AN OVERBEARING EGOIST

"Schopenhauer: His Life and Philosophy."
By Helen Zimmern. London: George Allen &c; Unwin.


Considering his undisguised contempt for their sex, it is rather curious that more than one woman should have written books about Arthur Schopenhauer, making the handsomest admissions not only of the good points in his character, but also of his genius as a philosopher. Miss Zimmern, in her excellent work, which is a completely revised edition of one originally published in 1876. is well aware that Schopenhauer's personality was, for most people, singularly unattractive. He was, in fact, an overbearing egoist, "boisterously arrogant" regarding the "Copernican revolution" he believed he had effected in human thought, enraged at the general neglect of his magnum opus, "The World as Will and Idea," jealous of the fame won by Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling, disgusted and angry because he failed to secure a University professorship, suspicious, irritable, and quarrelsome generally, and unsympathetic and rude towards his mother. Sensitive himself, indifferent to the feelings of others, morose, even hypochondriacal, he suffered, in Miss Zimmern's opinion, from an internal conflict which (to use the language of psycho-analysis) he never succeeded in resolving. Many of his eccentric qualities she attributes to pathological tendencies inherited from his ancestors. Nevertheless, she describes him not only as a "picturesque intellectual giant," but in his perfect sincerity and sterling humanity "a genuine man." Concerning his philosophy of the unconscious, purposeless, and unmoral Will which governs the universe, and the creed of absolute pessimism he built upon it, she is by no means uncritical, perceiving clearly enough its defects as a serious endeavor to explain Reality. As Ueberwerg has said, life for Schopenhauer is just "a cheat and a uselessly interrupting episode in the blissful repose of nothing." It is, in fact, worse than that—an actual evil inflicted on the world by the impersonal and irresponsible Will, which is ever driving us to live in misery and recklessly bring others into this vale of tears.
 The Will And Nirvana
Strangely enough, Schopenhauer did not favor suicide as a means of escape; he had some notion that, probably in a new existence, the Will would revenge itself for an abnormal effort to evade its cruel decree. Apparently he was not eager even, for a natural death; when cholera was ravaging Berlin in 1831 and claimed Hegel as one of its victims, Schopenhauer lost no time in running away, as he did from Naples when smallpox raged in that city. Miss Zimmern reminds us that he was something of a mystic, imbued with Buddhist thought. "He was undeniably a great Pessimist, the keynote of whose speculations was,
' 'Tis better not to be.' But these tenets, whether congenial to us or not, agree in essentials with the beliefs of three hundred millions of our race." The Buddhist ideal is, after many rebirths, Nirvana. Does Miss Zimmern share the common mistake of supposing that Nirvana is conceived of by philosophic Buddhists as annihilation? Nirvana is release from desire and conflict, but it is not extinction; on the contrary, Mrs. Rhys Davids defines it, with ample authority, as "an ageless, spaceless, and generally inconceivable, yet positive, state of being"—a state, too, of infinite bliss. Schopenhauer's fame, so slow in coming, was destined in the end to increase by leaps and bounds. Of modern philosophers he is, perhaps, the most widely read, the chief reason being doubtless the almost unique lucidity and liveliness of his style. He has had great influence on the schools of thought led by such men as von Hartmann and Nietzsche. Thomas Hardy, the English novelist and poet, has been claimed as one of his disciples, but Hardy was rather a meliorist than a pessimist, holding—if we may judge by the last chorus in "The Dynasts"—that the Will at last will rise to a redeeming consciousness—

That the rages of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered
from the darts that were.
Consciousness the Will informing, till
It fashion all things fair.


The Advertiser  22 October 1932,