased if you complete the lengthier piece you are planning, because I welcome every fairly conducted discussion of my work. Yours, Very sincerely, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main, 16 June 1855

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Schopenhauer’s Letters to Dr. David Asher

2 Dear Doctor Asher, The repeated interest you have shown me makes me take the liberty of approaching you with the request for information about something of considerable interest to me. In January several newspapers carried the news that the Philosophy Faculty in Leipzig has advertised a competition. The topic for the prize is ‘An Exposition and Critique of Schopenhauerian Philosophy’. I hoped, in vain, to find more detail about it in the Leipzig Repertorio. Dr Frauenstädt also knows nothing more about it than what is in that notice. It should not be difficult for you, dear Doctor, since you are on the spot, to gather news about it and to oblige me by passing it on to me. The topic has to be available in a fuller form and also in Latin, perhaps printed, in which case I would ask you to send it to me3 without postage paid. It should at least be on a notice board where you might be good enough to write down the few lines for me. Perhaps you have heard something by word of mouth regarding the drift of the thing. I suspect that there is nothing well-intentioned behind it since I am hated by the followers of Herbart in that faculty. That doesn’t matter. I am happy about this even so. I wait in hope for your favour and remain, Yours devotedly, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main, 6 January 1856

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3 Dear Doctor, Many thanks for the issue of the Journal4 you sent me and still more for your contribution to it. It has given me much pleasure. I attach special importance precisely to this part of my work, which has hardly ever been discussed at all – only, as far as I know, by Noak about five years ago in a ‘Metaphysics’ (I have forgotten the title).5 It was only half a page but so concise that it had everything in it. A real feat. In general, you have achieved all that was possible in the limited space. A couple more pages would have been beneficial. I would especially have liked you to say clearly what I mean by ‘ideas’, namely, just the Platonic ideas, the enduring forms of transitory natural beings, and not to have spoken (page 1916) of ‘idea’ in the singular. This is misleading for people because it takes them back to their woolly notions. I think I have not thanked you for the programme you sent me with the competition question,7 which of course throws little light on the subject. A Leipzig student who visited me said that the initiative came from the philosophical department of Professor Weiß. The students there had had a disputation about my philosophy. Thank you again for your activity in spreading word of my philosophy. Yours devotedly, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main, 20 July 1856 PS. I forgot to mention in the above how happy I am with what you said about my philosophy in your introductory remarks, especially your exposé of the great fundamental difference between my philosophy and that of all other philosophers (page 1918). It is truly amazing that for thousands of years people have been wrong about the fundamental constitution of our being on which so much else depends, while anyone who is without prejudice and is capable of making a judgement must know that things are just the other way round from what has been assumed.

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Schopenhauer’s Letters to Dr. David Asher

4 Dear Doctor Asher, Many thanks for the information you sent me.9 It is entirely new to me. I am glad of it, although I know that a Candidatus theologiae is not permitted to agree with my philosophy as a whole. It is my wish and hope to see the works printed. Back in England again! What it is to be young! Above all I would like to give you, belatedly, the assurance that, however many have already written about my philosophy, no one has so clearly and with such definition stressed its true worth as you have done in your essay about my music, page 190f.10 This is not flattery but the plain truth which I have realized on reading it again. I am only concerned that the periodical has a very limited circulation. I am glad to see that you have written an article about my priority question.11 I have expressed my opinion about this in Parerga vol. 1 pp. 124f. and hope that you have taken this into account.12 Should it have escaped your notice there might be time to follow it up. Precisely at this moment when there are efforts from all sides to do me down they have laden me again with Schelling’s priority although Hillebrand, in his Geschichte der deutschen Literatur,13 acknowledged the injustice of this criticism. But then a certain theologian Fricke recently comes along, in the Blätter für literarische. Unterhaltung,14 and tries to disparage me in every possible way and highlights that passage from Schelling from which I am supposed to have taken everything. Similarly, Weiße, who already in a review of the new Schelling edition in the same journal15 even criticized me for my clarity, comes back at me again in the Protestantische Kirchenzeitung no. 38, says all kinds of bad things about me and even says I am a disciple of Schelling. The source of his ire is that last autumn he paid me a visit and was not received. Menin aeide, thea.16 This is also probably the reason that he reproaches me with being ‘heartless’. Cornill’s book17 is by no means malicious. He even says good things about me. But the good fellow has learnt nothing and therefore understands little. He has no familiarity with Kantian philosophy and speaks accordingly as an innocent, naïve realist; and then when with my philosophy he encounters, as is inevitable, something that he cannot understand and see how it fits in, he shouts about contradictions and justifies himself by citing passages torn out of context. To accuse an author of contradictions is as much as to say that he is an idiot who does not know what he is saying. One should therefore never assume and say

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that there is a contradiction until it is clear that no interpretation is possible. I have often been praised for my strict logical consistency. Once he has acquired some sound learning the contradictions will automatically disappear. I will give you a parallel to your Hebrew discovery.18 I had already read in the Times that Max Müller (in his introduction to Rig Veda which he edited, both text and notes in 1854, or also in his “small essay”, as the Times calls it, on the Veda and the Zend-Avesta) said: “‘Brahm’ means originally force will, wish, and the propulsive power of creation.”19 The bookseller Frisch, Artaria’s successor, went to unbelievable trouble to procure the “small essay” for me: but it does not exist as such but is to be found in Bunsen’s Hippolytus, – to which I have no access. You will have more opportunity there than I have in my Abdera. “Make the best of it.”20 – One is also reminded of the Italian “bramare”, to have a strong desire (heftig wünschen). With best wishes Yours devotedly, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main 12 November 1856

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Schopenhauer’s Letters to Dr. David Asher

5 Dear Doctor Asher, Thank you for your new post, which I find very interesting, and may you always give me the pleasure of receiving similar things. (You do not need to pay postage on anything.) I am very happy with your essay in the Litt. Blättern,21 but I cannot help making a couple of comments: 1. I would have like you to have pointed out that all that Schelling has said in lectures or elsewhere comes after me, since the first edition of my main work was published in November 1818 and dated 1819. Only his “Essay on Freedom” (1809) appeared before my work. 2. As regards Weiß (sic) you have failed to criticize exactly what I had drawn to your attention: that he censures and mocks me precisely for the clarity of what I say. In his opinion, what I have to say takes little effort to understand and he attributes my successes to this very fact. In this he commits precisely the injustice which the Spaniard Iriarte mocks in the forty-second of his excellent and unique Fabulae literariae, where the concluding moral says: Si; que hai quien tiene la hinchzon por mérito, Y el hablar liso y Llano por d’émerito. (Yes, there are people who hold bombast for merit And simple plain speech for a fault.)

Weiß wrote this criticism in a footnote, which you perhaps overlooked. If you were to find the occasion still to rub this into him and sprinkle some of the above Spanish pepper into the wound it would give me much pleasure. The winner of the runner-up prize is probably the son of Professor Bähr (at the Art Academy [Kunst-Akademie] in Dresden) who is a very enthusiastic devotee of my philosophy and visited me in two summers. Last summer his son came as well. He is a student from Leipzig who moved to Heidelberg and told me he wanted to answer the competition question. Only he is (if I am not badly mistaken) a student of law, whereas student of philosophy is on the programme. I would like to see his answer in print,22 since it is undoubtedly the antidote to Seidel’s answer, which gives me the impression that Weiß has found a publisher for it.

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I hope soon to see your second piece on music in the Anregungen,23 assuming that you will not have insisted on payment from a journal which is still in its infancy. Yours devotedly, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main, 15 December 1856

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Schopenhauer’s Letters to Dr. David Asher

6 Many thanks, dear Doctor Asher, for your fine, glorious poem.24 It was given to me yesterday by the same youth who brought me the card with your birthday greetings. He also read me your poem. Doctor Sattler did not want to print the poem because it was “too polemical”, which shows that he is a philistine. The poem is not a direct polemic against anyone. It complains, in quite general terms, about the injustice I have experienced. If everyone was so scrupulous we would have no Aristophanes, no Persius, no Rabener, and no Xenien of Goethe, and so on. He is a dyed-inthe wool pedantic philistine. “put him down as such”. I received another very good poem on my birthday together with a glorious bunch of flowers (in February) from an anonymous person and many a sign of friendly interest from near and far – for example, an essay by Doctor Bahnsen on my geometrical theories, hastily included in 21st February issue of Schulzeitung für Holstein, Schleswig und Lauenburg; a letter from Harlem in Holland asking for a portrait of me [to be made] without the realization that there is one already. I am now being painted by two artists simultaneously in the same sitting: by Luntenschütz, who is finishing his second portrait, and by Göbel who is the best and most famous of the painters here. All of this will be followed by engravings. People can see that it is time – because of my 70th year. But things are going well. I have my full strength and am healthy. I am glad that you have given your second article on music to the Anregungen.25 I just regret that it is brief. Bähr’s book26 exceeds all expectations. It is excellent. It is hard to believe that such a young man could achieve this. He has completely understood and assimilated Kant and myself. I am really looking forward to Seydel’s book. He is hesitating. Perhaps, having seen Bähr’s book, he is worried that readers will have a different judgement from that of the Faculty, for whom it is enough that he is against me: Come on, Doctor, smartly, Out with your sword.

In any case, his work will be inferior to that of Bähr. My warmest greetings, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main, 16 March 1857.

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7 Many thanks, dear Doctor Asher, for the many and varied interesting items of news. -----------27 Seydel’s book28 is wretched beyond all expectation. To seek out contradictions is the lowest form of criticism of a book and system, practised by all blockheads29 – paging backwards and forwards to find sentences which, when taken out of context, cannot be reconciled with one another. This method, however, proves too much: not only that I am wrong but that I am an idiot who does not know what he is saying and at every step breaks the most fundamental rule of logic. Cornill30 has also gone down this well-trodden path on which one continually meets with pure rogues.31 To dismantle a philosophical system it is necessary to understand it fully, to go into it deeply and then to show that the fundamental ideas are wrong. But Seydel understood his task very well: it was entirely focused on tearing me down, no matter how, justly or unjustly. And for this he was duly awarded his gold medal and a diploma into the bargain, and the Faculty has prostituted itself32 by crowning this slovenly work and not rewarding Bähr’s excellent book. The reading public (who by the same token are of a higher kind) will judge differently from the Faculty and will at the same time ponder how it (the Faculty) used the money that was given to it for the encouragement of talent. The whole story will serve to further and expand my reputation. Seydel has evinced a high level of stupidity in two things: 1) that from the outset he has shown his malicious determination to disparage me – but who will believe him? 2) that he praises a parable of mine without understanding it and wrongly interprets it in terms of theodicy!33 Anyone of sound mind will understand it and see what Seydel is! I was very pleased with the news from Danzig.34 – What you say about Gebirol35 I find almost exactly, only more fully, in the Centralblatt of 11 July, so that I am inclined to think that this review is by you, but it is signed B.B. and I was not aware that you wrote for this journal. In any case, there is some connection with you. I would, indeed, like to see the book in order to assess the extent of its correspondence with me. But I do not want to order it yet. We are sure to hear more about it: perhaps the library here will buy it. I do feel antipathy towards everything Hebraic and Islamic. I don’t want to write my biography or have anyone else write it.36 The short sketch that I made at Erdmann’s request, which was also used by Frauenstädt, and two similar ones in Mayer’s Conversations-Lexikon in

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Hildburghausen and Pierer’s Real-Lexikon, are enough. I have no wish to expose my private life to the cold gaze of curious and ill-disposed readers. Yours, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main, 15 July 1857.

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8 Dearest Doctor, Much and all as I would like to oblige you I cannot bring myself to read a long manuscript37 and give an appraisal of it. This is a corvée, and at 70 I am at an age where one is legally dispensed from all such labour. I have more printed material, even material sent to the publisher, than I can cope with – and now a handwritten manuscript! – You can have it back at any time. – Regarding your difficulty in finding a publisher, take heart: I offered my Parerga manuscript free to three publishers and was rejected; then Frauenstädt gave it to Hain (sic), and gratis.38 On the basis of your article in the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung39 I have procured and read Gebirol: it is a dreadfully boring book, mainly because one is never quite sure what he is really saying since he is always concerned with his own entia rationis. But he can certainly be seen as my predecessor, since he teaches that the will is all and does all in everything. But that is also the sum of his wisdom. He teaches it only in abstracto and repeats it a thousand times. He is to me as a glow-worm, shining at night in a thick fog, is to the sun. Nonetheless he has still grasped the main idea, even on page 7 where he sees the existence of the objective world as purely in the knowing subject;40 yet his thought is still dull and impoverished, and of course this is attributable to his time and situation: – and it is further weakened by the two-fold translation.41 It wouldn’t occur to me to read Schellings Mythologies. Seyerlen’s? essays?42 qu’est que c’est? (sic). My philosophy is catching on: Professor Knoodt in Bonn and Doctor Körber in Breslau have lecturer on it during the summer. I have had many visitors in the summer, amongst them two Russians from Moscow and Petersburg; two Swedes, one of them from Upsala; a royal ambassor and imperial count; two ladies and all kinds of people. I can judge the dissemination of my philosophy much better from the letters and visits than from publications, of which I think I probably know only a half. In the last issue but one of the Central-Blatt 43the last mine of a series blew up. The series was started by the anger of Professor Weiß about refusing to receive him. Bang! Now I am dead. – The good Leipzig gentlemen don’t know that with such rubbish they are only damaging themselves: “the engineer blown up by his own petard.” Shakespeare. Recently I have again refused the visit of a scribbler and I hope that he too will lay mines à la Weiß: the bang is to my liking, the harm befalls them. And so courage! all you scribblers.

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Since you have become completely like an Englishman you would be well qualified to translate my works. You have given proof of a fundamental grasp of them at the beginning of your essay in the Anregungen. I think you would make more impact with this than with your novel.44 As a model I recommend to you the few pages which Oxenford, in the Westminster Review, April 1853,45 translated so well that “I [was] quite amazed”: he caught not just the meaning, but the style, my manner and attitudes. Astounding. As in a mirror! I would very much like to see your translation before you send it off, “to prevent all possibility of a mistake, and to see that all be right”. I understand English as I do German. As a rule every Englishman, in the first quarter hour, thinks I am his countryman. “Think about it.” “Sincerely yours”, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main, 22 October 1857. PS. A year ago Modern German Philosophy appeared as a reprint from the Manchester Papers 1856 Manchester 1s 6d. Just arrived in Mannheim – Weigel and Asher in Berlin replied that it is out of print. I am now having it looked for in Manchester. Perhaps you know something about it. Hopefully there is something about me in it. In any case it shows the interest there is in England for German philosophy.

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946 Dear Doctor Asher, Many thanks for the birthday greetings and for the pre-celebration with a full glass.47 This was the toast, and in order that “a testimonial” should not be lacking, Herr Wiesike in Plauendorf, the owner of the oil portrait, sent me and honoured me with a two-foot high silver cup with my name and some lofty words inscribed on it. Letters from eight apostles have arrived; there are letters also from Harlem (sic) and Vienna: a great success! I enjoyed your article about Gebirol.48 On the whole it is good although I have some criticisms regarding some details. This putting together of a series of short sentences is not helpful. The result is that you can make of it what you will. You should have given a good general picture of Gebirol’s meaning, giving the deepest possible interpretation of it, and then shown that – and to what extent – it is in line with my own thought. But now the main thing: about three weeks ago the local photographer M. came with a letter from the illustrated magazine and asked me, on foot of a contract, to sit for him. I did so. He promised to send the picture for me to see as soon as it was ready. He didn’t keep his word. But L.49 has seen it and found it not a good likeness and very bad. I hear that this M.50 does not, as a rule, do any portraits at all but only still life objects. I am annoyed at being presented to the broad public as a caricature. The leading and most respected photographers here are Seib and Schäfer. If you51 could arrange it that the magazine do another image of me – by one of these two – I would be happy to sit again. Make it clear to them, with all politeness, that this time they should not be so shabby and abjectly mean. A certain Herr Z.52 is travelling as commissioning literary editor for the new Revue Germanique. Amongst other things he has the task of commissioning an excellent version of my philosophy. Recommended by the mathematician C[antor] in H[eidelberg],53 L[unteschütz]., after getting my approval, suggested you. After that, Z. travelled further into the inland and, on his return, he will give his decision. This review pays an honorarium of 200 francs per sheet! They agree that the essay be in German, in which case they will have it translated. I said you could perhaps also write it in French so that in Paris they would only have to give it a final polish. But then, Doctor, golden money for a golden product. So, no effort and no study to be spared! It really should be at least two articles, since twenty-five to thirty pages contain very little. You should

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especially give an expanded version of your introduction to my music in the Anregungen: it is not possible to plagiarize oneself. Could you send me the pages of the Montagspost54 in a closed envelope? – “There is a good fellow” I would say. Good luck with your further education group,55 and I wish you a complete return to health. “Most sincerely yours” Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main, 25 February 1858. P.S. If you are unable to send me the Montagspost I would like to know the numbers. I recently received Morell on Modern German Philosophy. I haven’t read it yet but merely seen that he doesn’t know me.

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10 Dear Doctor Asher, You are clearly doing me an injustice in complaining that I don’t answer you, for your last letter of 3 March contains nothing resembling a question that needed to be answered; otherwise I would certainly have written. But I see it: the illustrators are the ones who, justifiably embarrassed, are taking shelter behind you. This is how it is: after I knew from L.’s report that the photograph which M. took of me was nothing like me and was an awful caricature, I asked you to say to them that I would prefer to sit again if they would commission a capable photographer. That you did this and nothing more is shown very clearly by your answer: “I have had further consultation with Weber, successfully or not I don’t know. At least he wrote down the names of those photographers.” You did what was agreed and nothing more. ----------------56 I have no wish to have my photograph feature beside that of railway directors and such in the magazine for philistines. I sat for M. because he came and made the request and I did not want to make his job difficult. He showed his gratitude by firmly promising something that was easy for him to fulfil – to send me the picture to look at first – and then mischievously broke his word. He needn’t approach me again. I was aghast later when I was presented to the world in caricature. Hence my offer. – Just don’t have …..57 write to me again. I want nothing to do with them. I paged through Haym’s book58 for a couple of hours, read, not without a certain pleasure, about Hegel’s moral wretchedness and Schelling’s bad (sic) writing. But I didn’t come across the passage about me: I’ll try to get it from the bookshop again. It’s a pity you didn’t give me the page number.59 Unfortunately I am not finding the half of what is being written about me. A thick book, Cartons etc, by a local Catholic priest,60 Beda Weber, has been published in which he does me down in the space of ten pages: no matter – the usual clerical barking against philosophers: but the scoundrel61 inserts passages between inverted commas which I never wrote. He even brings my dog into it. The rascal (the cleric, of course) snuffed it before the book was published. In the Prager Blättern für Litt. und Kunst, no. 8, 24 February there is, according to Litt. Unterh. Blättern,62 supposed to be an essay about me. I have ordered the issue. I have heard nothing further from Z[ingerle]. Can still come.

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Arthur Schopenhauer Warm greetings, Frankfurt am Main, 13 April 1858. P.S. One more thing! You send your letters as commercial letters to save on postage. But please don’t worry. Throw your letters into the post box unstamped. For me, such apostolic letters are worth ten times more than the cost of postage, and anyone who writes about my philosophy is doing business for me: so the postal expense is mine. So that’s settled!

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11 Dear Doctor Asher, Many thanks for your many missives. Since you wish it I am dispatching to you in a closed envelope63 the French version of my Fundamentals of Ethics.64 Weill had to reduce it to a tenth of the length: you have keep this in mind. He got the core of it right, but the translation is, on the whole, bad – as my margin comments show. What is unforgivable is that he added material ex propria penna, and, to my annoyance, purely Judaic stuff. The dialogue in the prologue is not true. – Please send it back to me in a week’s time. The Wiener Zeitung of 8 May has a highly interesting essay about my philosophy. You must read it. The local Bureau of the Allgemeine65 is sure to have it. It fills eight big folio columns and contains things that are good, bad, true, and fundamentally false: quite mad. It is Austria’s official State newspaper. I have had it delivered. If need be I could send it to you. He [the author] says that in Berlin ‘the enthusiasm for my philosophy has reached epidemic proportions’. I thought this was an exaggeration, but then came, published in Berlin, a drama of 206 octavo pages, Die Himmelstürmer, in poetic prose, all in iambics, in which my philosophy is seriously given dramatic treatment. Marvellous fun. Engraved on the cover is the Sistine Madonna and beneath it my poem about it.66 It is anonymous, and there is no preface. You must see it. Perhaps you could write an advertisement for it. – You had written that the Monday paper of 21 December, number 51, contains my chapter about women. I ordered it and there is nothing about me in it. Another time please look more carefully. – A catastrophe, in the form of a triumph of Goethe’s colour theory, along with mine, is gradually approaching. You are aware that there has been a verbal debate in the Polytechnical Society in Berlin. There was a lecture by Doctor Wolff pro Neutono, and [a lecture] by Doctor Grävell against it and pro Goethe. The latter has been published: “Description of Newton’s Colour Theory” [Charakteristic der Neutonischen Farbentheorie]. Grävell was here recently and will come again. Then a Doctor Clemens from here has published, in the Archiv für physiologische Heilkunde, a long article about colour blindness, in which he completely subscribes to my colour theory and supports Goethe. The adoration of Goethe is at its zenith. The records will be revisited, and then vae victis! Von Lassaulx, Rector of the Munich University, has just sent me a deluxe copy of his festschrift on “the prophetic power of the soul”. I find I am quoted twice in it and a passage from Parerga is also included. I have

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recently had visits from a Doctor from Vienna and a preacher from Moscow. You see how the epidemic is spreading. Two months ago M[ylius] sent me, in a very polite letter of apology, a copy of his photograph. It is not as bad as L[untenschütz] described it: the upper half, especially the forehead, is very good, and the eyes are all right, but the nose and mouth are messed up. I hope that the engraver can correct this and am consoling myself with the forthcoming publication together with its description. Cornill has published another book,67 in which there is a lengthy article about me in response to a review of his first book published in the Frankfurter Museum, February 1857. Luntenschütz has now finished my second portrait in oil: it is very much better than the first and will hopefully find a buyer somewhere. My advice is to send to Vienna where it seems the devil is to pay. I am sorry that your illness forces you to go Carlsbad again, and I sincerely wish you a favourable outcome. Yours, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main, 24 June 1858.

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12 Dear Doctor, I hasten to answer you so as to have asked you in good time to refuse to review Seidel’s book.68 I see from your letter that you are full of considerateness, caution, leniency and even prospects and intentions and that you would even bow respectfully to that fellow. But what we need here is a man who says, with Voltaire: “point de politique en litérature: dire la vérité, et s’immoler.” This is not your thing, as I see. A person who, while still young, for the sake of a tip from the Faculty, is capable of letting himself be used to besmirch a fine edifice, like my philosophy, that is built to last for centuries, deserves to be seen for what he is. And at the same time a really excellent book like that of Bähr should be reviewed and thus the Faculty’s judgement be seen as the prostitution that it is: that it be seen as playing the role of the mother to whom Hamlet holds up two pictures. The Faculty is wrong if it thinks such tactics can go unnoticed. My philosophy is being disseminated, it is unstoppable, and the records will be ever more frequently taken out and re-examined. As long as it was enough to keep a malicious and cowardly silence these gentlemen were in charge: but now that it is time for debate their weakness and wretched intentions will come to light. To set the students on me and to make them into judges about me! Lovely behaviour. The are working for me, not against me – out of [stupidity]. Now a Professor Zimmermann from Prague has written a lengthy history of aesthetics in which he devotes twenty pages to refuting, as best he can, my metaphysics of the beautiful. It all works in my favour. So, dear Doctor, leave the review of Seidel to someone else: perhaps there is someone who has a sharp tongue. Your conjecture that the article in the Vienna newspaper was written by Seidel is not only wrong but also unfortunate:69 he would praise me and then list the books which shamelessly passed over me in silence. He has been noting these for the last twenty years. A Viennese Doctor of Law who visited me recently thought the article was written a Doctor Barrach in Vienna. A stranger I was with recently told me that the editors of the Revue Germanique commission him to write an account of my Metaphysics of Music. I recommended that he use your essay. He already knew it. He knows nothing about Z[ingerle]: he denies that there was a high fee, and, on the contrary, he says he is writing the article gratis. – The same man told me that in the infamous book by Proudhon, de la justice dans l’église etc, it is unmistakable that he is acquainted with my philosophy. I will investigate this. Perhaps you will, too. Dr Grävell was

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here again: I showed him the essay by Doctor Clemens in the Archive for Physiological Pathology in which he subscribes to my theory of colour and Goethe’s in opposition to Newton. I regret that I am only finding a half of what is being written about me, and so I am asking you always to tell me what you find. Again I wish for you that your visit to the spa will bring a radical cure. Warmest greetings, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main 2 July1858 I am already horrified at the thought of the wretched photo in the magazine. It is rightly called Monday Post: wrong day and wrong number.70

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13 Dearest Doctor Asher, I have given you in some detail my opinion about the Seidel review requested from you and have nothing more to say about it, nor am I in the mood to pursue conjectures and casuistry about it.71 I’ll leave it in the lap of the gods. – We have seen what a brave warrior you are from the blow you struck against Haym72 after threatening for a long time. It was more like striking with a kid glove, more like an apology than a reproach. “Knock the rascal down!” is not your thing. You will have seen in the Litt. Blätt Fortlage’s review of Frauenstädt’s book, in which he speaks very nicely of my philosophy. In the Häusliche Heerd-Blätter, number 43, there is a review of a speech by Rupp in Königsberg. He argues against me and ascribes to Kant the ideas that are peculiar to me and that never occurred to Kant. The reviewer corrects him but far too tamely. Furthermore, in the Protestantische Kirchenzeitung there is a strange passage written about me by Weiß. It is on the same subject about which (as I think I reported to you) a plagiarist copied the pages from Par II, page 310, 11 word for word and used them as his own. The subject seems to exercise people: – it is the weak side of Christian morality. Also, Das Duell, mit Belegen aus den Schriften der neuen Gegner desselben by L. Müller, 1858 has almost half of it taken straight from my chapter on the subject, but he names me and praises me. An officer from Berlin sent me a manuscript of twenty-eight pages about my concept of beauty and the sublime. He has assimilated me so completely that he speaks as an alter ego. I’m very happy about it. If only I learnt of even the half of what is written about me. Please let me know what you come across. “The book of the Christians, or: The New Testament according to the results of the Tübingen School”, by R. Clemens, 1852, 163 pages, contains the famous Bible criticism. It is brief and (as far as I can judge) correct. It would arouse a great deal of interest in England and should do well commercially. I recommend it to you as something you might translate. Your annoyance with the periodical amuses me.73 You did well to stick with the English in Carlsbad. That’s what I, too, have always done in Italy. Englishmen are the best and most reliable company.

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I hope your treatment brings good results. Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt am Main 2 July1858

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14 Dear Doctor Asher, Thank you for sending me your booklet,74 which has worked out well. You have quoted a very good passage from Bacon75 which is well known to me: during the wearisome hours of research I have often sighed: “Yes, writing makes an exact man.” In lining up the so-called new classics with the old, p. 15, you have given them (with a few exceptions) one hundred times too much honour: and that you praise Julian Schmidt,76 – may the gods forgive you! Also, do you know how this [villain] speaks about me in his Litt. Gesch.? I am glad that the much discussed review was done by B[ähr]. He will do justice to the subject. I had hoped to find it in the Blätter, but it is not there yet. In the Journ. d. Débats, 8 October, at the end of a long review by Frank de l’institut there is a casual Christian anathema on me; I like it! As long as the know me and name me! c’est tout ce qu’il faut. The latest news is that there is a two-volume novel, Storm and Compass [Sturm und Kompass] – anonymous, but really from Dr Lindner,77 who announced it to me as exemplifying and embodying my philosophy. I don’t at all agree with this, although there are numerous mentions of my philosophy and quotations from it. It is otherwise a good novel. You could perhaps write a short article in the Litt. Blätter about the aesthetic treatment of my philosophy – about this novel and the Himmelsstürmer with a passing mention of Sansara?78 In England there is a large anti-church party that would be well served by a translation of the book of the Christians.79 There [in England] geology has discredited the Old Testament and that new book could give an enlightened view of the New Testament. ‘“To marry or not, is the question’”: – Question?!! I’ll give you a sound maxim of my own making, though it’s in English: Matrimony=war and want, Single blessedness=peace and plenty.80 Stick to that. This, by the bye, is an alliteration; the Germans call it a Staff-rime. But what’s that to us? But if you can get a girl with at least 30000 D. – you may. Affectionately yours” Frankfort. a. M., Nov. 1858 Arthur Schopenhauer

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15 “Dear Doctor, You write English astoundingly well, faith you do, and I am glad of it, for your sake, as it is your trade, and for my sake, because I see in you the future rare and unparalleled translator of my works, it’s for that you have come into the world. Believe me, it’s so. – But don’t now you think that I shall go on writing in English. No such thing: you may though, if you choose: no objection. But with me it would only be an affectation, moreover a task, and a bore to boot.” I have two letters from you to answer. First, thank you for drawing my attention to the passage in Stimmen der Zeit,81 but I am somewhat annoyed that you think there is something true in it. This is merely because the truth is twisted: The only philosophies that have been increasingly disseminated are those which turn away from higher speculation and move more or less towards faith, namely, Herbartian and Schopenhauerian philosophy. But what he means by ‘higher speculation’ is the nonsense about the absolute, which is the disguised God of the Jews, Jehova, and about the simple immaterial substance called Mademoiselle Soul. The philosophy professors can deliver that by the cartload. I, true to Kantian principles, do not speak about that of which neither I nor anyone else can know anything. And, with regard to ‘moving towards faith’, I ask what are my articles of faith? Perhaps that the nothingness which is finally what is left is not absolute, but only relative? I did not want to leave you in any doubt about it, although it is only hot air. It would be nice if you could get a copy of the Illustrierte82 for me and send it to me in a cross envelope.83 I have only seen it and read it in the casino. It is a shameful caricature and not at all like me. The fat nose is a result of the machine being too close; the eyes are squinting and the mouth is dreadful. This is a result of the stinginess of these people, who would do well to come up with a good image as a supplement. The thing has six thousand subscribers and thirty thousand readers. – I am very happy with Frauenstädt’s biography.84 I have a copy of the Anregungen with Büchner’s essay.85 It was easy to anticipate how such a b[arber][Barbiergeselle] would judge of my philosophy. Full of envy, he wants to put me down, but sometimes, against

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his will he lets his admiration show. But, lovely stuff! – for example, on page 4, ‘those most competent with regard to the will are the – physiologists! – namely, those who come at man from the outside and who don’t know what is happening on the inside. Let them restrict their competence to the enema. He challenges my transcendental idealism by having recourse to my fable about Iris and Sun,86 where the sun speaks and is seen and heard by Iris. How is that for rubbish! In addition, the fellow is lying. Where did I ever say that my philosophy would be dominant for over sixty or a hundred years or where did I say anything about its future influence? Nowhere. He is lying – page 3. Of course, none of it does me any harm. Readers are no so dumb. Voltaire was right when he said: ces gens servent à répandre votre renommée. But he threatens to continue [his comments] in several further numbers. It would therefore be good if you were to give your article on the three novels87 to another magazine. E[uropa] is ‘of very low standing’. The Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung88 would accept it, I think. Otherwise it will become out of date. I’ve read Sengler’s stuff,89 but I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. There’s nothing I can say about your plan to interpret Faust using my philosophy, since it all depends on how you do it. You can use it to throw light on all kinds of things and see them more clearly. Everything depends on your conception: you are the one to know whether you have thought of something clear, true and new. Tante Voss,90 28 November supplement, has a review of Sturm und Kompass. It also has in the 12 December to 1 January number translations from my cognate spirit Leopardi91 (whom I have been reading the last two months, with great délice, in the original) and has very worthy mention of me in the introduction and especially in the conclusion. The Wiener Zeitung has also mentioned me a couple of times. Lindner sends me all of that. Wishing you a happy, peaceful and above all healthy New Year, Yours sincerely, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt. a. M., 3 January 1859

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16 Dear Doctor Asher, You would have done me a grave disservice if you had succeeded in persuading Brendel not to send me the next instalments of Büchner’s essay. I much prefer it if people write against me than if they write nothing at all. Every attack that does not knock a man over strengthens him. I would be happy for you to dedicate your book on Faust to me and would value it, but I don’t write prefaces to other people’s books: never.92 If you are not looking for an honorarium you would easily find a publisher. A brochure in four sheets is small. The booksellers don’t make enough money to be interested. Four sheets is too much for an article in a journal. You would have to reduce it to half the length. Condensing like this is good for most writings, especially if the author is thinking of an honorarium. If by Cotta’scher Vierteljahrschrift you mean the Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift,93 I don’t think the latter is suitable. The most suitable would be Prutz’s Deutsches Museum. I am very busy. I have been working for the last four months on the third edition of my main work, which is now out of print. I have not yet reached an agreement with Brockhaus about the conditions. He should have got back to me sooner. My book will be missing from the shops for nearly a year. “Most affectionately yours” Arthur Schopenhauer P.S. Thank you for sending me the Illustrierte.

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17 Dear Doctor Asher, My belated but warm thanks for the writing, dedication and sending of your book.94 It goes without saying that it is a great joy to me, since it is in majorem mei gloriam and promotes interest in my philosophy. The passage from Stael95 interested me most. I was completely ignorant of it, although I read the book in 1814. It is extraordinary and I am glad that you have drawn my attention to it, since it corroborates my fundamental ideas. To interpret me as plagiarizing her96 would be laughable, since systems like mine cannot originate from someone else’s idea, and besides, what I have said in Parerga I, p. 125 is true. – I found it very displeasing that the passages from my work were full of misprints, sometimes so glaring that, through three such bad ones on page 58, the result was utter nonsense.97 The quotations from Goethe also have misprints.98 In your corrections you seem to have given careful attention only to your own text. – Some of your interpretations of Faust are, I think, incorrect, for example on page 57, “marriage”! Well, anyway, the saying habent sua fata libelli has this time been brilliantly confirmed by the unheard of order of 400 copies after the first advertisement. The only possible explanation for this is that my name heads the title and that people in their haste think that the work is mine or comes from me. We’ll how it develops. What recently gave me great joy is the Revista contemporanea, published in Turin – in its December number, published only at the end of January. It begins with a 40-page dialogue with the heading ‘Schopenhauer e Leopardi’. There is only casual mention of the latter and the whole is an exposition of my philosophy, with a very accurate and correct understanding and full of enthusiasm for its truth. The writer has taken it in succum et sanguinem, not taking excerpts from my works like the German philosophy professors – for instance, Erdmann – but has everything at his fingertips when he needs it. Doctor Lindner (who in his Vossische Zeitung of 30 November to 1 January had already published dialogues of Leopardi that referred to me) had sent me the journal, to which I have now subscribed. Doctor Wille of my Zürich circle was here recently. He knows the writer De Sanctis, who is an exiled Neapolitan and Professor at the Lyceum in Zürich. I have just heard that the bookseller Beer has received an order from Batavia for all of my books. I’m finally in Asia! I am very busy with the addenda to volume 299 and correcting the proofs of the first volume. Then on my birthday eight letters, one sonnet,

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four books, a fresh bouquet from Berlin – all of which require an answer. And now a gentleman from here comes bringing me two tragedies. Then there are sittings for painters and photographers. Göbel’s portrait of me is in the exhibition and is causing a sensation because of the likeness and beautiful painting. In view of all this you will excuse the belated answer. Yours very sincerely, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt. a. M., 9 March 1859

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18 Dear Doctor and devoted Apostle Your lament of 10 March is touching,100 but nothing can be done about it. I just want to say that I don’t think the Stael passage stems in any way from Schelling. If it had, it would have long since been laid at my door as they tried to do some years ago without coming up with anything except that Schelling said: ‘Willing is fundamental being’ (Wollen ist Ursein). This was so inappropriate that even the philosophy professor Hillebrandt in Gießen came to my defence in his Geschichte der deutschen Literatur.101 Thank you for the programme102 you sent me. I can acclaim it wholeheartedly. There is perhaps no other German who writes such perfect English as you do. It also contains many interesting and instructive things. The quotation from my work103 is suitably chosen and excellently translated. I only wish that it would encourage you and an English publisher to produce a translation of the whole of the Parerga. – In February Revue Germanique translated a chapter out of it into French. Hopefully the French translation of the treatise on the Freedom of the Will will appear soon. I’m sure I have already told you about the dialogue ‘Schopenhauer e Leopardi’ in the Revista contemporanea die Torino. I am so preoccupied with my third edition that I have nothing to add except my earnest wish for the improvement of your health. Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt. a. M., 15 April 1859

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19 Dear Doctor Asher, I am glad that you have returned safely from your travels on sea and land. I was interested to read what you have written about the publishing situation in London. But you have achieved some things and have hope of future success. But I am “grievously disappointed” that you did not see number 2 of the Bentley Magazine. In London, where you were moving in publishing and literary circles, it could not have been too difficult104 for you to get the number into your hand for five minutes. After receiving your first letter I wanted expressly to request that, but it was already the day of your departure. Despite my asking you to write to me via the post and without a stamp, you used this means. (“Now mind it, once for all, when I receive some interesting communication, I care a Damn for the postage; and now no more about it”). I consoled myself thinking that you would seek it out of yourself. But now you want to find out from me what is in it! “The devil do I know.” Try and make up for it and somehow or other find out, in Leipzig or Lunnun,105 whether the fellow is critical of me or repeats the song of the three sophists or even that of the current idiots. Not even the Economist reviews the number. I am inquisitive, like the landlord in the Mitschuldigen. Carriere106 did side with me, but much too tamely, against these asses. He is afraid of his colleagues. With regard to printing, we have got as far as half of the second volume107 and will hopefully be finished by the end of October. There are probably 120 pages added “according to my estimate”. I am here returning with thanks Quandt’s letter,108 which interests me as a last sign of life from him. But you haven’t even told me the title of the essay he refers to.109 I hope that bathing in the sea has restored your health. “sincerely Yours” Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt. a. M., 10 September 1859

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20 Dear Doctor Asher, I would have long since written to you had I not, for the last six weeks, been plagued by every dog in the parish. Brockhaus was in such a hurry that I had a sheet to correct nearly every day, which takes me three or four hours – and then to look carefully at the proof sheets! On top of that, the sculptor Ney (niece of the Marshal) came from Berlin to make a bust of me. This has just been finished and exhibited. Everyone finds it beautifully executed and the likeness unsurpassable. A sculptor has it rough. Like the engraver he can repeat his work a thousand times, but unlike the latter he does not have a publisher who advertises it. He has to rely on journalists. For this reason I have asked Doctor Brockhaus, when the bust has been viewed in Leipzig, to do an article about it in the Litt. Blätter. Likewise I am asking you, since you have connections with a number of journals (Morgenblatt:) to do the same for the sake of the sculptor. “Do, – there’s a good fellow.” My hearty thanks for your little book,110 but since it contains, apart from a few notes, only an outline of the programme in larger and more beautiful print, and you have so few copies, I take the liberty of sending it back to you very soon. It is something I don’t need and you do. Many sincere thanks for your literary notes, especially for those in the Novellen-Zeitung – and the Constitutionelle Zeitung – because if it were not for you I would not have heard about either of them. I have had to order them. The one in the Novellen-Zeitung111 is by a Dresden lawyer whom Baron E[berstein] introduced to me but whose name I have forgotten. I spoke frankly with him over supper without suspecting that everything I said would come into the paper. What an awful indiscretion! Most of what he has me say is true, but the stories are partly bowdlerized, for example, the ones about personal servants, Kant, the photographers, in the latter of which he merged three different stories into one. The lady in the Novellen-Zeitung112 seems to have been angry that I didn’t want to converse with her but pretended to be deaf in that ear: that should have been turned into an article to pay the hotel bill. But I was incorrigible. So, the Bentley Review is of no use.113 The English, like the French, still occupy themselves with the rags discarded by the Germans, – I mean the three sophists. Things will soon change. In the opinion of the Economist the National Review is the really philosophical journal.

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Quandt’s book114 hasn’t been sent to me. This is probably the fault of the bookseller. I had access to it from the shop and paged through it. My dear old friend ventured there into things that were beyond his captus. Rosenkranz, in his [Wissenschaft der logischen Idee]115 disparages me and refutes me. A joy to read! – Noak, in his volume 2 about Schelling, instructs us that I stole everything from Fichte and Schelling. – Carriere116 has only a few words to say about me. They think they have buried me. There is a surprise in store for them! People don’t notice the devil Even when he has them by the throat. Göbel’s engraving, based on his painting, is as good as finished and will be published soon. You can give me no greater pleasure than to tell me about everything that you find written about me. I am sure I am not seeing the half of it. I’m in Abdera117 here. The printing of the third edition118 is completed. I have instructed Brockhaus to send you a copy, which I ask you to accept as a sign of my appreciation of your services in philosophiam meam. The note in volume 2, p. 39, will make you laugh. And now I wish you good health. Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt. a. M., 10 November 1859

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21 Dear Doctor Asher, I have to thank you for your participation in my birthday: I would have done it earlier if I hadn’t been waiting for the new book119 which you promised to be sending very soon. I haven’t received a copy from you but have bought one, though unintentionally. The bookseller sent me one to look at, and in the mistaken idea that you had sent it for me I immediately cut the pages open and so have had to keep it. However, I haven’t read it yet. I immediately chanced upon page 32 and the note on page 44 in which the main religion on earth120 “quite cooly” (sic) is ignored. For this reason I feel antipathy to the book and it remains unread. I would in any case have been in no hurry to reply to your letters since they contain no notes about me like the many you have sent me that I cherish so highly. This is the one thing I need, since I don’t learn of the half of what is written about me. Precisely for this reason I have repeatedly and emphatically asked you not to pay postage on your letters, so that, without the slightest concern, you would immediately send me whatever you come across of this kind. Every such note is worth ten times as much as the postal cost. So please bear this is mind for me in future. In the litt. Blätter121 there is a very favourable review of your Faust book, but don’t make too much of it. It is an indirect plug for my third addition, in the interest of Brockhaus.122 What you say in your essay about Shakespeare123 is perhaps correct, – but is, unfortunately, witness to your constant thoughts about marriage: now, “let a wilfull (sic) man have his way. I am working now on the second edition of my Ethics which, hopefully, will be published in August. Wishing you better health and happiness, Yours, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt. a. M., 1 April 1860

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22 Dear Doctor Asher, Many thanks for your note,124 which was not at all superfluous, since I knew nothing about this criticism. But it is the worst that I have been smeared with. That is the ass of all asses. This stuff can’t do me any harm at all; instead it is to my advantage: “Ask Doctor Johnson, he’ll tell you all about it.” It is a long time since I looked at Stimmen der Zeit, which ought to be called The Asses’ Voices. So you can see how I need all such notes and I hope that you will generously send me whatever you find. The secretary at the Bürgerverein (Club) last week handed me the copy of the book125 you intended for me, in a scuffed envelope. Since, as I said, I already have the book it makes sense for me to send this copy back to you to let someone else enjoy it. I will have to cut off the inscription to send it in a cross envelope. It will go tomorrow. Thank you for your good will. To try catering for myself? This would be a good time for it. But mihi est propositum, in taberna mori. I haven’t seen my bust yet, and it seems that Ney is still there with it in Hannover where there seems to be no one capable of doing a cast. Instead of that she has sent me a photograph of herself standing by my bust; very nice. I am working diligently on the second edition of the Ethics and am reading very little that does not relate to it. How short the day is! In friendship and devotion, Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt. a. M., 15 April 1860

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23 Dear Doctor Asher, Thank you for the information.126 The only one I knew about was the article in the Vossische Zeitung, which had been sent to me. The others seem to be only quotations, and therefore unimportant: but I wish you had added the page numbers. --------------------127 Whether you could find here a suitable environment for your work I am not able to say since I live a very withdrawn life. But newcomers everywhere find great difficulties, especially here where every type of employment is permitted only to citizens. Yes, everyone experiences from time to time such an argumentum ad hominem supporting my pessimism128 – which does very well out of it. Continue to report to me what you come across and hopefully that you have followed my advice and are in top form again, which will give joy to “yours most truly” Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt. a. M., 16 1860

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24 Dearest Doctor Asher, I deeply regret that you have lost your job, but since I don’t know what advice to give I didn’t hurry to answer you. Should the committee not of itself have had better ideas? The current travel bug seems to have had some effect on you for a while too. It doesn’t touch me. “I like my rest: there’s no place like home.”129 I am herewith returning the letter from Prutz (“there’s something in names” – Tr. Sh.130) with sincere thanks, since it was interesting for me: I like to see a bit behind the scenes. Prutz is an arch philistine – that’s what I gathered from it. These journalists read nothing, but page through everything. What Prutz says about me in the underlined passage is the same that Wald said in his academic parentatio about Kant: Two parties into which the philosophical world, with regard to the Kantian system, is divided, of which one is made up of enthusiastic devotees, the other of enlightened but embittered opponents. Reicke, Kantiana, 1860, p. 22.

In Bohemia there is a gentleman who, according to his own assertion, every day puts a fresh garland on my portrait!! The Ethics is finished and will be published this month. Brockhaus has been instructed to send you a copy. Ney’s bust has finally arrived. It will be displayed shortly in the big exhibition in Berlin. Similarly in Vienna and also in Leipzig. Ney herself is approaching Brockhaus about it. When you have the opportunity, please channel something to me, but especially report everything you come across “on the subject of your old well wisher” Arthur Schopenhauer Frankfurt. a. M., 18 August 1860 [This was his last letter to me. On the day of his death, Friday 21 September 1860, I received the new edition of his Ethics. In the codicil to his will of 4 December 1859 he bequeathed to me his gold spectacles along with the bronze case.]

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I You have given me great pleasure, revered Sir, and I am bound to you by a debt of gratitude since your essay in number 50 of the Blätter für literarische. Unterhaltung132 does full justice to Schopenhauer’s achievements. Schopenhauer is the only friend who until now has accompanied me on my long life’s journey and, in all my memories of the most decisive and rich moments, his image is before me either for his deeds or for his advice and watchfulness. I am convinced that the defence which you have mounted for him against Weiß will be beneficial to his inner self, which so thirsts for love, is so often hurt and is extremely sensitive. This is why my serious concern that I am writing to you as a complete stranger did not prevent me from giving the warmest expression to my gratitude. What strange sacred creatures the professional philosophers are! They think it important to know who first articulated an idea, like the oracle who was not clearly conscious of the words she spoke. From the obscure utterances which these gentlemen take pride in one can see why their reflections are confused. The saying “le style c’est l’homme” is absolutely true with regard to philosophical writings, and you are quite right to see Schopenhauer’s style as reflecting his clarity of thought. I contest Schelling’s priority claim regarding the idea that Schopenhauer has developed in his book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. The kernel of this thought is already to be found in Kant’s words: The contingency of its form despite all the empirical laws of nature in relation to reason, since reason, which must know, in every form of a product of nature, the necessary element of it, if it is only to have insight into the conditions linked to its production but cannot, however, assume this necessity in the given form, is itself a justification to assume the causality of the same as if it is precisely thereby only possible through reason; but this, then is the faculty that acts (a will) according to ends, and the object, which can only be conceived of as stemming from this, would only possible as an end. (Kritik der Urteilskraft §63).

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Kant is our central sun in and around whose light all thoughts circle, and for philosophers, as for planets, the only thing that concerns them is which traverses the widest sphere; for me this is the most admirable thing about Schopenhauer’s philosophy, for it encompasses the entire universe. The will is the substratum of all being. Everything is through the will, and the will itself is real through everything that is, and it is not merely an abstract concept or something subjective as in Kant. Schopenhauer thereby built a bridge of conclusions over the chasm which until now separated idea and thing; the idea is the wanted and at the same time the thing-in-itself, so that Schopenhauer’s thought is infinitely fruitful and rich in conclusions. There is only one thing that I cannot understand: the denial of the will that he requires, for, what does it mean to will not to will? Not to will is still to will.133 The task is only to renounce the egoistic will and to bring it into harmony with the overall will, just as the one who lives according to nature is the happiest. Here I am not referring to the uncivilized, for nature also requires the development of the intellect, which decides what we are allowed to will. I do not know how Weiß judges Schopenhauer, but I presume he does not go beyond the bounds of propriety; but in the anthropology of the pious Immanuel Hermann Fichte, in which the monad theory of Leibnitz, together with his theory of pre-established harmony, is dressed up in theology; and every soul is created with an immortal body formed out of air; and revelation is declared to be a higher, perfecting experience which transcends perception; it is required of philosophy that it become theosophy – this is a crude and appalling attack on Schopenhauer. I wrote a reply to this, but editors to whom I sent it returned it to me, and I am not prepared to go from door to door to gain admission. Since my journal, the Allgemeine Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft und Literatur, has lapsed I have no voice. Such is the fate of old people. But Schopenhauer will find others to defend him, although at present there are few who dare to contradict the hypocrites. My joy during my holidays was the conversation with you, and I hope that you will kindly accept this as a proof of my high esteem. Yours devotedly, J.G. v. Quandt Dresden 26 December 1856.

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2134 The honour you show my friend Schopenhauer gives me licence, I hope, to send you, most honoured Doctor, the article included here.135 Although from a realistic point of view the world must not be regarded as appearance but as thing-in-itself, and the will as direct inner experience is not the only thing that holds certainty for me – for also sense perception of the matter that fills space gives me sufficiently certain knowledge – yet I am one of the most ardent admirers of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which can be truly regarded as metaphysics because the will is something incorporeal, a fact of consciousness, and, according to my friend’s system: everything. Outside of the will there is nothing. To come to terms with materialists and spiritualists I had to choose a standpoint between both: the realistic one. The opposing, purely abstract one like that of Schopenhauer is of a higher order and is so far removed that it allows of no contact and no mutual agreement. And yet it seems to me that the task of philosophy is to find a centre for thinking at which all conflicting views are reconciled, just as all the colours of the prism come into focus as pure light. Only by proceeding synthetically can we arrive at a unity of the multiplicity, a oneness of the different things, whereas the analytic method strips the multiplicity of its shared unity. The former method I like to see as a genuinely constructive one and the latter as destructive. May the professional philosophers bear with me. Some resemble sculptors, others the anatomists for whom only the bare skeleton remains. Now even if I have moved on independently I think that there is no contradiction between consciousness and will, but rather that knowledge and being constitute the one goal to which the will strives. I hope accordingly that read my article with indulgence. I send it to you as a token of my esteem. I remain, Yours sincerely, von Quandt

SUPPLEMENT A ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER’S VIEWS ON MUSIC 136

These numbers have, as the editor explained in the introduction, a different aim from that of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. They do have music as well as any kind of poetry and art as their focus, but are meant at the same time to take into consideration things which are closely or remotely related to these. These numbers are therefore ideal for drawing attention to something that richly deserves to be noticed: Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and especially his conception of music. Whether one agrees with it or not, one will have to concede that it is original. There are two reasons why I limit myself to music and exclude Schopenhauer’s ideas about the other arts: firstly, with regard to the latter, they have already been dealt with elsewhere and one can assume that aestheticians, writers and poets – who are more directly concerned with such studies – are already acquainted with them, whereas this cannot be said in the same measure of music and composers; and then the main point is that such studies about music are still so rare that they deserve special attention also for this reason. But before I enter on a fuller exposition of Schopenhauer’s conception I feel it is necessary to begin with some general observations by way of introduction. Here we are dealing firstly with where music is situated in the context of the arts in general, a question which, as will later be seen, was also of deep concern for our philosopher and the investigation of which opened up for him the essential meaning of music. Many, of course, want to hear nothing at all about any hierarchy in the arts and brusquely dismiss any question about the higher or lower ranking of one or the other of the arts. For them there is only art as such, and architecture, sculpture, painting, music and literature are merely different expressions which the genius, by virtue of his inner gifts, chooses or takes hold of with a view to expressing the beautiful and the sublime. This view is reminiscent of the famous fable of the three rings which Lessing used to such good purpose. One could, namely, compare the arts with the different religions and maintain that just as these daughters, of divine origin, although found in the most varied forms, still reveal the

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divine and have it acknowledged, so also the arts, their peers, all equally seek to realize the idea or the ideal that hovers in the mind of the artist. However, closer examination could lead to another conclusion, even in the case of the religions. It will soon make clear that even here there are levels of perfection; that the different religious systems, as they developed in the course of time and succeeded one another and still in the present age exist side by side, are on a higher or lower level with regard both to the purity of their conception of the Creator and his creation and of their ethical system; and one will, of course not entirely prejudice, show preference for one or the other. The case of the arts is similar. Here the material or the medium through which the artist seeks to give expression to the idea will be the measure of the more comprehensive or more limited expressive possibilities of his art. Starting from this principle, Hegel’s philosophy constructed a hierarchy of the arts according which they follow one another in the way just indicated. Rosenkranz, in his witty Aesthetik des Häßlichen and in keeping with that hierarchy, made some telling remarks about the role of the various arts. Since he is the Hegelian who, after Hotho, applied himself to aesthetics with the most eagerness, he may here speak as the representative of that school. Every art, he says, can portray the beautiful only within the limits of its specific medium. Architecture has to have matter elevated and sustained through matter, and has to be mindful of the centre of gravity, but then matter has to raise itself up to the sky. That is its verve, its freedom. In the column the architect is already announcing the presence of sculpture just as sculpture, in relief, announces painting. This latter expresses the warmth of individual life with such power that the musical sound seems to be missing only by chance; and yet the tones of colour are no real sound. Only music expresses our feelings in sound, and poetry alone is capable of expressing them clearly, as it is the most intimate expression of the spirit. In the same way, if not exactly in these words, Rosenkranz tries to explain the relationship of the arts and the immanent transition of one into the other. Fischer, in his excellent Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen, has a quite similar classification of the arts, which, however, here too are reduced to a unity. At first sight the explanation seems quite plausible. Because of its logical precision one cannot help applauding it, and yet one is inwardly inclined to withhold full acceptance. One asks how can the “divine art”, music, which has such a powerful effect on us and speaks such a universally comprehensible language; which is able so wonderfully to touch all the strings of our inner selves; which, with enchanting power is able so easily to awaken the strongest passions in us

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as it is to calm them down; which can give us both the highest jubilation and the deepest sadness, putting us now in inexpressible bliss and then in unutterable melancholy – should the art, of which the poets themselves have sung the praises and which is so universally honoured and which precisely in this present age enjoys such widespread attention, should not this art be seen as superior to all the other arts and be esteemed above all her sisters? This is where Schopenhauer steps in, affirming the question and reasserting the excellence and primary rank of music. And if a Dryden and a Pope, a Schlegel and a Staël vie with one another in singing its praises, celebrating its power or, with their glowing eloquence, glorify it as the daughter of heaven, Schopenhauer does more: he satisfies the thinking and inquiring mind and shows us what it is in music that gives it the power that justifies its being judged superior to the other arts. His view is as new as it is surprising. And since it is intrinsic to his whole philosophical view and stems from it alone, it will be appropriate here, for clarification, to introduce a few words here about Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Schopenhauer himself compared this philosophy to Thebes with its one hundred gates. Just as every gate led to the middle of the city, so through every page of his teaching or every individual discipline in his philosophical system one is led to its centre. Who would be unwilling to follow me if I introduce him with musical accompaniment? The upshot of Kant’s philosophy, to put it in a nutshell, was something very humbling for man’s knowledge, namely, the momentous proposition or idea that we are only in a position to know the appearances of things (phenomena) but not the thing-in-itself (noumenon). Fichte’s idealism, Schelling’s philosophy of identity and Hegel’s Absolute originate from this proposition. But while these different systems successively and concurrently competed for dominance, and pride of place was generally given to Hegel’s system, Schopenhauer had, quietly and unnoticed, thought Kant’s idea through to its logical conclusion and lifted the veil which until now had hidden the thing-in-itself from the gaze of our minds. It is noteworthy and characteristic of the imperfection of the human intellect, however high a level it attains, that Kant, who so successfully discovered and so correctly proved that we can only know even the appearances of things by virtue of our own innate (a priori) ideas of space, time and causality, did not remotely think that we carry within us the key to the other side of the world – the key to the thing-in-itself. But since Descartes and his cogito ergo sum, people were so much a prisoner to the notion that everything was to be sought in the intellect that not even Kant was able to free himself from it. But, after his fruitful idea which he cast

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like a seed into German soil where it spread rampantly, he might well have sensed that we could come to the knowledge of the thing-in-itself by a different route. Schopenhauer wrote his immortal work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, reversed the order of things by giving the primacy to the will and according the intellect only secondary status. In this way he broke the spell which had been cast on our minds. All philosophers, says Schopenhauer, went wrong in giving primacy to the intellect; according to him it is the will, this inner, true and indestructible essence of man, which is, however, of itself without consciousness. Will is first, intellect second. The will is metaphysical, the intellect physical, i.e. a product of the brain. Will, which remains the same in all things, whereas intellect is subject to great differences and gradations not only regarding various types of beings but also in relation to human beings amongst themselves, is for Schopenhauer the think-in-itself. When we know it in ourselves we also know the world as will; but the things, even our own bodies, in which the will appears and objectifies itself, are conditioned only by our representation of them and make up the world of representation. Whereas the will, i.e. the unconscious will not be guided by knowledge, remains unchanged in all things, it objectifies itself at different levels according to the principle of individuation [principio individuationis], and enters the world of appearances or the series of beings – extending from the great heavenly bodies down to man, in whom the intellect as light of the will achieves the highest level of development – enters our world of representation and, as it were, beguiles it into thinking these representations were the real and the perennial. In this way the veil of Maya (as the Indians of old called it) is brought down over our eyes and conceals from us the true nature of things. We are confronted with and imprisoned by appearances and are unable to solve the riddle posed by them or by our own existence. That’s when we turn either to art or philosophy, for both are equally engaged in trying to solve the problem of existence, the one by reflexion and the other by contemplation. Art – for this is all we have to discuss here – begins with an idea. This, the eternal idea that is within the things themselves and accompanies the will, though unconsciously, as it objectifies itself, is the true and sole source of every genuine work of art, and, as it is something present to the artist himself, he too strives, without abstract consciousness of his intention and the goal of his work, to bring the idea before us. The different arts run, for Schopenhauer, parallel to the objectivation of the will, so that also for him architecture, sculpture, painting in its various genres and literature are considered with regard to their place in the series and in the hierarchy. Although it is not my intention to

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reproduce here his telling comments about each of the individual arts I may be permitted, as I make the transition to the real subject of this essay, to give him the word. He says: In the foregoing we have given all the [fine] arts the general consideration required for our purpose – beginning with architecture, the aim of which is, as such, the manifestation of the objectification of will at the lowest level of its visibility where it shows itself as the dull, unconscious striving of mass according to its laws and manifests already at this level division and strife within itself, namely between weight and rigidity. We concluded our thoughts with tragedy, which on the highest level of objectification of will (precisely that division within the self) is presented to us in awesome magnitude and clarity. We find, however, that one of the fine arts has not been considered – as it could not – since no place could be found for it in the systematic framework of our study. It is music. It stands quite apart from all the others. We do not find in it the imitation or repetition of any idea familiar to us in the things of the world, and yet it is such a great and absolutely glorious art…that we can expect to find more in it than an exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi which Leibnitz claimed it to be.137

The number relationships which can be seen as the elements of music cannot, according to Schopenhauer, be considered as the signified; they function only as signs. It must, as we conclude from analogy with the other arts relate to the world in some sense as portrayer to the portrayed, as copy to the copied; this relationship is inward, true and appropriate because it is immediately understood by everyone. Schopenhauer now tries to solve the problem in the following way: The adequate objectification of will is the ideas. To stimulate knowledge of these through the presentation of individual things is the aim of all the other arts. All of them objectify the will only indirectly, namely by means of the ideas…[but] music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is, even as the ideas are, whose manifold appearance makes up the world of individual things. Music is by no means, like the other arts, a copy of the ideas; it is an image of the will itself which is objectified also in the ideas. That is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts – for these speak only of shadows, whereas music speaks of essence. But since it is the same will that objectifies itself both in the ideas and in music, although in each of them in a completely different way, there must of course be no direct similarity but a parallelism – an analogy – between music and the ideas, the appearance of which in multiplicity and imperfection constitutes the visible world. Showing this analogy will help

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Supplement A in the understanding of this explanation, which is made difficult because of the obscurity of the subject.138

For Schopenhauer the ground bass in harmony corresponds to what in the world is inorganic nature, the rawest material on which everything rests and from which everything rises and is developed. Furthermore, he sees in all of the ripieno voices which produce harmony – between the bass and the leading voice that sings the melody – the whole hierarchical structure of the ideas in which will objectifies itself. The ones nearer the bass are the lower of those levels –bodies which are inorganic but which are still expressed in manifold ways –, while higher ones represent for him the world of plants and animals. Particular intervals on the scales are parallel to the particular levels of objectivation of the will – the particular species in nature. Departure from the arithmetical correctness of the intervals is analogous to the differences of the individual by comparison with the type of the species. The deep bass, the representative of rawest matter, is the most ponderous in its movement. This slow movement is essential to its nature. The higher voices of the ensemble move more quickly, though still without having a melodic function and meaningful development. They run parallel to the animal world. Here there is the analogy with the whole prerational world – from the crystal to the highest animal form – in which no being has a fully coherent consciousness that could make its life to a meaningful whole, just as none perfects itself through education but is the same in every age according to its kind and according to its fixed laws. Schopenhauer sees in the melody sees the highest level of objectification of the will: the conscious life and striving of man. Like human life, the melody alone has a coherent meaning and intention from beginning to end. It tells the story not just of the will enlightened by reflection, traceable in reality as the series of its deeds, but also of its most secret things. It depicts every movement, every aspect of its striving, everything that reason includes in the broad and negative concept of feeling. That is why it has always been said that music is the language of feeling and passion. But just as the essence of man consists in his will striving, being satisfied, and then striving further, constantly … correspondingly the nature of the melody is to be a continual moving away from the tonic on a thousand different paths, not just to the harmonic – the third and the dominant – but to every note, to the dissonant seventh and much further away; but in the end it returns to the tonic, just as the manifold strivings of the will find their satisfaction. The invention of a melody, the revelation in it of all the deepest secrets of human striving and feeling, is the work of a genius, whose effect – here more obviously than

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anywhere else – is far removed from all reflection and conscious intention and could be called inspiration. Just as the quick transition from wish to satisfaction, and from this to a new wish, are happiness and well-being, so quick melodies without great transitions are joyful. Slow melodies involving painful dissonances and winding their way back to the tonic over the course of many bars are, by analogy to delayed and impeded satisfaction, sad. I shall not develop any further the proof of these analogies, which are obvious to the musician. Instead, with Schopenhauer I shall draw attention to the fact that music does not have a direct but only an indirect relation to them because it never expresses the appearance but only the inner essence, the in-itself of all things – the will: Music, seen as expression of the world, is a general language in the highest degree. It stands in the same relation to the generality of concepts as these do in relation to individual things. When in a scene or action etc. suitable music sounds it seems to open up their most secret meaning and functions as the most correct and clearest commentary. That there can be any relationship at all between a composition and a visual performance is based on the fact that both are merely different expressions of the same inner essence of the world. If now, in an individual case, such a relationship really occurs, i.e. that the composer has been able to express in the general language of music the stirrings of the will which constitute the kernel of an event, then the melody of the song, the music of the opera are rich in expression…This inexpressible inwardness of music, by dint of which it appears before us as a familiar yet ever so distant paradise, so completely understandable although we are unable to explain it, is based on the fact it reproduces all the stirrings of our innermost being but separate from reality and far from its torture.

I will add here some additional material from Part Two:139 The four voices of all harmony – bass, tenor, alto and soprano – or root, third, fifth and octave correspond to the four levels in the series of being: mineral, plant, animal, and human being…The fact that the high voice that sings the melody is at the same time an integral part of the harmony and is therein related to the deepest tonic note can be seen as analogous to the fact that the same matter which, in a human organism is the foundation of the human being, must also represent and support the idea of weight and chemical qualities, i.e. of the lowest levels of the objectification of the will.

Since music directly expresses will itself, here we have the understanding of why it has a direct effect on the will, i.e. the feelings, passions and emotions, of the listener so that it quickly heightens or also modifies them.

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For music, which is an independent art and the most powerful of them all, words are a foreign addition and of lesser value since the effect of the notes is incomparably stronger, infallible and more immediate than that of words, so that when words are merged with music they must be totally subordinate to it. But the relationship is reversed with regard to a given poetic work – a song or an opera text – to which music is added, for here the musical composition shows its power and higher capabilities by unlocking the most profound ultimate secrets of the feeling expressed in the words or of the plot of the opera. It renders their authentic and true essence and helps us to know the innermost significance of the processes and events, of which the stage offers only the shell and the body. The addition of text to music is very welcome to us and song with comprehensible words gives us great inward joy. This is based on the fact that our most direct mode of knowledge (through the will) and our most indirect (through intelligence) are stimulated simultaneously and in conjunction with one another. Let us now briefly consider purely instrumental music. A Beethoven symphony presents the greatest confusion, which, however, is based on the most perfect order; it presents the most violent struggle which in the next moment resolves into the most beautiful union; it is a true and perfect reproduction of the essence of the world which rolls along, and in an enormous tangle of innumerable shapes and constant self-destruction preserves itself. Melody consists of two elements: one rhythmical (quantitative) and one harmonic (qualitative). Both are based on purely arithmetical relationships – therefore on time. The rhythmical element is the essential one, since by itself it is able to produce a kind of melody, as happens, for example, on the drums. However, a perfect melody demands both, for it consists in the alternation of separation and reconciliation. The harmonic element presupposes the tonic, just as the rhythmical element (which is analogous to the symmetry in architecture) presupposes the nature of the beat, and consists in a deviation from it through all notes on the scale until, by a shorter or longer detour it reaches a harmonic level – usually the dominant or subdominant – which provides it with incomplete rest; but then follows its return, by an equally long route, to the tonic, where complete rest is achieved. Both have to happen in such a way that reaching the mentioned level and finding the tonic again coincides with certain preferred points in the rhythm – otherwise it does not work…The separation of the two fundamental elements consists in the demands of one being satisfied to the detriment of the other; but the reconciliation consists in both being satisfied at once and all of a sudden. This constantly

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occurring separation and reconciliation of the two elements of the melody (Schopenhauer explains the matter more in detail and even gives an example) represents, from a metaphysical viewpoint, the emergence of new desires and then their satisfaction. This is followed by an explanation of dissonance and consonance, major and minor keys, the two latter corresponding to the two general fundamental kinds of mood: cheerfulness or at least strength, and sadness or apprehension.140 So, instead of music being an ‘unconscious counting’ it is, according to Schopenhauer, an unconscious philosophizing. Hopefully the reader is now clear about Schopenhauer’s view of music. To test its validity it would be advisable to follow his own procedure which revealed to him the inner essence of that divine art, namely to surrender the spirit completely to the impression of the musical composition in its manifold forms and then to return to reflection and to the thought process of our philosopher as briefly outlined above. It is not our wish in any way to spoil the pure artistic enjoyment of the numerous concert-goers by requiring them to make philosophical reflections as they listen to a piece of music. Where a person manifests a natural bent towards speculation and an inner drive for enlightenment about everything offered to the senses and through them to the mind, it will happen of itself; on the other hand, where these conditions are lacking it would be in vain to require it. But should art become a mere tickling of the senses? Should it really be just something to enjoy and have no other purpose? We do not think so. On the contrary, we are of the opinion that it should have an ennobling effect on us, purify us, liberate us from crass sensuality, and uplift us. A genuine work of art will not set out to achieve this but will unconsciously achieve it with a receptive subject. For such a person a Beethoven symphony will not just be extremely enjoyable but at the same time an effective sermon, a warning to bring about in one’s inner self a harmony encountered in the sound of the masterpiece and to endow his whole life with that sacredness which is in the music and stamps it as divine art.

II141 Even in Aristotle (Politics VIII.5.), his study of the different arts resulted in a hierarchy of the different arts. With regard to music, he sees it, in keeping with the meaning of the name, quite rightly as the meditative art and distinguishes it from painting by virtue of the fact that painting records, in forms and colours, the movements of the soul, whereas music is the soul itself in its representation. Of the recent philosophers, it is

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especially Schopenhauer who deems music worthy of a deeper investigation and has taken pains to allot to it its proper place amongst the arts. His conception of music is essentially the same as that of Aristotle. In an earlier study I have described Schopenhauer’s view more at length. Here I would like to substantiate it further. If we speak of the stillness of the grave and the silence of the tomb as characteristic of death, making a sound, by contrast, characterizes life. As a rule a child comes into the world with a cry: it utters, for the first time, its will to live. In the early years, the crying of the child that so often frightens the worried mother and wrings from her desperate explanation that she does not know ‘what the child wants’ is often nothing but the expression of the will to live or, in other words, ‘the delight in existing’. The song of the birds in the forest, just like the yodelling of mountain folk or the whistling and warbling of boys on the street – bursting with life but often affronting our ears – are all expressions of the same feeling. But at every stage in life and on every level of education the joyful mood – the heightened will to live – will be expressed spontaneously in sounds which are either made by oneself or are stored in the memory, and will be heard. The whole of living creation, at least insofar as it has, through its external structure, raised itself above the ground, is penetrated by this drive; in the human being, it produces – as soon as the mind begins to be active and dull feeling turns into knowledge (consciousness) – on the one hand language as expression of the spirit, of reason, and, on the other hand, song as the expression of feelings.142 Passion, the stronger stirrings of the inner self, the intense will to live is no longer content with language but creates its own powerful medium; it goes unconsciously back to the natural condition and expresses itself through individual sounds, through interjections, until, in its growing uneasiness, it no longer has these at its disposal and is left only with sighing. Here we have arrived at the limit of the will to life’s utterances insofar as sighing is the faintest and most feeble of them; but, as is everywhere the case, it is true here to say: “les extremes se touchent”. The human being is the only one able to sigh, and the higher the level of education achieved, the purer the inner self, the nobler the soul, the more perspicacious the eye of the mind, so much the more frequently, unfortunately, must a sigh issue from his breast. Even the negro is unable to sigh, to say nothing of animals; and so this weakest expression is by the same token spiritually the highest. In it philosophy and poetry are concentrated and merged. The deep thinker and the tender lover meet in the sigh.143 And just as the happy mood rises from a light trilling sound to a loud and stormy cheer and shout for joy, so, too, the expression of pain develops from a sigh to a cry of desperation. This, too,

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if one looks at it closely, is none other than an expression of the will to live. It is, as it were, its last, its final effort, the cry for help of the drowning man. The despairing person, far from giving up on life, still wants to live, or, to say the same thing in the language of Schopenhauer, affirms the will to live. Now just as reason shapes and raises thought into organized language, so that the babbling of a child at the breast becomes well-ordered speech, in a similar way music gathers all those expressions of feeling, of the will to live which is expressed in sounds; these sounds are what music is made of. They have to resonate in one’s breast just as they do in the ear of the artist,144 if he is to command and reproduce them. He must engage with both scales, the joyful and the painful, and if he has managed to work with the individual notes and has been able to bring harmony into them art has come into existence, music has come about. And yet it still remains on the lowest rung in the hierarchy of art – on the same level as architecture. As mentioned in my earlier essay, harmony in music corresponds to symmetry in architecture. Both are servants of external order – one for the eye and the other for the ear. Through melody music is raised to the next level of the hierarchy – to that of sculpture. Through its colouring and shading it is raised to the level of painting. Music does share with literature sentiment, passion, the finest movements of feeling and the strongest stirrings of the soul, but these elements are proper to music. Music gives them their purest expression. Music is the very language of feeling, not just its representation. It will therefore surpass verbal language both in clarity and intelligibility – all the more because words are only the cadaver of thought, not thought itself, whereas sounds –in their different kinds and levels – are always the expression of the feelings in question. Speech itself first becomes intelligible through sound, and if the word is a product of the intellect, emphasis comes from the will. This explains the power of good delivery which consists in nothing but the correct and stronger accenting of what is spoken. As long as the composer merely reproduces, delivery will be the most important element of his achievement and he will be judged according to its warmth or coolness. Only soul and feeling, which the virtuoso or singer is able to bring to his delivery, make him a genuine artist; only insofar as his playing or singing have these characteristics will he show his creativity, his genius. Purely mechanical dexterity, on the other hand, reduces him to the level of talent. Whereas the language of reason only has an effect on reason – stimulating it to think, convincing it – the language of feeling, of will, works directly on the will. Just as it derives directly from deep within, it penetrates with irresistible force into the same depths; it animates, enthuses, enraptures, kindles the passions, ignites the flame of life, makes

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every nerve tremble, produces a storm in our, breast, calms it again, cools the feverish glow, placates, soothes and pacifies us. But it was not my intention here to describe again the power of these sounds or to celebrate the effects of music; instead, by revealing their true origin and tracing them back to their source and breaking them down into their simple elements I wished to justify my views as expressed above. I believe I have achieved this end, and if, as Schopenhauer says, the will is the metaphysical in us – i.e. the divine – because it is the first, the unique, the eternal, so may that art which has the function of expressing it directly be rightly and without exaggeration called the divine art. I have just one more comment to add. If Leibnitz, as we saw above, sees in music the soul’s unconscious counting, so Schopenhauer finds in it an unconscious philosophizing and sees this difference of opinion in the fact that Leibnitz has conceived and considered the art from a lower standpoint and Schopenhauer from a higher – even the highest standpoint. If music is thought of as belonging to the first level I have mentioned above where it is cognate with architecture, music is indeed made up of numbers: for, just as symmetry is determined by measure and straight edge, so are harmony and rhythm simply determined by measure and numbers and are only achievable by these mechanical means. But on the highest level, where music, true to its name, becomes the meditative art, tracks the expressions of the will to live in all its various manifestations and by showing it becomes the quietive of the will that philosophy strives for – only by a different route – it is indeed the unconscious philosophizing for which Schopenhauer wants it to be conceived and acknowledged. And so his view is loftier than that of Leibnitz just as – to use an analogous example – Plato’s theory of ideas (or even Anaxagoras’s earlier “nous”) is far superior to the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers and far more sublime. Editor’s Note145 Concurrently with the above article another one on the same subject came in from a Bl146 colleague. We are publishing this in tandem because we think it would be interesting to see the contrast of the two articles although they express even quite contradictory views on the subject. If this is at first sight off-putting, the explanation and the reason for the contradiction is clear: it derives from the nature the material. In his philosophy Schopenhauer has achieved great insights; he holds a very justifiable view, so that his fundamental conception of the essence of music is highly significant. But he did not have a specialist’s knowledge of music and so it had to happen that when it came down to detail he was guilty of trivialities and errors. Both writers are right: the first one in regard to the general principle and the second in regard to the particular.

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Schopenhauer’s musical views in particular The philosophical writings of one of the most important thinkers of our time, Arthur Schopenhauer, arouse our interest to an uncommonly high degree. Even if we are in no way followers of his main system (an interpretation of the world as will and representation) we are still compelled to have great admiration for the intellectual acumen with which he penetrates the world of thought and for the incisive clarity and energy with which he expresses himself. However, Schopenhauer, as with all philosophers who suppose that because they think deeply about everything they can have a fundamental knowledge and give a correct explanation of everything. Thus, Schopenhauer the thinker wants to analyse an art, music. He gives his judgement here with the same unshakable faith in his infallibility as he does with his other philosophical opinions and does not seem to realize that, to make a sound judgement about music, the most comprehensive knowledge, the most complete involvement and the finest education in taste and feeling are required. That with Schopenhauer not even the first of these conditions is fulfilled is shown already by various errors in his theory of music. He seems, for example (this only in passing), to know nothing about the ninth chord, since on page 361 of his Parerga und Paralipomena he proclaims that a chord has at most four notes. Schopenhauer would be acting more philosophically if he did not – through unjustified judgements about things, the innermost essence of which cannot be understood by purely [rational] thought – reveal weaknesses and erroneous views that are nowhere more upsetting than in the mouth of such a brilliant thinker. Here the smallest error is more unpleasant and lasting that the crudest affronts to truth and reason from the pen of an insignificant person. Both in his newest work just mentioned and in his great main work we encounter the strangest, most naive and completely false statements about music that, in our astonishment, we read again and again to persuade ourselves that we have not misunderstood them. And yet Schopenhauer says (and we quote his own words) that he intends “to show reason, if only in a general way, what it is that music says in melody and harmony and what it talks about” and thinks he has succeeded, in regard to this art, in opening to our gaze a broad perspective we had never dreamed of and in showing new points of view. New – this is a predicate which we certainly must use in reference to many of his statements; yet these are always just as false as they are new and give us not one single and acceptable insight into music. And at the same time Schopenhauer is guilty of an error for which he, quite rightly and at every opportunity, most severely chastises other writers. He starts from quite

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false premises, so that everything that he goes on to build on them must also of necessity be false. To prove the truth of this assertion we want to pick out some of the erroneous claims from one or the other of his works and shed light on them. In his main work Schopenhauer constructs an analogy between nature and music, which consists in the following. He sees in the ground bass raw material, inorganic nature, and in the middle voices the ever developing higher organization, and in melody he sees man as the highest level of objectivization of the will. This is a very nice poetic fantasy, but, looked at from a scientific point of view it is devoid of any solid foundation, for in music the melody is often given to the base and the middle voices and the accompaniment to the higher voice – indeed several voices are involved at the same time in different melodies – whereas in nature the gradual rise from the inorganic to the organic cannot be reversed in a similar way. From this false conception the most obvious errors are developed. Seeing raw matter in the ground bass Schopenhauer goes on to philosophize as follows: “The deep bass moves very ponderously; its movement is by nature very slow; swift movement at a deep level is not thinkable.” On the contrary: if deep notes exist at all, it is not only possible to imagine a trill or quick passage but also to execute it. We hear both on the organ pedal. The next sentence linked to this makes an even more strange impression: “Only the melody exists in a meaningful and planned environment; the accompanying voices move without a melodic context and meaningful development.” According to this, Schopenhauer seems to know something about homophonic writing but has not the slightest notion about polyphonic handling of voices. Let us hear more: The composer reveals the inner essence of the world and expresses the deepest wisdom in a language which his reason does not understand just as a magnetic sleepwalker reveals things about which she understands nothing when she is awake.

No, nature has not made it that easy for the composer. The musical genius has to be born as such, but on what endless false paths and wrong turns would the genius wander around if, unconsciously and blindly, it only followed what fantasy dictated and like a magnetic sleepwalker revealed things about which she understands nothing when she is awake. Good music may well seem to our philosopher as natural and fresh as it

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sounds, inspired by the moment, but only complete ignorance of the nature of musical art could allow him seriously to make such a claim. One of Schopenhauer’s fundamental errors is explained precisely by the fact his ear is capable of hearing only one melody – and this has to be always in the higher voice; otherwise he does not hear it. He seems to have no notion of the fact that several voices can move together in different melodies at the same time; that in the fugue, for example, each voice – even the deepest – has its own melody. Furthermore, he says much about music that paints images, and he is obviously unaware that in our literature on music, for example in works by Engel and Marx, this subject has already been sufficiently – even exhaustively – handled. Let us hear his own words (vol 2, pp. 387 of P.and P.): Music speaks directly to the heart, whereas it has nothing directly to say to the head, and it is an abuse if one assumes it does anything such – as happens in all music which paints images and which, for this very reason, deserves once and for all to be condemned. Even if Haydn and Beethoven have strayed in this, Mozart and Rossini to my knowledge have not.

If he were only speaking here of that simplistic painting music which tries to imitate individual sounds from nature, even from the animal world, for example, the roaring of a lion, the skipping of lambs, the swarming of fish as happens, for example, in Haydn’s Creation and the Seasons, he would not necessarily – still despite certain very important reservations – deserve contradiction. But several of his other statements, for example, the one on p.363 of P. and P.: “The mocking contempt with which the great Rossini sometimes handles the text is something genuinely musical if not exactly praiseworthy” – such statements show us that he has no understanding of that most beautiful and most noble end of music – to give, as truly as possible, expression of feeling, to paint, in other words, the various moods of the soul; and since it does not matter to him whether a Tancred in charming dance rhythms or in sustained tones of sorrow laments the infidelity of his beloved as long as he finds the melody sits pleasingly on the ear, we have to say that he is completely lacking in fine taste and aesthetic feeling – which are the first demands one is justified in making of anyone who wants to write about music. In our time it is generally acknowledged that to be a great composer it is in no way enough to invent beautiful and pleasing melodies but that the latter have, above all, to express the character of the persons and situations to be depicted. This shows Mozart’s greatness, and many of Rossini’s glorious melodies would also have a much different effect if he had not often treated the text

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with precisely that mocking contempt. We cannot share Schopenhauer’s indignation that a waiter in an inn sang the glorious melody “di tanti palpiti” only to profane it further by inserting a trivial text. On the contrary, in our opinion it must have more pleasant effect coming from a waiter who is in love and pining than in the mouth of the heroic knight Tancred. In any case, with music which, as Schopenhauer himself says, treats the text with mocking contempt there can be no question of a profanation through the insertion of another text. With his musical understanding the waiter’s instinct was better than that of Schopenhauer. Furthermore, it needs to be said to Schopenhauer that precisely Rossini used musical painting in a most striking way – for example, in his “Barber”, where he depicts a complete storm with thunder, lightning and rain; we would not at all characterize this as an “aberration”, since it is justified by the particular situation. Then, nearly everything that Schopenhauer says about the text to which the music is set is wrong and one-sided. Here, by the way, he never seems to have in mind anything but the worst and most insipid texts. He sees in them only a hindrance to the free development of the music and considers that for music to be used for church, opera, and dance is foreign to its nature. And yet to fulfil such ends is precisely the role of music. It exists essentially to express certain feelings and moods of the soul; even the symphony, which he sees as the most beautiful arena for music, is not meant to give us an indeterminate ebb and flow of sounds and melodies but to give us a musical depiction of certain moods. Schopenhauer also gives us (p. 358 of P. and P.) a comparison of architecture with music. Here he compares text, action, march, word, dance and all the other uses of music with the functional aims of architecture. In subordinating itself to these aims, architecture is forced to demean itself by sacrificing some of its beauty. This comparison is clearly not apt, for music remains, with or without text, an artistic product that gives joy to heart and mind but is in no way meant for or capable of use in any practical way. But whether a composer feels, when he is working on a text that appeals to him, that he must reduce his music to the level of serving some practical purpose, Schopenhauer should seek the answer from the composer himself. The statement about Gluck (p. 61 P. and P.) “that he has made his music a slave to bad poetry and that, apart from the words, it has no attraction at all” is, well, original and unique in its kind. It is true that the merging of word and tone into a beautiful whole is a glorious quality found to a very special degree in Gluck, but who will ever deny the high

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value of his music even when there is no text! If one were to play in an orchestra the accompaniment of one of the arias of Iphigenie, or Alceste etc. and have a solo instrument take over the role of the voice, who could say that the piece of music in this form could not be enjoyed? It is quite understandable that, given his wrong views about text, Schopenhauer maintains that music “finds its nicest playground in masses and symphonies and here celebrates its Saturnalia”. He lacks the comprehension, the feel for a highly spiritual, intimate merging of word and tone. We would not argue with him about these individual views of his if he did not so definitely set them up as a norm for everyone else’s views. The most striking of all his statements is to be found on p. 362 P. and P., vol II, where he says: The singing itself often disturbs the harmony insofar as the vox humana, which, looked at musically is an instrument like any other, does not want to co-ordinate and fit in with other parts but wants simply to dominate them. Of course, where it is a soprano or alto voice there is no problem because melody is essentially and naturally suited to their quality; but in the bass and tenor arias the dominant melody is usually given to the higher instruments, and the singing itself seems impertinent – a purely harmonic line that wants to shout down the melody.

To whom did it ever occur, in listening to the glorious tenor arias – for example, of Max, Adolar, Pylades – to listen exclusively to the orchestral accompaniment as the higher voice? Who has heard – in the bass arias of Caspar, Agamemnon, the water carrier – a purely harmonic voice which impertinently wants to shout down the melody? And so, when Schopenhauer further goes on to maintain that “solo arias are fitting only the soprano and alto voices and that tenor and bass voices are only to be used in duets or ensemble pieces”, we can only suppose that his ear is made differently from that of the rest of men. He does add, it is true, that “great masters like Mozart and Rossini have been able to alleviate this situation, even to overcome it, but not to cancel it altogether.” But that is precisely its cancellation. The whole proposition falls to the ground; if only one master succeeds, and if this one master succeeds only once in alleviating this situation (if there is any situation to be alleviated at all), then the possibility exists and only those composers should be reproached who had not yet found the right path; but we thank our great composers, all of whom have found it. Next, should nature, to whose systematically exact control Schopenhauer so often appeals, have created bass and tenor voices only as subordinates to accompany the others? Precisely the voice of the man, whose

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superiority over women in all talents and capabilities our philosopher, at every given opportunity, stresses and highlights? These few excerpts from Schopenhauer’s works will suffice to give the reader an idea of the truly childish naivety of his conception of music and to document yet again the fact already mentioned that great men cannot achieve significant things in every sphere and yet are prepared to overstep the boundaries set for them, always to the detriment of themselves and others. This essay was written not so much for musicians and artists; rather, we thought we owed some enlightenment to the layman in music who thinks he has to accept as true and correct what established prominent persons say; it was written especially for those who, seduced by Schopenhauer’s otherwise important achievements, would now like to attribute a similar value to his musical views as well.

SUPPLEMENT B SALOMON IBN-GEBIROL: HIS RELATIONSHIP TO ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

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Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe par S[alomon]. Munk. Première livraison refermant des extraits méthodiques de la source de vie de Salomon Ibn-Gebirol (dit Avice-bron), traduits de l’arabe en hébreu par Schem-Tob Ibn-Falaquéra; la traduction française de ces extraits, accompagnée de notes critiques et explicatives; une notice sur la vie et les écrits d’ibn-Gebirol, et une analyse de sa source de vie. Paris 1857. Concerning the will in nature. Outlining elements of confirmation which the philosophy of the author has received, since its publication, from the empirical sciences. By Arthur Schopenhauer. Second revised and enlarged edition. Frankfurt am Main, Hermann. 1854.

After having already communicated, in number 33 of the Blätter, the external circumstances of the work referred to, I am taking the liberty here of delving further into its content and, as briefly as possible, throwing further light on the congruence148 of Gebirol’s philosophy with that of Schopenhauer. As I mentioned there, this is not done with the intention of contesting the originality of the Frankfurt philosopher’s basic idea and ascribing it to Gebirol – the known facts relieve me of the burden of vanquishing those who think there is perhaps a sniff of plagiarism. My decision to undertake this work is purely one of scholarly interest, but especially inspired by my feeling of loyalty as a Jew: I have undertaken to rebut the reproach which Schopenhauer has levelled again Judaism as a system of religion that runs counter to the truth. It is my intention to prove the opposite. Comprehensive fulfilment of this task will have to happen elsewhere and at a later date. In the meantime, I shall have to prove – and here I am not looking at a Spinoza or a Mendelssohn – that being rooted in Judaism is no hindrance to free research and does not inhibit it in the least. It must, of course, be said from the beginning that Gebirol’s system ends

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in theism – which is a thorn in the eye of many a philosopher of our era. But I must admit that I see in this end result Gebirol’s concession to the dominant views of his era more than his own firm conviction. This explains the dark and confused facets of his system, which, from the evidence we have, wavers between theism and pantheism – paying homage now to Aristotle and now to neo-Platonism – and, in addition to these, assimilates Buddhist and mystical elements. Even this superficial analysis of what constitutes his philosophy shows an unmistakable similarity with Schopenhauer’s system, and if Schopenhauer is far superior to Gebirol in clarity and avoidance of ambiguity, it will still become apparent that precisely the inner core of their teaching is expressed by both the older and younger philosopher with equal definition. Proceeding now to the highlighting of the main points – and here I am taking my lead from Munk – I shall indicate the points of convergence between the two systems as well as those in which they differ. For the sake of clarity I shall leave the relevant passages untranslated. “Le terme final”, Munk says in his analysis with reference to § 2 of the fragments, auquel l’homme peut atteindre, c’est la connaissance de la volonté, cause finale de tout ce qui est, créatrice et motrice de l’univers. Ce but sublime, l’homme l’atteint par la science ou la méditation, et par la pratique ou les exercices pieux.

This brings us, right from the beginning, to the heart of Schopenhauer’s system. He could not have expressed his central idea more clearly himself. Likewise, for him two paths lead to his goal: the path of philosophy (the pure and applied – I feel justified, in accordance with his theory, in using this latter expression to refer to art), and the path of asceticism. “Pour bien comprendre ceci, il faut avoir étudié d’abord la science de l’âme et de ses facultés.” Correspondingly, he puts the “World as Representation” before the “World as Will” and deals first with human reason as subject. Cette science consiste dans la connaissance de toutes les substances et notamment de la substance première qui soutient tout l’univers et le met en movement. Cependant une connaissance parfait de la substance première est impossible

“What will is”, Schopenhauer says, “cannot be explained” parce que celle-ci est au-dessus de toute chose. (“Will is the really metaphysical”, says Schopenhauer); “l’homme, être fini, ne saurait saisir l’essence

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infinite, et il ne peut la connaître par ses oeuvres”. (On the contrary, according to Schopenhauer (I, § 18) we know about the will directly, but our knowledge of the world of appearances is always only indirect); “car savoir, c’est embrasser ou comprendre en soi la chose sue, et le fini ne saurait embrasser l’infini.” (In line with this Schopenhauer says: “Everything that is known is, as such, only appearance.” Whose is the contradictory position here I prefer not to decide. I suspect, however, [it is] on Schopenhauer’s side, just as in the following sentence greater clarity and consistency of thought is on the side of Gebirol. “Trois choses composent l’être; la matière avec la forme, la substance première (Dieu) et la volonté, intermédiaire entre les deux extrêmes.” Will would here be in its right place, namely as a bridge between matter and spirit, whereas for Schopenhauer matter149 is the link between world as representation (but is this not precisely the world of matter?) and the world as will. On the other hand, in Gebirol’s second book there is an almost impenetrable obscurity and a complexity of thought which is difficult to unravel. Here cabbalistic elements such as the theory of the spheres are mixed in. But I believe it is necessary to indicate a point where another correspondence – between Schopenhauer and Gebirol’s thinly veiled pantheism – can be seen. “La première est l’unité véritablement une, tandis que la dernière est pour ainsi dire l’unité multiple.” (Munk, p. 88). What is this if not the principium individuationis, which Schopenhauer uses to explain multiplicity in unity. And just as in Schopenhauer the unconscious will objectifies itself, rising level by level from the mineral sphere up to the human sphere, so for Gebirol matter (at first unconscious but then with consciousness acquired through form) ascends in the same order to unity. Thus Gebirol has this objectivization happen through aspiration, desire, and love (aspiration, désir et amour) – corresponding to Schopenhauer’s unconscious striving – and declares nature perfected when the level is reached where matter through the influence of will united with universal form (probably man as microcosm) becomes intellect. Then he, too, stresses the proposition that existence (existentia) is the essence (essentia) of every thing. I highlight this proposition because Schopenhauer makes important deductions from it and bases on it his theory of man’s accountability. Just as Schopenhauer’s will is not subject to the principle of sufficient reason so, too, for Gebirol neither the “what”, the “how” or the “why” are relevant to essence. These three categories named – at the head of them is the essence, so that there are now four categories which then in a mystical way (Pythagorism?) – correspond to the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 offer an analogy (though somewhat distant) to

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the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason as divided up by Schopenhauer. Thus in the essence we have the causa fiendi, in the “what” the causa cognoscendi, in the “how” the causa essendi, and in the “why” the causa agendi (?)150 The extent to which Gebirol differs from Schopenhauer is clear from what we have said. It must furthermore be said that whereas Schopenhauer ascribes freedom to will but sees the agent as subject to necessity, we find the reverse with Gebirol: his agent premier constitutes the necessary and the object of its activity is the possible and thus the free. Finally, Gebirol’s “Extase” takes the place of the “Nirwana” which Schopenhauer’s system has borrowed from Buddhism. Pour arriver à la veritable connaissance des substances simples, il faut que l’homme, pour ainsi dire, se dépouille entièrement des liens de la corporéité (veil of Maya for Schopenhauer) et du monde sensible et se transporte par la méditation dans le monde intelligible, en cherchant à identifier son essence avec ses substances supérieures. (Munk, p. 201)

In summary: the reader will have become aware of the correspondence between the two systems with regard to their main ideas. For both philosophers will is primary and intellect is secondary; for both, matter achieves consciousness of self only on the highest level; for both, unity becomes multiplicity by virtue of an inner drive; for both, the world of appearances stands in the way of true knowledge, is representation; and two paths – that of reflection (philosophy) and that of asceticism – lead to the goal, which for Schopenhauer means quietening the will and for Gebirol union with the Supreme Being. I do not want to challenge or pass over in silence the idea that the so-called weltanschauung on which one of the systems is based is diametrically imposed to that of the other – because Gebirol’s is optimistic and Schopenhauer’s is pessimistic. In any case, the weltanschauung affects only the ethical part of the system and has nothing to do with the metaphysical. It is not our intention to examine here which of the two is more correct. But if, as Schopenhauer claims with indignation, Judaism is the source of the optimism on which our Gebirol bases his views, here we have the first convincing argument for saying that free seeking for truth is quite compatible with this anschauung and that from this position one can arrive at the same result as from that of pessimism. Naturally we cannot assume that a thinker in the 11th century could express his views as daringly and fearlessly as a philosopher of the 19th century; one would be badly mistaken if one were to think that this Jewish philosopher knew nothing of life’s misery, that his life was a bed of roses and that his mood and view of life was one of unclouded serenity.

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His beautiful and sublime writings give clear evidence of the contrary. They express the deep pain raging within him and the worry that fills his soul, and, like Schopenhauer, he too finds rest only in pure contemplation, in his quest for wisdom. And so here Jew and Christian peacefully reach out to one another across the centuries; both have a profound appreciation of nature in its depths and have tried to lift its veil; both, driven by an extreme thirst for knowledge and inspired by an ardent love of truth, have escaped from the bonds of passion and, as with the wings of an eagle, have soared above the mist of the senses to purer regions of light and here found bliss. But when one of them, when he sees the cosmos beneath him, or, to express it in stricter terms: when in looking around him he finds in all things the one free will and in sympathy with them calls out tat twam asi (that is you!), the other one hears the creative ‘Word’ which controls the will and says to it: ‘Let there be’; in this way he has his creatures strive to win back the unity which they have left and in which all that they lack is supplied and a life of bliss is granted them.

SUPPLEMENT C ON INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER

“Know thyself” was the great saying spoken by the Delphic oracle consulted by Socrates. It is the principle on which he, who has been described as the wisest of men, based all of his guiding instructions. Also in our era there is a need for the call to “learn to know yourself!” because again science is the dominant voice amongst all the disciplines – and, of course, not without great benefit to civilization. Science rules our minds so that even the philosopher no longer dares to stand on his own feet. He takes no step forward, even on his own territory – that of pure thought, idea – without consulting the findings of the scientists. He hardly dares to use the word “soul”, and even a “life force” is no longer admissible by the gentlemen with magnifying glass and test-tube. It is true that through this iron control of the strict empirical method we are shielded from the empty fantasies of rambling quibblers; we are spared the airy theories that fall like a house of cards when they are subjected to the test of reality; but on the other hand we run the risk of completely forgetting our better part – call it what you will – I mean that which distinguishes us from all other beings, that which makes us people who have a consciousness of self. We risk becoming accustomed to a purely materialistic view of life, no longer capable of attaining to the level of idea, so that mental shallowness inevitably follows. Of course it is good to feel, like that wise king, at home with nature, to speak about the trees, “from the cedars of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall”; about the cattle and the birds, the worms and the fish; it is fine to name every little star, to allocate a family to every little flower; to know what lurks in the depths of the sea and in the dark bosom of the earth; how the mountains rose up and how the layers of the earth’s crust were formed; to calculate the paths of the planets and to understand the oscillations of light; but it is still better to be at home within one’s inner self and to know one’s self. This knowledge is, even today as in the time of Socrates, the highest, the noblest and most useful for man and will always remain so, for it alone is the condition of our perfection and of all genuine ennobling both of the individual and of the totality; it alone is the foundation of all ethics or moral teaching. As a noble modern English writer, who was once much misunderstood and

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denigrated by his nation, said: “According as man knows himself, he is just and good and wise.” Thus spoke the Delphic oracle thousands of years ago, and thus spoke the poet Shelley – for it is his words that I have just quoted – in our present century. To help me in introducing you to this knowledge permit me now, after these general observations, to focus on the task I have set myself for today, namely, to speak about character. I have chosen his subject deliberately, first of all because it concerns every person sufficiently to be of interest, but, secondly, because you will immediately see that magnifying glass and scalpel are of no use here, that neither the microscope nor the most precise chemical analysis can enlighten us here, so that we find ourselves on ground where all these tools which are so helpful to the scientist fail us. We are operating in the sphere of speculation, of purely spiritual contemplation.151 Incidentally, in the whole of philosophy there is no more important subject of inquiry than this, none with such far reaching implications and influence. Pedagogy or the theory of education – and what could match these in importance for human society – cannot advance one step, its course would be dilatory and stumbling, its efforts have to be exposed to all kinds of mistakes as long as it is not clear about the nature of character and has not adopted a firm and unshakable stance in this matter. Such a stance is on no less importance in social, juridical and aesthetic contexts. And yet views on this subject are for the most part very vague and obscure. Character has even been confused with intellect – proof enough that people have not even become clear about the meaning of the word. Without a clear definition of the expressions used in philosophical investigation the result can be no better than an empty argument about words, and communication is impossible. To avoid this danger it will be necessary for me, above all, to tell you right from the beginning what I mean by “character”. The word itself, as you will know, is of Greek origin and means what is imprinted or engraved. Character is, therefore, what is engraved in a being, what inheres in it and makes it to be that which we know it to be. The character of a human being is made up of the moral qualities he has, or, to be more precise, the share he has in the complex of virtues and vices of humanity. Up to this point you will probably agree with me. But now I shall go further and venture to make a statement, challenged by many, that you may find striking and paradoxical: that the character of the person is innate. When you hear this, have various misgivings might arise in you and I do not deny that these are, at first sight, justified. I do not need to tell you that the reason one hesitates to accept this truth is that one feels justified in immediately concluding that

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people are therefore not responsible for their actions. And we may not, if we are serious and honest about our investigations, shrink back from the consequences arising from the truth. We should not tremble as is if before a ghost and take flight. Instead, we should confront them squarely, cope with them, and try to achieve clarity about them. The very etymology of the word suggests that character, just like talent, is something inborn in us. You will see this truth more clearly when you consider that every being, every thing must have certain qualities, that there can be no existentia without an essentia. But this essentia is precisely its character, and in this sense and for this reason every individual must have his character and bring it with him into the world. Perhaps you are reminded of what Goethe said in his Tasso: A talent is formed in quiet isolation A character through exposure to the world.

Does this statement of the insightful poet seem to contradict what I have just been saying? In no way, gentlemen, although I could not say for definite that Goethe, in this juxtaposition of talent and character, was being deliberate. It would be pedantic to assume that with every one of his lines a poet was expressing some theoretical conviction, or that the poet – on the assumption that he was a genuine poet – wrote everything that the reader knows to be true with the same clear consciousness that we require of the man of science. This is precisely what distinguishes the poet from the philosopher: that he brings to light unconsciously and, as it were, through inspiration or intuition, truths which the philosopher discovers only by dint of strenuous thought and ascertains through a rigorous thought process. It happens that Goethe, in another place which I shall have occasion to speak about later, shows that he has been guided by the right principle in this question and knew the truth, so that the conclusion I want to draw from the statement just mentioned is justified. What I mean is that hardly anyone will entertain the crazy notion that a talent can be acquired – the saying “nascitur, non fit” (is born, not made) is true, in my opinion, not only of the poet of whom it is especially said, but of every activity that requires intellectual and spiritual ability. Otherwise, how could we speak of aptitude? However, an individual’s inborn talent needs cultivation if it is to ripen and achieve perfection. The same applies exactly to character, except that, as Goethe so splendidly and precisely expressed it, the development route of each – character and talent – is different. Talent, which because of the intensity involved in its self-development, needs quiet and concentration. It needs to withdraw into an inner life. Character, which develops its

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activity in the external world, needs for this very reason external intercourse with people and has to be toughened through its battles in the outside world. So much in explanation of Goethe’s statement. But I must ask you not to take this explanation the wrong way. I am not really dealing with character insofar as is revealed externally and in intercourse with others. Instead, I would like my words to be understood in the sense given above and according to my definition: the totality of moral qualities which imprint themselves on the individual, giving him his moral stamp. Character is nothing more than this. When, in normal life, one speaks of character and refers to someone as a man of character or a man lacking in character, such designations are based on inaccuracies of expression. This is a confusion of character with principles. No-one can be without character, but he can be lacking in principles which govern his actions. A so-called man of character is one who has firm principles which guide him in his activities – one who, on the basis of these principles, follows certain goals with determination and, through his endurance and perseverance, achieves them. This determination and perseverance which I attribute to the so-called man of character are qualities which are inborn in him. They are part of his character. They come to light and become visible to us only through his activity. To call him for this reason a man of character and to contrast him with the man lacking in character is, of course, justified by language usage but is unphilosophical thought, because even the lack of determination and perseverance – the person who is indecisive and vacillating – is character. It is not a desirable or enviable type of character, but a character nevertheless: the inborn mark of the individual in question. Even such negative qualities can be just as marked as the positive ones, although for so-called character plays, where the heroes are individuals with very clearly and sharply defined qualities or character traits, the latter are generally preferred. Those with negative qualities are suitable both for comedy and for tragedy. I am thinking of Hamlet as an example. But these comments belong to the sphere of aesthetics which I do not intend to approach. I am returning to the theme with which I began. Remarkable as the theory of innate character may at first sight seem, I have to remind you that, without its being actually stated as a theory, it has been fundamental to anschauungen which have always been dominant and thus have always been in men’s minds – at least vaguely sensed. “Coelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt” (those who traverse the sea change their clime but not their character) the ancient Romans said, and similar sayings about the immutability of character could be cited from all periods and all nations. And is it not the first demand we make of the

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writer that the characters he portrays are developed with strict consistency? Or could we speak of the character of a nation and describe it if it were subject to alteration? And it is the same with individuals as it is with nations. How badly deluded a person would be who, encountering a friend after a long absence and thinking his character had changed, acted accordingly. And how badly deluded have people been who in such circumstances, misled by such false principles, have chosen to act towards the friend in such a way that – with resulting regret or harm – they sadly find that the friend is the same as ever. Or should that which is true in reality be not true in art? But you know, gentlemen, that one would not forgive a dramatic writer, that one would consider he did not know the ABC of his art, if he were to present us with a figure that represented one character at the beginning of the play and a quite different one at the end. The generally accepted rule in art is that every figure called into being by the fantasy of the writer has to retain to the very end the character first signalled to us. It is not for an instant allowed to depart from its role, so that the attentive spectator must be able to anticipate, in every new situation, how the character in question will act. And this calculation will never be wrong as long as the writer understands his art. Let us not deceive ourselves, and let us make up our minds about it – even if we harbour doubts and are hesitant in yielding to truth and in relinquishing the delusion that external circumstances produce the character of the individual – they can influence it, shape it and develop it, but they can never turn it into something completely different from what it was previously. If we sometimes hear of such changes, if we are told of a complete reversal taking place in outstanding men, as is supposed to have happened, for example, with Shakespeare and Goethe, it will be necessary to decide whether we are concerned here with character or intellect. With regard to the two just mentioned it was clearly an intellectual reversal. In other cases – for example, some of the Roman emperors and Philipp II, where certainly it was the character that seemed to have changed under changed circumstances or in the course of time, becoming exactly the opposite of what it had formerly been – it was precisely the external circumstances or the time that brought to light aspects of the character that had formerly lain hidden. But nothing could ever have been brought to light that had not been there from the beginning; for, as I said, every existentia must have its essentia. After having prepared you for an understanding of a teaching that is still too little heeded and too little known, I now have to say who is its main proponent. But first permit me a word of explanation.

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In philosophy, as in all branches of learning in every area where there are different views and starting points, it will be necessary, unless one wants to set up a system of one’s own – although even here it would be necessary to take cognizance of already existing views and, depending on the situation, link up with them – to commit to some system or other. However, for such a commitment, by which I mean a profound assimilation and digesting of the views and teachings of another, a certain predisposition is required – like the susceptibility for an epidemic sickness, since the mental constitution of a person is similar to that of the physical. For this reason much of what we have read or heard makes only a fleeting impression on us and is, at the most, retained in our memories without becoming part of our life and soul and having a lasting effect. Only when we meet with views and ideas which we have already cherished ourselves – even though until then we have only had a vague sense of them and have not brought them to the level of clear consciousness – will we be so moved by them as to take full possession of them and make them our own. “You are like the spirit you understand” [Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst] is a sentence that has nothing of Mephistopheles in it but that contains a simple truth, and we need, in support of what I have been saying, only to invert it. For my part, I found such a correspondence of my previously cherished views with those of the recently departed – famous, but not yet properly known – philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. I have committed to his system, though not without several deviations from it, and have been referred to, by Schopenhauer himself, as his disciple. Who will take it amiss if I use every available opportunity to disseminate his views – insofar as I consider them true and productive – and to give them access to broader circles? And now I hardly need to say that I owe him my understanding of the subject I have been expounding, that he is the great and daring proponent of the truth I have been explaining. I shall therefore take the liberty of quoting for you a lengthy passage from the prizewinning essay he presented to the Norwegian Sciences Society [Sozietät der Wissenschaften]. But before that it will be necessary to go back to his predecessor, the great Königsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant, an early starting point, to give you at least a fleeting glimpse of the origin and development of this special doctrine of Schopenhauer. According to Kant everything that appears in nature has 1) an empirical cause which itself is the effect of another empirical cause. This series of conditioned causes is based on an unconditioned cause which is not empirical or something we can experience but only something which can be grasped by the intellect or can be thought. Every cause operates

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according to a definite law, and in the way it works and acts each thing in nature is distinguished from every other. Likewise, the character of man is subject to this same law and is distinguished [from others] on the basis both of the empirical law and of the law grasped by the intellect. The empirical character is none other than a natural phenomenon, conditioned in its activity by natural causes, a link in the chain of things in which it comes into being and passes away, an object of experience or understanding having, as such, nothing unconditional about it. Character in the higher sense does not appear in nature, it is independent of time, shuts out all time sequence and thus all change, all originating and passing away, and is simply unconditioned and original in what it does. This [higher] aspect of character is equally present in every act of the individual, like the stamp on a thousand seals; it determines the empirical character as it presents itself in time and space. This empirical character, even as appearance in all its manifestations, however motivated, has to show the consistency of a law of nature. Freedom, therefore, is here linked with necessity. Freedom exists in the higher aspect – or, as Kant normally calls it, the thing-in-itself. Necessity is found in the empirical, or in appearances. Schopenhauer considers this doctrine of Kant’s about the relationship between freedom and necessity to be the greatest of all products of man’s profound thinking. In conjunction with this he established four principles or axioms and explained them with the focus and clarity which is peculiar to his thought. The character of man, he says, is 1) individual: it is different in every person. It is true that the character of the species is fundamental in all persons, so that the main characteristics are found in everyone. But here there is such a significant degree of more or less, such a difference in the combination and modification of the qualities throughout that one can assume that the moral differences between individuals is completely on a par with the intellectual differences – which is saying a lot – and both are incomparably greater than the physical difference between a giant and a dwarf. 2) The character of man is empirical. One gets to know it only through experience – not just in other people but also in oneself. And so we will often be disappointed – not just in others, but also in ourselves – when we discover that this or that quality, for example, justice, unselfishness, courage, is not present in the same degree as we indulgently assumed. Exact knowledge of our own empirical character gives us what is called acquired character. A person possesses this when he clearly knows his own qualities, both good and bad, and thereby knows with certainty what he can confidently expect of himself and what not. 3) Man’s character is constant: he remains the same right through life. He experiences seeming changes of direction and

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content in his life which result from a difference in age with its accompanying needs. A person does not change. The way he acts in a particular instance is the way he will always act in completely similar circumstances (assuming the correct knowledge of these circumstances). Some people will verbally deny this truth but will presuppose it in their actions when they never again trust a person they have found to be dishonest but trust a person whom they have found to be honest. This truth is the basis for all judgement of character and confidence in the tried and tested. Even if such trust on some occasion proves misplaced we never say, ‘his character has changed’. Instead we say, ‘I was wrong about him’. Similarly, when we want to judge the moral worth of an action we try above all to arrive at certainty about the motive for it, but then we direct our praise or blame not towards the motive but towards the character that let itself be defined by such a motive as the second factor – but the only one inherent in the person – in this deed. Finally, 4) The individual character is inborn. It is not the result of art or of chance circumstances. It is the work of nature itself. It is revealed already in the child who shows when he is small what he will be when he is big, so that two children with exactly the same education and in exactly the same environment present, very clearly, two entirely different characters. Each will show the same character with old age.152 These, gentlemen, are the four momentous principles I wanted to lay before you for your careful consideration; but you would rightly go away unsatisfied if I thought I had fulfilled my task and were to close with these premises. You will have been sufficiently convinced of the significance of the propositions I have just presented. You will appreciate that both selfknowledge and all understanding of other people is based on these principles and is impossible without them. But you will ask how it stands with improving mankind. What is to be said of his accountability, and what can be achieved by education in these circumstances. The answer to this question will bring us back to our starting point. I began by using the old but eternally significant saying: “Know thyself.” I now come back to this knowledge and to conscience. Socrates, gentlemen, was already teaching that all virtue consists in knowledge. His whole aim was, through knowledge, to restore morality and give it a deeper foundation. Without proper knowledge, he maintained, no proper behaviour is possible. Schopenhauer himself shared the Greek philosopher’s view. He says: Only knowledge can be corrected, so that man can arrive at the insight that these or those means he used earlier do not achieve his ends or that they bring more disadvantage than gain. In this case he changes the means, not the ends. It is always true that knowledge is the sphere and domain where

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all improvement and ennobling takes place. Character is unchangeable and motives operate with necessity, but they have to pass through knowledge as through the medium of motives. But knowledge is capable of various kinds of expansion, of ongoing correction on innumerable levels. This is the goal of education. The training of reason through knowledge and insights of every kind is morally important because it opens access to motives otherwise unavailable to people. Thus, even when the circumstances are the same, the situation of a person on a second occasion can be quite different from that of the first occasion – if, in the meantime, he has been able to understand the circumstances correctly and completely, and can now be influenced by motives to which he was formerly not open. But no moral effect extends further than the correction of knowledge, and the undertaking to remove a person’s defects of character through speeches and moralizing and thus change his character – his real morality – is like the plan, through external means, to change lead into gold or through careful cultivation to make an oak-tree produce apricots.

Gentlemen, we must look this truth squarely in the face. We must be led by it in our actions if we are striving for success in bettering and ennobling mankind. And this truth is proving to be ever more significant in our era. Recently a book was published in England which caused a general sensation and has already been translated into German by a prominent philosopher. I am referring to the History of Civilization by Buckle.153 It is a book which in its whole treatment of history and in its philosophical view of this best of all teachers promises to be groundbreaking. It could be useful to apprise you of the guiding principles of this very important work in order to bring it to your particular attention. They are as follows: 1) That the progress of races depends on the success with which the laws of phenomena are investigated and the extent to which the knowledge of these laws is shared. 2) That before such an investigation can be undertaken a spirit of scepticism has to come about. 3) That the results of this investigation serve to increase the influence of intellectual truths and to lessen that of moral truths – which are less capable of progress than the intellectual – not absolutely but at least relatively. 4) That the great enemy to the progress of these investigations and therefore to human civilization is the protective spirit with which governments try to watch over and teach people what they are to do and churches prescribe what they are to believe. All of his [Buckle’s] principles – and I do not subscribe to them one and all – amount to the saying attributed to Francis Bacon, his great countryman: ‘Knowledge is power.’ The knowledge he wants is, of course, not similar to that which I have spoken of here; it is not Socratic knowledge but rather the kind that Socrates rejected or did not

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consider necessary for the promotion of human morality and nobility. But it will not have escaped your notice the Buckle was fundamentally in agreement with the view I have put forward here, namely that knowledge is a condition, the sole condition, of progress. The difference between us lies in the fact that he is deal with races, the totality, whereas I am dealing with the individual. What knowledge of the great unchangeable laws of nature is for the totality is for the individual, as far as his moral ennobling is concerned, knowledge of himself. But all knowledge of humanity is based on this knowledge, a science which is still completely in its infancy and for which all regular observation is lacking and which cannot be raised to the status of a science precisely because we have not established firm principles regarding character or have not subscribed to those already established. Fortunately, both in life and in literature the principles are unconsciously accepted. Thus we come more and more to the insight that the state has the responsibility to educate the poorer classes, which is better than to build prisons and to devise penal systems; that it is better to guard against crime than to punish it and that this is better achieved by means of education. However, education itself can only be effective and flourish if it is based on right principles from the start, when we understand what can be expected of it and do not aim at the impossible; if we are able to adopt the correct means and keep our gaze fixed on the sole aim which it is possible to achieve. This is a task which almost all of us, whether fathers or teachers, are called upon to carry out. But how few have this calling! How few have achieved clarity for themselves about this task! How often is there a total lack of planning in education! How often is the approach unprofessional! What errors are made! How often are educators themselves in need of education – or, to avoid a confusion of concepts – instruction about education! No one will achieve anything in education – or properly educate – without being guided by correct principles or possessing the necessary, but, of course, rare keen powers of observation for divining the moral disposition or character of the child. From early on, indeed mainly in the first years of childhood, the aim must be to smooth what is rough, to straighten what is crooked, to guide the will to what is right, and to prevent what is arbitrary. In this way, something can be achieved even in the most unfavourable circumstances. Later, the prospects of success, even with the most careful teaching, are always doubtful, because by then real education has ceased. But we must not forget that one person without any education at all can turn out well and another, with the most conscientious guidance and the most comprehensive instruction, can turn out badly. This is because in the first case character – the good disposition and mentality –

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is inborn, and in the second case because education does not catch on everywhere or because the right application of this remedy to mischievous natures is not sufficiently understood. In general, the parents of such hardened children, being as educators biased and blinded by love, will achieve the least; those occupied with the improvement of neglected children will achieve the most through their detachment and through the clear-sightedness they have developed from dealing with such cases. But just as there are incurable sicknesses there are also individuals who are unreceptive and closed off from all educational influence and are therefore incorrigible. Here and there one encounters the view that education of such natures is to their disadvantage and can even promote their inclination to vice, and in fact there is no lack of examples to support this view. It can be shown, in individuals as well as in nations, that the higher the level of education the more vicious and shrewd their malice, the more sophisticated their cruelty, the more degenerate their vices, and the blacker their crimes. But in such cases education has simply born no fruit or was inappropriate. The inevitable result was that the intellect, accompanying the will as its beacon, focused on egoism and honed by instruction, can only worsen the negative side of the character which is rooted in the will. Everything in life has its dark side. But the abuse, if I may call it that, must not be allowed to cancel the proper and productive use of a means. I am quite aware that what I have just been saying amounts to platitudes and that I have to ask for your indulgence for having taken up your time with them. In my defence I can only say that in my opinion there are certain highly important truths which, no matter how general and accepted they may be, cannot be repeated often enough. But it is now time for me to return from this diversion and at last to look at the question of a person’s responsibility for his actions – his accountability. This question is as important as it is difficult. It needs to be approached with great caution, and I cannot guarantee that you will find my solution entirely satisfactory. The question will already have drawn itself to your attention. You must immediately have seen that, if a person’s character is inborn and unchangeable, his actions are necessarily so as well, and he cannot be made responsible for them. Thus freedom of will is denied and the person becomes a victim of the iron laws of necessity. This, gentlemen, is a question which has troubled philosophers down through the ages and is still waiting for an answer. I could not present to you the one offered by the philosopher I follow, Schopenhauer, without looking more closely at his metaphysics – which is far from my intention here. I also feel all the less inclined to do so as I must frankly confess my dissatisfaction with this point in his teaching. I differ from him here and

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look for a different explanation. However, to indicate to you how he copes with the problem I will tell you, at least briefly, that he does allow for freedom – not in man’s activity but in his being. To understand this requires further knowledge of his system. But however well one knows his teachings, this explanation remains obscure and has no basis for explaining man’s responsibility for his actions. Then what is the basis? It is normally seen as man’s free will. Whether there is such a thing is a vexed question amongst philosophers and it is of too subtle a nature for me to explore it here. Fortunately I can leave it to one side and do not need to wait until the dispute is finally resolved. Whether the will is free or not, we know quite clearly that through his reason man is able to control his impulses and that his conscience is what tells him what not to do. According to this view, or rather, on the basis of these principles, also a judge proceeds without concerning himself with the question of freedom of the will. He assumes that anyone who is of sound mind, i.e. anyone whose reason is intact and who is thereby accountable, is responsible for his actions, and on this basis the judge hands down his sentence on the guilty person. The sole condition for responsibility is therefore knowledge. This increases with age and, in many cases, with the level of education. A child who is unable to distinguish between right and wrong is not at all responsible; an adult who has only limited understanding of right and wrong is less responsible than one who has clear understanding. If character were to be the criterion for punishment and guilt attributed to it, then all three – the child, the uneducated and the educated adult – would be equally guilty. But that is not how it works in life. Even though the law has only one way of measuring punishment both for the educated and the uneducated, we condemn the former more severely and have sympathy for the latter more than we condemn him. We simply act unconsciously on the basis of correct principles. In practice we are right even though our theory can be wrong. That is why, as I have already mentioned, the state is now more concerned to guard against crime than to punish it. More attention is paid to schools than to prisons. The state feels that through neglecting education for the poorer classes it largely incurs responsibility for the crimes committed by them; that it is its duty first to teach and then to punish, and that it can renege on this duty only at its own expense. So you see, gentlemen, that the doctrine that character is inborn contains nothing dangerous for the state; that I attribute responsibility solely to the intellect; that for me knowledge is the decisive factor regarding responsibility. You will now be less inclined to resist acceptance of that important truth, without, however, testing it carefully and considering it from every angle.

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You will, of course, then find that correct knowledge is not necessarily sufficient to achieve right behaviour or that it will necessarily result in right behaviour. You will find that, given the way we are, it must only too often be said of us that we know and approve of the right thing only to follow what is wrong. This humbling experience is certainly lamentable and speaks volumes for the imperfection of human nature. But you will, on the other hand, realize that without knowing what it is it is impossible for us to do what is right and good. Individuals who are endowed with a good disposition will do what is right instinctively. Mankind would be in a sorry state if there were no good and noble inborn qualities; but when I refer to the statement that “the tendency of the human heart is bad from childhood onwards” I am only following a book that no-one would accuse of representing pessimistic views but which has been seen as the source of optimism. For this reason, teaching and instruction will always be necessary for everyone, and the ancient Greek philosopher I have often mentioned here will be proven right. Naturally, habit is another requirement, for practice works in the moral sphere in the same way as with art, and another Greek philosopher, the great pupil of Socrates, considers habit to be a greater force and of more value than mere instruction. However, the latter will always be essential for virtue and indispensable for leading a completely moral life. If knowledge is rectified and good teaching has taken root, no matter what the inborn character, there is a guarantee that, even if it cannot be altered, the insight acquired by reason will help towards victory and the person’s behaviour will remain on the path of what is right and good. In conclusion: to summarize briefly the whole content of my lecture today, may I cite the stanza of our great poet which I have already mentioned, in which he expresses the outcome of the doctrine I have laid before you about individual character. He speaks in energetic language which is as poetic as it is philosophical: Just as, on the day that gave you to the world The sun rose up in greeting to the planets You soon began and continued on to flourish According to the law that brought you into being, That you now must be, with no escape from self According to the sibyls and the prophets. No time, no force is able to break down A form once shaped that, living, will develop.

RECENT SCHOPENHAUER RECEPTION

I. French Voices Victor Hugo Since not all admirers of Schopenhauer will have read the works of the French writer, we would like to quote a passage from his Les misérables (T. IV. P. 2. P. 216) which is easily identifiable as referring to Schopenhauer’s philosophy. L’admirable aussi, c’est la facilité à se payer de mots. Une école métaphysique du nord, un peu impregnée de brouillard, a cru faire une révolution dans l’entendement humain en remplaçant le mot Force par le mot Volonté. Dire: la plante veut, au lieu de: la plante croît: cela serait fécond en effet, si l’on ajoutait: l’univers veut. Pourquoi? C’est qu’il en sortirait ceci: la plante veut, donc elle a un moi; l’univers veut, donc il a un Dieu. Quant à nous, qui pourtant, au rebours de cette école, ne rejetons rien, à priori, une volonté dans la plante, accepté par cette école, nous paraît plus difficile à admettre qu’une volonté dans l’univers, niée par elle. Nier la volonté de l’infini, c’est à dire Dieu, cela ne se peut qu’à la condition de nier l’infini. Nous l’avons démontré. La négation de l’infini mène droit au Nihilisme. Tout devient une conception de l’esprit. Avec le Nihilisme pas de discussion possible. Car le nihiliste logique doute que son interlocuteur existe, et n’est pas bien sûr d’exister lui-même. Seulement, il n’aperçoit point que tout ce qu’il a nié, il l’admet en bloc, rien qu’en prononçant ce mot: Esprit. En somme, aucune voie est ouverte pour la pensé par une philosophie qui fait tout aboutir au monosyllable Non. À: non, il n’y a qu’une réponse: Oui. Le nihilisme est sans portée. Il n’y a pas de néant. Zéro n’existe pas. Tout est quelque chose. Rien n’est rien.

We reply to this twaddle of the great writer by using his own words: “L’admirable aussi, c’est la facilité à se payer de mots.” Twaddle is, of course, forgivable; but Victor Hugo is here guilty of completely twisting the truth, which is all the less understandable and excusable given that the title of Schopenhauer’s main work, “The World as Will and Representation”, already does what V. Hugo requires when he says: “si l’on ajoutait, l’univers veut”. Of course, Schopenhauer did not pull off the trick of

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drawing from the antecedent “l’univers veut” the conclusion “donc il a un Dieu”. Naturally, “escamotage” [sleight of hand] is a French word. And that is the name we give to this process – for want of a German word that adequately describes it. And as far as the nihilism is concerned about which the author talks his drivel in the passage quoted, it is not necessary for anyone who has studied Schopenhauer to be told that no such nihilism – as the kind written about by Hugo – is to be found in his work. It is the Hegelian “nothing”, or that of Zeno which he seems to have had in mind when he wrote down these words (and perhaps this latter led him to the idea of putting down “zero”); but it is not the Schopenhauerian nothing, which just like the Buddhist nothing, does not belong to the metaphysical part of his doctrine but to the ethical part. And so the writer is mixing up both disciplines when he speaks of a philosophy “qui fait tout aboutir au monosyllable Non.” Victor Hugo’s whole argumentation thus turns out to be pure verbiage which does not deserve a serious rebuttal, and only the importance of the man as a writer and the danger that the casual reader of his work could easily be impressed by his authority could justify our dwelling so long on his views.

A. Foucher de Careil This scholar’s book: Hegel et Schopenhauer. Études sur la philosophie allemande modern depuis Kant jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: L. Hachette & Cie., 1862) has never achieved recognition in Germany apart from in the book by Frauenstädt-Lindner Arthur Schopenhauer. Von ihm, über ihn (pp.439ff.) – and yet it deserved recognition because of its honest exploration of the subject it deals with. In drawing attention to the book it is not my intention to write a criticism of the critique of Schopenhauer’s philosophy contained in the book; however, I must make the comment that Foucher de Careil is also guilty of the error made by his aforementioned fellow countryman and likewise uses the words we have reproved when applied to Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In a different passage from the one already referred to [???] he says in the same sense: “Le nihilism”, a dit M. Cosin, “devrait être le dernier mot de la philosophie de Kant, s’il était sincère. Il l’est. Schopenhauer l’a prouvé.” Here is the same confusion of metaphysics and ethics as we find in Victor Hugo. However, he is far from dismissing Schopenhauer with a few trivial words. On the contrary, he devotes the greater part of the 384-page book to Schopenhauer, only 141 pages falling to Hegel. He fully acknowledges Schopenhauer’s importance

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as a philosopher and especially as a writer. What he objects to in the system will now be set out briefly.154 1. Careil denies the ideality of causality. Schopenhauer’s contrary position, he considers, does away with God, the soul and freedom of the will – and this explains the abovementioned agreement with V. Hugo. 2. The world as representation and the world as will have no connection with one another, and so the system suffers from dualism. 3. Basing man’s responsibility on the freedom of the (cosmic) will (of “esse”) is too subtle and mystical to be comprehensible. 4. Sympathy is not at all suitable as an ethical principle. Schopenhauer’s is not the Christian one, and the Christian is not, in turn, taken from the Buddhist. No virtues can be based on resignation. 5. In Christianity pessimism is wedded to optimism. 6. Finally, confusion arises from the ambiguity in the words “representation” and “will” as used by Schopenhauer insofar as the former can be subjective or objective and the will can mean, at one time, the desire to live and, at another time, man’s energetic activity. Since I have reason to suppose that only a few of my readers have in their possession a copy of the book under discussion I would like to quote a passage from it, which, if things are as the writer says, gives us Schopenhauer’s own words. Foucher de Careil says (p. 239): I have seen how he (Schopenhauer) was excited by the thought that the philosophical commentary on his doctrine of the will is found in the rightly proclaimed book of Bichat about life and death. I have heard him complain about the laziness or carefreeness of my countrymen who are not proud enough of Bichat’s fame and I have seen how he agrees with Saint-Marc Girardin in expressions of regret about the administrative vandalism which, by the destruction of the tower of Saint John of Lateran, caused the last evidence of the work of our great anatomist to disappear.

“‘The French,’ he [Schopenhauer] said to me, ‘should raise altars to this great man. Through his distinction of two kinds of life – an organic and an animal, an unpersonal and personal – Bichat has opened up a new and deep path [of enquiry] to follow. Listen to these words of the great

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anatomist; they deserve to be written in gold letters over the gates of our medical schools: Il est sans doute étonnant que les passions n’aient jamais leur terme etc.’” (See W.als W.u. V.. vol II, p. 297.) Schopenhauer is supposed to have then said to Careil: Imagine my joy, when, after thirty of philosophical isolation in academic wilderness I encountered this divine genius who had read in the human body everything that the philosophical observations of my whole life had revealed to me. For the thesis which I support and which will be my claim to fame in the future is none other than that of Bichat in his rightly famous book about life and death. Only the words are different. The basis is the same. My doctrine of character and freedom which is deduced from it is already there in embryo in Bichat’s work. Since character for him is the moral physiognomy of the passions and temperament is that of the inner functions and both are intimately related to organic life, he has seen, as have I, that character and temperament do not change and cannot be improved by education. Education can, indeed, strengthen the life of the intellect so that it can withstand the blind forces of organic life; but to change this latter or to modify it fundamentally is impossible.

I shall leave the rest of this passage untranslated since exactly the same can be read in Schopenhauer (ut supra) – which is the reason for the doubt I have mentioned about the truth of what Foucher de Careil presents as a real personal conversation with Schopenhauer on the subject. This fictional dressing up of a quoted passage in the shape of a conversation seems customary in France and belongs to the excusable untruths with which this unfortunate nation lets itself be beguiled during wartime. We find something similar with M. Chamell-Lacour, who will be discussed now. But first a comment – which after the foregoing letters is of course, superfluous – that M. Foucher de Careil has made a mistake where he says that Seidel’s book was crowned with awarded a prize by the University of Berlin rather than the University of Leipzig. In conclusion, one of the most curious statements in a book that is otherwise commendable should be mentioned: “La race germanique que nous voyons toujours à travers les nuages brillants de Mme de Staɺl, paraît peu propre à la philosophie” (p.372). In a book about Hegel and Schopenhauer this statement sounds – to put it mildly – like a joke. This slap in the face to the obvious facts requires no further comment.

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The Revue des deux Mondes In its 15 March 1870 number, this review carried a relatively long article about Schopenhauer by P. Chamelle-Lacour after Taillandier had mentioned him in essays on German literature several times but only in passing. Chamelle-Lacour expresses his concerns about the outcome of Schopenhauer’s doctrine but does him justice and presents his system accurately enough. However, he is inaccurate where he says that Schopenhauer has very few “disciples”. Amongst these he numbers Gwinner, Dorguth, Lindner and Emden! Gwinner and Emden were, indeed, friends. Whether the latter was also his “disciple” is something we don’t know. And Gwinner, his biographer, even declared in his book Schopenhauer und seine Freunde (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1863) p. 35 note) that he “does not adhere to Schopenhauer’s philosophy”. It seems that Chamelle-Lacour had never heard of Bähr, Bahnsen, Rokitanski, myself, and many others. All of those mentioned in no way exhaust the number of his “disciples”, and these could be without number, for not all who are committed to his philosophy have said so in public. It is certainly true that, leaving aside other countries, there is no city in Germany where Schopenhauer does not have followers who quietly contribute to the dissemination of his philosophy, and even Taillander could have corrected Chamelle-Lacour in this. Only a few months before the publication of the essay under discussion here, the Revue des deux Mondes received an article from the pen of the correspondent just mentioned, in which he reports about the great influence exercised by Schopenhauer on the younger writers in Germany, and numbers even the outstanding Spielhagen amongst them – something that Kreissig (whether rightly or wrongly, I prefer not to say) challenges in his Lectures on the contemporary German Novel [Vorlesungen über den deutschen Roman der Gegenwart]. With regard to all the others named by Taillandier, to which he could have added many more important names both of novelists and other writers, no one will deny the fact that they were influenced by Schopenhauer. Clearly, therefore, the two correspondents of the revue held contradictory opinions, but the editors were easily able to see that Taillandier and not Chamelle-Lacour had the truth on his side as is clear from the simple fact that both repeatedly devoted space in the revue’s columns to Schopenhauer. The editors would have been in a position – after they had taken up what the former wrote – to exert better control over striking statements of the latter and to correct them in a note. Precisely because the Revue des deux Mondes is such a prestigious and widely disseminated magazine – one could even say, without exaggeration, the most prestigious

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and most widely disseminated – it should be criticized for such carelessness. As already mentioned, Chamelle-Lacour also writes as if he had heard words of wisdom from the lips of Schopenhauer himself, words which, of course, are likewise to be found in Schopenhauer’s own works. He writes as if he met him at dinner in a hotel, and he uses the occasion to reproduce an anecdote first told by Gwinner and exploited by other writers – and naturally distorted – about the gold coin he put on the table. We can forgive Chamelle-Lacour this triviality. It is less excusable when he has Schopenhauer sitting opposite him at table holding a monologue about sexual love and the progress of humanity – which anyone familiar with Schopenhauer’s work will recognize as a mere tailoring or adaptation of particular passages in the works of Schopenhauer. This kind of presentation may make sense for a broad readership that is always on the lookout for something spicy, but anyone who is involved with philosophy should see truth – even in small things – as most sacred.

II. English Voices The Saturday Review Under the title M. Renan et Arthur Schopenhauer. Essai de Critique. Par Alexandre Balche. Odessa chez l’auteur (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1870) appeared last year a pamphlet that was honoured by being reviewed in the Saturday Review of 24 December in such detail that the review was almost as long as the pamphlet itself. Since the report contains many interesting things and provides the reader with the content of the pamphlet in question, at least a part-translation of the piece would possibly be welcome to many people – all the more so as this is the only English voice to have been heard since that famous essay about Schopenhauer in the Westminster Review of 1853. Apart from my own contributions in the unfortunately defunct The Parthenon and the Journal of Anthropology of January 1871,155 I have seen nothing about Schopenhauer in the English press. Darwin, whose ideas at several points converge with those of Schopenhauer, nowhere makes a mention of him. On the other hand, as Professor Dr B. Carus has informed me, Alfred Wallace, whose works are regrettably not accessible to me, is said to have referred to him and to subscribe to his doctrine about the will. The article in the Saturday Review is as follows: It is not at all surprising that, again and again, we find an eager disciple of the strange German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, popping up in

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one or other part of the world. In one respect Schopenhauer has an incalculable advantage over all other successors of Kant. His works are comprehensible for every English reader who is able to follow the English metaphysicians, and, if his conclusions raise an eyebrow, at least his line of argument is clear. By contrast, Hegel’s dialectic has made an impression on many that would be produced by a book on geometry in which the proofs are more than usually complicated and the axioms anything but self-evident. He also has in common with our philosophers this quality: that he does not speak like a professor at his academic lectern, whereas Fichte, Schelling and Hegel could be seen as a succession of high priests of a metaphysical church which has exerted a despotic influence on the minds of those incapable of thinking for themselves. A glance at the works of some of the less gifted Hegelians, for example, will convince every unbiased reader that the authors accept the logic of the master with faith as blind as that which has the most modest Christian, and the least capable of thought, believe in the Athanasian creed. Even atheism, which does not upset Schopenhauer and which he disdains to confuse with pantheism, is less repugnant in nature than the form that originates from the materialist systems, insofar as it is accompanied by a profound belief in certain important Christian teachings and really amounts to something bearing the ugly name of mysticism. It is clear that, even if Schopenhauer’s system, directly emanating from Kant, ends in Buddhist mysticism, Schopenhauer himself was no mystic, and that, although he preached nirvana as the final goal to which man should strive, he never achieved that goal himself. However deep a thinker he is, he never ceases to be a complete man of the world, and when he expresses his political views he reminds us very much of Thomas Hobbes, since he, too, was opposed to the democratic current of the period. De Balche, a Russian, confesses to being a disciple of Schopenhauer and decided this year, seemingly before the beginning of the war, to take up cudgels with Renan. Schopenhauer boasted, residing in Frankfurt, that he was not a philosopher by profession but a disinterested friend of science, whereas the intellectual autocrats in Berlin and Jena, in his view, thought up metaphysical theories as if they were commercial objects and their ‘speculation’ should be understood more in terms of their purse than in relation to Plotinus. Renan is a thinker by profession and even dared to write in favour of the (older) French Revolution. De Balche is a business man who devotes his leisure hours to the study of Schopenhauer and who hates the French Revolution from the bottom of his heart. If Renan had read his Schopenhauer like a good disciple he would have guarded against appealing to the worst vices of the French character, namely, vanity and envy. The main criminal, who, according to Schopenhauer’s codex,

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The extracts from Schopenhauer’s works, filling more than half of this little book, deal with law and politics, and, whatever one may think of the doctrines presented, they are very attractive because of their stark contrast to the democratic clichés which in recent years have contributed to a delusory atmosphere. Here we have a man before us who is perhaps an odd fellow but who flatters no one, not even the ladies or the ordinary people. After a short discussion of Schopenhauer’s theory of law, the writer continues: The reader who is not familiar with Schopenhauer could perhaps believe that he so emphatically presents the theory, already held by others before him, in order to initiate a grandiose communist plan, and that he not only calls a spade a spade but intends to emphasize the usefulness of requiring every person to work. Indeed, when the philosopher concludes this part of his teaching by saying that the abolition of luxury would most probably be the most effective cure for all human suffering one could almost expect that he would be support such dirty equality as something self-evident. But this is a deception. This apparent complaint about the unequal distribution of work is all smoke and mirrors. No one was less sympathetic to pick and shovel workers than Arthur Schopenhauer.

There follows a lengthy excerpt from Parerga, vol. II. 256, to which we refer the reader if he is not already familiar with it. Today,156 when Schopenhauer’s suggestion has been realized, may I be permitted to quote only the passage where he says: The German people’s division into many tribes under as many ruling princes with one emperor over them all who keeps the peace internally and, externally represents the unity of his realms, is natural because it results from its character and its circumstances. I am of the opinion that, if Germany is not to face the fate of Italy,157 the imperial dignity removed by its arch enemy Bonaparte the First must be restored with the greatest possible effect.

His fantasy did not reflect the presumption of Bismarck’s act, for he adds: Because we no longer live in the time of Günther von Schwarzburg, when election of the emperor was a serious matter, the imperial crown should

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alternate between Austria and Prussia after the death of each emperor.

We will have to count him, the Prussian, as a politician of the dominant German party which, of course, in 1866 received the death blow. Well now, he may be dead as a politician, but as a philosopher he is assured of eternal life.

III. New German Voices Victor Kiy and Carl Rokitansky In his worthy essay “The pessimism and ethics of Schopenhauer” [Der Pessimismus und die Ethik Schopenhauer’s] (Berlin: A.W. Hahn, 1866) Kiy tries to provide a scientific foundation for pessimism, or, as he says, to develop the idea of it. He sees pessimism 1) as a subjective idea, i.e. as resulting from a theoretical egoism – the formal foundation of pessimism – and 2) according to its objective content, its real foundation. Theoretical pessimism would have its foundation either in a one-sided idealism, or a one-sided realism, or a false individualism, and each of these possibilities is then presented in detail. Also, “pessimism according to its objective content” is considered under the category of “negative contradiction” from three angles: 1) reason as false, i.e. as the positive negation of the true; 2) nature as malady, i.e. the positive negation of well-being; and 3) the selfconscious spirit as evil, i.e. the positive negation of good. The author concludes the section on “the negative contradiction in nature, or malady” with the following words: And so we come to the conclusion that nature, in itself without guilt, brings about the existence of malady only through reflection on the chance suffering of isolated individuals, and that therefore only a necessary revelation of the innermost being of the idea of nature is what subjectively appears to be a malady.

At the end of the whole process the writer finally says: Practical egoism, evil, is therefore the main source of pessimism; it is the true and sole root of sufferings in this world. Without practical egoism, without evil, the concept of pessimism would be completely lacking in content.

Contrast this result of a deductive study with that of an inductive one. In his lecture given at the formal meeting of the Imperial Academy of Science on 31 May 1869 on the “Solidarity of all animal life” (Vienna,

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Carl Gerold, 1869), the author, councillor Professor Dr Carl Rokitansky – then vice-President and now President of the Academy – proposed the following theses: 1) That the roots of all animal life and animal intercourse reach from the highest circles right down to protozoan life; 2) That animal nature, inexorably bound by laws in its empirical development, consists in hunger and movement with an awareness of repletion and the satisfaction of aggressive activity, and that in these we find the foundation of a radical solidarity in animal life. Right at the beginning the author says: “It is, of course, self-evident that I include man in this, and that he plays the most important role.” This much had to be prefaced in order to convey to the reader the meaning of the following passage in the fullness and momentousness of its consequences. After the author has introduced and evaluated the Kantian theory of character – a theory to which Schopenhauer also subscribes – he says (p. 24): I am breaking off here and addressing a bond which originates in the animal character I have been describing; this bond, of dark colour, embraces the whole animal world: it is suffering. If we approach the animal world from this angle there can be no doubt about the positivity of suffering in the destiny of the animal world; it is both clear and natural that only suffering can result from what I have proven to be the necessary and ineradicable aggressive character of animals. I believe I have delivered objective and conclusive proof of a view which, on the one hand, is in glaring conflict with the very essence of the most widely disseminated and beloved religions and with the theme expressed in the deepest conceptions of the poets and philosophers; and which, on the other hand, one abominates while completely misunderstanding its foundation in idealism; finally, which, disregarding the binding, activating, and healing nature of suffering, claims it is the result of a sick, resigned mind and, in Germany, rightly relies on a literary epoch which is rich in this kind of aberration.

I am unable here to give provide detailed proof of the above and shall limit myself to underlining the salient points for orientation in this field where there is so often agreement between those who understand nature, philanthropists, and law-givers. For this reason one can omit the sufferings which result from the fact that the satisfaction of needs rooted in the animal world’s common dependence on nature is frustrated. The sufferings which are by far the most numerous, and at the same time the keenest and most enduring, are those which the

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animal world produces itself: first, plundering and murder in the animal world in its manifold forms. Civilized man feels he is justified in such acts against animals if he refrains from cruelty and thereby imitates those animals which are able infallibly to kill their victims quickly – in contrast to those that torment their victims and kill for the pleasure of doing so. Then there are the sufferings which come from the struggle for the satisfaction of the most commonly shared needs between animals, between man and beast, and, finally, between human beings. Amongst human beings there is furthermore the struggle for the satisfaction of needs which are partly specific to the level of civilization, are artificial, and even imaginary. These are needs which men develop in their struggle to win uncertain, problematic, degrading prizes as they chase after phantoms. Next there are the sufferings which gnaw at him – such as exhaustion, remorse, and envy – and which then further awaken new and ever more morbid desires. Then there are the sufferings of being misunderstood in one’s noble strivings, and – as something additional for noble natures – the torment of sympathy for the fate of peoples, states, families and individuals. There can be no question for the unbiased mind that the sufferings in the destiny of the animal world – and especially of human beings – far outweigh the joys.

This view, arrived at scientifically by an inductive method, should have more weight than the deductions of Kiy, and a pessimistic view should be seen as closer to the truth than an optimistic one. There will certainly be an element of subjectivism in the former, or, more clearly, the pessimistic view will always reflect the subjectivity of the person concerned, but only insofar as a distinction is drawn between a deeper and a more superficial way of looking at things. This is not to deny that the former will have its physiological and psychological causes. Of course there is no effect without a cause. But let us hear what else our medical guide has to say. On the basis of the premises he has stated he believes it is easy to think that, despite all variation in the form of suffering and its distribution, the overall sum of it and each158 of its intensities is constant and that here an inexorable law of nature rules.

Thus our author subscribes to the Quetelet-Buckle view of moral statistics which in recent times is finding ever more support. Rokitanski continues: In general, in can be said about sufferings arising from aggression that the sum of them is an equivalent of the frustrated and suffered aggression, but this presupposes sympathy, that strange phenomenon by virtue of which the individual will be gripped by the suffering of others and will

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From Schopenhauer we are familiar with this metaphysical basis for solidarity in sympathy; Rokitansky’s deduction further deepens Schopenhauer’s ethical principle, which is precisely sympathy, and shows that “the pessimistic direction which, according to Kiy”, Schopenhauer quite arbitrarily took in his Ethics, is in fact quite inseparably linked with it and is its true foundation.

Johann Czermak Frauenstädt complained in his preface to the third edition of Schopenhauer’s work that his theory of colour had not at all been taken up and evaluated by experts in the field. This led the famous Leipzig physiologist, Professor J. Czermak, in an essay presented to the Imperial Academy of Science on 7 July 1870 “On Schopenhauer’s theory of colour, a contribution to the history of colour theory”, to do away with the complaint and to “review the files” on this subject – as Schopenhauer prophesied would happen.159 Czermak thinks that the reason why Schopenhauer’s colour theory has been ignored by experts until now is explained by the fact that, starting out from the theory of colour which is very much his own and is a really important physiological theory, Schopenhauer not only adopted Goethe’s explanation of physical colours, and – apart from some dilettantes and painters – was alone in unwaveringly flying the flag of Goethe’s colour theory, but also in his writings supported the Furor Antinewtonicus in the most crass manner. In the course of his study, Czermak, who calls Schopenhauer ‘the most formidable thinker since Kant’, separates out what is wrong in his theory of colour from that which is useful and original in it, and at the same time does justice to Newton. He then says of Schopenhauer’s theory of colour that it is eminently physiological, that it is, in a wonderful way unmistakably congruent with our present day views – with regard to its main characteristics and general formulation – although not as highly developed in its detail and precision. This is all the more amazing and

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unexpected since its author never overcame his blind, absolute opposition to Newtonism and to the exact methods of the natural sciences. He had only very flimsy and limited empirical material – secondary images – and his treatment of those was also one-sided. He continues: And even if Young’s really ground-breaking hypothesis, which alone has provided the foundation for modern colour theory, was available in print fourteen years before the publication of Schopenhauer’s theory, it is still to Schopenhauer’s credit that he blazed a new trail – which was also fundamentally correct – and through his physiological theory discovered the most general and essential basis for every true colour theory; and therefore Schopenhauer’s theory, although it was published after that of Young and never became important or had an impact, has to be considered at least as a philosophical anticipation of current views. This achievement will doubtless assure him of a lasting place of honour in any complete history of colour theory.

Johann Karl Becker This young scholar, son of Schopenhauer’s friend mentioned earlier who was a district court official in Mainz, also studied colour theory and published an essay in Poggendorf’s Annalen, Supplementary vol. 5, p. 305, entitled “On the theory of subjective colour phenomena” (Zur Lehre von den subjektiven Farben-Erscheinungen) to which I cannot help drawing attention. He begins with the experiments referred to by Helmholtz in his Handbook of Physiological Optics (Handbuch der physiologischen Optik), and says (p. 307): Whoever wants to be informed about the real process of seeing, and especially about the different functions of the mind – of the intellect, the forming of concepts, reasoning – so that no doubt remains and no obscurity, I would refer him to Arthur Schopenhauer who treats of this subject on completely the same basis and with almost identical results as Helmholtz. He has thought them through more precisely and philosophically, although not nearly as much with the support of results from experimental research. This dates back to 1816 with his brief work on seeing and colours and more in detail in the second edition of his classical work on the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason. I consider this reference all the more fitting – and a duty towards the great thinker – as one can look in vain in Helmholz’s book for the name of Schopenhauer, and one could easily be inclined to attribute the greatest of his achievements to another person. The other fundamental ideas of his curious philosophy have, as Hartmann has recently shown, already been expressed by Schelling, the man he holds in such low esteem. In this, I am as far from saying that the man acknowledged as the greatest physiologist

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Recent Schopenhauer Reception of our time plagiarized Schopenhauer as I am of agreeing that Schopenhauer borrowed his fundamental ideas from Schelling.160 But it is still strange, very strange how two men carrying out research from such different standpoints and without knowing about one another, when working on the same subject come to almost the same conclusions – down to the tiniest details.

Regarding the experiments carried out by the author and the laws he derived from them I must refer to the essay itself. It should be noted here that the results produced by the former have confirmed the correctness of Schopenhauer’s conclusions. The same author, now a teacher of mathematics at the gymnasium in Schaffhausen, published as a book Essays from the border between mathematics and philosophy (Zürich: Fr. Schultheiß, 1870). In contrast to recent efforts of certain mathematicians who seek to provide the foundations for a “mathematical [natural] science” – which should really be called “speculative mathematics” – aimed at discovering the smallest number of principles possible from which the empirically given facts can be derived with mathematical necessity, this book sets out “to draw attention to the profound researches of the greatest thinkers of our nation, Kant and Schopenhauer.” I would like to take the opportunity to mention that in my book Religious Faith (Der religiöse Glaube) the same views are expressed. Becker’s views, as those of a professional mathematician, can here be recommended to mathematicians and philosophers.

Richard Wagner In his work on Beethoven (Leipzig: C.W. Fritsch, 1870) the famous composer entertains thoughts about the essence of music, and in doing so pays homage to Schopenhauer’s views. Since I have described these myself in detail in Supplement A there is no need here to go into them any further. I would like merely to quote some things from Wagner’s work. “Goethe and Schiller”, says the writer, “are on common ground in their sense of the essence of music.” But he says that Schopenhauer is the first to have realized and shown with philosophical clarity the place of music in relation to the other arts – by ascribing to it a nature that is totally different from that of the plastic and literary arts. After referring to the two sides of our consciousness and to musical conception as originating from the side that Schopenhauer sees as turned inwards, Wagner adds: But if this consciousness is consciousness of the self – i.e. of the will – it must be supposed that controlling it is essential for the purity of the

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consciousness that points outwards; but the essence of the thing-in-itself, to which intuitive knowledge has no access, is only accessible for the inwardturned consciousness – if this latter has achieved the capacity to look inwards with the clarity the former has as it looks outwards and intuitively grasps ideas.

Then he says: And for progress along this path Schopenhauer gives us the right direction through his profound hypothesis – important here – about the physiological phenomenon of clear vision and his theory of dreams which is based on it. If in that phenomenon the inward-turned consciousness achieves real clarity of vision, i.e. capacity for sight where our waking consciousness turned towards daylight only darkly senses the mighty foundation of the movements of our will, the [musical] sound emerges from this night into really true awareness as direct expression of the will.

According to Wagner, side by side with the world which visibly shows itself in waking and in dreams, a second world, only perceivable through hearing and announcing itself through sound, is present to our consciousness: a real world of sound alongside the visible world. We can say of them that they relate to one another as dream to waking. Each of them is as clear to us as the other, although we do know that they are completely different from one another. Just as the visible dream world can only be formed by a special activity of the brain, so, too, music enters our conscious by a similar brain activity.

I shall break off here and refer the reader to Wagner’s own work if he is not already familiar with it, for the point of these fragmentary excerpts is to draw them to the attention of Schopenhauer’s followers and friends. The subject itself is dealt with in enough detail in my essays above.

Eduard von Hartmann This philosopher, who through his Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten) deservedly achieved early fame, delivered in this work and in several other shorter writings – some of them published separately and others in journals – so many and such important contributions about Schopenhauer’s philosophy that I need at least to cite their titles. They are, aside from the above-mentioned main work, the following:

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1 Published separately: Schelling’s Philosophy as Unity of Hegel and Schopenhauer (Schelling’sche Philosophie als Einheit von Hegel und Schopenhauer), (Berlin: Otto Loewenstein, 1869), and, insofar as Schopenhauer’s teaching is based on that of Kant and takes it as his starting point, to this category also belongs Hartmann’s newest book: Characterization of the ‘thing in itself. Kantian Studies on the Theory of Knowledge and Metaphysics (Das Ding an sich und seine Beschaffenheit. Kantische Studien. zu Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik) (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1871). 2 Essays in Philosophische Monatshefte, edited by J. Bergmann. Vol. 2, no.6 (March) Berlin, Nicolai’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung: “On the need to reshape Schopenhauer’s philosophy on the basis of its fundamental principle.” (Über die notwendige Umbildung der Schopenhauer’schen Philosophie aus ihrem Grundprinzip heraus)161 (pp. 457-469), and, insofar as Dr Julius Bahnsen is a follower of Schopenhauer and, in his writings, evaluates his teaching, it is fitting to mention a review of him by E. von Hartmann in the same journal (vol. 4, no. 5). I have extracts from the same journal. The titles of the writings discussed there are as follows: Essays on Characterology. With Special Consideration of Pedagogical Concerns. [Beiträge zur Charakterologie. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung pädagogischer Fragen], by Dr Julius Bahnsen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1867) 2 vols.; On the Relationship between Will and Motive. A Preliminary Metaphysical Study of Characterology (Zum Verhältnis zwischen Wille und Motiv) by Dr Julius Bahnsen (Stolp und Bromberg bei Eschenhagen, 1870).

ENDNOTES

1 My Open letter to Dr Arthur Schopenhauer [Offenes Briefschreiben published in Leipzig in the Dyk’sche Buchhandlung. Now available in English as an ebook, translated by Dan Farrelly.] 2 The questionable passage referred to by Schopenhauer was: “Omnis natura vult esse conservatrix sui.” The “vult” is what confused me, and Schopenhauer, who undoubtedly was quoting from memory, was also wrong insofar as the word “vult” is not in Cicero’s text, which says: “Non dubitemque dicere, omnem naturam esse conservatricem sui.” De Finibus, V. 9.) 3 Which also happened. See the next letter. 4 Dr F. Brendel’s Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und Wissenschaft, vol.1, no. 4. See Supplement A. 5 Perhaps he means Noak’s Die Theologie als Religionsphilosophie (1853). But then what follows would not agree with what he said about the subject in his Senilia, where he says: “L. Noak, in his book Die Theologie als Religionsphilosophie 1853, presents my metaphysics and philosophy of nature very convincingly in the first twenty pages, using my expressions. However, he does speak in the most disgusting Hegelian jargon. And my name is not mentioned in the whole book.” See Arthur Schopenhauer. Von ihm. Ueber ihn. Von E.O. Lindner und J. Frauenstädt. (Berlin: A.W. Hayn, 1863), p. 581, note. 6 “Art”, I said, “starts from the idea.” 7 The subject: “Exposition and criticism of the principles of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.” 8 See Appendix. 9 I had informed him that the prize was awarded to Rudolf Seidel, candidatus theologiae at the time, and now Professor Dr Rudolf Seidel. A second student, whose name I had not found out at the time was awarded the Accessit. Both were awards for their essays on Schopenhauer’s philosophy. 10 See footnotes in the previous letter. 11 The article entitled “Nochmals Schelling und Schopenhauer” appeared somewhat later in Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 50, 1856. 12 I had already done this in my Open Letter, p. 8. 13 Die deutsche Nationalliteratur seit Lessing bis auf die Gegenwart, vol. 3, p. 385. 14 [I have searched in vain for this article in the periodical.] 15 Nos 28 and 29 (10 and 17 July) 1856. 16 ‘Sing, Goddess, the wrath…’ 17 Arthur Schopenhauer als Uebergangsformation von einer idealistischen in eine realistische Weltanschauung, von Adolf Cornill. Heidelberg 1856. See the letters to Frauenstädt, p. 694 and p. 697.

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18 I had written to him that Schelling had also had the idea with which I had first ventured to approach him, namely, that the Hebrew word for “father” is based on the root word “to will”. “The roots of the Semitic languages are verbs – they are regularly two syllables consisting of three radicals. (Even where those which in pronunciation have become one syllable the original type is restored in individual forms.) Given this characteristic of the language it is unavoidable that the word that in Hebrew means ‘father’ is seen as derived from a verb meaning ‘desire’ and therefore at the same time contains the notion of neediness which also is seen in the adjective derived from it.” See Schellings’s Sämmtliche Werke. Abteilung 2, vol. I; also under the specific title Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie. (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1856), p. 51.) 19 The original meaning of “Brahm” is strength, will, wish, and the creative drive.) A similar passage is to be found in Max Müller’s A History of Ancient Sanscrit Literature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1859), p. 564), where he gives a translation of a hymn from the 10th Mandala, which closes with the line: “Then first came Love upon it.” (Here for the first time love was added.) And the deceased Professor Wilson commented (in the Edinburgh Review, no.228, 1860, p. 384): “The word (love) is kama, which means desire, wish; and it expresses here the wish, synonymous with the will of the sole existing Being to create.” 20 [Abdera, in Thrace, is the birthplace of Protagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher. Here, it presumably means “wilderness”. “Make the best of it” is Schopenhauer’s English. Wherever Schopenhauer’s English occurs in the text it will be signified by double inverted commas.] 21 See note 1, p. 278. 22 See the next letter. 23 The article, which is to be seen as the continuation of the article on Schopenhauer’s views on music – mentioned several times – was published only after his death. 24 I had dedicated a poem to him for his birthday and intended it to appear in the Frankfurter Conversationsblatt. Since it was rejected, I sent Schopenhauer a written copy. 25 The article mentioned in the previous letter. 26 Die Schopenhauer’sche Philosophie in ihren Grundzügen dargestellt und kritisch beleuchtet, von C.G. Bähr (Dresden: P. Kuntze, 1857). 27 [Zum Trost über Ihre “broken down matrimonial alliance” empfehle ich Ihnen in D’Israeli’s “Curiosities of Literature Vol. 2 das Kap. “a literary life” zu lesen: – es sollte heißen “on literary men’s wives”. Einen Englischen Roman zu schreiben, war ein verwegenes Unternehmen, da die Engländer gerade darin excelliren, – und nun gar philosophisch-autobiographisch! Ihre Klagen darüber erinnern mich an die Faust-Stelle: “Wer mag wohl überhaupt jetzt eine Schrift /Von mäßig klugem Inhalt lesen!” Und durch die folgende beruhige ich mich über Ihre grausenhaften Prophezeiungen: “Und, weil mein Fäßchen trübe läuft, /So ist die Welt auch auf der Neige.” As a consolation for your broken down marriage I recommend that you read D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature Vol. 2, the chapter. “a literary life”. – It should

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be called “on literary men’s wives”. To write an English novel was a daring undertaking since this is precisely where the English excel – and now even a philosophical/autobiographical one! Your moans about it remind me of the passage in Faust: “Who, these days, wants to read anything of reasonable substance!” The following passage helps me to cope with your dire prophesies: “Because my cask is draining fast”/The world, too, is coming to an end.] 28 Schopenhauer’s philosophisches System, dargestellt und beurteilt von Rudolf Seydel. Gekrönte Preisschrift. (Leipzig: Breitkopf u. Härtel, 1857). 29 [Here Asher writes ‘St’, short for the offensive ‘Strohköpfe’.] 30 See the fourth letter and note. 31 [‘L.’, short for ‘Lumpen’.] 32 [Asher omits this phrase and writes …… .] 33 Here Schopenhauer is unjust to the writer. Seydel says that Schopenhauer explained – by using a parable of the oasis and the desert (Parerga II §. 390 of the first edition or §. 406 of the second edition) – the truth that evil is there for the sake of good. In many passages, especially Parerga II (§152, 171, 173, 181 of the first edition) he moves in the direction of a theodicy. The interpretation of the parable is incorrect, for Schopenhauer merely wanted to use it to highlight the sad loneliness of the genius amidst the inferior minds of those surrounding him. It also admits of Seydel’s interpretation, which for many certainly has more appeal, and in no way does he see theodicy in it but rather in the paragraphs referred to. 34 I had informed him that Dr Stein in Danzig (Schopenhauer’s home town) had visited me and told me that a member of the literary club there had himself given a lecture about his system. 35 I wrote to him: “The most important and most interesting thing that I have to tell you is the discovery I have made that you have found a forerunner in the famous poet and philosopher Salomon Ibn Gebirol, extracts from whose ‘fons vitae’ have been published by the Orientalist, S. Munk in his Mélanges de philosophie Juive et Arabe. First edition (Paris: A. Frank, 1857). Also a Dr Seyerlen is now doing the same, following another manuscript in Bauer and Zelter’s Theologische Jahrbücher, as you probably know. Munk had already in 1846 identified this Gebirol with Avicebron and it is now established that the work de materia universali originates from him and is identical with ‘fons vitae’.” 36 I had asked him whether he had already given anyone permission to write his biography. 37 I had asked him for an assessment of my book Über den religiösen Glauben which was later published. 38 See Schopenhauer’s Briefe an Frauenstädt, p. 499. 39 No. 33, 1857. This was intended only as an advance signal. See the next letter. 40 The passage in Munk is as follows: “Si tu étudies la science de l’âme, tu connaîtras sa supériorité, sa permanence et sa faculté de tout environner, de manière que tu seras étonné de sa substance, lorsque tu la verras, du moins en quelque sorte, porter toutes les choses. Tu sentiras alors que toi-même tu environne tout ce que tu connais des choses qui existent, et que les choses existentes que tu connais subsistent en quelque sorte dans toi-même. En te sentant ainsi toi-même

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environner tout ce que tu connais, tu verras que tu environnes tout l’univers avec plus de rapidité qu’un clin d’oeil. Mais tu ne pourrais le faire, si l’âme n’était pas une substance subtile et forte (à la fois), pénétrant toutes les choses et étant la demeure de toutes les choses.” [If you study the soul you will know its superiority, its permanence and its ability to encompass everything, so that you will be astonished at its substance when you see that, at least in some way, it supports everything. You will feel then that you yourself encompass everything known to you of existing things and that the existing things that you know subsist in some way in yourself. In feeling yourself like this encompassing all that is known to you, you will see that you encompass the whole universe with more speed than the blinking of an eye. But you would not be able to do it if the soul were not a substance both subtle and strong (at the same time), penetrating all things and being dwelling place of all things. My translation. D.F.] 41 Munk’s French translation is based on the Hebrew of Schem-Tob-Ibn-Falaquera. The language of the original text is Arabic. 42 I had asked him if he had read Schelling’s Philosophie der Mythologie and the essays by Seyerlen in the Theologische Jahrbücher (by Bauer and Zelter, 1856 no. 4) in which he outlined Gebirol’s system. 43 Literarisches Zentralblatt, 14, 1857, contains a favourable review of Seybel’s book. 44 I had told him that I had written a novel in English. 45 In the famous article entitled “Iconoclasm in German Philosophy”. 46 [Number 9 in Grisebach’s edition (Schopenhauers Briefe, ed. by Eduard Grisebach, Leipzig, 1860) is omitted by Asher, presumably because of detailed references to his personal health. It is dated 3 December 1857. Schopenhauer writes as follows: Werthester Herr Doctor, Da dieses Ihnen erst im nächsten Jahre zu Händen kommen wird, begnüge ich mich damit, Ihnen einen sehr wohlgemeinten Rath zu ertheilen. Gehn Sie täglich, bei jedem Wetter, 2 Stunden, rasch, folglich allein, spazieren; so werden Sie Ihre Obstruktionen los werden, nach kurzer Zeit. Dann aber fortfahren. Sagen Sie mir nichts von Zeitverlust: la santé avant tout! Den Morell, “on modern German philosophy habe noch kürzlich erhalten, aber noch nicht gelesen, sondern bloß ersehen, daß er mich nicht kennt. Mit den aufrichtigstenWünschen für Ihre Herstellung, Der Ihrige Arthur Schopenhauer. Frankfurt, d. 3. Dec. 1857) Dearest Doctor, Since this will only reach you next year I will just offer you a piece of well-meant advice. Each day, no matter what the weather, go for a quick two-hour walk – alone of course – and in this way you will, in a short time, rid yourself of your constipation. But then keep it up. Don’t talk to me about it being a waste of time. Health above all! I received Morell’s book

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recently “on modern German philosophy”. I haven’t read it yet but have only seen that he doesn’t know me. With the sincerest wishes for your recovery, Yours…] 47 I had written to him that, at a social gathering of the Leipzig Writers Union, I had raised a toast to him. 48 Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 52, 1857. This was a somewhat more penetrating article; but it was not the place to deal with the subject as exhaustively as Schopenhauer wished. 49 Lunteschütz, according to Grisebach. 50 Milius, according to Grisebach. 51 Asher has “sie” = they. This is probably a misprint for “Sie”, which makes more sense, since Asher is to make the arrangements. 52 Zingerle, according to Grisebach. 53 Cantor in Heidelberg. 54 The Morgenpost repeatedly brought quotations from his Parerga. 55 I had told him that I had succeeded in initiating a further educational organization for young businessmen in Leipzig. 56 [Asher omits a whole paragraph from the original. In Grisebach page 424 the passage reads: “Vom Teufel der Geldgier besessen, greifen sie zur dummen List, sich zu stellen, als hätten sie es unrecht verstanden, und schreiben mir: ‘nach gefälliger Mitteilung des Herrn Dr. Asher wollen Sie die Güte haben, uns ein besseres photogr: Porträt zu vermittlen.’ Unter diesem ekelhaften Modeausdruck ‘vermitteln’ verstehen sie, daß ich für mein Geld ein Bild machen lassen soll, mit welchem sie ihr Geld verdienen. Natürlich habe ich die schmutzigen Gesellen keiner Antwort gewürdigt, sondern ihnen überlassn, die darauf gehörende sich in Götz von Berlichingen selbst aufzuschlagen.” Possessed by the demon of greed they stupidly pretend not to have understood, and they write to me: “After what Doctor Asher so kindly communicates, you will be good enough to let us have a better photographical portrait.” In their disgusting modern parlance they are saying that with my own money I am to have a picture made with which they can earn their money. Naturally I have not deigned to answer these low-life fellows but leave it to them to look up what Götz von Berlichingen would recommend.] 57 [Here “die Gesellen” (these fellows) was in Schopenhauer’s original letter. Omitted by Asher as too derogatory?] 58 Hegel und seine Zeit, Berlin 1857. 59 The passage is to be found in the Introduction (p. 4): “Many are only now, for the first time, hearing about Schopenhauer’s philosophy … will the apostles of this system (Baader and Krause were previously mentioned) succeed in being heard in wider national circles? Is there any prospect of one of these systems gaining sole control of education and way of thinking of the age? The truth is – and precisely this upward push, this insistence, this pervasiveness of the dii minorum gentium is the proof – the truth is that the realm of philosophy is in a state of complete disorientation, in a state of dissolution and disintegration.”

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60 [Schopenhauer uses the word ‘Pfaff’, a contemptuous way of referring to a priest.] 61 Asher has only “H.” instead of the full German pejorative word “Hundsfott”. 62 [Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung.] 63 Instead of the then customary method of folding and closing a letter with a seal, some letters were enclosed in an envelope and marked with a cross. It was a more secure but more expensive method of mailing. 64 It was the Revue Française of 10 December 1857. In the same periodical on 20 December 1856 an article by the same author was published entitled “A. Schop. la philos. de la magie”. He spells his name A. Weil, not Weill as above. 65 He meant the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. 66 See Parerga II, 2nd edition, p. 693. 67 Materialismus und Idealismus in ihrem gegenwärtigen Entwicklungskrisen beleuchtet (Heidelberg: Mohr, 1858). 68 The editors of Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung had sent it to me for review. I wrote to Schopenhauer that I was undecided as to whether I should accept to do it or not and I felt I was not justified in writing in such a tone as his about the book, especially since it was well written and very carefully thought out. 69 The author of this article, like Seidel, wanted to see in Schopenhauer not so much the philosopher as the significant writer. This and other signs led to my conjecture. 70 See letter no. 9. 71 I had answered his last letter with the following: “The only concern I have is for yourself, dear Doctor, for I am convinced – and your bellicose letter makes me even more convinced – that my review of Seydel’s book would not have been enough to satisfy you. To do what you want, or at least say you want, would have needed a lengthy treatment of the subject. The editors asked me to be particularly brief. Besides, I think it is regrettable to attribute motives to anyone. Seydel may well have worked quite impartially. What reason could he have had to wish you ill? I find it in no way fitting to drag personalities into the judgement of a book.” Furthermore, I suggested he consider that if I refused to write the review the book could fall into the hands of an opponent, in which case he would come out of it much worse than if I were to take on the review. 72 In an article in Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung: “Lewes and Schopenhauer über den Charakter” I inserted the comment: “Dr Haym could well be indignant that I refer to someone as a great philosopher whom he consigns to the diis minorum gentium.” 73 The deceased Dr Heinze, former editor of the Illustrierte Zeitung, had promised me that he would bring Schopenhauer’s portrait to him for his birthday. He did not keep his promise, and it was delayed from week to week. 74 Über die Kunst zu lesen, oder Was und Wie soll man lesen? (Leipzig: C.F. Fleischer, 1858.) 75 “Of Studies”, from Essays, Moral, Economical and Political. 76 I was recommending merely the careful study of literary history, and this only with certain reservations. In this context I named J. Schmidt along with Schlegel and Gervinus because I knew of no other one and at the time there was probably no

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other one that dealt with the modern period as fully as Schmidt’s history. The passage that Schopenhauer is referring to is in Schmidt’s Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (vol. 3, 3rd edition, pp. 374f.) See Lindner’s Ein Wort der Verteidigung (p. 41f.) 77 Schopenhauer was mistaken. “The new opus”, Lindner said in his Ein Wort der Verteidigung p.117, “was the novel written by my wife: Sturm und Compass. My part in it was limited to stylistic editing, apart from the philosophical twist in the fourth book, which was neither fish nor fowl. In the second edition this is to be omitted and the original religious trend restored.” 78 A novel by Alfred Meißner. (Leipzig, Grunow.) 79 See the previous letter. 80 For a change I had written him a letter in English. 81 No. 1, 1858 had included an article by Kolatschek “Über die neuere deutsche Philosophie” in which passage quoted above appeared. I said in my letter to Schopenhauer: “You, I am sure, will not concede to him what he remarks with regard to the result of your philosophy, though I, for my part, cannot help seeing some little truth in it.” 82 No. 805, 1858, which contains the long promised biography together with the portrait of Schopenhauer. 83 See letter 11, footnote 67. 84 I had suggested him, as the older friend of Schopenhauer, and declined the commission which I had received from the editors to write the biography. 85 The January number, 1859. The title of the essay was: “Aus und über Schopenhauer.” 86 See Parerga II, §. 405 of the second edition. 87 See the previous letter. I had, in fact, written no such novel. 88 Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung. 89 I had drawn his attention to the fact that Sengler’s Erkenntnislehre vol.1 devotes some pages to him. 90 Popular way of referring to the Vossische Zeitung. 91 See Lindner, ut supra, p. 119. 92 I had asked him whether he preferred that I dedicate the book to him or that he write me a foreword to it. 93 In the beginning I intended to offer the book to the latter. 94 My Arthur Schopenhauer als Interpret des Goethe’schen Faust. Ein Erläuterungsversuch des ersten Theils dieser Tragödie. (Leipzig: Arnoldische Buchhandlung,1859.) [English translation as eBook by D.F.] 95 See p. 11 of my book. 96 Ibid. 97 Unfortunately true. 98 Just the one, p. 19 where instead of “weiser” I had “weicher”. 99 Of his main work. 100 I expressed my regret to him that my book did not meet with his full approval, and that because of the required speed of the printing process if the book was to be in his hands for his birthday (I had only started it in January) those misprints had crept in and had been overlooked by me.

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See above, letter 4. That of the Leipziger Handelslehranstalt für Ostern 1859 in which there is an article by me entitled: “On the Study of Modern Languages in General, and of the English Language in Particular”. 103 Parerga II 2nd edition §. 309. 104 That was not the case. Besides, my stay in London was very short and, in the limited time, I had so many things to attend to that a person who knows London would not be surprised that I did not succeed in seeing the Magazine. 105 This is the way the lower classes in England pronounce the word “London”. 106 This refers to a letter in which I said: “Carriere sides with you against Zimmermann in the periodical Philosophische Zeitschrift (vol. 35, no. 1.)” 107 See letter 17. 108 See the appendix. 109 I had presumed he already had it. 110 My Leipziger Handelslehranstalt piece (letter 19) was published in a separate edition by Trübner in London and C.F. Fleischer in Leipzig, 1859. 111 It should be Constitutionelle Zeitung (1 October, 1859). See Lindner, ut supra, p. 123. 112 14 November, 1859. 113 I had told him about the report of one of my friends in London about the article in question, which read: “I read trough (sic) the article on German philosophy, which is short and not very profound. It makes no mention of Schopenhauer’s, but principally dwells on Schelling, Fichte and Hegel, and the gist of the whole is, that as all of these philosophers have assumed unity as the ultimate basis of all, and this has not led to a satisfactory result, let somebody set out from dualism.” 114 See Appendix. 115 Wissenschaft der logischen Idee. Part 2. Logik der Ideenlehre (Königsberg 1859), pp. 326, 413, §. 417. 116 In his Aesthetik (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1859). 117 [Abdera, in Thrace, is the birthplace of Protagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher.] 118 His main work. 119 My Der religiöse Glaube. Eine psychologische Studie. Als Beitrag zur Psychologie und Religionsphilosophie. (Leipzig: Arnold, 1860). 120 He means the Buddhist religion. The significance of this book I have dealt with in my foreword. What passage he is referring to as being on p. 32 is not quite clear. But it seems, as Frauenstädt supposes in his letter to me, to refer to my opposition to the apriority of the concept of causality. Since this opposition drew sharp criticism from Professor Fortlage (in the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung) I am taking this opportunity to point out to him that I am speaking of the origin of the reasoning behind that Kantian proposition, and I refer him to Hume and to B. Suhle’s Antimetaphysische Untersuchungen, Part I (Berlin, 1862). 121 Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung no. 12, 1860. The author was H. Marggraff. 122 The passage speaks for itself and needs no further commentary. 102

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In the Notes and Queries, no. 190, 1859, published in London (and later in the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung) appeared my “Autobiographical Passage in Shakespeare’s Tempest”, where I attempted to show that the passage IV., 1, where Prospero, with the words “Therefore take heed, as Hymen’s lamp shall light you”, warns Ferdinand against haste, must stem from the poet’s own experience. 124 I had informed him that Stimmen der Zeit carried a critique of his philosophy by a Dr. E. Löwenstein. 125 Mentioned in the previous letter. [Der religiöse Glaube.] 126 They were in relation to the mention of Schopenhauer in Justi’s ästhetische Elemente der Platon’schen Philosophie, Osten-Sacken’s booklet about Baader und St.-Martin, B. Goltz in vol.2 of his Die Deutschen, and in the Voß’sche Zeitung of 29 April and 1 or 2 (?) May 1860. 127 [Eigentlich schreibe ich Ihnen, um Ihnen wohlmeinend zu rathen, daß Sie schlechterdings nicht sollten Ihre “situation” aufgeben: wer eine hat, darf sie, in diesen überlaufenen u. gedrängten Zeiten nicht fahren lassen, – mordicus festhalten. Daß man lieber einen Engländer hätte,giebt Denen nicht die Befugniß, Sie, wie einen Bedienten, abzuschaffen. Zudem haben Sie gezeigt, daß Sie Englisch schreiben, so gut wie ein Engländer nur irgend kann. Von Ihrer Aussprache kann ich nicht urtheilen, da ich nicht Englisch mit Ihnen geredet habe: – sonst wohl: – denn mich halten, in der Regel die Engländer für einen Engländer, wenigstens in der ersten ¼ Stunde, oft länger. – I am really writing to offer you some well-meant advice – namely, not to give up your job. Anyone who has one should not, in these times of pressure from overcrowding, let go of it, but hold on to it tenaciously. The fact that they would prefer to have an English person does not give them the right to dismiss you as a servant. Besides, you have shown that you can write English as well as any Englishman. I am unable to make any judgement about your accent, since I have never spoken English with you. I could have, otherwise, since the English usually take me for an Englishman – at least in the first quarter of an hour, if not longer. With regard to the fact that you have to teach at 7am, the solution is simple: set your clock forward by an hour. A proved method. But you should give up “the sweetest of your morning studies”! – Memento: primum vivere, deinde philosophari.] 128 At that time I was threatened with the loss of my post at the Handelslehranstalt in Leipzig, and, thanks to the manoeuvring of a colleague, I did lose it. 129 What a premonition! 130 Tristram Shandy. 131 This letter was passed on to me by the Brockhaus publisher. Herr von Quandt, who did not have my address, sent it to me through Brockhaus. 132 See letter 4. 133 The same concern is expressed in my Offenes Sendschreiben, p. 16. 134 This letter was accompanied by a letter from Herr G. von Quandt, dated 8 August 1859, in which he wrote: “Dear Sir, I take the liberty of sending you the last little book written by my father, which he was not destined to see published. Amongst my father’s papers was the draft of a letter meant for you. I am including here a copy of it for you.”

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Wissen und Sein. Eine realistische Abhandlung zur Ausgleichung des Spiritualismus und Materialismus, J.G. von Quandt (Dresden: Burdach, 1859). 136 From Brendel’s Anregungen, April 1856 and November 1860. 137 Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is... 138 Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.. 2. Aufl. 1.Bd. Leipzig Brockhaus 1844, pp. 289ff. or 3 Aufl. pp.301ff. [This title will henceforth abbreviated as W.als W.u. V.] 139 W.als W.u. V. 2 Bd. 2. Auflage p. 446, or 3 Aufl. p. 509. 140 For Spinoza, too, all emotions of the soul are reducible to laetitia and tristitia. 141 This second essay published in Brendel’s Anregungen (November 1860) was preceded by an obituary for the departed which I did not think necessary to include here. In the introduction to the essay itself I have also deleted an explanatory passage which was already included in the previous essay. 142 “Songs”, says Bichat, “are the language of the passions, of organic life, as the ordinary word is that of understanding, of animal life.” (Quoted from Schopenhauer’s W.als W.u. V. 3rd edition II, p. 298). 143 The same idea, although from a quite different, physiological perspective, is expressed by Lewes. “The philosopher”, he says, “who is brooding over his problem will, from time to time, be heard to sigh almost as deeply as the girl who is brooding over her unhappiness.” (Physiol. of Common Life. Tauschnitz Ed. Vol II. p.277). 144 Hoffman expresses quite similar views on music as an art in his Phantasiestücken in Caillot’s Manier (passim, but especially in Part 2, pp. 438 and 449ff.) Lazarus, in Part 2 of his Leben der Seele, has said a lot of sound things about music, but space does not permit me to quote the telling passages myself. Suffice it to say that if his starting point had been Schopenhauerian instead of Herbartian principles he would have been even more directly on target. 145 Since many of our readers will welcome hearing an expert’s views on Schopenhauer’s theory of music the comments of the editors of Brendel’s Anregungen are added here. 146 Presumably Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung. 147 From Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung. No.52, 1857. 148 Also S. Sachs in his Hebrew periodical Kerem Chemed and Dr. B.Beer in his review of Munk’s Mélanges in Literarisches Zentralblatt have pointed out the similarity. 149 “Mater rerum” is his definition of this word. Should not, accordingly, will be thought of as the “pater rerum” – will, desire, as Schelling correctly saw it and as I saw it when I first read Schopenhauer? 150 [The question mark is inserted by Asher.] 151 Today, ten years after I delivered the above lecture, I have a different view of this. Truth requires this concession. 152 Since this lecture was written, a disciple of Schopenhauer’s, Dr Julius Bahnsen, has given a detailed account of this teaching of the master in his Beiträge zur Charakterologie. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung pädagogischer Fragen. 2 vols, Leipzig. F.A. Brockhaus, 1867.

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[Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862) was an English historian, author of an unfinished History of Civilization.] 154 [The numbering 1-6 is inserted here for the sake of clarity.] 155 The title of my essay in this quarterly is: “Schopenhauer and Darwinism”. 156 Written on 4 May 1871. 157 It should not be forgotten that Schopenhauer wrote this in the year 1850, something which the editor of the second edition, Dr J. Frauenstädt, seemed to think it was unnecessary to note. 158 [A misprint in Asher’s text. He has “jene” instead of “jede”.] 159 See above, [letter 11]. 160 See above, p. 6. 161 This was also included in the Collected Philosophical Articles on the Philosophy of the Unconscious [Gesammelte Philosophische Abhandlungen zur Philosophie des Unbewussten], by E. von Hartmann. A new publication by Carl Duncker in Berlin. No doubt this new edition of his scattered essays will be warmly welcomed by the many friends of the author. It hardly needs mentioning that those who have not yet read the works will derive a great deal of profit from them.