The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) published his most famous work, The World as Will and Representation, in 1819, when he was 31. It was not well enough received to land him a permanent academic position, so it's fortunate for him that he was what we'd call a trust fund beneficiary—his father, a successful businessman, had drowned in a canal, quite likely a suicide, when Arthur was 17, and his share of the inheritance, invested conservatively, yielded an annual income of approximately twice that of a university professor. He settled into a modest but comfortable life of study and leisure at Frankfurt. He did not lack confidence in his own merit; here is a passage, from a later book, in which he is no doubt backhandedly explaining why his "masterpiece" had been largely forgotten:
If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.
I can imagine him trying not to betray his gratification upon reading the Wikipedia article on himself, especially:
Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, Schopenhauer had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science.
The article about him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a trove. His name has become associated with "pessimism," which is a little simple without being unfair. Here is a characteristically straightforward expression of a dim view that also possesses, I think, at least a bit of uplift:
The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instil in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation is we are? From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de misères. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.
It was perhaps hard to live up to this creed, for the same volume includes:
What the pathetic commonplace heads with which the world is crammed really lack are two closely related faculties: that of forming judgments and that of producing ideas of their own. But these are lacking to a degree which he who is not one of them cannot easily conceive, so that he cannot easily conceive the dolefulness of their existence.
It also includes a section titled "On Women" that I think we might all agree is bereft of ideas that were ahead of their time. An American reader, meanwhile, might be startled by the following, which follows the chauvinism by only a few pages:
Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal. We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature: but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what it is. For enlightenment on this matter, though, you have no need to wait until that happens: there exist hundreds of reports, recent and less recent, which will suffice to convince you that man is in no way inferior to the tiger or the hyena in pitilessness and cruelty. A weighty contemporary example is provided by the reply received by the British Anti-Slavery Society from the American Anti-Slavery Society in answer to its inquiries about the treatment of slaves in the slave-owning states of the North American Union: Slavery and the Internal Slave-Trade in the United States of North America. This book constitutes one of the heaviest of all indictments against mankind. No one can read it without horror, and few will not be reduced to tears: for whatever the reader of it may have heard or imagined or dreamed of the unhappy condition of the slaves, indeed of human harshness and cruelty in general, will fade into insignificance when he reads how these devils in human form, these bigoted, church-going, Sabbath-keeping scoundrels, especially the Anglican parsons among them, treat their innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into their devilish clutches. This book, which consists of dry but authentic and documented reports, rouses one's human feelings to such a degree of indignation that one could preach a crusade for the subjugation and punishment of the slave-owning states of North America. They are a blot on mankind.
This book, Essays and Aphorisms, is a roller coaster ride. I find myself reading passages over and over again—but not, as with other philosophers who have a place in the humanities curriculum, because I'm conscious of having failed to apprehend the meaning.