![]() When his father committed suicide, his mother skipped away to Weimar and re-invented herself as a hostess – the elderly Goethe came to her salons – and as a highly successful writer of sentimental novels. The downside was that his father was a depressive neurotic from a family with mental health problems, married to a woman much younger than him, and of a very different, livelier, disposition. The result was to make him an admirably cosmopolitan figure – he was at heart a European: there was nothing of the German nationalist about him. To prepare him for a mercantile future he was taught modern languages, and he grew up speaking excellent English and French along with his native German. Schopenhauer’s father was a wealthy Danzig merchant, and young Arthur was brought up to follow in his father’s footsteps. Of course, like any philosophy, Schopenhauer’s must in the end stand before the tribunal of truth or falsity – but in the case of Schopenhauer it is also the expression of a particular, individual view of the world, and is throughout impregnated with the difficult, sometimes irascible personality of its author. Schopenhauer too belongs to this select group, and David Cartwright’s new biography of Schopenhauer enables us to better understand his philosophy by better understanding the man. This is not the case with artist-philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, where there is an intrinsic connection between their life and work. Philosophy Through Personal Historyīecause of its abstract nature, the work of philosophers rarely reflects their life-experience any more than that of scientists. Indeed, for Schopenhauer, Sartre would have been as mistaken in his psychology as was the arch-rationalist Kant. Thus we are not free to choose ourselves, as Sartre would require: we are already what we are. Freedom of the human will is an illusion brought about by the emergence of self-consciousness. And what we are, like all living beings, are so many unwitting expressions of the will that rules us (see panel). Instead, he tells us that our “virtues and vices are inborn” and that it is through what we do that we discover what we are. Though he offers a ‘philosophy of life’, he can scarcely be seen as a forerunner of existentialism, if only because for him a grim determinism rules: we have no space to choose what we are to become. He was writing in the period of German idealism, but although he is indeed an idealist of sorts, it is very much on his own terms, and in many ways he is much more empirically-minded than his contemporaries. Schopenhauer is a figure who rather evades categories. His style is polished and admirably clear – even though he was writing in a period when his fellow German philosophers were producing prose of often impenetrable obscurity (Hegel, for example). It also helps that he is one of the most readable of philosophers. This is not only because he had a high regard for art as offering us temporary relief from the “miserable pressure” of life (of the Will), but also because he offers a philosophy of life, rather than technical treatises, seeing one of the tasks of philosophy as to provide consolation in the face of death, although without what he saw as the falsities of Christianity. Schopenhauer, famous as the arch-pessimist of philosophers, has never been forgotten, but it could be said that his main influence has been outside of philosophy – on composers such as Richard Wagner and on novelists and poets too numerous to mention. If Kant restricted the domain of ethics to rational creatures, Schopenhauer, for whom rationality was only a thin veneer over an essentially animal nature, stressed our mutual capacity for suffering, and in his ethics of compassion gave animals what he thought their due. Not only of humanity, one might add, but also of animals. He regarded optimism as “not merely absurd, but also as a really wicked way of thinking, and as a bitter mockery of the unspeakable suffering of humanity.” ( The World as Will and Idea, 1819). Not surprisingly, Schopenhauer had little regard for Leibniz – “a miserable little candlelight” he called him. I’ve decided to spend my life trying to understand it.” “Life,” he was to declare, “is a wretched business. He became an atheist in his teens, convinced that such a world as this could not have been created by an all-good being. If Leibniz, that great German figure of the Enlightenment, proclaimed that we live in the best of all possible worlds, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) held that we live in one of the worst – one permeated through and through by suffering and death. Schopenhauer Roger Caldwell looks at the most pessimistic of philosophers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |