Schopenhauer is in all respects the antipodes of Herbart.  If in Herbart philosophy breaks up into a number of distinct special inquiries, Schopenhauer has but one fundamental thought to communicate, in the carrying out of which, as he is convinced, each part implies the whole and is implied by the whole.  The former operates with sober concepts where the latter follows the lead of gifted intuition.  The one is cool, thorough, cautious, methodical to the point of pedantry; the other is passionate, ingenious, unmethodical to the point of capricious dilettantism.  In the one case, philosophy is as far as possible exact science, in which the person of the thinker entirely retires behind the substance of the inquiry; in the other, philosophy consists in a sum of artistic conceptions, which derive their content and value chiefly from the individuality of the author.  The history of philosophy has no other system to show which to the same degree expresses and reflects the personality of the philosopher as Schopenhauer’s.  This personality, notwithstanding its limitations and its whims, was important enough to give interest to Schopenhauer’s views, even apart from the relative truth which they contain.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the son of a merchant in Dantzic and his wife Johanna, nee Trosiener, who subsequently became known as a novelist.  His early training was gained from foreign travel, but after the death of his father he exchanged the mercantile career, which he had begun at his father’s request, for that of a scholar, studying under G.E.  Schulze in Goettingen, and under Fichte at Berlin.  In 1813 he gained his doctor’s degree in Jena with a dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.  Then he moved from Weimar, the residence of his mother, where he had associated considerably with Goethe and had been introduced to Indian philosophy by Fr. Mayer, to Dresden (1814-18).  In the latter place he wrote the essay On Sight and Colors (1816; subsequently published by the author in Latin), and his chief work, The World as Will and Idea (1819; new edition, with a second volume, 1844).  After the completion of the latter he began his first Italian journey, while his second tour fell in the interval between his two quite unsuccessful attempts (in Berlin 1820 and 1825) to propagate his philosophy from the professor’s desk.  From 1831 until his death he lived in learned retirement in Frankfort-on-the-Main.  Here he composed the opuscule On Will in Nature, 1836, the prize treatises On the Freedom of the Human Will and On the Foundation of Ethics (together, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, 1841), and the collection of minor treatises Parerga and Paralipomena, 2 vols., 1851 (including an essay “On Religion").  J. Frauenstaedt has published a considerable amount of posthumous material (among other things the translation, B.  Gracians Handorakel der Weltklugheit); the Collected Works (6 vols., 1873-74, 2d ed., 1877, with a biographical notice); Lichtstrahlen aus Schopenhauers Werken, 1861, 5th ed. 1885; and a Schopenhauer Lexicon, 2 vols., 1871.[1]