- The famous incident when Schopenhauer was sued for throwing a seamstress out
of his anteroom occurred in Berlin in 1821, at just the time when it became
apparent that he would have no success lecturing in competition with Hegel
(Safranski, 1989: 271–273). - Arthur Schopenhauer is not the only one who was inducted into creativity by these
contacts; his widowed mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, began to write essays and
novels in 1813, virtually simultaneously with Arthur’s philosophy, and became by
the 1820s the best-known woman writer in Germany. She had also hosted Mme.
de Staël—the other famous woman writer of the day—when the latter was an
émigrée from the French Revolution. The Schopenhauer family, heirs to a merchant
fortune, nicely exemplify the investment of money in the single-minded pursuit of
cultural eminence: not as consumers, but for social contacts as means of cultural
production. - “If I am asked where the most intimate knowledge of that inner essence of the
world, of that thing in itself which I called the will to live, is to be found... then
I must point to the ecstasy in the act of copulation” (Schopenhauer’s journal,
quoted in Safranski, 1989:269). - Another distinctive strand in Schopenhauer’s cultural capital, the knowledge of
Upanishadic philosophy, which was just beginning to be translated in 1799–1802,
was made available by his wide network contacts in the old Romanticist camp. In
just these years Friedrich Schlegel began to promote Sanskrit philology (1808), and
August Schlegel in 1818 at Bonn occupied the first German chair of Indology
(Halbfass, 1988: 63–107). - Hegel’s immediate background was not particularly distinguished in comparison
to Schopenhauer’s: after leaving Jena in 1806, he had been a newspaper editor in
Bamberg for two years, headmaster of a Gymnasium at Nuremberg for eight years,
finally becoming professor at Heidelberg in 1816 (succeeding Fries, who went to
Jena) two years before his invitation to Berlin (Gregory, 1989: 32–33; Kaufmann,
1966: 227–230; Safranski, 1989: 252). - In France, a mixture of various non-academic bases existed throughout the century.
Voltaire and Rousseau, although popularized and eventually enriched by the new
publishing market, relied for material support during most of their lives on old-
fashioned individual patronage. Voltaire at one point also received some collective
patronage at Frederick the Great’s academy. Montesquieu, Helvetius, d’Holbach,
and Turgot were self-supporting aristocrats, although their intellectual interests
were shaped by contacts with the circles around the new publishing enterprises.
On the publishing market in Germany and its associated careers, see Bruford
(1965, 1962); Brunschwig (1947); Wuthnow (1989: 228–251). - Johan Heilbron (1994: 26–46) shows that in France, where aristocratic salons in
the period from 1650 to 1790 brought together status-conscious courtiers with the
most ambitious intellectuals, the hegemony of the literary style was taken to an
extreme. The standards of polite and entertaining face-to-face conversation pro-
duced an emphasis on aphoristic wit and superficial cleverness of expression, and
a denigration of sustained argument or erudition as pedantic. In this milieu, disdain
for the traditional university subjects was especially strong.
Notes to Pages 636–640^ •^1005