Arthur Schopenhauer: On Human Nature, The Art of Controversy, Counsels and Maxims

Where did Schopenhauer go wrong?  How did a man capable of unearthing such marvelous insights as 

"When you come into contact with a man, no matter whom, do not attempt an objective appreciation of him according to his worth and dignity.  Do not consider his bad will, or his narrow understanding and perverse ideas; as the former may easily lead you to hate and the latter to despise him; but fix your attention only upon his sufferings, his needs, his anxieties, his pains.  Then you will always feel your kinship with him; and instead of hatred or contepmt, you will experience the sommiseration that alone is the peace to which the gospel calls us" (On human Nature, 7)

Find the nerve and the obliviousness to utter with the same pen:

"Hence it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice.  This is mainly due to the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the powers of reasoning and deliberation" (Studies in Pessimism, 65)?

My working framework was to assume that Schopenhauer was the proverbial frog in a well, which is to say that he saw rather clearly the things that were in his own experience as a cis, straight, educated, comfortable, white man; and that when presented with anything that was at all removed from that world, he was utterly unable to conceive of it.  This reading served me well, and it wasn't until the last essay in this collection, "Genius and Virtue", that I recognized it as a symptom of a larger failure on his part.

The dichotomy that Schopenhauer sets up in this essay, namely that of the Intellect and the Will, is a theme that runs throughout these hundreds of pages.  It sometimes takes another guise--individuation and universality, Mind and Soul, Virtue and Genius--it is this central conflict that occupies the great majority of his deliberation. It is to be recognized in more modern works as the Subject and the Object, and though Sartre and de Beauvois would probably shoot him on sight, they are not immune to his influence.

Only in "Genius and Virtue" does it become clear the depth of Schopenhauer's error: he has misidentified the two, and accordingly chosen the wrong one.  For him, Genius, intellect, and Mind are the truly subjective states, those with true agency and clarity.  Will, soul and Virtue, on the other hand, and whimsical forces of nature, mere objects, that must be endured, if not disregarded entirely. How Sartre must have laughed.  

Is there anything more truly an object than the Mind?  For Schopenhauer, the Mind perceives and regards the soul as an object, but how thoroughly opposite is the reality.  I think.  I am.  Thinking does not me.  The I precedes the mind in every conceivable way, and it is only the Will that can be thought of as a true subject.  How terrifying such a thought would have been for Schopenhauer, and how utterly incapable of facing it he was.  All he had was his intellect.  It is no wonder that his Will, the finger of attention, pointed to it as the very end of existence. It's the oldest trick in the ego's book: look over there!  Schopenhauer saw his intellect as a penetrating beam of light that revealed the nature of all existence.  In reality, it was a mirror that revealed nothing but itself.