If you’re still looking for a few gifts for the pessimistic metaphysician on your Christmas list and have around $750.00 lying around, here are a few presents you might consider shoving under the tree.
The Georg Solti Ring cycle recorded for Decca in the 1950s and 1960s and produced by the great John Culshaw was a landmark in stereo technology, still considered one of the best recordings ever made. (I have the original releases and can vouch for that.) It’s never been out of print, but a few years ago Decca remastered the original recordings and issued them on both SACD — whatever that is — and vinyl. Except for Das Rheingold, the new remasters are still in print (and I hope Decca is smart enough to repress Das Rheingold too). You can find them all here for the price of a mid-level audiophile system, appropriately enough. Surely there’s a middle ground between this and streaming it over Apple Music, but what the hell. It’s Christmas. Decca has a pretty compelling argument a little down this page.
Yesterday I wrote about Arthur Schopenhauer, with whom most of us my age became familiar through the classic E.F.J. Payne translation from Dover Publications. More recently, though, Cambridge University Press issued new translations of all of Schopenhauer’s work under the editorship of Christopher Janaway. Sandra Shapshay of Indiana University reviewed the first volume of Cambridge’s The World as Will and Representation shortly after its 2010 publication. It will be hard to give up Payne’s remarkable rendering, but after reading through Professor Shapshay’s evaluation, I admit she must be right: the Cambridge is the keeper. You can get the lot in paperback for $300.00 or so, and unlike the new Solti Ring releases, they all seem to remain in print.
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.
I’m delighted to hear, therefore, that Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center will launch a podcast series based on Mr. Rosen’s book next week. Per its web site:
Pursuit: The Founders’ Guide to Happiness is a 12-part series hosted by Jeffrey Rosen featuring Ken Burns and leading scholars. It explores how the founders understood personal growth as essential to the common good, and how you can put those ideas into practice today.
I wrote and published the below — along with its concluding popcult legerdemain — on July 3, 2024.
Every year around this time I try to honor the season by unsuccessfully pestering my wife and children to watch 1776 with me (they can’t be blamed for my failure, I suppose; all that prancing around to ersatz Gilbert and Sullivan, in the guise of a history lesson no less, brings even the most forgiving audience crying to its knees) and reading something that pertains to the historical significance of the moment. I’m about halfway through The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen, a constitutional lawyer and the president of Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, a book that I plan to unsuccessfully pester my wife and children to read.
The subtitle is well-descriptive of the book, which studies the role that classical virtues of Greek and Roman philosophers played in the education, thinking, and actions of the Founders — virtues such as order, temperance, humility, industry, frugality, sincerity, resolution, moderation, tranquility, cleanliness, justice, and silence. Many of the Founders, like Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, repeatedly cited these virtues and especially Cicero in their writings and thinking, and they wormed their way into the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution as well. Although they held themselves to these high standards, the Founders frequently usually failed to meet those standards (their failure was most spectacularly miserable when it came to slavery), but it was the attempt to better themselves — to pursue “happiness” as it was defined during the Enlightenment, rather than the “happiness” as it’s defined in these more hedonistic days — that provided them with insights into democracy and republicanism.
As I say, I’m about midway through and am loathe to say more about it before I’m finished, but it did cater to my curiosity about the role that architecture and physical surroundings play in the way we think about ourselves and our world. In the early and mid eighteenth century, Philadelphia’s architects embraced the Georgian style of order, proportion, and restraint: even today, the buildings around Independence Mall in Philadelphia remain experienced on a human scale, and the orderly, practical rowhouses and trinities of Olde City and Elfreth’s Alley too seem appropriate to a cozy comfortability.
These were the buildings that the Founders lived and worked in and ate and drank at as they debated the foundational documents of the United States. Even today we can walk in their footsteps and admire the same Georgian order, proportion, and restraint. Alas, the style was not to last — architects around the turn of the century embraced the Federal and Greek Revival styles that led to buildings like the First Bank of the United States a few blocks away from Independence Hall. It appeared as if they were trying to live up to Philadelphia’s reputation as the “Athens of America,” and they were going to have the buildings to prove it, goddammit.
Twilight of the gods? The Greek Revival First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, built in 1797. Photo: National Park Service.
Although it’s a bit of a left-field stretch, there’s another sense in which The Pursuit of Happiness is relevant to today’s Philadelphia. Rob McElhenney’s comedy It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is in many ways Pursuit‘s counter-text. Instead of cultivating the classical virtues of order, temperance, humility, industry, frugality, sincerity, resolution, moderation, tranquility, cleanliness, justice, and silence, the reprobates who frequent Paddy’s Pub in South Philadelphia cultivate the classical vices of disorder, crapulence, narcissism, sloth, extravagance, perfidy, half-heartedness, extremism, chaos, filth, bigotry, and noise. This provides a fertile ground for the show’s frequent satiric forays into politics and culture: Mac, Charlie, Frank, Dennis, and Sweet Dee confront issues like abortion, racism, sexual identity, drug addiction, urban blight, gun control, the MeToo movement, political corruption, and welfare by indulging in these vices without apology, self-control, or self-knowledge, often destroying property and the lives of innocents in the process.
I’m not sure that IASIP can really bear all the weight that I’m putting on it — the show is a gross-out comedy first and foremost, after all. But the show depicts what happens to people and politics when the classical virtues are ignored and the irrational id instead of reason and restraint is given free rein to trample over the rights of others. While the show’s setting in Philadelphia is in part an accident of chance — McElhenney is a Philadelphia native, and the show’s B-roll of Philadelphia locations is affectionate and lovingly knowledgeable — the gang traipses through the same streets as the Founders, an unintended comment on just how far we’ve fallen in the 248 years that have separated them. But if you want to see how we started, read The Pursuit of Happiness; to see where we ended up, watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
However you celebrate Independence Day and America’s 248th birthday tomorrow, I hope you make it a good one.
Yesterday I wrote about Arthur Schopenhauer, with whom most of us my age became familiar through the classic E.F.J. Payne translation from Dover Publications. More recently, though, Cambridge University Press issued new translations of all of Schopenhauer’s work under the editorship of Christopher Janaway. Sandra Shapshay of Indiana University reviewed the first volume of Cambridge’s The World as Will and Representation shortly after its 2010 publication. It will be hard to give up Payne’s remarkable rendering, but after reading through Professor Shapshay’s evaluation, I admit she must be right: the Cambridge is the keeper. You can get the lot in paperback for $300.00 or so, and unlike the new Solti Ring releases, they all seem to remain in print.
