Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher. He was one of the most important 19th
century philosophers, most famous for his work The World as Will and
Representation. He is known for having espoused a sort of philosophical pessimism that saw life as being essentially evil and futile, but saw hope in
aesthetics, sympathy for others and
ascetic living. His ideas profoundly influenced the fields of philosophy, psychology, and literature.
Life
Schopenhauer was born in Stutthof (now Sztutowo, Poland) near Danzig
(now Gdańsk), a mostly German speaking city and an exclave of Royal Prussia under Polish
suzerainty, surrounded by the Kingdom of Prussia. He was the
son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and Johanna
Schopenhauer, a middle class mercantile family of Dutch heritage,
although they had strong feelings against any kind of nationalism. Indeed, the name Arthur was selected by his father especially
because it was the same in English, German, and French. His parents were both
from the city, and Johanna was an author as well. After the city fell to Prussia
during the second partition of Poland in 1793 the Schopenhauer family fled to Hamburg; in
1807 Schopenhauer's father died, possibly by suicide, and Johanna moved to Weimar. Schopenhauer never got along with
his mother; when the writer Goethe, who was a
friend of Johanna Schopenhauer, told her that he thought her son was destined for great things, Johanna objected: she had never
heard there could be two geniuses in a single family. Schopenhauer studied at the University of Göttingen and was awarded a PhD from the
University of Jena. In 1820, Schopenhauer became a lecturer at the University of Berlin; it was there that his famous quarrel with Hegel began.
Schopenhauer was influenced by Friedrich Schelling, called
himself a Kantian, and despised Hegel — he formulated a pessimistic philosophy that gained importance and support after the failure of the German and Austrian revolutions of 1848.
Philosophy
Schopenhauer's starting point was Kant's division of the universe into
phenomenon and noumenon, claiming
that the noumenon was Will and the most important since it is
the inner content and the driving force of the world. For Schopenhauer, human will had ontological primacy over the intellect; in other words, desire is
understood to be prior to thought, and, in a parallell sense, "will" is said to be prior to "being". In solving/alleviating the
fundamental problems of life, Schopenhauer was rare among philosophers in considering philosophy and logic less important (or "less effective") than art, certain types of charitable practice ("loving kindness", in his terms), and certain forms of
religious discipline; Schopenhauer concluded that discursive thought (such as philosophy and logic) could neither touch nor
transcend the nature of desire -- i.e., the will. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer posited that humans living in
the realm of objects are
living in the realm of
desire, and thus are eternally tormented by that desire (The role of desire in life has a similar role in the religions of
Vedanta-Hinduism and Buddhism, and Schopenhauer draws attention to these similarities himself).
While Schopenhauer's philosophy may sound rather mystical in such a summary, his methodology was resolutely empirical, rather than
"speculative", or "transcendental":
-
- “Philosophy... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as
existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.”
-
- Schopenhauer, Parerga & Paralipomena, vol. i, pg. 106., E.F.J. Payne Translation
-
- “This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of
our consideration.”
-
- Schopenhauer, World as Will & Representation, vol. i, pg. 273, E.F.J. Payne Translation
Schopenhauer's identification of the Kantian noumenon (i.e., the actually existing entity) with Will deserves some
explanation. The noumenon was what Kant called the Ding an Sich, the "Thing in Itself", the reality that exists
outside of, and the foundation of, our sensory and mental representations of an external world; in Kantian terms, those sensory and mental representations are mere
phenomena. Schopenhauer's assertion that Will is this noumenon might at first instance strike some as oddly as Heraclitus's revelation that everything is made out of fire.
But Kant's philosophy was formulated as a response to the radical philosophical skepticism of David Hume and his
fellow British Empiricists, who claimed that as far as we
could tell there was no outside reality beyond our mental representations of it.
When Schopenhauer identifies the noumenon with Will, what he is saying is that we participate in the reality of an
otherwise unachievable world outside the mind through Will. We cannot prove that our mental picture of an outside world
corresponds with a reality by reasoning. Through Will, we know — without thinking — that the world can stimulate us.
We suffer fear, or desire. These states arise involuntarily. They arise prior to reflection. They arise even when the conscious
mind would prefer to hold them at bay. The rational mind is for Schopenhauer a leaf borne along in a stream of pre-reflective and
largely unconscious emotion. That stream is Will; and through Will, if not through logic, we can participate in the underlying
reality that lies beyond mere phenomena. It is for this reason that Schopenhauer identifies the noumenon with Will.
Psychology
Schopenhauer was perhaps even more influential in his treatment of man's mind than he
was in the realm of philosophy.
Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed by the tribulations of love. But
Schopenhauer addressed it, and related concepts, forthrightly.
- "We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man [love] has hitherto been
almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material."
He gave a name to a force within man which he felt invariably had precedence over
reason: the Will to Life (Wille
zum Leben), defined as an inherent drive within human beings, and indeed all creatures,
to stay alive and to reproduce.
Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental, but rather understood it to be an immensely
powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world:
- "The ultimate aim of all love affairs ...is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite
worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it."
- "What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation..."
These ideas foreshadowed and laid the groundwork for Darwin's
theory of evolution, Nietzsche's Will to Power and Freud's concepts of the libido and the
unconscious mind.
Aesthetics
This wild and powerful drive to reproduce, however, caused suffering and
pain in the world. For Schopenhauer, one way to escape the suffering inherent in a world of
Will was through art.
Through art, Schopenhauer thought, the thinking subject could be jarred out of their limited, individual perspective to feel a sense of the universal directly — the "universal" in question, of course, was the will. The contest of personal desire with a world that was, by nature, inimical to its satisfaction is inevitably tragical;
therefore, the highest place in art was given to tragedy. Music was also given a special status in Schopenhauer's aesthetics as it did not rely upon the medium of representation to communicate a
sense of the universal. Schopenhauer believed the function of art to be a meditation on the unity of human nature, and an attempt to
either demonstrate or directly communicate to the audience a certain existential angst for which most forms of
entertainment — including bad art — only provided a distraction. A wide range of authors (from Thomas Hardy to Woody Allen)
and artists have been influenced by this system of aesthetics, and in the 20th
century this area of Schopenhauer's work garnered more attention and praise than any other.
According to Daniel Albright (2004), "Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art
that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself."
Schopenhauer's politics were, for the most part, a much-diminished echo of his
system of ethics (the latter being expressed in Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, available in English as two separate books,
On the
Basis of Morality and On the Freedom of the Will; ethics also occupies about one fourth of his central work,
The World as Will and
Representation). In occasional political comments in his Parerga and
Paralimpomena and Manuscript Remains, Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government. What was
essential, he thought, was that the state should "leave each man free to work out his own salvation", and so long as government
was thus limited, he would "prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of [his] fellow rats" — i.e., a monarch. Schopenhauer
did, however, share the view of Thomas Hobbes on the necessity of the
state, and of state violence, to check the destructive tendencies innate to our species. Schopenhauer, by his own admission, did
not give much thought to politics, and several times he writes prideful boasts of how little attention he had paid "to political
affairs of [his] day". In a life that spanned several revolutions in French and German government, and a few continent-shaking
wars, he did indeed maintain his aloof position of "minding not the times but the eternities".
Schopenhauer and Women
Schopenhauer is also famous for his essay Über die Weiber, in which he expressed his opposition to what he called
"Teutonico-Christian stupidity" on female affairs. He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey", and opposed Schiller's poem in honor of women, Würde der Frauen. The essay
does give two compliments however: that "women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than [men] are" and are more
sympathetic to the suffering of others.
The ultra-intolerant view of women contrasts with Schopenhauer's generally liberal views on other social issues: he was
strongly against taboos on issues like suicide and masochism and condemned the treatment of African
slaves. This polemic on female nature has since been fiercely attacked as misogynistic. In any case, the controversial writing has influenced many, from Nietzsche to 19th century feminists. While Schopenhauer's hostility to women may tell us more about his biography than about philosophy, his biological analysis of the difference between the sexes, and their separate roles in the struggle for survival and
reproduction, anticipates some of the claims that were later ventured by sociobiologists and evolutionary
psychologists in the twentieth century.
Schopenhauer on Hegel
Schopenhauer seems to have disliked just about everything concerning his contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The following
quotation from On the Basis of Morality (page 15-16) is quite famous:
- If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an
inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous
misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most
stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.
- Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so
that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an
inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.
Schopenhauer's critique of Hegel is directed at his perception that Hegel's works use deliberately impressive but ultimately
vacuous jargon and neologisms, and that
they contained castles of abstraction that sounded impressive but ultimately contained no verifiable content. He also thought
that his glorification of church and state were designed for personal advantage and had little to do with search for
philosophical truth. Although Schopenhauer may have appeared vain in his constant attacks on Hegel, they were not devoid of merit when targeted at someone who may have seen the Prussian state of his day as
perfect and the goal of all history till then, depending on how you interpret him.
Common Misconceptions
Many are put off Schopenhauer by descriptions of him as an obstinate and arrogant man, who did not lead the ascetic life that
he glorified in his work. The idea that he made resignation into a command to virtue is inaccurate, as he was merely trying to
explain asceticism in terms of metaphysics. He does refer to the asceticism
as a state of "inner peace and cheerfulness", but he also clearly states that he was not trying to recommend the denial of the
will above the affirmation of the will. Furthermore, the call to asceticism was supposed to come to select individuals as
knowledge all of a sudden, rather than being a virtue that can be taught.
Nietzsche seems to have made this misinterpretation and many gain a distorted
view of Schopenhauer from reading Nietzsche. The following sentence from
Twilight of the
Idols is often quoted:
- He has interpreted art, heroism, genius, beauty, great sympathy, knowledge, the will to truth, and tragedy, in turn, as
consequences of "negation" or of the "will's" need to negate
Schopenhauer did see all these things as means to a more peaceful and enlightened way of life, but none of them were "denial
of the will-to-live". Only asceticism is referred to in that way. Nietzsche also
claimed that Schopenhauer did not recognise that suffering had a redemptive quality, yet his recognition of this seems blatantly
clear in part 4 of The World as Will and Representation.
Also, his identification of the Will with the Kantian "thing-in-itself" has been
misunderstood. Kant defined things-in-themselves as being beyond comprehension and that
no-one could know the inner nature of a material thing. It is often thought that Schopenhauer denied this, but he did not. What
he did assert was that one could know things about the thing-in-itself. For example, you can know that the will is a striving force, that it is endless, that it causes suffering, that it will produce boredom if
unoccupied, etc. However, he did not say that you could directly know the will. In
addition, it has sometimes been criticised that he never defined the will, but he explained
that it could not be fully defined.
Bertrand Russell produced a very inaccurate article on
Schopenhauer in his History of Western
Philosophy. He alleged that Schopenhauer was hostile to Christianity and that he saw Christian asceticism as completely different from that of Buddhism and
Hinduism. This view is completely incorrect, as a large part of both volumes of
The World as Will and
Representation deals with how Christianity has the same "inner-kernal"
[as he puts it] as those two Eastern religions in teaching the impermanence of all world pleasures and the virtue of resignation.
Schopenhauer did make criticisms of Christianity, but these were mainly of
those things which he saw as having been inherited from Judaism, which he certainly
did despise. Will Durant wrote a more accurate chapter on Schopenhauer in his
The Story of
Philosophy, largely allowing Schopenhauer to speak in his own words.
It has often been thought that Schopenhauer believed in solipsism. He actually
said that solipsism could only be believed by those in a madhouse: "it would need not so much a refutation as a cure" [ The World as Will and
Representation, Volume 1, Chapter 19]. Sartre took Schopenhauer to task on this
point.
Train of influence
Bibliography
Major works
- Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, 1813 (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of
Sufficient Reason)
- Über das Sehn und die Farben, 1816 (On Vision and Colours)
- Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1818/1819, vol 2 1844 (The World as Will and Representation)
- Über den Willen in der Natur, 1836 (On the Will in Nature)
- Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens, 1839 (On Freedom of the Will)
- Über die Grundlage der Moral, 1840 (On the Basis of Morality)
- Parerga und Paralipomena, 1851
Online texts
Source
- Albright, Daniel (2004). Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources, p.39n34. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226012670.
External links
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