"
Ibsen, however, aspired to no such honor, and, while he never actually
denied the influence, the relation between him and the philosopher seems
to be much rather one of parallelism than of imitation. Ibsen was a
poetical psychologist of the first order, but he could not bring himself
to read the prose of the professional thinkers.
In his attitude both to philosophical and poetical literature Ibsen is
with such apparently remote figures as Guy de Maupassant and Shelley; in
his realism and his mysticism he is unrelated to immediate predecessors,
and has no wish to be a disciple of the dead. His extreme interest in
the observation of ethical problems is not identified with any curiosity
about what philosophical writers have said on similar subjects.
Weininger has pointed out that Ibsen's philosophy is radically the same
as that of Kant, yet there is no evidence that Ibsen had ever studied or
had even turned over the pages of the _Criticism of Pure Reason_. It is
not necessary to suppose that he had done so. The peculiar aspect of the
Ego as the principal and ultimately sole guide to truth was revealed
anew to the Norwegian poet, and references to Kant, or to Fichte, or to
Kierkegaard, seem, therefore, to be beside the mark.
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