Herbart’s contribution to modern thought lies in his psychology. Modern thought has not accepted his metaphysics, but it has been influenced to a not inconsiderable degree by his psychology. Herbart gave the death-blow to the old “faculty psychology,” and he placed psychology upon the same basis as the natural sciences. The science of psychology was not to Herbart a discussion of the nature of the soul, for that is unknowable. It is the study of the aggregate of the contents of consciousness. It is not a study of psychical faculties, but of psychical elements. This reduces psychology to an atomism, like other sciences, and thereby frees it from the influence of theology. Thus was the so-called modern psychology made possible by Herbart. Herbart’s theory was also of incalculable value to moderneducational theory. The conception of the influence of environment upon mental life, the theory of the development of mental life, the natural method of “preparation, presentation, association, systematization, and application” of an educational subject, the theory of the correlation of subjects—all are founded upon his psychology. Herbart’s attempt to apply mathematics to the laws of psychological phenomena was not so fortunate. At one time, during the nineteenth century, psychologists hoped much from mathematics in their science; but the hope has been practically abandoned. In recent years the demand for exactness has been met in psycho-physics, which operates with mathematics in a different way.
Arthur Schopenhauer[71] and his Philosophical Relations. Schopenhauer is grouped with Herbart because (1) both had an especial dislike for the idealistic development that the Kantian movement took; and (2) both built their theories upon interpretations of the Kantian thing-in-itself. While Herbart was a Realist, Schopenhauer was a Mystic; which only shows how theories, seemingly very different, can have the same source. Herbart’s Realism was an interpretation of Kant’s thing-in-itself as many realities; while Schopenhauer’s Mysticism was an interpretation of it as one reality. In both theories the consciousness, and with it the reason, were conceived as derivations of the thing-in-itself.
The best approach to Schopenhauer’s doctrine can perhaps be made by contrasting it with his pet aversion—the doctrine of Hegel. Schopenhauer was to Idealism what Mephistopheles was to Faust—he turnedRomanticism into pessimism. The theory of empirical evolution, which was to be highly developed in the nineteenth century, lay in theoretical germ in the teaching of the immediate followers of Kant. To Hegel the historical development of the cosmos is the struggle of reason, which with all its essential contradictions is futilely striving to come to itself. To Schopenhauer the history of the cosmos is also an endless struggle, although a struggle in which all reason is absent. Hegel could conceive the history of the cosmos as a development worthy of investigation. Schopenhauer, on the contrary, took no interest in history, because to him it could not be a development. To Hegel, phenomena form an intimate part of the cosmic struggle, since they are the content of the cosmic-reason; to Schopenhauer, phenomena are the surface illusions of an ebullient, unreasoning Will.
As the first theoretical pessimist of Europe, Schopenhauer expressed for the nineteenth century one of its most essential characteristics. He got scant recognition during his lifetime on account of the vogue of Hegel; but to-day it is Schopenhauer, rather than Hegel, who has a popular influence, and is widely read. This is partly on account of his masterly literary style and partly by reason of the content of his doctrine. The nineteenth century was carried along upon a strong current of pessimism because of (1) industrial problems, which involved many ethical considerations, and because of (2) its breaking away from traditional religious ties. So long as the unbounded optimism of Idealism prevailed, the world had little room for Schopenhauer’s teaching; but when Realism with its limitations took hold of the nineteenth century, then did Schopenhauer’sday of recognition come. The popular mind has found in Schopenhauer its best philosophical expression, and representatives of his teaching have been numerous. Among them are Richard Wagner (1813–1883) with his music dramas; Von Hartmann (b. 1842) with his theory of the unconscious; Nietzsche (1844–1900) with his extreme statement of egoism—that in view of universal evil, the only hope is in the survival of the strongest and in the virtue of selfishness.
The Life and Writings of Schopenhauer (1788–1860). Schopenhauer was the kind of genius who is always an alien to the world of men. He lived a long, lonely, isolated life, in which his inherited emotional and brooding nature became more and more cynical and pessimistic. Even in his paternal home he found himself a stranger. His father pushed him into mercantile business, which he hated; and after the death of his father his brilliant mother told him that he was welcome to her Weimar home only as a visitor. The doors of all academic circles were closed to him; and he, in commenting on it, said that he had failed to get an academic hearing, because the German did not believe in a metaphysics which was so expressed as to be understood. But the cause of his isolation lay mainly in himself. He was neurasthenic and peculiar—the subject of ill-temper, night-terrors, causeless depressions and dreads. With the genealogy of Schopenhauer’s family on his father’s side before us, who could wonder?—the grandmother insane, one uncle insane, one uncle idiotic, one neurotic, and his father a suicide. Schopenhauer’s own peculiarities were not pathological. He had a genius that blossomed as early in his years as Hegel’s blossomed late. He wrote his two important works before he was thirty.
1. Period of Education (1788–1813). The parents of Schopenhauer were wealthy, and in 1803 he traveled with them in England, France, and Holland. In 1804 he entered business, which he gave up the next year on the death of his father. In 1809 he was busy studying the classics, philosophy, and Hindu learning in Weimar, Göttingen, and Berlin.
2. Period of Literary Production (1813–1831). In 1813 he wrote the Four-fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, in the Thuringian forest, when other German young men were rallying to arms against Napoleon. This was accepted as a doctorate thesis at Jena. From 1814 to 1819 he lived in Dresden at work on The World as Will and Idea, which is the complete exposition of his doctrine. The work is divided into four parts: 1. Theory of Knowledge; 2. Description of the Forms of the Will; 3. Art as a Deliverance from the Will; 4. Morality as a Deliverance from the Will. In 1820 he got a position as Privat-docent in the University of Berlin. This was the only year of his teaching and was an utter failure.
3. Period of Retirement (1831–1860). In 1831 he went to Frankfort-on-the-Main to live alone and in retirement. Slowly he became known and gathered a little circle of disciples about him. He died in 1860.
The Influences upon Schopenhauer’s Thought. The principal influences upon Schopenhauer’s thought were three: (1) Kant, from whom he got his transcendental theory of knowledge (he always considered himself to be Kant’s true heir); (2) Plato, from whom he got his formulation of eternal Ideas as offering an escape from the Will; (3) the Hindus, from whom he got his ethical-Mysticism and the confirmation of his pessimism.
Schopenhauer is unique among the philosophers of Europe, because he denied all for which the Enlightenment stood. Even such reactionaries against the Enlightenment as Rousseau were a part of its essential spirit; for the presupposition of traditional theology and philosophy has been that existence is essentially a harmony. Schopenhauer, however, appealed to the discordances and the sorrow of existence, and drew the inference that fundamentally existence is irrational. For the source of Schopenhauer’s unique teaching we have to look, therefore, farther than modern Europe. The preceding modern European philosophers whom we have studied, developed their philosophies from purely Occidental sources. Schopenhauer drew from the Orient as well as from the Occident. The Romanticists had re-discovered Orientalism. The study of the Hindus had been interesting European scholars since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer, who was introduced to Indian philosophy by Goethe’s friend, Fr. Mayer, read the Upanishads in a Latin translation; and they contributed much to the development of the theory which his own emotional and cynical nature had presaged. The Hindus had long felt that the main problem of existence is moral and physical evil. Schopenhauer found in this teaching the statement of his own attitude.