"Ornithorhynchus Paradoxus": The Reception of Arthur Schopenhauer between 1818 and 1848

Abstract

This essay intends to examine the reception of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the period betweeen 1818 and 1848, thereby contributing to a demythologization of the luck of the philosopher’s thought on these three decades prior to the beginning of his fame. In order to achieve this, after showing a general picture of the personal myth that has characterised a great part of the historiographic tradition according to which his philosophy would have been ignored or silenced (1), we will present the four key lines of his reception, through the analysis of the news that his contemporaries gave of his philosophy in reviews, manuals of history of philosophy, or encyclopedias. Those four key lines are: a reading of Schopenhauer’s philosophy that stressed on its oriental features (2), an interpretation in an idealistic key which placed a lack of originality in Schopenhauer’s philosophy (3), an academic community that placed it against “the spirit of the times” due to the secondary place of Reason against the Will (4) and finally, the emergence of the first followers of Schopenhauer’s philosophy (5).