I’m not sure how I managed to avoid it on my previous visits to Vienna, but next time I’m in town I’ll be sure to stop by the Café Schopenhauer in the 18th District. Named for the 19th century German philosopher with a nod to his enjoyment of comfort, the cafe also features a bookshop — quite delightful, and off the tourist path.
Though his home was in German lands further north and Schopenhauer visited Vienna only once or twice during his lifetime, his work became a central part of Vienna’s intellectual and cultural life after his death. “[Of] all the post-Kantian philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer — with the epigrammatic punch and elegant literary style which set him off from his academic and professional colleagues in philosophy — was the most widely read and influential in the Vienna of the 1890s,” Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin observe in their Wittgenstein’s Vienna, leaving his mark on the work of Sigmund Freud, Arnold Schönberg, Karl Kraus, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among so many others — even Gustav Klimt. (He also more recently left his mark on Thomas Bernhard, so the influence continues.)
I am now at that age at which wisdom is radiating from me like heat from a stove, as H.L. Mencken once put it, and part of that wisdom I think is the ability to look back at the enthusiasms of youth to see which of these remain comforts of what can laughingly be called my maturity. Somehow these all seem to coalesce — or, perhaps more accurately, coagulate — into my affinity for Austria’s capital city. So Schopenhauer and Vienna are two of these enthusiasms; music and the art of fin de siècle Vienna another. And, more recently, a home in religion. I might even suggest that this last is a seemingly logical home, given the enthusiasms that came before, especially when I consider my more recent enthusiasm for sacred music of the 17th and 18th century German-speaking lands (an enthusiasm which has led to many pleasurable hours listening to radio klassik Stephansdom). I doubt that monotheistic religion and Schopenhauer’s philosophy can readily be reconciled intellectually, but reason isn’t the only game in town.
Schopenhauer’s own position that Christianity is one of the most appropriate symbolic expressions of his philosophy does suggest an affinity. Certainly, compassion as the highest ethical value and ascetic resignation as the most appropriate posture with which to face the world resonate with both Christianity and pessimism. The idea that music is the art form which provides through an abstract contemplation of the will a temporary respite from suffering, too, gathers up a few relevant threads. Therefore my affection for Bach and Richard Wagner.
Schopenhauer did get a few things wrong. It seems that he believed instrumental music was the highest form of the art because of its mathematical abstraction, words acting as a distraction from the form; I find that only the addition of the human voice completes music’s emotional and spiritual possibilities. And if Christianity is a symbol of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, it’s worthwhile to consider whether reversing these polarities isn’t an appropriate approach to both.
The old man has been generating some interest lately apart from my own armchair musings. David Bather Woods, who contributed a brief introduction to Schopenhauer to Five Books a few years ago, is the author of a new biography, Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist, published by the University of Chicago Press just last month; Professor Woods also co-edited a new volume of essays, The Schopenhauerian Mind, released by Routledge last June. Two books does not represent a groundswell of global enthusiasm, of course. But it does appear that Schopenhauer is now emerging from behind Friedrich Nietzsche’s reputation as a laudable alternative, and it may be about time. Over the past few years I’ve had just about as much as I can take of Nietzsche’s Übermenschen, their transcendence of morality and dismissal of Christianity as a “slave religion.” Bad enough when it’s in the academy; worse when they’re actually in positions of power.
So where does that leave wisdom? Wisdom prevents me from suggesting that I’ll follow this post up with others of a similar nature. If you want to make an unwise gesture that may encourage that foolishness, you can leave a comment or “like” this post below. That leaves me with Voltaire, I’m afraid, and so the obvious wisdom is to tend my own garden, and I think Schopenhauer would say the same. I continue to learn my German — perhaps one day I’ll be able to read some of this in the original and better understand what I hear on radio klassik Stephansdom. It’s not unlikely I’m listening as you read this. Until then, time to bring down the Payne translation from the shelf and look forward to listening to this new recording of Parsifal. And soon, I hope, to wander on over to Staudgasse 1 in Vienna and order up a Zweigelt or three. I’ll see you there.
Recommended: Bryan Magee is an ideal guide through both Schopenhauer and Wagner, especially in the 2000 book The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy. (The original British title, if you’re playing along at home, was the simpler Wagner and Philosophy.) Magee is also the author of what is still the best introductory book about Wagner, Aspects of Wagner, a wonder of concision and insight at a mere 102 readable pages.
