The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 4, April, 1852Various
History
The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 4, April, 1852
Various
Art, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals
ARTHOR SCHOPENHAUER, of Berlin, has recently published _Parerga und
Paralipomena, or little Philosophical Writings_, in which, according to
a Leipsic reviewer, "the author asserts that _his_ philosophy is not
merely the _only_ advance in that department since the days of Kant, but
that _his_ system bears the same relation to all earlier philosophy,
that the New Testament bears to the Old. In addition to this, he
attempts to solve the problem, how can it be possible that he has ever
been as unknown to the literary and scientific world as the Man in the
Moon, while the absurdest and most ridiculous theories, such, for
example, as those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, have been so
generally accepted. But as he, in spite of the most earnest endeavors,
can find no internal ground for this unaccountable blindness of the
public, he seeks it in another direction. These impudent sophists, it
seems, have had no other ground than simply _that of making money_! With
the hocus-pocus of common charlatans they have carried their wares to
market, and as _candidates_ and teachers of philosophy generally spring
up from the same effort, there resulted an alliance of charlatans whose
object it was on the one side to raise themselves to heaven, and on the
other to suppress all true thinking, so that the public might be
prevented, by a just consideration of their own worthlessness." "Such
accusations as those," continues our reviewer, "awaken an unfavorable
impression, which is not in the least diminished by continued boasting
and grandiloquence, and a clumsy roughness of style, which not
unfrequently falls into downright burlesque. The work itself is an odd
mixture of actual recollections and arbitrary fancies, of explanations
and superstitions, which force us to regret that many really admirable
thoughts which occasionally surprise the reader in an assembly of
trivialities and paradoxes, must inevitably be lost. Those philosophers
certainly provoke sharp criticism when we separate their truly
scientific contents from their visions and dispositions, and it would
perhaps be more in accordance with the spirit of the age to return more
earnestly to _Kant_ than most of the more recent philosophers are
accustomed to do. Still nothing is in the least gained for the negative
aim of criticism, when the critic makes it such an easy matter to cast
away, without further consideration, all of the latest advances in
philosophy, because he believes that he has detected errors in their
pretended fundamental thoughts, without first ascertaining whether these
fundamental thoughts are really the leading principle of the system, and
when he on his own side falls into suppositions which have certainly
received long since a satisfactory refutation from the later philosophy;
as, for example, in the Kantean opposition of things in themselves, and
their appearances. The _positive_, with which Herr Schopenhauer believes
that he has enriched science, the derivation of united spiritual
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