This past June, Cambridge University Press inaugurated their uniform series of new translations of Schopenhauer’s entire published oeuvre with The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics in a translation by Christopher Janaway. The new series is welcome: until now, English versions of Schopenhauer’s books have been available from a wide variety of publishers (almost all of them in E.F.J. Payne’s translations), but perhaps each generation requires a Schopenhauer of its own. As Janaway says in his preface to the series, “Over the last three decades interest in Schopenhauer in the English-speaking world has been growing again … yet until now there has been no complete edition of his works. The present six-volume series of Schopenhauer’s published works aims to provide an up-to-date, reliable English translation that reflects the literary style of the original while maintaining linguistic accuracy and consistency over his philosophical vocabulary.” Janaway continues by noting that Payne’s translations “have stood the test of time quite well and performed a fine service in transmitting Schopenhauer to an English-speaking audience. Payne’s single-handed achievement is all the greater given that he was not a philosopher or an academic, but a former military man who became a dedicated enthusiast.” The new edition seeks to maintain a more “scrupulous” attention to philosophical vocabulary and repair Payne’s “tendency towards circumlocution rather than directness.” I hope to have more information on other volumes in the series shortly.
In the meantime, the new Schopenhauer Source Web site, developed by a variety of European universities, offers a unique opportunity to view Schopenhauer’s own manuscript pages held by the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. “The principal goal of this digital facsimile edition is to show to the scientific community the genesis of one of the most influential philosophies of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” the Web site notes.
Finally, you can find nearly anything on YouTube. Below is the first part of a five-part discussion between Bryan Magee (The Philosophy of Schopenhauer) and historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston, S.J., which provides an introduction to Schopenhauer’s work and his place in the history of philosophy, culture, and aesthetics.
***
In the second part of a five-part series, Bryan Magee and Frederick Copleston discuss individuation, the subject/object distinction, the potential of knowledge about the qualities of Kant’s thing-in-itself and the means by which we may have access to this knowledge. They also spar over some disagreements and problems:
***
Bryan Magee and Frederick Copleston discuss the prescience of Kant and Schopenhauer’s consideration of matter-as-energy, the nature of the “Will,” Schopenhauer’s “pessimism” and the role of aesthetic contemplation in part three of their five-part conversation about the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer below:
It’s in the nature of a brief, one-hour consideration of a philosopher’s work that any individual issue will get somewhat short shrift; aesthetics does here as well. Those interested in pursuing it further will find the primary source in Book 3 of The World as Will and Representation (both volumes – volume two picks up and elucidates aesthetic issues first presented in volume one, especially in regards to tragedy, which I hope to explore here next week). Dale Jacquette’s collection Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts is a fine anthology of essays, and Ulrich Pothast’s The Metaphysical Vision (1982, just published in 2008 in an English translation) relates Schopenhauer’s philosophy to the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett. Both of these are for the general reader rather than a specialized audience of academics and worth seeking out.
***
The Cambridge University Press informs me that the completion of their new Schopenhauer edition is likely some way off. But the next volume, a new translation of The World as Will and Representation, is tentatively scheduled for publication in the first half of 2011. No doubt it will be worth the wait.
In the penultimate episode of this interview series on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Bryan Magee and Frederick Copleston take up the philosopher’s sense of ethics and morality, based in a metaphysical but atheistic option towards compassion and love rather than in a sense of duty (Hegel) or a “categorical imperative” (Kant). They also discuss the difficulties inherent in Schopenhauer’s suggestion that, in the rejection of the phenomenal world, the will must turn against itself. Although I find that this may be the basis for a conception of Schopenhauerian tragedy – that the endless violent struggle between action and resignation and the inescapability of the will’s manifestation in the phenomenal world in each of us as individual subject/objects describe this sense of tragedy – Copleston, particularly, finds this hard to swallow, as you’ll note here:
***
In the final segment of their discussion on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Bryan Magee and Frederick Copleston assess his influence on Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein, and briefly mention his even more profound influence on writers and artists: