Why did Schopenhauer HATE Hegel?

throughout the history of western philosophy there have been a lot of rivalries and hostilities but i can't think of a more vitriolic and one-sided one than that between arthur schopenhauer and garrick wilhelm friedrich hegel two extremely influential 19th century german philosophers who shared their love of kant but took his philosophy in entirely opposed directions hegel is nowadays remembered as a historicist philosopher one who placed the philosophy of history at the center of thought who saw history as a progressive development in which absolute spirit humanity in its collective existence moves towards the realization of ever greater

freedom and among the many popular thinkers that he influenced the most famous is undoubtedly karl marx schopenhauer on the other hand is remembered as the high priest of philosophical pessimism a somewhat depressive thinker who argued that the world is at bottom governed by a metaphysical will or a will to live an irrational all-encompassing and endlessly striving force he emphasized the ultimate meaninglessness of life and argued in favor of ascetic resignation resignation from the will to live as the solution to life's sufferings and the most famous philosopher he ended up influencing was of course friedrich nietzsche

now if you open schopenhauer's magnum opus the world as will and representation his most important work without question it won't take you long to find out that he's not the biggest hegel fan in the preface to the second edition he writes i constantly saw the false and the bad and finally the absurd and the senseless standing in universal admiration and honor and a footnote here specifies the hegelian philosophy then he talks about charlatanism being held in the highest admiration and the footnote here once again specifies hegel later in the book he refers to hegel as

an intellectual caliban a stupid and clumsy charlatan repulsive and dull and an unparalleled scribbler of nonsense he refers to his philosophy as senseless sham wisdom calls it mind destroying and writes that the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense and scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words such as had previously been heard only in mad houses finally appeared in hegel all of these remarks are quoted from just one book and that's not even all of them and what's remarkable is that this book is otherwise quite clearly written and organized in a pretty tidy way

it mostly exhibits a common collected kind of philosophizing where there's very little that's superfluous but then sprinkled throughout it are these hateful references to hegel that don't seem to serve much of a point and don't really add anything to schopenhauer's arguments and many of which are just repetitions of the same personal attack with slight variations schopenhauer seems to have been actively looking for any available opportunity to publicly insult hegel and it's even weirder considering that this was mostly a one-way thing as hegel never returned that kind of hostility so what made schopenhauer despise hegel so

much that's what we're going to talk about in this video of course part of the explanation definitely has to do with schopenhauer's personality he was without a doubt cynical and irritable it's probably fair to say bitter and by reputation not particularly sociable or fun to be around his own mother in a letter to him wrote i know perfectly well how you are you irritate me to no end and you are extremely difficult to deal with you criticize everything and everyone except yourself so it is not surprising that you become alienated from the people close to

you there is no person on earth who can tolerate being criticized by someone with as many personal weaknesses as you have if you were not such an annoying little man you would have been nothing but laughable but now it is impossible to live with you so he was clearly quite opinionated and quick to criticize and did not mind overstepping good manners when speaking his mind originally schopenhauer had trained to become a merchant like his father but after being one for two years he became certain that it wasn't for him and decided to become a scholar

instead he therefore started his academic studies relatively late in life at 22 years old in the university of guttingen he studied metaphysics psychology and logic with his teacher gotlob and schurze and schulze advised him to concentrate on plato and emmanuel kant and that he did he really sunk his teeth into these two thinkers and by immersing himself in their works found a strong foundation for his own philosophy the core of which he would never renounce so by the time hegel was the chair of philosophy at the university of berlin and rapidly gaining in popularity schopenhauer

had already developed a confidently held philosophy based on the works of kant and plato whom schopenhauer saw as the two most important figures in all of western philosophy given this the encounter with hegel's texts was probably an extremely jarring experience for him despite them both being admirers of kant not only were hegel's philosophical goals and methods radically different from schopenhauer's his terminology and style of writing were extremely unusual obscure and sometimes impenetrable to fully understand it schopenhauer would have had to put in the kind of effort that he had put into studying plato and kant

and he saw no reason to do that so schopenhauer's reaction was pretty predictable he concluded that the only reason hegel would write in such an obscure style is to obscure the fact that he has nothing worthwhile to say after all if you already have a philosophical outlook and a firm idea of what good philosophy is and then you encounter something totally alien to that idea you're more likely to assume that it's not worth your time than to give it the benefit of the doubt he saw in hegel's obscurity a worrying trend in this way philosophizing

degenerates into a mere combining a kind of lengthy reckoning which like all reckoning and calculating employs and requires only the lower faculties in fact there ultimately results from this a mere display of words the most monstrous example of which is afforded us by mind-destroying hegelism where it is carried to the extent of pure nonsense exaggerated as it may be schopenhauer had at least earned the right to make this kind of criticism as his own writing style was exceptionally clear and comprehensible among the german philosophers but this attack on obscurity was by no means the only

criticism schopenhauer leveled against hegel his next problem was hegel's historicism for hegel philosophy was not a matter of static eternal truths it was something that develops through history therefore in judging philosophical ideas he did not have a simple standard of whether an idea was true or false rather he was just as concerned with the place a philosophical idea had in an overall historical development and it had to be understood in the context of such development schopenhauer in this case was a more traditional philosopher than hegel closer to plato and kant and that he believed that

history has nothing to do with philosophy proper because while history deals with changes philosophy must concern itself with what is permanent and unchanging quote the hegelians who regard the philosophy of history as even the main purpose of all philosophy should be referred to plato who entirely repeats that the object of philosophy is the unchangeable and ever permanent not that which now is thus and then otherwise all who set up such constructions of the course of the world or as they call it of history have not grasped the principal truth of all philosophy that that which

is is at all times the same that all becoming and arising are only apparent that the ideas alone are permanent that time is ideal end quote and for schopenhauer one of the things that is permanent and unchanging is the will people animals objects they come and go they are born and they die they are created and destroyed but underneath it all is always in essence the very same will that is manifesting itself a will that is immortal boundless and defined only by its inherent striving changes in a sense illusory and so long as philosophers focus

on it they will be misled incapable of penetrating into the essence of the world he therefore saw hegel as ruining philosophy vulgarizing it because by turning it towards the historical he was turning it away from that which mattered most to a true philosopher the eternal and this connects directly to the next central disagreement between the two i should mention schopenhauer's pessimism versus hegel's historical optimism hegel acknowledged that history is full of horror and terror that its wheels are oiled with blood but his optimism consisted in this that the terror and the bloodshed are not entirely

meaningless random events rather they are episodes in a larger historical development that is both positive and meaningful the development of absolute spirit towards the realization of freedom the french revolution for instance inevitably involved violence but it proclaimed the rights of man on earth and thereby moved humanity in its historical existence closer to its purpose freedom and self-consciousness which manifest itself both in philosophy and in politics for schopenhauer freedom in the mundane empirical world was a mere illusion and the closest thing to a purpose that life had was the realization that life is not worth living

and the consequent turning away from life he saw historical progress as an impossibility because no matter how much things change socio-historically there will always be a manifestation of the very same will irrational aimless constantly striving and endlessly hungry meaning that humanity will always continue to strive with no final satisfaction no ultimate purpose and the idea that all this is leading somewhere is delusion the exact opposite of self-consciousness where hegel saw a progressive rational and universal development schopenhauer saw a bunch of events which were all equally meaningless and without purpose for him the study of history

was worthwhile not because it reveals some kind of progress inherent to history but because it provides us with examples of the suffering and destruction inherent to life and thereby helps shatter any naive optimism we might nurture their conflicting views on history reveal themselves in their views on napoleon as they both happen to catch a glimpse of him in person it is sometimes said that hegel had just finished writing the phenomenology of spirit which detailed the historical journey of absolute spirit towards freedom and self-consciousness when he saw napoleon entering the city of vienna he famously wrote

i saw the emperor this world soul riding out of the city on reconnaissance it is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual who concentrated here at a single point a stride a horse reaches out over the world and masters it hegel thus saw napoleon at least at the time as a cause for optimism a world historical individual an individual of international significance who embodies his historical period and moves it forward to its next stage schopenhauer on the other hand was not so optimistic he wrote that napoleon quote revealed the whole malice of the

human will and the suffering of his age as the necessary other side of the will revealed the misery that is inseparably united with the evil will whose total appearance is the world but this is just the purpose of the world that it will recognize the unspeakable misery with which the will to life is bound and is strictly speaking one bonaparte's appearance thus contributes greatly to this purpose the purpose of the world is not to be an insipid fool's paradise rather it is to be a tragedy in which the will to life recognizes itself and turns

away from itself bonaparte is only a powerful mirror of the human will to life end quote in other words in napoleon schopenhauer saw not absolute spirit but the will not the progress of history but the striving of the very same will that expresses itself in different forms in every single historical period and thus presents nothing essentially new not a cause for historical optimism but only another reason for pessimism a particularly violent example of the will which is always driven by egoism and always causes suffering it is interesting that both of them saw in napoleon a

reflection and proof of their philosophical beliefs even if their conclusions were completely opposed and we see here how their philosophical disagreements were not just a matter of scholarly debate but deeply informed how they understood the events and politics of their time and when in 1848 a revolution broke out in germany schopenhauer viewed the revolutionaries just as he had viewed napoleon the same manifestation of irrational selfish striving necessarily accompanied by suffering and he cheered on the soldiers who were fighting to crush the revolution towards the end of 1819 about a year after writing his magnum opus

disappointed that his book wasn't doing very well schopenhauer decided to apply to the university of berlin to qualify as a so-called private sent this was a kind of university lecturer that instead of getting paid a salary by the university would get paid on an individual basis by the people attending the lectures the chair of philosophy at the university of berlin at the time was none other than hegel and on his application schopenhauer expressed a very strange wish he wanted his lectures to be scheduled at the exact same time slot as hegel's as a weird kind

of challenge i guess most of the faculty were appalled by the arrogance of such a request but hegel himself seemed to have no problem with it and granted it in 1820 in order to qualify schopenhauer had to pass a test lecture evaluated by a couple of professors including hegel he seemed to do well and the only question hegel asked him concerned a small conceptual matter to keep it short higgle asked schopenhauer what he meant when he spoke of animal functions because he suspected that when using this term schopenhauer was confusing motives that his reasons for

action with causal factors a small argument ensued but was ended by another professor saying in schopenhauer's defense that his use of the terminology was in keeping with the zoology of the time hegel politely decided not to press the point any further and qualified schopenhauer for his position the way i see it this was a chad move on hegel's part there's few things more powerful than treating a person who despises you with such calm politeness but in schopenhauer's later account of events hegel had actively tried to prevent schopenhauer from qualifying and also supposedly revealed himself to

be completely ignorant of natural science be that as it may schopenhauer got what he wanted a lecturing spot at the same time slot as hegel's but given that hegel was pretty much a celebrity at this time everyone was lining up to see him and tropenhauer's lectures ended up being almost completely empty leading him to shamefully leave berlin for several years probably hating hegel even more than he already had this event almost certainly strengthened some of the anti-academic sentiments schopenhauer had it's easy to see these sentiments as simply a case of sour grapes but at the

same time a person can make a truthful point even if they're making it for petty reasons schopenhauer argued that academic philosophy had an integrity problem because it necessarily had to appeal to a certain group of people and inevitably promoted conformity german universities were back then funded by kings and princes and you couldn't teach anything that royalty strongly opposed without risking losing your position there's still disagreements among people today regarding to what extent hegel censored or adjusted his political philosophy precisely for this reason more generally schopenhauer disliked the very idea of doing philosophy for money because

the search for truth is then likely to become subordinated to the ones who fund your work he quoted the phrase i sing the song of him whose bread i eat he once again referred back to one of his favorite philosophers plato who just like socrates before him did not charge money for philosophical teachings which schopenhauer saw as part of their philosophical integrity whereas plato's intellectual opponents the sophists were precisely those who earned money from teaching schopenhauer thus believed that his philosophy was better off in a self-funded career than an academic one this anti-academic sentiment was

part of what nietzsche would come to like about schopenhauer and he especially admired schopenhauer's willingness to stand alone nietzsche projected a kind of heroic solitude onto schopenhauer admiring the fact that at a time when hegelianism was extremely trendy schopenhauer stood his ground against it even if it meant being alienated from the academic community nietzsche himself would later experience similar problems being shunned by his academic colleagues having few students attending his lectures and feeling out of place in academia at times like these he looked to schopenhauer as a model an untimely person a person out of

joint with the historical moment he occupies it's interesting that schopenhauer who in his real dealings with hegel was quite a sad and almost pathetic figure managed to leave behind a legacy that someone as influential as nietzsche found to be a powerful inspiration and the final irony of this video is the fact that while schopenhauer was throughout most of his life a cynical pessimist in both attitude and beliefs the final years of his life were marked by a relative optimism his works were finally growing in popularity he began acquiring admirers and disciples he was receiving visitors

and gifts and even academia finally noticed and acknowledged his works the way he saw it all truly good things take a long time to be appreciated and his time to be appreciated had finally come he died of pulmonary respiratory failure in 1860 while sitting at home on his couch and the last friend who had visited him said that he was at peace with dying now i'd like to thank my patrons those whose song i sing because i eat their bread 404 error official fan page a b a sociology of tarat alec radford alex gavrilio andrew

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so this was another shorter video that i wanted to get out there before leaving home for a while let me know if you enjoyed it and if you like videos that focus on some of the biographical details of philosophers lives if people are interested perhaps i'll make more videos on philosophical beef in the future though i don't know if there's any others as extreme as schopenhauer's if you become my patron you'll get access to a google drive where i post my scripts relevant pdfs and occasional supplementary video notes i write you'll also get to vote

on occasional polls i make regarding video topics and you'll get a link to my discord server let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like me to cover in the near future i'm considering doing a video on the german revolution at some point but that will be a big project and i'll have to do a lot of research before i can start making a video on it anyway i hope you're doing well and i hope you're having a good day i'll probably see you in the summer thank you