There is something mildly comic about the name Arthur Schopenhauer. The homely ‘Arthur’ doesn’t sit well alongside the stately, mouth-filling ‘Schopenhauer’. Schopenhauer himself saw such incongruities as the essence of humour. He was a full-blooded metaphysician but also a vulgar materialist, and in moving between the two his work, like his name, teeters on the brink of bathos. He studied medicine at the University of Göttingen, but he also believed in what he called the Will, a blindly persistent desire at the root of everything, and detected its presence in yawning and sneezing, vomiting and twitching, as well as in more high-toned matters such as the utter futility of human history. Rather as Freud would abstract particular wants and wishes to the more fundamental phenomenon of desire, so Schopenhauer subsumed scratching an itch and fighting a war to the same category. The Will is a grisly caricature of Hegel’s Reason or Spirit, which is a far more positive affair.
Schopenhauer wanted to outdo Hegel in intellectual grandeur, but his work has a cracker-barrel quality to it, as when he illustrates the conflict between body and mind by pointing out that people find it hard to walk and talk at the same time. He regarded Hegel as a supreme charlatan, and in a fit of masochism chose to hold his lectures at the University of Berlin at the same hour as the great man, ending up with an audience of just three students. He regarded the work of most philosophers except for Plato, Kant and himself as a lot of hot air. He was venomous, arrogant and cantankerous, and professed to believe that Germans needed long words in order to give their minds more time to think. He was also a ferocious misogynist even by the relaxed standards of the time. He once picked a woman up and threw her violently to the floor, causing her permanent damage. He regarded feminism as ‘lady-nonsense’ and was in favour of polygamy. His mother told him that he was irritating, overbearing and insignificant, which makes you wonder what his enemies thought of him. He was also a full-blown irrationalist, for whom reason was merely a blunt instrument of the Will. All human consciousness, he believed, is false consciousness, a pathological refusal to see things as they really are. The world is one vast externalisation of a useless passion, and that alone is real.
Schopenhauer is an intellectual monomaniac, in thrall to his one big idea about the Will. This lack of complexity is also the reason he lends himself to popularising accounts like this one. David Bather Woods writes in a deliberately non-intimidating style as he takes the reader through the various stages of Schopenhauer’s uneventful life. He was born in Danzig in 1788 and visited London as a teenager, where he made sure to drop in at the Bedlam asylum and witnessed three public hangings at Newgate. By the age of seventeen he was already convinced that the destiny of humanity was to suffer. After medical training at Göttingen, he eventually obtained a lectureship in Berlin and later moved to Frankfurt, where his morose estimate of humankind was confirmed by his not receiving a prestigious essay prize even though he had been the only entrant. When street fighting broke out in Frankfurt in 1848, the legendary year of political insurrection in Europe, he allowed counter-revolutionary Austrian soldiers to take shelter in his apartment. He supported hereditary monarchy and abhorred major social change. The celebrity that had always eluded him graced his later years. He died in 1860, assured that his book on the Will would exercise the minds of thinkers for centuries to come.
Woods’s study leans more to the life than the thought, which is always a temptation in the genre to which it belongs. Not many general readers can grasp the intricacies of German Idealism, but everyone knows what it means to have a white poodle called Atma die and to replace it with a brown poodle of the same name, as Schopenhauer did in 1849 (generally speaking, he preferred dogs to human beings, even though they, too, were emanations of the pitiless Will). Woods’s book has some typical bits of biographese: ‘In his youth, curly locks of ash-blond hair fell over Schopenhauer’s forehead,’ and his mouth was ‘full and beautiful’. The great irony of literary and intellectual biography, a form beloved of the British, is that we wouldn’t be particularly interested in the biographical stuff were it not for the light it might throw on an author’s work, yet such biographies often not only fail to illuminate the work, but use up space that might have been devoted to examining it.
Schopenhauer has long held the title of gloomiest philosopher in history. He sees human existence not as grand tragedy but squalid farce, with men and women writhing in the grip of appetites that are both pointless and insatiable. Their chief motive in coming together is fear of boredom. He writes of ‘this world of constantly needy creatures who continue for a time merely by devouring one another, pass their existence in anxiety and want, and often endure terrible afflictions, until they fall at last into the arms of death’.
There is no exalted purpose to this ‘battleground of tormented and agonised human beings’, only ‘momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure … constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted’. Nothing could be more obvious to Schopenhauer than the fact that it would be infinitely preferable if the world did not exist at all – that the whole project was a ghastly mistake which someone should have had the common sense to put an end to a long time ago. Yet his major work, The World as Will and Representation, was published in 1818, towards the end of an era of visionary hope and revolutionary idealism. It is as though he is already prefiguring the dip in the political fortunes of the European middle classes, as insurrection gave way to reaction and emancipation to oppression.
Schopenhauer was not unaware of this historic shift. ‘To enter at the age of five a cotton-spinning or other factory,’ he writes, ‘and from then on to sit there every day first ten, then twelve and finally fourteen hours, and perform the same mechanical work, is to purchase dearly the pleasure of drawing breath.’ He himself came from a long line of Hanseatic shipping merchants, was trained as an apprentice in the family business and lived off a share in his father’s estate. Nietzsche considered him one of his most important teachers, and Freud, astonishingly, thought him one of the half-dozen greatest individuals who had ever lived. One of the few professional philosophers to treat him as more than a crank was Wittgenstein, who perhaps saw in his work an anti-philosophy akin to his own.
As modernism took root in the early 20th century, this scourge of rationalism and political enlightenment came increasingly into his own. Schopenhauer came into vogue as despondency did. Conrad, Kafka, Beckett and Borges all owe him a debt. His favourite English novel was Tristram Shandy, which, like his own vision of human history, is a hopeless muddle from start to finish. As Woods points out, the Frankfurt School found Schopenhauer freshly relevant in the shadow of Auschwitz. Thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer always valued honest hopelessness over fraudulent idealism.
Woods doesn’t delve deeply into The World as Will and Representation, without which Schopenhauer’s name would almost certainly have faded from the historical record. Whatever one thinks of its perpetual grousing and homespun moralising, there is a science-fiction-like horror at the heart of the book which was to become an important feature of modern thought. At the core of the self is something – the Will – which is implacably other to that self, an inert, intolerable weight of meaninglessness, as though we were all permanently pregnant with monsters. What makes me what I am is utterly indifferent to my individual identity, which it uses simply for its own pointless self-reproduction. This Will, which is the pith of my being, is yet absolutely unlike me, as blank and anonymous as the forces that stir the waves. What is now irreparably flawed is subjectivity itself, not just some perversion or estrangement of it. It is what we can least call our own. We are leaving behind the Kantian era of the autonomous, self-fashioning individual, the free agent of its own destiny, for a world in which we are the playthings of impenetrable powers.
The idea of giving voice to this otherness can be found everywhere one looks in modernist culture. It is there in a benign form in D.H. Lawrence, for whom we do not belong to ourselves but must simply be open to whatever anonymous creative force is evolving within us. In the thought of T.S. Eliot, this force assumes the impersonal authority of tradition, which the individual talent must allow to flow through it. W.H. Auden tells us that ‘we are lived by powers we pretend to understand,’ while structuralists set out to identify the secret presence of these powers in the workings of particular cultures. If language becomes a major protagonist for 20th-century intellectuals, it is largely because it exemplifies the fact that we are spoken more than we speak. Besides, the powers that put consciousness in place are necessarily absent from it, as Freud seeks to demonstrate. Our self-opaqueness and self-oblivion are essential to the way we work. We could not act without them. There can be no free agency without repression. In a sense, the cheerless sage of Danzig was right all along.
Schopenhauer wasn’t, however, a nihilist. Woods refers to his interest in aesthetic experience – one of the few ways we can give the slip to the voracious Will. There are those for whom art is all about subjectivity, but for Schopenhauer art is all about escaping from it. When we encounter a work of art, desire drops away and we are able for a blessed moment to see a piece of the world as it really is. In our selfless attention to the object we cease to be subjects, freeing ourselves from lack and therefore from longing. The gift of genius, Schopenhauer writes, is nothing less than the most complete objectivity. The tangled chains of cause and effect into which all things are locked fall away, plucking that object from the grip of the Will and allowing us for a moment to savour it purely as spectacle. As the object becomes purely itself, the subject dwindles to a disinterestedness so absolute that it becomes a form of self-immolation. Art is a therapy for egoism. As with Freud’s death drive, you must take pleasure in your own dissolution. Only then does realism become possible. The world is transformed into a charade for the spectator’s delighted contemplation. The stage is set for Nietzsche, who proclaims in The Birth of Tragedy that the world can be justified only aesthetically.
It is art, then, that resolves the problems unearthed by philosophy, as it does so frequently in modern times. From Schiller and Arnold to Nietzsche and Pater, art or culture come to occupy the place once filled by the Almighty, and aesthetics becomes a surrogate theology. An activity confined to a small minority becomes the means of rescuing civilisation. At least religion involves billions of people, however doubtful its socially transformative powers may be. The redemptive role of art is the opium of the intelligentsia, a mirage that refuses to be put to rest: Simon Schama told us recently on television that art is where a divided society can find some common ground.
What can be true of art, however, can also be true of one’s treatment of others. For Schopenhauer, there can be no solution to suffering, but by acknowledging that the individual ego is a fiction one can behave towards others with true indifference – which is to say, make no significant distinction between them and oneself, and thus treat them with compassion. Once you recognise the delusion of individual identity, universal empathy becomes possible. This allows Schopenhauer to pluck an ethics from his pessimism. To act morally is not to act from a particular standpoint, but to act from no standpoint at all. Quite who is being empathetic in this situation isn’t easy to say.
Woods has something to say about Schopenhauer’s fascination with Hindu and Buddhist culture, which marks him out among 19th-century Western philosophers. He was attracted by what he saw as the asceticism of these creeds, but also by the fact that Buddhism aimed for the death of desire. It saw the ego as illusory, and taught its followers to live humbly, ungreedily, with the simplicity of a saint. Schopenhauer found it hard to live humbly and enjoyed making a stir with his dismal view of human history. Sensationally one-sided though that view was, it has more of the truth than the one held by the Victorian sages who found in history a steady progress from barbarism to the stock exchange. Even the enlightened Hegel held that the pages of happiness in the human chronicle are rare. Humanity has never been able to establish a state of justice and peace on any scale for any considerable length of time. History has been a saga of savagery, whatever finer achievements it has chalked up. One may seek a balance between the savagery and the successes, but it is hard to know how many superb accomplishments would be required to compensate for the forty million slain in the Mongol conquests of the 13th century, or the seventy million dead in the Second World War.
There are thinkers like Hegel for whom history is essentially over, and others like Schopenhauer for whom it doesn’t matter much whether it is or not, given the immutable nature of human wretchedness. But there are also those like Marx for whom history has yet to begin. In his view, what has happened so far can be consigned to the antechamber of pre-history, which contains one variation after another on the same dreary narrative of exploitation. Only when this is brought to an end can we launch out on history proper, and what this will look like cannot be pre-programmed. As a secular Jew, Marx is faithful to the Judaic prohibition on predicting the future, which is a way of trying to second-guess a God who refuses to be pinned down.
He would, however, have found Schopenhauer’s version of history drastically undialectical. In Marx’s view, modern history has been a tale of enthralling progress, as capitalism unleashes productive forces and generates an untold amount of wealth that needs to be shared in common. It also ushers in individual freedom and autonomy, liberalism and democracy, tolerance and civil rights, the breaking down of traditional barriers and the basis of a global community. All this, however, has come at an almost intolerable cost: hard labour, grinding poverty, spectacular inequality and the death of the spirit, as human life ceases to be a delightful end in itself and becomes merely a means of acquisition and accumulation. These, for Marx, are not different stories but sides of the same coin. His answer, then, to the question whether history is a story of barbarism or civilisation is an emphatic yes.