VIII. Reactionary World Conceptions

“Life is a miserable affair; I have decided to spend mine by thinking about it.” Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1861) spoke these words in a conversation with Wieland at the beginning of his university years, and his world conception sprang from this mood. Schopenhauer had experienced personal hardship and had observed the sad lives of others when he decided upon concentrating on philosophical thought as a new aim of life. The sudden death of his father, caused by a fall from a storehouse, his bad experiences in his career as a merchant, the sight of scenes of human miseries that he witnessed as a' young man while traveling, and many other things of similar kind had produced in him the wish, not so much to know the world, but rather to procure for himself a means to endure it through contemplation. He needed a world conception in order to calm his gloomy disposition. When he began his university studies, the thoughts that Kant, Fichte and Schelling introduced to the German philosophical life were in full swing. Hegel's star was just then rising. In 1806 he had published his first larger work, The Phenomenology of the Spirit. In Goettingen, Schopenhauer heard the teachings of Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the author of the book, Aenesidemus, who was, to be sure, in a certain respect an opponent of Kant, but who nevertheless drew the student's attention to Kant and Plato as the two great spirits toward whom he would have to look. With fiery enthusiasm Schopenhauer plunged into Kant's mode of conception. He called the revolution that his study caused in his head a spiritual rebirth. He found it even more satisfactory because he considered it to be in agreement with the views of Plato, the other philosopher Schulze had pointed out to him.