Paul Chan
It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times: a new biography of the famously pessimistic philosopher.
Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist, by David Bather Woods, University of Chicago Press,
294 pages, $29.99
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Arthur Schopenhauer resurfaces into public consciousness whenever living feels so hard and bad, one wonders whether life is worth the effort. More than any other Western philosopher, he thought living is nothing but a pain. The best life can muster beyond pain is boredom. For Schopenhauer, the wisest thing is not to have been born. Or not to live long. “The brevity of life,” he wrote in his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, “which is so constantly lamented, may be the best quality it possesses.”
Despite his low opinion of life, the nineteenth-century philosopher had a lot to say about how to get on with it, and endure. “Live first, then philosophize,” Schopenhauer advised. David Bather Woods has taken the philosopher at his word and has penned an accessible, at times engaging, biography that tells how his life spawned a philosophy that found truth in the very worst of things.
Outsiders tend to gravitate toward Schopenhauer, perhaps because he saw himself as one. He wrote in a refreshingly clear and jargon-free style, which allowed his work to reach beyond academia. Artists and writers love Schopenhauer, Woods reminds us. I was first turned on to him through Samuel Beckett. Kafka, Gide, Borges, and Proust were admirers. I suspect this is in part because Schopenhauer valued art more highly than philosophy, in contrast to Hegel, his self-professed nemesis.
What Schopenhauer has to say can be hard to stomach, so Woods tries to mitigate this through humor. I guffawed when I read the preface title: “Live, Laugh, Love.” It’s so comically off-brand, it might as well be the title of a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. Schopenhauer himself can be funny. In his Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), he claimed that no reasonable person should take Fichte, Schelling, and especially Hegel seriously, unless it is to “regard Hegel’s scribblings as medicinal to be kept in chemists’ shops as a psychically effective vomitive, for the disgust they excite is really specific.”
Schopenhauer admired Eastern philosophy, which explains (to a degree) his bleak outlook. The first of Buddhism’s four noble truths is that existence is suffering, which pretty much sums up his core insight. Woods traces his interest in Eastern thought through a notebook from his student days, which was filled with choice proverbs transcribed from the journal Asiatic Researches. An annotation reads, “The will-to-live is the source and essence of things.” From this, Schopenhauer would construct a vast system of thought centered on his notion of “Will” as what underwrites all reality.
“No man ought to expect much from others, or in general, from the outside world.” “To be very happy is not difficult, it is indeed impossible.” What kind of life inspires thoughts like these? Schopenhauer certainly had his share of disappointments and tragedies. His father, Heinrich, died when Schopenhauer was seventeen (the family suspected it was suicide). When The World as Will was first published in 1818, virtually no one paid attention to it. He lived in relative obscurity for decades. It is not difficult to see how what Schopenhauer had to endure inspired his legendary pessimism. Woods tells us as much.
But what also comes across loud and clear is how Schopenhauer fostered or exacerbated many of the key conflicts in his life. When his father (who Schopenhauer described later in life as “a strict, violent man”) died, the adolescent blamed his mother Johanna for not loving Heinrich enough to prevent his death. Schopenhauer’s animus toward Johanna grew when she and Adele (his younger sister) moved to Weimar after Heinrich’s death. There, she forged a new life as a celebrated writer and hostess of a literary salon. Schopenhauer resented his mother’s newfound freedom and growing fame, calling her pursuits “frivolous.” Johanna, on the other hand, cared for her son to the degree he was willing to let her. She encouraged him to pursue philosophy instead of business, as Heinrich had demanded. She convinced her publisher to print his first book. She introduced him to people who would go on to shape young Schopenhauer’s thinking, including Goethe, who attended Johanna’s salon.
Still, the philosopher never made peace with Johanna, even at the end. He did not attend her funeral (or his sister’s, incidentally). He seemed only really interested in himself, his pet poodle, and getting the attention, or the better, of other men. He acted as if he alone knew The Truth. Woods reprints a poem Schopenhauer wrote in 1819, a year after The World as Will came out:
Howe’er you view the work,
Its life you cannot imperil.
It you may hold up but never will destroy.
Posterity will erect monuments a memorial to me.
My favorite story: in 1839, he wrote an essay for a competition sponsored by the Royal Danish Society. Schopenhauer was so sure he would win, he sent a letter in a sealed envelope along with his manuscript, detailing his ideas for how the judges should announce his prize to the world, when they were ready to award him. He lost, despite the fact he was the only entrant! We have a term today that fits Schopenhauer like a glove: toxic masculinity.
The dean of faculty at the University of Berlin, who circulated Schopenhauer’s petition to teach there, noted his “arrogance and extraordinary vanity.” Woods characterizes him as “personal and petty” in his later writings. But perhaps no one captured him quite like Johanna. In a letter dated 1807, she wrote:
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; of wanting to improve and
master what you cannot command.
In this context, Schopenhauer’s famous pessimism looks less like a fearless vision grasping the essential truth about existence, and more like the insolent attitude of a man who thought there must be something fundamentally wrong with the world because it didn’t give him exactly what he desired.
Nothing captures his attitude more than his opinions about women. His writings on the subject are so odious, Woods even declares, “the less said about Schopenhauer’s official views on women, the better.” Is it though? Schopenhauer’s misogyny is, I think, the most prescient and timeless aspect of his philosophy. His ideas that women are “the second sex that lags behind in every respect,” and are only suitable as lovers, wives, mothers, and caretakers, clearly thrive today, from what passes as discourse online to what literally passes as state and federal legislation.
Schopenhauer’s sexism also strikes me as inextricably bound to his pessimism, for both attitudes are underwritten by an inability or unwillingness to see value in relating to what exists beyond what one wants. Relationships in Schopenhauer’s life were largely instrumental. When he wanted care, help, or recognition, he turned to his sister, a few part-time lovers, his mother, or men he esteemed. And when he didn’t get what he wanted, he turned on them. Schopenhauer seemed wholly unaware that the suffering he saw all around was in part his doing.
An older and wiser friend taught me that to really understand a philosophy, one has to know who it is arguing against. Concepts become more understandable when who that philosophy is trying to convince or criticize comes into focus. There is no shortage of thinkers Schopenhauer was beefing with: Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, the list goes on. But Woods’s biography (perhaps unintentionally) makes the case that his philosophy may have been arguing with someone else his entire life, the one true adversary he just had to get the last word on: his mother.
Paul Chan is an artist who lives in New York.