Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy | Rüdiger Safranski

Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy | Rüdiger Safranski | Arthur Schopenhauer: A Man and His Misery

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	Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy Rüdiger Safranski Harvard University Press, 1991 - 404 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This richly detailed biography of a key figure in nineteenth-century philosophy pays equal attention to the life and to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Rüdiger Safranski places this visionary skeptic in the context of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel--and explores the sources of his profound alienation from their "secularized religion of reason." He also provides a narrative of Schopenhauer's personal and family life that reads like a Romantic novel: the struggle to break free from a domineering father, the attempt to come to terms with his mother's literary and social success (she was a well-known writer and a member of Goethe's Weimar circle), the loneliness and despair when his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation, was ignored by the academy. Along the way Safranski portrays the rich culture of Goethe's Weimar, Hegel's Berlin, and other centers of German literary and intellectual life.

When Schopenhauer first proposed his philosophy of "weeping and gnashing of teeth," during the heady "wild years" of Romantic idealism, it found few followers. After the disillusionments and failures of 1848, his work was rediscovered by philosophers and literary figures. Writers from Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett have responded to Schopenhauer's refusal to seek salvation through history. The first biography of Schopenhauer to appear in English in this century, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy succeeds in bringing to life an intriguing figure in philosophy and the intellectual battles of his time, whose consequences still shape our world.

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In the wake of Kant

Like particle tracks from an atom smasher the Kantian heritage splits into a multiplicity of outcomes of which Schopenhauer's line, beside the Fichte to Hegel sequence vociferously denounced by the philosopher, is the clearest and yet most mysterious. As if attempting to recover from the sudden ambiguity of the conceptions of the noumenal yet reinstating its foundations in the distractions of Hegelian dialectic, Schopenhauer in his brilliant grasp of all the fundamental issues recasts the Kantian basics into his own more streamlined perspective of the breakthrough, or breakdown, of transcendental idealism.
This biography tells the exciting tale of this exile in the generation of Hegel, where the unity of the original discourse suffers its passage through the rapids in the disintegration of a creative era of philosophy, the mirror image of Marx. The story told by Safaranski evokes perfectly the strange charm surrounding this irrascible and one-pointed genius, whose absurd dismissal by too much modern thought as some eccentric antique only shows philosophy has lost its way, and forgets the clear strains of his melody streaking a host of successors, beginning with Nietzsche, whose intoxication with the dangerous elixir of the noumenal exteriorizing as a concept of will, like a rock star on drugs, is a harbinger of the reversal of the source, in a tragic finale. Schopenhauer remains a great test of one's understanding of Kant, for he dared a further critique, with a result that demands a clear vision of the original critiques, without mesmerization of the texts. He also saw the direct connection, obvious, yet elusive, with the greater traditions of the Indian yogas and Upanishads as the European Enlightenment moves instinctively to grope beyond its victories to compensate for its limitations. Each will follow here, because he must, in the void between Hegel and Schopenauer, seeking the unity from a bifurcation, to which the philosopher bore constant witness, through these wild years.

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Arthur Schopenhauer: A Man and His Misery

I've heard it said ((and by biographers, no less)) that a good biographer needs to spend so much time with his subject that he either ought to start off in love with him--or end up falling in love with him. Reading *Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy* I'd say that Rudiger Safranski most definitely belongs in the second category. But it's a tough love that Safranski feels for his subject; out of all the principle characters in this comprehensive study of the life and philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Safranski is hardest on the philosopher himself. He even shows more sympathy for Schopenhauer's preternaturally cold, self-serving, and reluctant mother--only criticizing Johanna S., at last, in relation to her shabby mistreatment of Schopenhauer's sister. So glaring is Sadanski's efforts to bend over backwards to accommodate and excuse Johanna that one finally wonders if he were afraid of being accused of otherwise justifying Schopenhauer's misogyny and being tagged with the same label himself.

By the same token, and rather paradoxically, Safranski starts off his exegesis of Schopenhauer by actually attributing the philosopher's pessimistic philosophy in no small part to the lack of motherly affection he experienced as a baby. I found this sort of revisionist psychoanalytic reductionism almost insufferably disheartening, to say the least. One might similarly reduce any philosopher's work on the basis of such a critical method and thereby render the entire history of philosophy nothing more than a catalogue of psychiatric curiosities--the solipsistic compensations of so many emotional cripples, sexual neurotics, and late bedwetters who, blessed with immense logical and linguistic gifts, managed to successfully reconfigure their childhood dysfunctions into grand world-views. If nothing else, one might at least theorize that Schopenhauer's distant, hands-off mother gave him a direct--and painfully accurate--experience of the coldness and indifference of the universe itself--and, thus, the enduring relevance of his resultant philosophy even for those of us who were raised by warm and nurturing moms. We are all of us orphaned in this heartless cosmos.

These caveats aside, I found Safranski's *Schopenhauer* to be an excellent book that admirably balances the life and work of the philosopher, while also providing an excellent historical and political background of the period and its major philosophical figures--Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, etc. After reading some of the reviews here criticizing the text and/or the translation as dull and plodding, I was pleasantly surprised to find how *readable* and, yes, even lively the book was, relatively speaking. To be sure, it's a densely-written book and the typeface is too small. But, let's face it, this is a scholarly biography published by Harvard University Press about a 19th century philosopher. Schopenhauer isn't an action hero and this isnt the latest potboiler by John Grisham or Dan Brown. Just how lively can you expect the book to be?! Nonetheless, for a work about a 19th century German guy who thought life was a terrible mistake that only grows worse and worse over time until the worst of all happens and you croak--I actually found myself laughing out loud in parts, especially at some of the excerpts from the philosopher's own texts. Schopenhauer can be hilariously funny and there's probably no greater put-down artist in the entire philosophical canon.

Of course, it helps enormously if you're a fan of Schopenhauer, or have an affinity for his dour outlook on life, but I'd wholeheartedly recommend *Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy* as an excellent one-volume treatment of the life, the times, and the philosophy of one of history's great misanthropes and one of its most incisive theorists of human misery.

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Translations

arlodriver is rightly concerned with the wooden style displayed in this book and the volume on Heidegger. The fault, however, is not Safranski's but rather that of his translator, Ewald Osers, as Shelley Frisch's fine rendering of Safranski's biography of Nietzsche conclusively proves.

Continental View

There are several excellent books available that describe and analyze the life and works of Schopenhauer. One is 'Schopenhauer' by Patrick Gardiner, another is 'The Philosophy of Schopenhauer' by Bryan Magee; the Very Short Introduction by Christopher Janaway is also very good. To those must be added this book by Rudiger Safranski, although it is a significantly different treatment. Gardiner, Magee, and Janaway are all Brits and write largely from that philosophical tradition, while Safranski, a German, is steeped in Continental philosophy and writes from that perspective. That means a perspective heavily informed, as he tells us, by Heidegger, Sartre, and Foucault, among others. It means that the prose will often be highly dramatic, with words like 'being' and 'self' appearing in caps, as 'Being' and 'Self.' If your patience for that sort of thing is limited, you may experience a rising sense of irritation by somewhere in the second half of Safranski's book. But Schopenhauer was, after all, a European metaphysician, wasn't he?

The book shows great scholarship, with many fascinating details about Schopenhauer's life and times; it also contains sections of analysis that are breathtakingly well written and insightful. Safranski is extremely good on Kant; his identification of Kantian ideas presaged in Rousseau was something I've not seen elsewhere, for one example. He sometimes uses "will to live" as a synonym for "will," which makes it sound close to the Nietzschian notion of the "will to power." But the reader should know that for Schopenhauer will also had a much broader meaning, encompassing even the most basic natural forces, like magnetism or the force involved in a stone falling toward the earth. And Schopenhauer's metaphysics had three tiers, the will and its objectification in individual objects, plus an intermediary level corresponding to Plato's Ideas. That intermediate level does not seem to be mentioned anywhere by Safranski, even though it is both a very problematic aspect of Schopenhauer's system and plays an important role in his theory of the visual arts. In Safranski's treatment of Schopenhauer's ideas about human freedom, the philosopher's doctrine of character is not adequately developed, although it is critical for his ethical theory. Finally, Schopenhauer carefully analyzed the nature of concepts, and he spent a lot of time railing against the use of concepts that are not grounded empirically in perception, thus rejecting the floating idealisms of Fichte, Schelling, and especially Hegel. Schopenhauer's theory of concepts is not adequately explicated by Safranski; the term 'concept' does not even appear in the index.

Safranski's book probably has maximum value as a supplement to Gardiner or Magee. It is not as complete or systematic as those in its presentation, but it contains a lot of additional insights and factual material that make it well worth reading. And, of course, none of these are substitutes for reading Schopenhauer himself, as he was a superb writer who constantly strives to be clearly understood.

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Schopenhauer... more than just a pessimist

I didn't mind the style of this book. It doesn't feel wooden to me. I will admit Safranski does repeat himself to fill pages and that's why I am not going to gush and give this five stars. I think editting is more of an issue here than translating.

All biographies - I should say "successful" biographies - aim at presenting an individual in his/her time, mentioning his/her relationships and his/her work. Safranski gives the reader a fairly thorough look at the beginning of the 19th century. I really enjoyed getting to know the dark, misanthropic philosopher. He was a complex, albeit egotistical man with a penchant for isolation, paranoia and hypochondria. I will recommend Bryan Magee's book as well. It's nice to compare.

Schopenhauer, I discovered borders somewhere between the artist and the intellectual as a personality. There is something about him that reminds me of other artists with huge egos and incomprehensive manners. Unlike Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer lived a stormy inner life. His father was rumored to have committed suicide, he was at loggerheads with his mother, he looked down on women, he was anti-patriotic, despised Napoleon (while Hegel revered him as did many of the Romantic French writers following the Napoleonic Era), moved around, slept with a gun close by, allowed government troops into his room to fire on the uprisers in Dresden, physically assaulted a cleaning lady, wrote works of genius, inspired great artists and thinkers (Nietzsche, Wagner, Mahler, Mann, Conrad, Hardy, Proust, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Turgenev) had two dogs named "Atmen" and died sitting on his sofa. And these are just the highlights.

I doubt I would have enjoyed his company had I met him in his time. Safranski offers, in my opinion a "compassionate" glance at a man too obstinate to be socially graceful and too important in the history of ideas to be ignored.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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