Have we been making progress over history? Or is the world made of a fundamental essence that never changes? What is the meaning of time? And the timeless? Schopenhauer and Hegel famously did not get along. But their feud was philosophical, as well as personal, writes Joshua Dienstag.

In the summer of 1820, Arthur Schopenhauer, aged 32, arrived at the University of Berlin to give a lecture course with the grandiose title of ‘Universal Philosophy’.  Incredibly, he asked the registrar to schedule his lectures at the same hour as those of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel held the university’s chair in philosophy and, at that point, was probably the most famous philosopher in the German-speaking world.

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Hundreds of students attended Hegel’s lectures. Five registered for Schopenhauer’s. In the following semester, Schopenhauer attracted zero students so his lectures were cancelled. That was the end of his university career.

Hegel, the elder by eighteen years, only met Schopenhauer once and took no notice of the younger man in his writings. Schopenhauer, by contrast, raged at Hegel for years.

After Hegel’s death in 1831, his reputation began to decline and a strange reversal began. Over the following decades, it was the obscure lecturer who became the more famous philosopher.  His later works sold thousands of copies and went through multiple printings. For many, Schopenhauer’s pessimism set the philosophical agenda in the second half of the nineteenth-century and beyond, while Hegel’s Enlightenment optimism became the object of ridicule. What had happened?