Category Archives: Arthur Schopenhauer

From the archives: New Expressionism

Posted on by

As I continue to write Erlkönig I’ll be republishing several entries to keep the fire here going.

Originally posted on 18 October 2010.

In Schopenhauer’s conception of knowledge and the world, mankind is phenomenon par excellence, the object through which subjectivity can be known and the will as thing-in-itself recognized, if not described or describable in the symbol-system of language available to the individual. The will itself, because it is not describable, can’t be characterized as tragic, but this locution is available to describe the phenomenal world in relation to that will. Only that which can be directly experienced by the individual can be said to exist: it is far preferable to the abstract concept as a valid recognition, as a valid object of knowledge. Just as color cannot be described to the blind, or music to the deaf (for the vibrations under foot and hand at the concert hall are not in essence dissimilar to the vibrations of the subway or the earth), one who does not experience an extreme or a quality cannot recognize it as something known. The individual body through which the will can be recognized, and the words with which it can be explored, become the instrument of exploration and experience.

This places particular weight on the theatre and drama as aesthetic means of this exploration of the phenomenon; it is a quality of the art which most theatre practitioners (dramatists, directors, producers and critics alike) and audiences today are loathe to admit. It makes of the art a far more urgent discipline than they’re comfortable with, in that it renders the entertainment, amusement and business that attaches to the form irrelevant, especially in the forms of mimetic social realism or ironic post-modernist distance that attach to its practice even today. Obviously, in this conception, theatre and drama are the truly experiential arts, for the mediation is through the body, not the page or canvas, and it is the body that is the primary vehicle for experience. Apart from music, tragic drama is at the apex of the aesthetic imagination as conceived by Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer was prophetic in more senses than one, inspiring many of the artists, writers and composers of the Expressionist school that arose in Austria and Germany beginning in the late 19th century. But there is a New Expressionism as well, and one which has its philosophical roots in the old. David Ian Rabey in his English Drama Since 1940 identifies a stream of post-war drama which he names a “New Expressionism,” which predated In-Yer-Face theatre, an off-shoot of this New Expressionism, by several decades, citing the work of David Rudkin, Heathcote Williams and other dramatists. “This involves a consciously heightened form of presentation which is unapologetic about its anti-conventional strageness, in which often ‘exterior facts are continually being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized,’ in a passionate expression of, and search for, individual regeneration. … This form of renewal is prioritised as preliminary to epic theatre’s foregrounding of social relations to address the political collective. [Emphasis mine] … Unlike Absurdism, which may reflect a loss of faith in language, reference, action and consequence, Expressionism recreates an unconventional faith in consequence: the power of individual defiance to trigger wider seismic upheavals of power, countering ‘information’ and passivity with a demonstrative capacity for active transformation.” (Rabey 128) [1]

Rabey’s description takes in a broad swathe of post-1970 drama in his book, but it is also a useful corrective to the characterization of a dramatist like Samuel Beckett as “absurdist,” especially when it comes to Beckett’s prose and drama after 1960, when the novel How It Is and the play Play marked a division between his early work and his later; especially in the late plays Catastrophe and What Where, political and ideological considerations are secondary and founded upon a metaphysical ground. What’s more, all of this later work, especially pieces like Not I, are experiential rather than discursive, and the subjective psychic events are those which provide the necessary sensation. Because they also exhibit “a demonstrative capacity for active transformation,” they are immediately relevant to a consideration of the plays of Howard Barker, David Rudkin and Sarah Kane.

The later work of Beckett and the plays of Barker, Rudkin and Kane are beyond considerations of optimistic and pessimistic. Or, more accurately, they may be both. A capacity may exist, but it may or may not be fulfilled, and possibility may or may not become probability or ever realized: it is these that are demonstrated in the theatre; it remains to the individual spectator to fulfill or realize these capacities and possibilities in their own lives, having first recognized them through the aesthetic experience. But it is this capacity and possibility that is demonstrated in the theatre, and because it is beyond the currently fashionable Procrustean formal beds of social realism or post-modern irony, it remains marginalized, however awesome may be its power to transform both the art of theatre and the experience of those who attend it.

The “In-Yer-Face theatre” that emerged in the 1990s, and of whom Sarah Kane is a common (if inappropriate) exemplar, is described by Aleks Sierz; it is interesting to note in this context, since it too is a theatre founded in experience:

[In Yer Face theatre] is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation. … Questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage; it also taps into more primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating discomfort. Crucially, it tells us more about who we really are. Unlike the type of theatre that allows us to sit back and contemplate what we see in detachment, the best in-yer-face theatre takes us on an emotional journey, getting under our skin. In other words, it is experiential, not speculative. [Emphasis mine] (Sierz 4)

This is correct in so far as it goes, but I would insist that it is this theatrical experience itself that becomes the object of speculation; it must do so, if it is not to remain a solipsistic sensual experience which ends at the theatre door. Howard Barker’s conception of theatre as a crucible for moral speculation certainly does not obviate the practice of extreme and excessive stage activity and dramatic language. Indeed, speculation and experience revolve and feed upon each other on the New Expressionist stage. The theatre remains an arena of contemplation and speculation, even as this is generated by the experiential events that take place between performer and spectator, mediated by the symbol-system of dramatic language.

It is my hope in this series of posts to explore this conception of New Expressionism as described by Rabey and Gritzner, and trace its development back through the original Expressionist movement to its philosophical origins in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and aesthetics. This is not to say that Beckett, Barker, Rudkin and Kane share much beyond these bare outlines. Beckett’s constricted, de-eroticized landscape is a far cry from Barker’s expansive, even excessive, re-eroticized imagination, and they are barely recognizable, perhaps, as exemplars of the same school. But it seems to me that their emphasis on the subjective experience, their deliberate intent to operate as far outside the Culture Industry as it may be possible to do, is a critique of the same metaphysical, moral and aesthetic stance in which that Industry stands as was Schopenhauer’s opposition to the ameliorist Enlightenment of his time.

All four dramatists begin with dislocation: dislocations of narrative and character. These dislocations are similar, if not identical, to the freeing of dissonance — that is, the thing-in-itself allowed liberty to express itself phenomenally — that defines the work of Arnold Schoenberg, that twentieth-century composer who provided the underscore to the Expressionist movements of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Footnotes
  1. Rabey’s discussion is the basis of Karoline Gritzner’s 2008 essay “(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment,” which is crucial to the start of any discussion of this dramatic and theatrical mode. It was published in Contemporary Theatre Review: 18:3. [↩]

Books: Arthur Schopenhauer by Peter B. Lewis

Posted on by

Arthur Schopenhauer by Peter B. Lewis. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. 181 pages; 27 illustrations. Available from amazon.com.

It’s a surprise to find a life of the Sage of Frankfurt, a defiant product and defender of bourgeois and conservative social values, in Reaktion Books’ series of short biographies “Critical Lives.” Other volumes in the series include books on the likes of Bataille, Baudelaire, Burroughs, Chomsky, Foucault, Lenin, and Marx. A certain leaning to the radical left, this — a group of writers to whom Schopenhauer would likely not appeal, and they certainly wouldn’t appeal to him. When late in life he finally did receive a measure of success, it was not from the academic quarter, Peter B. Lewis writes:

While academic reviews … were dismissive, the few enthusiastic readers of Schopenhauer at this time came, for the most part, from the professional middle class outside the universities. Judges and lawyers, together with a private scholar, constituted the vanguard of admirers with whom he was in contact in the late 1830s and ’40s …

Schopenhauer was a stout bourgeois himself, the son of an upper-middle-class merchant of distinctly republican values, and his philosophy, unlike his arch-rival Hegel’s, was unlikely to attract the attention of the young rebels who arose in Europe in the wake of the French Revolution and the upheavals of 1848. Indeed, in that year, Schopenhauer admitted Austrian soldiers to his second-floor apartment in Frankfurt and allowed them to fire upon working-class protestors below.

He was a piece of work, as Lewis’s biography attests — any warts-and-all biography of the philosopher concentrating on the life rather than the work reveals far more warts than all. A misogynist, Schopenhauer never married but carried on a series of seedy dalliances with chorus-girls and actresses, fathering two children who died in infancy. Despite his expertise in the physical and empirical sciences and his natural skepticism if not cynicism, he was a sucker for things like mesmerism, “spirit-seeing,” and other Madame Blavatsky style fraudulence. He and Goethe spent several years developing a crackpot anti-Newtonian scheme of vision and colors. While charges of anti-Semitism and racism against Schopenhauer may be excessive, they arise from passages which justify those charges. And, finally, for all his celebration of abstract aesthetic experience as a release from the pain of the world, he most admired the novels of Walter Scott and the operas of Rossini, utterly failing to recognize the musical revolution launched by his acolyte Richard Wagner, who dutifully sent the philosopher scores of his Ring cycle and Tristan und Isolde, this latter perhaps the work which most remarkably reflects the Schopenhauer worldview. Despite his conception of personal ethics as based in compassion rather than duty, Schopenhauer treated most people abysmally. While he admitted that he was unable to practice what he preached and that his philosophy proved why this was so, the stink of rationalization rises like a heavy fog from this particular apologia.

But Schopenhauer’s work was radical in the progressive years following the 18th and 19th century revolutions, and is still so today. His 1818 The World as Will and Representation counsels, in a prose style which among German philosophers is radically clear itself, compassion and renunciation in the face of a world driven by a violent unconscious will. Progressive and amelioristic public projects are doomed because the evils they seek to eradicate will only emerge elsewhere in the culture and human behavior. Sexual desire, he was among the first modernists to say, was the most significant influence on human activity. Collective thought — whether we call it groupthink or the hivemind these days — is by its nature conformist, destructive to the individual consciousness. This life is, as he defined it, a “pensum,” the only peace to be found in ascetic self-denial, as Schopenhauer describes in a paragraph justly characterized by Lewis as one of “his most beautiful passages”:

Nothing can distress or alarm him any more; nothing can any longer move him; for he has cut all the thousand threads of willing which hold us bound to the world, and which as craving, fear, envy, and anger drag us here and there in constant pain. He now looks back calmly and with a smile on the phantasmagoria of this world which was once able to move and agonize his mind, but now stands before him as indifferently as chessmen at the end of a game, or as fancy dress cast off in the morning, the form and figure of which taunted and disquieted us on the carnival night. Life and its forms merely float before him as a fleeting phenomenon, as a light morning dream to one half-awake, through which reality already shines, and which can no longer deceive; and, like this morning dream, they too finally vanish without any violent transition.

It is no wonder that Schopenhauer’s writing appeals far more to artists than to academic philosophers. There’s not much to parse here, not much to string out. The lucid style lends authority to the thought, and the thought itself thereby begins to appeal to those of a certain mindset — including Samuel Beckett’s (another “Critical Lives” biographee), when he said that he wasn’t so much interested in the validity of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics than he was in his work as the greatest justification for pessimism ever attempted.

Lewis’ biography is an excellent introductory book to Schopenhauer’s life, if not his work, largely because it doesn’t adequately tease out the radical dimensions of his thought. The best introduction to that remains Bryan Magee’s magisterial treatise or David Cartwright’s  biography published a few years ago, the length of which may be forbidding to the newcomer to Schopenhauer’s thought. But Lewis’ life is still a welcome introduction, as clear and well-structured as one could ask for. A longer reconsideration of Schopenhauer is due; fortunately a handsome new uniform edition of the philosopher’s work is under way from Cambridge University Press. In the end this reconsideration of Schopenhauer might find him even more radical than most of the writers in Reaktion Books’ series. But for that one needs to turn to the thought, and not the rather objectionable life.

“Optimism is not only false but pernicious”

Posted on by

Arthur Schopenhauer never characterized his philosophy or himself as “pessimistic,” though he never rejected the characterization when it was applied to him. He uses the word only four times in The World as Will and Representation, according to the comprehensive index of both volumes. Neither the words “optimistic” or “pessimistic” can be readily applied to the tragic consciousness — there is a determinism in both words that stifles a more nuanced conception of the form and the consciousness — but Schopenhauer is ready to explain why optimism itself is unwarranted, even destructive. His most pointed comment on this below:

At bottom, optimism is the unwarranted self-praise of the real author of the world, namely of the will-to-live which complacently mirrors itself in its work. Accordingly optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man’s happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence; whereas it is far more correct to regard work, privation, misery, and suffering, crowned by death, as the aim and object of our life … since it is these that lead to the denial of the will-to-live. In the New Testament, the world is presented as a vale of tears, life as a process of purification, and the symbol of Christianity is an instrument of torture. Therefore, when Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and Pope appeared with optimism, the general offence caused by it was due mainly to the fact that optimism is irreconcilable with Christianity. This is stated and explained by Voltaire in the preface to his excellent poem Le Désastre de Lisbonne, which also is expressly directed against optimism. This great man, whom I so gladly commend in the face of the slanders of mercenary German ink-slingers, is placed decidedly higher than Rousseau by the insight to which he attained in three respects, and which testifies to the greater depth of his thinking: (1) insight into the preponderating magnitude of the evil and misery of existence with which he is deeply penetrated; (2) insight into the strict necessitation of the acts of will; (3) insight into the truth of Locke’s principle that what thinks may possibly be also material. … Rousseau’s whole philosophy is that he puts in the place of the Christian doctrine of original sin and of the original depravity of the human race an original goodness and unlimited perfectibility thereof, which had been led astray merely by civilization and its conequences; and on this he then establishes his optimism and humanism.

Arthur Schopenhauer
“On the Vanity and Suffering of Life”
The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II (584-585)
Translated by E.F.J. Payne

Schopenhauer’s thoughts are echoed by American novelist William Gaddis in discussing Wyatt Gwyon, the main character of his masterpiece The Recognitions. In a 1960 letter, Gaddis wrote:

Wyatt has arrived at a doctrine somewhat akin to Gide’s ― a doctrine which holds that salvation lies in scraping away the consolatory deceits and secondhand values of the counterfeit personality and in obeying the promptings of the real self, the soul, in the full awareness that man is “born into sin” and that sin must be “lived through”: all efforts to escape from the burden of imperfection are a denial of humanity and therefore lead to spiritual and emotional forgery.

The full letter will appear in The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by Stephen Moore and scheduled for publication by the Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.

Introductory readings

Posted on by

I regularly write here about Samuel Beckett and Arthur Schopenhauer, but not only to air my own perspective. It is my hope that my readers themselves will also be drawn to seek out their writings. But as always, I don’t know what happens on the other side of this connection, and I will try to offer some encouragement and direction to their work briefly here.

I am assisted in this by the fact that both Schopenhauer and Beckett wrote for what used to be called “the common reader” rather than a coterie or academic audience: to those readers who may find an affinity with their art regardless of cultural or educational background. This was not the case at first: Schopenhauer’s first book, On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason, was a doctoral dissertation written in pursuit of an academic degree and position; Beckett’s early audience was in part academic and in part the community of readers that surrounded Joyce. This renders their early work somewhat opaque to the newcomer. But both writers, not too much later in their careers, abandoned these academic and coterie readerships and addressed, it seemed, anyone who cared to pick up their books. They remain rich in reference, but the new reader ignorant of their references may still be profoundly moved by this work. Current reputation and the sheer number of their books still make these volumes formidable and forbidding. There’s no reason this should be the case. Herewith, a few roads in for my own common readers:

Schopenhauer’s masterwork is The World as Will and Representation, but again, its 600 pages of the first volume alone, followed by another 700 of volume two, may put off the reader new to him. Fortunately there is Penguin Classics’ Essays and Aphorisms, edited by R.J. Hollingdale, which collects several pieces from Schopenhauer’s late Parerga and Paralipomena in a trim and highly readable 240 pages. While the anthology includes no excerpts from WWR, Hollingdale’s introduction places these essays in the context of Schopenhauer’s wider thought, and the book provides a taste of Schopenhauer’s sprightly and lyrical style. With luck, the reader will then be drawn to the first volume of WWR, which is available in three good recent translations: E.F.J. Payne’s (until recently the standard English translation), Richard Aquila and David Carus’, and the new translation in the Cambridge series (which will likely become the new standard English version). Payne’s is the least expensive and most secondary literature in English refers to it.

In 1976 Grove Press published Richard Seaver’s anthology of Beckett’s early- and mid-period work I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On. Although obviously lacking anything from the final and perhaps most brilliant decade of Beckett’s career, I Can’t Go On … does offer samples of a variety of Beckett’s work, including his poetry and criticism; many of the longer works are here in excerpted form, but the complete texts of Waiting for Godot and Krapp’s Last Tape are included, along with shorter prose and dramatic texts. Seaver’s introduction and his headnotes to each of the selections are illuminating and helpful to the Beckett newcomer. After this, and before tackling the Three Novels of the late 1940s, the reader might wish to read the three early stories in Stories and Texts for Nothing, which predate and introduce the style and concerns of the “trilogy.” The three late novels collected in Nohow On, finally, are essential to a full understanding of Beckett’s project.

The secondary literature for both these writers is voluminous, and those who feel that they’d like to get their feet wet before confronting Schopenhauer and Beckett themselves can choose from a range of introductory texts. Christopher Janaway’s Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction from Oxford University Press is, at a mere 137 pages, an excellent and nicely illustrated precis of Schopenhauer’s work addressed to the newcomer. While David Cartwright’s 2010 biography is a fine read (my review is here), the more concise and less expensive Arthur Schopenhauer by Peter B. Lewis will be published soon in Reaktion Books’ series of short biographies (and will be reviewed here in due course). This gives me the opportunity to note Janaway’s insightful note on Schopenhauer and may give the reader a clue as to how to approach WWR once ready to do so:

Many have found Schopenhauer’s philosophy impossible to accept as a single, consistent metaphysical scheme. But it does have great strength and coherence as a narrative and in the dynamic interplay between its different conceptions of the world and the self. … Thomas Mann likened Schopenhauer’s book to a great symphony in four movements, and it is helpful to approach it in something of this spirit, seeking contrasts of mood and unities of theme amid a wealth of variations. Certainly there have been few philosophers who have equalled Schopenhauer’s grasp of literary architecture and pacing, and few whose prose style is so eloquent. (8; emphasis mine)

While James Knowlson’s biography of Beckett is indispensable, it is also very long. Those seeking a shorter, if more idiosyncratic, introduction to his life will find Andrew Gibson’s 2009 life in Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series quite enlightening (my review is here). There are few short introductions to Beckett’s work as good as Janaway’s on Schopenhauer; John Calder’s monograph The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett captures both the man and the writer quite well. Calder was, for decades, the publisher of Beckett’s prose work in Great Britain and a close confidant of the writer’s. It is worth seeking out.

From the archives: Schopenhauer: A Biography by David E. Cartwright

Posted on by

The publication of the Cambridge University Press edition of Schopenhauer’s works continues in October with the release of On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings. I repost below a review of David Cartwright’s biography of the philosopher, originally published on 12 July 2010 . One of the dimensions of Schopenhauer’s work I failed to explore here was the status of The World as Will and Representation as philosophy-as-art, and art-as-philosophy. It is something I bear in mind as I work on Erlkönig.

Schopenhauer: A Biography by David E. Cartwright. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 575 pages.

Book cover: Schopenhauer: A Biography by David CartwrightThe 1855 Jules Lunteschütz portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer that graces the cover of David E. Cartwright’s new biography of the philosopher depicts a different man from the stern magus of the 1859 Johann Schäfer photograph that appears on the cover of the Dover Publications edition of The World as Will and Representation, or even the romantic youth of Ludwig Ruhl’s 1818 portrait that appears on the cover of Bryan Magee’s The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. On Lunteschütz’s canvas one sees an older and formal but not uncongenial man with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, certainly not without humor but a formidable presence nonetheless. The mischief, formality and formidability all emerge from Cartwright’s own portrait, the first full-length, English-language biography of the philsopher: a worthy successor to Rudiger Safranski’s lush, sometimes romantic Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, and a timely volume as well.

Over the past twenty years, Schopenhauer’s star has once again been on the rise in both the academy and on the shelves of general bookstores, and it’s fitting that this biography accompanies the new Cambridge University Press edition of Schopenhauer’s works. Fitting because instructive: as a writer who believed that true philosophy was born in experience rather than abstract conceptualizations of the world, Schopenhauer’s own story should reveal something of the genesis of his extraordinary work. And fitting because timely: Schopenhauer would no doubt assert that the passage of nearly two centuries since the publication of his magnum opus should be no barrier to applying its conclusions today. Schopenhauer would dismiss the idea that thought over time reaches slowly towards some kind of Absolute truth or spirit, the progressivist argument that Hegel and his followers conceived as the march of history towards some kind of immanent State or Church that would conceivably demonstrate a redemption for mankind. Though science continues to search for and believes it has found some kind of physiological, evolutionary thesis for the emergence of consciousness, this would still only answer the “how,” not the “why,” of the mystery and wonder of life on earth.

Cartwright, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, has been publishing on Schopenhauer for several decades, and appropriately his breezy text is something of a warts-and-all picture. Certainly Schopenhauer’s legendary misogyny receives considerable attention, in both the first and the final portions of the biography, noting that just before his death Schopenhauer may have been changing his views on women, “telling [Richard Wagner's friend Malwida von Meysenbug] that when a woman succeeds in raising herself above the crowd, she grows ceaselessly and greater than a man” (a “tantalizing” note indeed); and he even notes the accusations of anti-Semitism that have been directed towards the philosopher on occasion over the years, accusations that were in no way alleviated by Hitler’s admission that he carried five volumes of Schopenhauer’s works in his knapsack during his service in the German army during World War I.  The question about the first is whether or not this misogyny arose from his personal experience with his mother and sister (both of whom were successful authors during Schopenhauer’s lifetime, generating not a little spiteful envy) rather than his epistemology or metaphysics; about the second, the irreligious Schopenhauer castigated not the Jews themselves but the optimistic assumptions about God and existence that underlie the Judaic religion which, he believed, made the realizations of the Schopenhauerian truth behind existence more and more difficult.

Cartwright’s descriptions of Schopenhauer’s relationships with women are among the most well-hewn portions of his biography, correcting the traditional picture in certain key respects (fortunately Cartwright had access to excellent editions of both mother and daughter’s work), confirming it in others. The description of Arthur and sister Adele’s tentative but clearly significant friendship in the latter’s final years is especially touching. His nutshell paraphrases of the work of Schopenhauer as well as other philosophers are somewhat hit or miss. He provides a lengthy discussion of the color philosophy of Goethe and Schopenhauer (appropriate for the translator of On Vision and Colors, perhaps the most specialized of Schopenhauer’s writings; a new edition of this appears in the forthcoming volume), a discussion which illuminates this obscure text without entirely convincing the reader of its relationship to Schopenhauer’s other work; on the other hand, he treats The World as Will and Representation with considerable sensitivity, and appropriately gives the philosopher’s final major work Parerga and Paralipomena the attention that it deserves as a miscellany rather than a major theoretical statement. On other philosophers, again, Cartwright is sometimes good, sometimes not so good, such as in his discussion of Fichte’s “I and Not-I,” which for this reader remains somewhat opaque, though I suspect this has as much to do with Fichte as it does Cartwright.

Cartwright also does the signal service of clearly differentiating the man — a pessimist, no doubt; Schopenhauer did not object to the term as applied to himself — from his philosophy, which may have been tragic but was certainly beyond simple binary oppositions as pessimism and optimism. The word “pessimism” itself scarcely occurs in The World as Will and Representation, though “tragedy” does; and perhaps the best characterization of the work in these terms is that of an “anti-optimism,” since optimism, as Schopenhauer conceived it, did the suffering of the world a grave disservice, an “absurd, wicked way of thought, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable suffering of human kind,” in Cartwright’s words.

As likely the most authoritative English-language biography to emerge in this generation, Schopenhauer: A Biography is an essential addition to the bookshelf that holds the philosopher’s books; and as such it’s also open to a few piddling quibbles. One would have liked to see a section of photographs, for example; at times the proofreader appears to have been asleep (the last chapter even contains a footnote that retains an author’s proof query); these must have been beyond Cartwright’s purview. But Cartwright’s matter-of-fact tone is an essential corrective to Safranski’s sometimes purple prose, and to ask for much more than this would have produced a volume of interminable length. The biography can be highly recommended both to those who are familiar with Schopenhauer’s thought and to those who come to it for the first time.

***

Cartwright also reports the reaction of Schopenhauer to the music and operas of Richard Wagner, easily the earliest genius (and only among the first of many artists) to have been profoundly affected by Schopenhauer’s  thought. Schopenhauer, a regular theater- and concertgoer, found The Flying Dutchman “overdone and too busy,” according to Cartwright. His reaction to Wagner’s Ring libretto, which the composer sent to the philosopher “from respect and gratitude,” was no less ambivalent. “Schopenhauer did not respond to the author, preferring instead to fill the manuscript with snide remarks, critical observations, question marks, underlingings [sic], and exclamations [sic; where is that proofreader when you need him?] marks. Frequently, he was offended by Wagner’s language — it hurt his ears: ‘He has no ears, this deaf musician.’ To a stage instruction, indicating that the curtain was to close quickly, Schopenhauer quipped, ‘Since it is high time.’” Schopenhauer’s tastes ran more to Rossini and Mozart; though one would have liked to know Schopenhauer’s reaction to Beethoven’s 1824 Choral Symphony, that orchestral work which premiered only six years after the publication of the first edition of The World as Will and Representation and which reaches similar sublime heights of human expression, that reaction alas appears lost to history.

That Schopenhauer’s philosophy has always appealed more to artists than to academic philosophers is a truism so common that it’s not worth repeating. Of course this should be so; that Schopenhauer considered art a more productive avenue into the mysteries of the thing-in-itself than philosophy, necessarily a conceptual pursuit, appeals to artists’ amour propre. But this conclusion neglects to consider Schopenhauer’s aesthetics themselves, and whether or not they can be said to emerge organically from the epistemology and metaphysics of the first two books of WWR, as Schopenhauer insisted.

I think they can, and Superfluities Redux readers will also no doubt find this not worth repeating. A recognition of time, space and causality as the only a priori means of experience — a phenomenal experience that explains all representation but cannot begin to touch the noumenal thing-in-itself that Schopenhauer identified as “will” — is a stripped-down Kantianism completed with Schopenhauer’s conception of unconscious, destructive “will” as that essence that precedes even the phenomenon. “Will” (and it must be remembered that this is an inadequate term for the thing-in-itself, suggestive but only inadequately descriptive, an imperfect metaphor for something which cannot be described in language) is only knowable through the human body’s status as the “immediate object” of all experience.

We have access to intimations of this will, if not to will itself, and we have access to it through the knowledge of our experience through our own bodies, in which we have a kind of internal recognition of our status as subject. The body is the instrument of that “single thought” that Schopenhauer believed his philosophy as a whole explicated: in Schopenhauer’s words, “The world is the self-knowledge of the will”; in John Atwell’s perhaps more comprehensive construction, “The double-sided world [as both will and representation] is the striving of the will to become conscious of itself so that, recoiling in horror of its inner, self-divisive nature, it may annul itself and thereby its self-affirmation, and then reach salvation.” It is a salvation that also includes in this world compassion, based on the Upanishadic understanding of identity of one-with-other (a recognition of the tat tvam asi (“this art thou”) of the Chandogya Upanishad) rather than the obligatory duty towards compassion of Kant — because abstract, without a meaningful moral or ethical basis — an identity that forms the subject of the magisterial final, most lyrical book of WWR.

This is far from a complete explication of Schopenhauer’s thought. But it does provide a basis for a new kind of theatrical and dramatic tragedy, a tragedy that dissociates itself from the tragedy of the aristocracy and the high-born heroic figures of both the Greek and Shakespearean exemplars of the form. Indeed, it seems possible (to Maurice Benn, at least) that Schopenhauer’s work was a major influence on Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, written less than twenty years following the first edition of WWR: a play which has been called the first modern tragedy.

For us, Schopenhauer’s positing of the body as the immediate object and the form of the dramatic tragedy as the highest discipline of aesthetic endeavor (with the unique exception of music) suggest that the tragic form can be productively recalled to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Ulrich Pothast has suggested as much with his recent book on Schopenhauer and Beckett’s fiction and drama, The Metaphysical Vision, though I would like to go Pothast one better and suggest that Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics also serve to provide a basis for a contemporary tragedy that is additionally informed by Theodor Adorno’s post-catastrophic cultural vision and Georges Bataille’s philosophy of the body. Schopenhauer’s consideration of sexuality as the primary drive of the will, and the yearning towards the ecstasy in bodied contemplation of the thing-in-itself as experienced by this immediate object in union with the subject, provides additional foundation for a specifically erotic, sensual, physicalized tragedy as conceived by playwrights as diverse as Büchner, Samuel Beckett and Howard Barker.

It is unlikely that among modern philosophers there was a more regular theatregoer than Arthur Schopenhauer, who made it a habit to visit the theatre whenever possible; his work itself is rife with metaphors drawn from the stage. But it is doubtful that Schopenhauer would himself recognize his thought in either Adorno or Bataille, or theirs in his own. Certainly the morally conservative Frankfurter, who complained of the relationship of Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walküre that it was offensive to common decency (Cartwright says, “At the close of the first act of The Valkyrie, the incestuous and adulterous love scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde, Schopenhauer, who himself would sometimes suspend sexual morality, was appalled: ‘One can forget about morality occasionally, but one should not slap it in the face’”), would be unswayed by Bataille’s explorations, and Adorno was prone to irritably dismiss the nineteenth-century thinker. But I remain convinced that it is here that a 21st century tragedy may find a path.