Now the will, into which every form of life can be resolved, is the source of all human misery and unhappiness. The only way in which men can free themselves from the bondage of the will, and throw off its yoke, is by looking upon beauty. It is in art that eternal truth is revealed with a directness and certainty to which science never attains. This theory is connected with the Platonic theory of Ideas. The real inner nature of things, the Ideas in the Platonic sense, are revealed in creative and imaginative art. The faculty of vision, which enables men to divine this reality behind appearances, and to interpret it to others, is the gift of the artistic genius. He "understands the half-uttered speech of nature, and articulates clearly what she only stammered forth." The man of genius produces works of art by intuitive insight. He sees through the outer shell to the inner significance that lies at the heart of things. Genius is the faculty of renouncing entirely one's own personality for the time being, so as to become clear vision of the world, free of subjectivity. The genius must have imagination, above all things, in order to see in things not that which nature has actually made, but that which she endeavoured to make, but could not.
Art, however, does not deliver us permanently from life, but only for moments. It is therefore not a path out of life, but only an occasional consolation in life.
It is the saint, who through the surrender of all willing, through the intentional mortification of his own desires, attains to true resignation. Happiness and unhappiness become then a matter of indifference, and the spell of the illusion, which held us chained in the bonds of this world, is broken for ever.
These were the views which found expression in Schopenhauer's great work, The World as Will and Idea, which was finished in 1818. He found a publisher in Brockhaus of Leipsic. While the work was going through the press, he attacked his publisher with such violent rudeness, that Brockhaus wrote declining all further correspondence with one "whose letters in their supreme coarseness and rusticity savour more of the cabman than of the philosopher."
The work appeared when Schopenhauer was thirty years of age, an extraordinarily early date at which to produce so complete and elaborate a system of philosophy. In this work the outlines of his whole system are permanently fixed. The whole contains, he says, but a single thought. That thought exhibits itself as metaphysics, æsthetics, and ethics. He wrote later many essays and supplements, but these all go towards confirmation and expansion of his earlier work. For the rest of his life he was repeating his original theories, with infinite variation in expression. This is entirely in accord with his own theory of age. At thirty, he maintained, the intellectual and moral endowment has reached its highest development. All that is done later is to vary and expand the main principles already laid down.
His book fell still-born from the press. Twenty years later he succeeded in getting his publishers to undertake a second edition, but this too received but scant recognition. Schopenhauer had built great hopes on his work, and his disappointment was bitter when no word of notice greeted its appearance. "I dread silence about my system, as a burnt child dreads the fire," he wrote on one occasion. When bringing his manuscript to the notice of the publisher, he had written that the work "would hereafter be the source of a hundred other books." He confided to a disciple that upon completing the work, he had felt so convinced that he had solved the enigma of the world, that he had thought of having his signet-ring carved with the image of the sphinx throwing herself down the abyss. "My philosophy," he wrote, "is the real solution of the enigma of the world. In this sense it may be called a revelation."
Before the book appeared, Schopenhauer travelled to Italy. He first spent some weeks in Venice, where Byron was living at the time. The two, however, did not meet. He then set out for Rome, by way of Bologna and Florence, and there he spent the winter. His time was spent mostly in the art collections, and in the study of Italian. He kept, as he always did in travelling, a diary, recording not so much his observations on things seen, as his moods and moralisings on them.
In May of the following year, as he was returning home, he received the news of the bankruptcy of the Dantzig house in which almost the entire means of his mother and his sister were invested. He himself had a far smaller amount at stake. The business arrangements connected with the winding-up of the firm, which his mother accepted, were not to Schopenhauer's taste, and the estrangement between himself and his relatives now became permanent. He showed his usual promptness to suspect evil, and his angry accusations were so bitter, that a silence of eleven years fell between himself and his mother and sister. His struggle with the firm in question lasted for two years. Schopenhauer came off triumphant financially, his capital with interest being paid in full, whereas the other creditors obtained only thirty per cent.
His great work having now been launched in the philosophical world, Schopenhauer turned his thoughts to the chances of an academic appointment. After many inquiries he decided finally on Berlin, and made an application. Specimen copies of his published works were sent in, and a private trial lecture delivered. Here in 1820 he began his career as assistant lecturer, and a course of lectures was announced, of six hours a week, on philosophy in general. He chose as his lecture hour the very time at which Hegel delivered his principal course, thinking to enter into direct competition with him, and carry off his students. His hopes, however, misled him. The students were not to be beguiled away from the omnipotent Hegel, and Schopenhauer's course was a complete failure. He was not a good lecturer, and the course fell through before the end of the term. The lectures were never again delivered.
The six years he spent in Berlin were not in other respects happy ones. He was on bad terms with all his colleagues, and even in his private life he contrived to bring worry and legal trouble upon himself. In a small entrance hall, common ground to himself and another lodger, he, one day, found three women engaged in conversation. He demanded their withdrawal. Two complied, but one, a sempstress lodging in the same house, refused. Thereupon Schopenhauer, stick in hand, threw her forcibly twice out of the house. She fell, and on the following day brought her case before the court. After six months, the verdict went in Schopenhauer's favour, but an appeal was lodged, and, in his absence, the court inflicted a fine of twenty thalers, as compensation for injuries inflicted. Some months later the sempstress brought a further action. She claimed that her injuries were more serious than had first appeared, and that she was now permanently incapacitated for work. Schopenhauer was condemned to pay her sixty thalers a year as aliment, and five-sixths of the costs of the case. This sum he paid until the time of her death, twenty years later. On her death certificate he wrote, "obit anus, abit onus." The episode throws light on the character of the philosopher, with its marked strain of coarseness and ill-controlled passion.