Arthur Schopenhauer in 2010 | Superfluities Redux

Caspar David Friedrich, "Cloister Cemetery in the Snow" (1817-1819). Oil on canvas, 121x170cm. Destroyed in World War II.

As I await the publication of the new translation of The World as Will and Representation from Cambridge University Press, I’ve been re-reading perhaps the most easily accessible volume of Arthur Schopenhauer’s work, the Penguin Classics edition of Essays and Aphorisms, translated and edited by R.J. Hollingdale and first published in 1970; it has remained in print ever since. It contains only material from the second volume of his last work, a miscellany entitled Parerga and Paralipomena, and does not take the place of Schopenhauer’s masterpiece. But the ideas contained in The World as Will and Representation (1818) infused every line of Schopenhauer’s writings from then until his death in 1860, as they infuse the writings here as well; it remains a good introductory volume to his work, far better than the “short introductions” which can often be found on bookstore shelves, however excellent some of them might be: it is always better to go to the primary source than to the secondary literature. As Schopenhauer himself once said, a book is like a mirror: if an ass looks into it, you can’t expect a genius to look out.

I turn again to Schopenhauer perhaps thirty years after I first came across his thought in the concluding chapters of Thomas Mann’s 1901 novel Buddenbrooks, in which the third-generation scion of the Buddenbrooks family, Thomas, comes across The World as Will and Representation late one night and experiences what can only be called an epiphany, a key to the suffering and decline of the Buddenbrooks family over the previous generations. One should always pay special attention when an author puts his own name to a character; here, Thomas the character recognizes himself in Schopenhauer’s words as Thomas the author must also have done (there is an excellent 1938 essay by Mann on Schopenhauer in the sadly out-of-print Essays of Three Decades). After this epiphany, the bourgeois Thomas Buddenbrooks slowly returns to take his place in the phenomenal world; the bourgeois Thomas Mann, however, would continue to read and explicate Schopenhauer’s philosophy through the rest of his career.

In re-reading the works of the great authors we found in our youth, it is only the greatest in which we find their work gaining color and depth; continuing experience confirms that early appeal; what was unclear at 17 will become much clearer, if the work has continuing validity, at 47. One glances at Schopenhauer’s essay “On Ethics” to find:

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. … In the year 1848 it came to light that in England a husband or wife, or both in collusion, had not once but a hundred times poisoned their children one after the other, or tortured them to death with hunger and neglect, merely for the insurance money from burial clubs. … Reports of this sort belong, it is true, to the blackest pages of mankind’s criminal record. But the source of them and everything like them is the inner and inborn nature of man, in which the first and foremost quality is a colossal egoism ready and eager to overstep the bounds of justice. Does the admitted necessity for a so anxiously guarded European balance of power not already contain a confession that man is a beast of prey which will pounce upon a weaker neighbour as soon as he notices his existence? And is this fact not confirmed every day in ordinary life? (138-139)

And then one glances at only two headlines from the past week’s newspapers, and seeing these, who can doubt the veracity of Schopenhauer’s conclusion, however much it may disgrace the race? For the optimist (an “absurd, wicked way of thought, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable suffering of human kind,” as Schopenhauer biographer David Cartwright describes Schopenhauer’s perspective on optimism), these events remain mysteries; for those who have recognized the validity of Schopenhauer’s vision, they are mysteries no more.

As the old Save the Children advertisement went, one can pay attention or one can turn the page; it comes as no surprise that the rustling of paper becomes nearly thunderous in a society ruled by the Culture Industry. But, to be honest, one must say about Schopenhauer as he said about Kant that his mistakes and missteps say as much about his genius as the truths he has unearthed. It is clear that Schopenhauer’s misogyny has its personal basis in his relationship with his mother (Hollingdale in his introduction says that, “Without overdriving the comparison one could say that his was the reaction of Hamlet” [34]: Schopenhauer blamed his mother for the suicide of his father and their relationship through the rest of their lives was disastrous to say the least), and this too colored his consideration of eroticism. So too Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, which is unnecessarily burdened by a curious understanding of Platonic Ideals — an understanding which confuses his aesthetics perhaps not catastrophically, but renders it weaker nonetheless. And, often, Schopenhauer’s undoubted talent for clear and powerful rhetoric takes up where his power of reasoning leaves off, frequently producing the most beautiful passages of German prose ever written, but somewhat lacking in suasion to the careful reader.

As Schopenhauer revised Kant, he himself was revised in the decades following his death, particularly in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche who went on to repudiate Schopenhauer’s pessimism; but perhaps his most insightful critic was an artist. Richard Wagner never repudiated the philosopher’s work, but interestingly revised it, marrying the Upanishadic “tat tvam asi” (“this art thou”), the basis of Schopenhauer’s ascetic compassion and aesthetic experience, to Eros as well. This is not as evident in Wagner’s Ring (which had already been partially composed when Wagner came across Schopenhauer’s work), but led to the creation of Tristan und Isolde, perhaps the most Schopenhauerian work of the composer and therefore of the 19th century. Indeed, Schopenhauer was not convinced of the value of the Ring when Wagner sent it to him, and when Tristan premiered in 1865, Schopenhauer had been dead for five years. Wagner, without abandoning either Schopenhauer’s pessimism or metaphysics, added an erotic avenue towards transcendence to accompany the paths of asceticism and aesthetics and in doing so provided one of the great works of genius the human mind and spirit has ever produced. This same avenue traces through Shakespeare’s two great erotic tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida, as well.

More on Schopenhauer as the days go by, but more today in these posts: