Schopenhauer was exposed to Goethe.^13 The young Schopenhauer made a
favorable impression on the aging Wieland, whose journal had launched the
Kantian movement 25 years before. His ambition buoyed by his sponsorship,
Schopenhauer visited all the famous centers; he studied at Göttingen in 1809–
10 under the old oppositional critic Schulze and the psychologistic Kantian
Bouterwek, then in 1811 heard Fichte lecture in Berlin; he presented his
dissertation for a degree at Jena in 1813, as if to identify himself with the old
movement.
The slot which Schopenhauer spied, now that the psychologists had pre-
empted the Kantian heritage, was a return to Kant. But he was too ambitious
merely to repeat Kant. He transformed the dualism of categories plus the thing-
in-itself into the dualism of representation plus will. Kant had always been a
proponent of natural science; this naturalism was reinforced by Schopenhauer’s
exposure to Goethe at a time when the Great Man had felt in need of support
on his neglected theory of colors. Just before working out his own system, in
1816 Schopenhauer had collaborated with Goethe and produced a defense of
the latter’s color theory. Schopenhauer’s much more original contribution, that
the thing-in-itself is the will, came from philosophizing his own sexual expe-
rience.^14 This blend of the personal with the philosophical, plus the iconoclasm
of speaking openly about sexuality, was a heritage of the Romantic literary
movement, which was still echoing at Weimar when the young Schopenhauer
arrived there. Schopenhauer’s creativity was in providing a philosophical slot
in which this became crucial material.^15
Just as Schopenhauer was beginning to publicize his position, he found
himself in a contest for attention with Hegel. He is famous for having at-
tempted to lecture at the same time as Hegel, making an abortive attempt to
establish himself as a Privatdozent at Berlin in 1820 and intermittently during
the rest of Hegel’s life. Usually there were no listeners at all, sometimes one or
two, while Hegel had a hundred or more. The attempt was not as arrogant as
it seems in retrospect, for after Fichte’s death in 1814, there seemed a vacuum
in the Idealist leadership. Naturphilosophie was regarded by many as too
extreme, Schelling’s current mythologizing was disreputable, and in the contest
for the Berlin appointment the Kantian Fries was for a while the favorite over
the relatively unknown Hegel.^16 Although Hegel initially in 1818 attracted only
modest numbers of pupils, his fame grew overwhelming in the 1820s. The
Fichtean slot which he preserved and expanded had far more resonances and
sources of alliance in the intellectual world than Schopenhauer’s iconoclasm
and religious pessimism. To the extent that he was known, Schopenhauer was
misperceived as a version of Fichte’s or Schelling’s will philosophy (Safranski,
1989: 260). Supernumeraries outside the law of small numbers are penalized
by being seen through the categories of the dominant schools.
By the time of his death in 1831, Hegel’s pupils dominated the Berlin center;
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^637