The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp
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The translator’s English as printed (R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
xxviii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
a thousand times more insight into their doctrines than the heavy and distorted accounts of them that everyday men produce, who are still for the most part deeply entangled in the fashionable philosophy of the time, or in the sentiments of their own minds. But it is astonishing how decidedly the public seizes by preference on these expositions at second-hand. It seems really as if elective affinities were at work here, by virtue of which the common nature is drawn to its like, and therefore will rather hear what a great man has said from one of its own kind. Perhaps this rests on the same principle as that of mutual instruction, according to which children learn best from children.
One word more for the professors of philosophy. I have always been compelled to admire not merely the sagacity, the true and fine tact with which, immediately on its appearance, they recognised my philosophy as something altogether different from and indeed dangerous to their own attempts, or, in popular language, something that would not suit their turn ; but also the sure and astute policy by virtue of which they at once discovered the proper procedure with regard to it, the complete harmony with which they applied it, and the persistency with which they have remained faithful to it. This procedure, which further commended itself by the great ease of carrying it out, consists, as is well known, in altogether ignoring and thus in secreting — according to Goethe’s malicious phrase, which just means the appropriating of what is of weight and significance. The efficiency of this quiet means is increased by the corybantic shouts with which those who are at one reciprocally greet the birth of their own spiritual children — shouts which comPREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
\xix pel the public to look and note the air of importance with which they congratulate themselves on the event. Who can mistake the object of such proceedings ? Is there then nothing to oppose to the maxim, primum vivere, deinde phUosophari? These gentlemen desire to live, and indeed to live by philosophy. To philosophy they are assigned with their wives £tnd children,, and. spite of Petrarch’s povera e nitda vai filosofia, they have staked everything upon it. Now my philosophy js by no means so constituted that any one can live by it. It lacks the first indispensable requisite of a well-paid professional philosophy, a speculative theology, which — in spite of the troublesome Kant with his Critique of Keason — should and must, it is supposed, be the chief theme of all philosophy, even if it thus takes on itself the task of talking straight on of that of which it can know absolutely nothing. Indeed my philosophy does not permit to the professors the fiction they have so cunningly devised, and which has become so indispensable to them, of a reason that knows, perceives, or apprehends immediately and absolutely. This is a doctrine which it is only necessary to impose upon the reader at starting, in order to pass in the most comfortable inauner in the world, as it were in a chariot and four, into that region beyond the possibility of all experience, which Kant has wholly and (br ever shut out from our knowledge, and in which are found immediately revealed and most beautifully arranged the fundamental dogmas of modern, Judaising, optimistic Christianity. Now what in the world has my subtle philosophy, deficient as it is in these essential requisites, with no intentional aim, and unable to afford a means of subsistence, whose pole star is truth alone
XXX
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