I think Arthur Schopenhauer is an INTJ.Have you read his Parerga und Paralipomena?His views about genius show that he is an INTJ.
Kant and Nietzsche are INTJs too.
I think so.
(BTW:I'm chinese)
Yes, I have read his Parerga Paralipomena. It is a 1200 page collection of essays. Some of them reflect a tough-minded perspective, others a value driven.
His idea of genius was as follows. The intellect takes primacy over the passions. We become a weight-less mirror of the world.
This idea is more likely to have been conjured by an NT than an NF. However, other ideas of Schopenhauer suggest otherwise. For example, he maintained that the arts are more efficient than the sciences in acquisition of genius is one.
The other is where he states that the deepest thoughts come from the heart.
His pessimism appears to be altogether unfounded, and many of his followers are better known for having an emotional conversion to Schopenhauerianism than the intellectual. His opinion on women, the worthlesness of human life, and the need for a self-denying lifestyle are expressed with great conviction, yet not much is propounded by way of solid logical arguments in favor of this cause.
As we see, his argument to support this is metaphysical. Namely that the Will is always restless and blind. Suffocates the mind's peace. That is of course true, but does not provide any sound reason for us to believe that we will never have the inner peace. As Schopenhauer does not specify to what extent the Will is restless and to what extent is must be pacified in order for inner peace to take hold. He fills in the gap in his argument with a value-based assertion. So is the case for many of his ideas.
However, in order to clearly understand Schopenhauer's type, we must first of all focus on his biography.
There we find that he was an emotional boy who was deeply hurt by his mother's rejection of him, and that played a very significant role in how he has come to see the world. His opinion of women and profound pessimism without a doubt are rooted in this. When we review how he has attempted to deal with this matter, we see his true natural predilections manifest. He emotionalized the situation, he did not sit back to detach or react with anger. Much unlike Nietzsche who was forced to deal with the family who never understood him.
He enjoyed entertaining people at a restaurant nearly every night, and his direct reaction to the emotional feedback he has received from his audience could not have been any more clear-cut. He clearly fed off their feelings more than of their thoughts. He was remembered by most of his listeners for how he was able to present his thoughts on German culture and politics in a way that was interesting to nearly all of his listeners.
Such attunement with the audience is quite uncommon among INTJs and often paralleled only be ENFPs who have a broad view of the person-centered situation yet retain enough of the Thinking essence to properly structure their presentation.
Schopenhauer implicitly longed for approbation with great intensity and his rancor against Hegel and the professors of philosophy is one example of this. He was chiefly upset with the fact that Hegel held a very prestigious position at an elite university. He was merely jealous.
It should also be noted that just like Bryan Magee, perhaps his most well known popularizer Schopenhauer did not see intellectual pursuits as the most important thing in life. As his earlier proposition that the arts conduce more to the perfection of the intellect than the sciences seem to suggest. He first and foremost loved art, and was one of the most frequent visitors to the theatre in his town. He endorsed many superstitions which he has inherited from the Eastern Religious dogmatists which he hardly bothered to subject to critical analysis, must have assumed them to be his sacred values. Many of the absurdities in his Magnus Opus seem to reflect this. He has presented them as gospel not by virtue of sound argument, but through forcefulness of conviction. Bertrand Russell reports that Schopenhauer claimed that several passages in his World as Will and Representation were written by the Holy Spirit, as well as that he has endorsed black magic. I would be hardly surprised to find confirmation for that claim of Russell's. I remember Schopenhauer employing the following phrase 'whoever doubts the integrity of **this practice** should be called not a skeptic but not ignoramus'. I do not remember what this practice was, but it was clearly along the lines of some hocus pocus akin to alchemy. His favorite reading was literature and had mastered 7 languages. Fine arts, literature and foreign language are clearly closer linked with Feeling rather than thinking and it is not at all surprising that INFPs report the easiest time with learning foreign languages and are over-represented in that department.
Schopenhauer was a value driven individual. From the time he switched residence because he 'HATED' fighting to how he clung to his pessimism, mysogyny and superstitions concerning spirituality. Most of which he seemingly refused to subject to dispassionate philosophical scrutiny.
His philosophy was thoroughly imbued in his personality and was for the most part an instrument to appease his values at the expense of intellectual integrity. For this reason many of his ridiculous superstitions and values he acquired as a result of his upbringing were not renounced no matter how scholarly he became.