Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist

By David Bather Woods

The University of Chicago Press. 294 pages. £23.98  ISBN-13:978-0-226-82976-0

Reviewed by Tony Roberts

 

‘As the two of them talked, Brahms rambled on about his agnosticism, his growing interest in Schopenhauer the philosopher of pessimism (Wagner’s favorite). On the way back to his hotel with violinist Josef Suk, Dvořák was thoughtful and silent. Suddenly he exclaimed with real anguish, “Such a man, such a fine soul —and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!”

                       Johannes Brahms: A Biography by Jan Swafford (1999)

We must take anecdotes of the celebrated cum grano salis. But it was certainly true that Schopenhauer magnetized artists, writers, philosophers and composers with his pessimism, and especially musicians for he believed that music ‘is not like the other arts, a presentation of the effects of the better consciousness in the material world of the senses, but is itself one of the effects’. Music was for him the highest art, concerning itself with the will, the metaphysical principle itself. And then there were the writers. Listing just some of the number who admired Schopenhauer’s philosophy (including Tolstoy, Turgenev, Hardy, Mann, Borges, and Beckett), Bather Woods suggests that he ‘called forth and emboldened the manifold qualities in their own temperaments that attracted them to him. In some cases, it was his own writerly sensibility that was so attractive.’ In others, no doubt, his fine style combined with his openness to Eastern as well as Western thought appealingly underscored his compelling gloom about the human condition.

David E. Cartwright wrote comprehensively on the philosopher’s waspish life in his excellent Schopenhauer: A Biography (2010). (Kant may well have anticipated the philosopher when he famously wrote, ‘from such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing straight can be built.’) David Bather Woods’ Arthur Schopenhauer is less than half the length of Cartwright’s book. This is ideal for an introduction to the fascinating philosopher.

The cover of my hardly dog-eared paperback of The World As Will and Idea (Everyman) has a reproduction of the portrait of the philosopher by Angilbert Göbel from 1857-1859, half-smiling, cunning as a Balzacian character. It is a warmer image nevertheless, Schopenhauer’s favourite according to Woods. This biography opts for a more austere, grim-lipped photograph from the latter year, appropriate to its pessimistic subtitle.

Bather Woods writes: ‘This book explores how the events of his life, philosophical or otherwise, can be read in the light of his thinking, and vice versa. In doing so, it raises the question of whether Schopenhauer’s pessimism is a livable philosophy. Topics include life and death, crime and punishment, solitude and society, love and sex, gender, fame, madness, and revolution.’ This then is a thematic biography, ‘linear and looping’. It rather skilfully tells his life story and something of his mother’s and sister’s, in a systematic but interrupted fashion. Those like myself who are habituated to the long, sturdy, linear biographical approach may have a reservation, and yet life and thought here are woven together with real insight and in an engaging manner.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig (Gdańsk) in 1788 to a shipping merchant family, comprised of Heinrich Floris and Johanna (and later a sister, Adele). The family moved to Hamburg, though Schopenhauer lived two years of his youth in Le Havre as an apprentice to another shipping merchant, acquiring French and once touring in Europe with his parents. This included some unhappy months at school in England. At his father’s suicide in 1805, Schopenhauer quit his apprenticeship deciding, ‘Life is a missliche Sache [an unpleasant business]; I have resolved to spend it reflecting upon it.’

His exasperated mother wrote to him when he was nineteen: ‘I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you. All of your good qualities become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others… With this you embitter the people around you… no one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself.’ It might seem cruel to say it so bluntly, but as Bather Woods sufficiently illustrates, ‘The advantages as a writer to Schopenhauer in particular were manifold. Transposed into his works, his potentially repellent personality traits… were free to become compelling literary and intellectual qualities, so long as they found the right audience.’

In 1809 he entered the University of Göttingen where he eventually took up philosophy, transferring to Berlin for his doctoral thesis. A reworking of this became On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813). Moving to Dresden, in 1818 he published his philosophy as The World as Will and Representation. One preface to the book praising his late father was ditched in favour of an assault on Hegel and his followers. In 1819 he decided to teach. Schopenhauer sent his published works to the dean of faculty in Berlin with this suggestion about his timetable: ‘I ask you to choose the hour according to your best judgement: the most suitable is probably the one where Professor Hegel reads his main lectures.’ His arrogance appalled the university and yet he achieved his objective in challenging the supremacy of the most renowned philosopher of the time. Unfortunately the consequence was that he never lectured to more than five students in his years there, while philosophy majors attended his eminent rival’s classes in large numbers.

Schopenhauer left Berlin in 1831 in advance of cholera. Always a restless outsider, he travelled in Europe. The decade had offered him only failure academically and romantically, as well as an expensive lawsuit resulting from an argument with a female boarder at his lodgings, which taxed his finances for years. Despite an expanded edition of the book, renown only came in 1851 with the publication of Parerga and Paralipomena (Appendices and Omissions). He died in 1860 in Frankfurt, where he had lived since 1833.

The ‘Will’, in his eventually famous book, refers to the will to live, the life energy that living things share (the ‘Representation’ has been translated as ‘Idea’). It is not a convincing phenomenon for some. ‘The thesis, that human, and indeed all beings, are expressions of a blind, ceaseless will to life,’ argued David Berman, ‘is probably Schopenhauer’s principal and most original philosophical contribution.’ Yet in Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? (2008), the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski asked, ‘Can we really understand the idea of an all-powerful and all-controlling, aimless, impersonal will, undirected by reason? What kind of experience could make us believe in it? And how is it possible that no one saw the truth about it before, seeing that it is supposed to be evident through everyday experience?’ Schopenhauer had taken his master Kant’s distinction between the world of phenomena and the world of the object (the ‘thing-in-itself’), and turned the latter to will (a will that Nietzsche would shape into power).

Writing variously of his famous pessimism, Schopenhauer held his position: ‘If reward and bliss are the goal [of life], then the world is very poorly designed. But if, on the other hand, the purpose of the world is to test and punish us, then its design seems much more fitting, albeit less comforting.’ And, ‘People have complained loudly that my philosophy is melancholy and comfortless: but this is only due to the fact that instead of making up a future hell as the equivalent of sin, I proved that there is already something hellish where the guilt lies, in the world.’ Therefore, ‘Nothing is more useful than to accustom oneself to regarding the world as a place of penance, hence as a prison, a penal colony as it were, a labour camp’, because ‘the destiny of suffering is written all over human existence.’

If pessimism is Schopenhauer’s gift to philosophy, his gift to biography is his personality. There is something comical about his arrogance, which is curiously redeeming. On one occasion he submitted a paper to a Danish essay competition. With the submission he sent a sealed letter giving instructions regarding the conferring of his prize should he win and, when he did not (despite the fact that he was the only entrant), he published his essay alongside a successful one he had written. The title page included, for the first essay, the words ‘crowned with a prize by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences’ and, for the second, ‘not crowned with a prize by the Royal Danish Society of Sciences, at Copenhagen, 30 January 1840’.

Characteristically, when he acquired a copy of the British Westminster Review which had written on him, Schopenhauer explained to a German newspaper editor, ‘The translated passages are very good… He seems to have understood Kant’s philosophy as a whole… The presentation of my system is, of course, very inadequate, especially in the ethical part.’ This was a sublimely ego-driven philosopher: ‘I am the man who has written The World as Will and Representation and has given a solution to the great problem of existence which perhaps will render obsolete all previous solutions, but which in any case will exercise the minds of thinkers in the centuries to come.’

For a man who thought it best not to have been born, there is much understanding of the way of the world. His views were in some cases passably forward-looking for his day. Humaneness was an article of faith, compassion in particular. Art and love had their moments in his philosophy. He hated animal cruelty (loved dogs), understood suicide and madness, both of which he had witnessed. In fact he opposed cruelty in all its forms, including the death penalty.

Love is a significant subject in Bather Woods biography. Chapter six is entitled ‘Love Stories Without Love’. Schopenhauer did not understand women, avoiding them mostly, including those in his family. The chapter describes the (un)romantic lives of brother and sister, as well as the philosopher’s views on love and friendship. He did not entirely deny love’s existence but felt it arose from sexual desire. He did concede that, ‘passionate sexual love is sometimes accompanied by a feeling that is of a completely different origin, a feeling that is actually friendship grounded in harmony of temperament’. Then he adds the rider, ‘although this usually only comes to the fore when genuine sexual love has been extinguished by its satisfaction.’ To Schopenhauer there was, however, ‘a much worthier goal’ associated with sex: procreation. This may seem contradictory, given his view on the valuelessness of living. His biographer’s explanation of the reasoning behind it is as follows: ‘Schopenhauer reminds us that while every individual human being inevitably dies, humankind in general lives on. This is just as well, in his view, because “the individuality of most people is so miserable and worthless that they really do not lose anything,” whereas humankind itself “might have some value.”’

In the chapter following, ‘The Second Sex: How Schopenhauer Underestimated Women’, we find even less comfort in our search for enlightened views on the sexes. ‘Women, he wrote, are “the second sex that lags behind in every respect.” They are “destined neither for great mental nor physical works.” Women should therefore be accommodated by society, but never revered. They are suitable only as lovers, wives, and mothers, or nurses and governesses.’

The one same-sex relationship that Bather Woods deals with is Schopenhauer’s friendship with Anthime Grégoire de Blésimaire, with whose shipping merchant family he had once lived. In contact again in 1836 he envied his friend’s having a rural life and family (though one could not then ‘devote himself to the truth’). He had chosen to remain a bachelor, although in his past there were two little daughters who lived only briefly. He had also had a long term non-exclusive relationship with a dancer, he reported to Anthime. When the two friends finally met in 1845, it was something of a disaster (‘He is of such a disagreeable character that we quarrelled quite seriously… He is considered mad, and indeed he must be,’ wrote the friend).

Schopenhauer’s first biographer, Wilhelm Gwinner, said in his eulogy of the late philosopher, ‘Ordinary people saw the misanthrope in him. But, however little he thought of people, he felt for them; he was full of compassion.’ This seems about right. As to whether his ‘pessimism is a livable philosophy’, as our author asked at the book’s beginning: that would appear, on the evidence of Schopenhauer’s life, a thorny prospect. Most of us, like Brahms, would hedge our bets, if only just a little, and look to love.