As a young artist, Joyce does not seem to have taken Schopenhauer
quite seriously. This is confirmed in an anecdote told by Padraic Colum,
dating from the beginning of the century: Another time Joyce was among
those in the National Library when I was; readers were departing. Timing
my exit to be with Joyce's, who was at the turnstile with a friend, ready
to leave, I left some volumes on the counter. They were The World as
Will and Idea. When the three of us were on the stairway, Joyce said
with the raillery he often used when addressing me in those days, "You
see before you two frightful examples of the will to live." § Which
meant that Joyce and his companion were out to pick up girls. (...) As
we went along Joyce talked in a way that was supposed to be a revelation
to me of the uncloistered life. In those days he would have relished playing
Mephistopheles to Faust (...)". Nevertheless, "[h]is mind mustn't have
been totally preoccupied with prospects [the girls] on the South Circular
Road, for after we had cups of tea in a confectioner's in Harcourt Street
and went strolling again, we shifted to the World as Idea." (Colum, 46-47)
Judging from this anecdote, Schopenhauer was not on the same level of importance
to Joyce as, say, Giambattisto Vico or Thomas Aquinas, which seems to be
confirmed in the only reference to Schopenhauer in Ellmann's biography:
"Furlan was in a phase of enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which
Joyce tried to choke by urging that Thomas Aquinas was the greatest philosopher
because his reasoning was 'like a sharp sword.' (342). Still, together
with explicit references to Vico and Aquinas, "a world of differents" is
mentioned in one and the same breath: "The Gracehoper (...) tossed himself
in the vico (...) and the next time he makes the aquinatance of the Ondt
(...) it shall be motylucky if he will beheld not a world of differents."
(FW 417. 03-10) - which may (but does not necessarily have to) be an implicit
reference to Schopenhauer's Welt als Vorstellung (Cf. WWV,
Book I, § 3, 40: "Wem aus der einleitenden Abhandlung die vollkommene
Identität des Inhalts des Satzes vom Grunde, bei aller Verschiedenheit
seiner Gestalten, deutlich geworden ist, der wird auch überzeugt seyn,
wie wichtig zur Einsicht in sein innerstes Wesen gerade die Erkenntniß
der einfachsten seiner Gestaltungen, als solcher, ist, und für diese
haben wir die Zeit erkannt."
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