Wittgenstein was very much taken by Schopenhauer in his youth, and we know he read him intensely. Particularly around the age when he was finishing school and beginning his later studies in Berlin. That feeling towards Schopenhauer changed over time, though. In Wittgenstein’s private notes, later published in Culture and Value:
“One could call Schopenhauer an altogether crude mind. I.e., he does have refinement, but at a certain level this suddenly comes to an end & he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his finishes. One might say of Schopenhauer: he never takes stock of himself.”
So what happened? At 16, Wittgenstein read The World as Will and Representation and adopted Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism (the idea that the world is fundamentally “my representation”). The entire concluding section of the Tractatus – where Wittgenstein talks about the “solipsistic I,” the world as a limited whole, and ethics/aesthetics being one – is essentially Schopenhauer translated into the language of mathematical logic.
We know, though from his notebooks and conversations with others that his view of Schopenhauer then shifts. He finds him too “glib”, too clean, things too clear and neat and, in some sense, easy. Schopenhauer, for example, solves the mystery of the universe by labelling the underlying force of reality “The Will.” To the (later) Wittgenstein, this felt like a cheap linguistic trick. It didn’t solve the philosophical knot in any way, it just gave the knot a mysterious, evocative name.
Also, compared particularly to Frege and Russell (who taught Wittgenstein in different contexts), Schopenhauer began to look like a sweeping, romantic prose-stylist rather than a rigorous thinker. Wittgenstein remarked that when he read Schopenhauer, he could “see to the bottom very easily” and to Wittgenstein, if a philosophical problem looks easy to solve, you probably haven’t actually understood its depth.
Wittgenstein was a choosy person, with his God-complex, and saw himself as unique figure.
Wittgenstein was certainly a choosy person, in many ways, but he was not someone with a God complex. Wittgenstein’s own journals abound with incredibly intense self-criticism, self-roasting, and self-recrimination. He held himself to incredibly high standards, which he generally thought he fell short of. He also held others to very high standards – particularly if they (claimed) they were engaging in philosophy. This was all because, for Wittgenstein, it mattered intensely. I think this is also key to Wittgenstein’s later dismissal of Schopenhauer. He may also have seen himself as something of a unique figure, but absolutely not in the sense of being marked out as exceptional, brilliant, or laudable – only in the sense of being deeply uncomfortable and highly distressed by things that didn’t seem to trouble others nearly so much.
Wittgenstein was notoriously brutal on himself. He was obsessed with purity, confession, and stripping away pretence – he often sought to try and confess or disclose his transgressions to those around him, for example. And it wasn’t just personal or psychological; he deeply believed that philosophy wasn’t just an intellectual exercise but a battle against one’s own vanity.
Wittgenstein later wrote that Schopenhauer “never searches his conscience.” I think he saw Schopenhauer as a hypocrite, really, who wrote brilliant things about the tragedy of human existence but didn’t actually suffer or work through them internally. Because Wittgenstein himself struggled constantly with his own ‘soul’ and feared being a “fraud” or a merely “reproductive” thinker rather than a truly original creator, he may well have applied that self-same scrutiny to Schopenhauer.
Let’s not forget that Schopenhauer lived a highly comfortable, bourgeois life, frequented fine restaurants, fought bitter legal battles over money with his mother, and was deeply vain about his own genius. It’s easy to then imagine that Wittgenstein came to look down on Schopenhauer for treating philosophy like a beautiful literary garment you could put on, rather than a painful, agonising restructuring of your soul.
Why did Wittgenstein dislike Schopenhauer?
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