"If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state".
"Rascals are always sociable — more’s the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others’ company".
"Means at our disposal should be regarded as a bulwark against the many evils and misfortunes that can occur. We should not regard such wealth as a permission or even an obligation to procure for ourselves the pleasures of the world".
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is one of the cleaner cases among XIX-century philosophers. While "revision typings" is something I'd usually rather avoid, ILI and EIE are the closest revision pair due to a certain emotional negativity that certainly fits the subject here. The base is ILI: the metaphysical pessimism, the polemical-critical mode, the rigid energy-conserving routine, the secretive private life, the misanthropic seeing-through of mediocrity. The EIE accent gives him some grand quasi-mystical vibes, and accounts for his conflict-proneness and theatrical vanity.
His pessimism is characteristic of a very strongvalued Ni, the most pessimistic function out of all eight (and even of all twelve, if Talanov's extra four are taken into account). Schopenhauer's central claim was that the world is the manifestation of a blind, purposeless, suffering-generating Will, and that human existence is therefore fundamentally miserable. "Yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied." Life is "a business that does not cover its costs." The most one can hope for is reduction of misery, achieved either through aesthetic contemplation (which temporarily suspends willing) or through ascetic renunciation (which extinguishes it).
Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism outline his concept of decline, even if he rarely uses the word itself. "In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means". His metaphysics is also declinist. Even great civilizations and great works of art, which momentarily allow will-less contemplation, are themselves temporary and eventually die. Behind every present configuration of things, Ni sees the configuration's eventual dissolution. In more common way of phrasing it, Schopenhauer was characterized by his own mother as "a depressing know-it-all" — not a bad summary of Socionics-ILI stereotype.
His polemics are also quite telling. He managed to write against Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, the German idealist establishment, academic philosophy as a discipline, Christianity, optimism, marriage, women, and most of his contemporaries individually and collectively. Hegel as the "clumsy charlatan" (he even deliberately scheduled his lectures to compete with Hegel's, a public challenge that backfired when Hegel's hall overflowed and his stayed near-empty). Academic philosophers as people who have made philosophy "a means of livelihood." The shrewd "others may appreciate you, but I know what you are" seeing-through is Schopenhauer's frequent mode, combined with some moderate-strength Fe-style emotional denunciation. The emotional rigidity ("constructivism") combined with negativism (weak, but self-explanatory Reinin dichotomy) is on full display here. Even his intellectual perception of the external world as mere appearance and illusion, a phenomena that masks the thing-in-itself has a flavor of intellectual "deep debunking".
Schopenhauer is also sometimes typed as IEI, but for this type, he was too bilious, too analytical, and too outwardly aggressive, lacking self-control. IEI is another Ni lead, but it's a "ligher", more "gently melancholic" type in its classical expression. "Gentle" is definitely not a word you can attribute to Schopenhauer, despite his humanitarian concern for animals and the reduction of their suffering, which does point to his Fi as not the weakest function in his profile.
Schopenhauer lived alone and formed no close friendships, which points to introversion and ILI over EIE. The portrait of him by his contemporaries — "complicated and ill-tempered," "hypersensitive and vain," "difficult nature of his relationships with colleagues" — is the picture of an ILI who did not soften his temperament for social acceptance and who had no friends because he did not need or want them. "The cheapest sort of pride is national pride" is also much more of an ILI sentiment than an EIE one.
The EIE accent not only increases the negativist and emotionally rigid qualities, but also the artistic ones. Schopenhauer offered art and renunciation as paths of escape, and the conception of art he developed is heated and quasi-mystical in a way ILI alone does not generate. Aesthetic contemplation in his system is redemptive — it momentarily suspends the suffering of willing — and music is the supreme art because it expresses the Will itself.
The genius is the one whose intellect can break free of the will and engage in sustained will-less contemplation, briefly touching a higher reality and bringing back the work of art as a gift to non-geniuses. This is much closer to the EIE conception of the artist as a medium between higher and lower realms. The serious engagement with Indian philosophy fits the same accent. It gave the pessimism a soteriological framework, and provided an expression to the realization that "all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike".
Wagner and Nietzsche, both EIE, read Schopenhauer as their forerunner because the EIE accent in him spoke directly to them as unique, quasi-mystical geniuses. The line forward from his Ni-ish negativism to Wagner's Götterdämmerung and to Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism (the death of God as the long European decline of the highest values) and to Spengler's Decline of the West (civilizations as organisms that function on biological-temporal cycles) is direct. European cultural pessimism is, in many ways, a Schopenhauerian Ni-pessimistic-anticipatory inheritance.
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