Arthur Schopenhauer - George Hunka

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I’ve just about completed my move to Philadelphia and am gearing up to writing again here just after Labor Day.

My books and music are just about unpacked. With every move my library becomes smaller and smaller as a practical matter, but the process does tend to focus the attention on what I’ll be dragging with me into my retirement years. And it provides insight into what affinities and ideas have stayed with me all this time. There is, of course, Vienna:

Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner have earned a place of honor:

And apparently German and Austrian literature have been saved from the local used book store, along with a growing collection of language textbooks:

Finally I’m just about ready to spend my time on a writing project about Vienna. But before that, there’s one child to get to college, another to a new high school, and myself to a more orderly daily routine. I haven’t forgotten my friends, so you’ll hear more from me soon.

Four by four

My books have yet to be unpacked, so in the meantime I’ve been busying myself with celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first Bayreuth festival and the first production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle in its entirety. (You can’t say I don’t know how to have fun.) While at the moment I don’t have 16 hours to devote to all four operas again, I’ve been enjoying Eric Schulz’s 2012 four-part, six hour documentary The World of the Ring on Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage-Plus platform, an ideal introduction to the Ring which even has something for those who already know it well. Fortunately it ranges across a wide variety of approaches to the operas, from a look at Christian Thielemann’s rehearsals with the Wiener Staatsoper to Laurence Dreyfus’s more musicological musings to a really stunning set of observations from the late pianist Stefan Mickisch. The first part, about Das Rheingold, can be found here, and more information about the series is here. If you can possibly find a way to see it, I encourage you to do so.

The Ring is a tetralogy, and though the number three supposedly possesses certain magical and mystical qualities, the number four appears to do so for German-language culture — at least the German-language culture I have special affinities for. Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation is composed of four long sections; and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s landmark Hitler: A Film from Germany stretches its four parts over seven hours. A more impressive coincidence is that these works over more than two centuries have been commenting on and challenging each other. We would not have the Ring that we have (not to mention Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde) were it not for the inspiration that Wagner found in the sage of Frankfurt, and Syberberg’s film wraps its aesthetic concerns around both of them.

Because each of them invites the spectator, the reader, the listener to approach from not only — and not primarily — an intellectual but also an emotional and sensual perspective, perhaps it’s appropriate to characterize each of them as symphonic in structure and intent: even Schopenhauer and Syberberg emerge from a conception of music as an internal human dynamic that reaches beyond language. Wagner himself seems to have particularly posited Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, performed at the start of the Bayreuth festival every year, as a cornerstone of his own operatic edifice. These four-movement works, by their very substantial size and difficulty, the interweaving of idea and sensuality both within each and among themselves, reach beyond their status as exemplars of German culture to confront human experience itself with their challenges and questions.

When I do eventually get my books back up on a few shelves, I may delve more deeply into this. I have a retirement coming up, and that 16 hours of Wagner is up there on my list.

Self-help with Arthur Schopenhauer

A quick glance over the philosophy section of the local bookstore will reveal the prominence of books about stoicism. This is, I think, a sign of the times; volumes like The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living and Lessons in Stoicism: What Ancient Philosophers Teach Us about How to Live cherrypick Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus for nuggets of wisdom that will somehow make us all more “resilient,” that awful word that’s become a 2026 catchphrase, like “boots on the ground.” On the flip side of all the positive qualities associated with the word is a certain emotional coldness to the slings and arrows of the world that dissuades us from acting on the desire to change it. “Life sucks, get a helmet,” stoicism distilled into a nutshell, is one of the more cynical approaches to experience, whether it’s from the stoics or anyone else.

“There is a popular style of philosophical biography that presents the philosopher’s life as a model for how to live well,” writes David Bather Woods on the first page of his biography Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist, out just a few months ago from the University of Chicago Press, citing Sarah Bakewell’s 2011 life of Montaigne. “Introducing Schopenhauer to this genre faces a major obstacle, and not just because of his many personal flaws.” What Bather Woods does not mention here, in the first chapter of his very fine biography of the Sage of Frankfurt-am-Main, is that Schopenhauer’s already written his own self-help book, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, which appears in the first volume of Parerga and Paralipomena.

This is not that. It’s fair to be leery of the biographical approach to any writer, and kudos to Bather Woods for admitting it. He has produced a swiftly and gracefully readable book about Schopenhauer which doesn’t stint on explication (though because Schopenhauer wrote for a general public rather than an academic audience there are fewer knotty interpretive problems than you might expect). Divided into ten chapters, the book focuses on the philosopher’s life, then the issues that arise from it: his father’s early death introduces a discussion of Schopenhauer’s attitudes towards suicide; his early travels in Europe provide a ground for explicating Schopenhauer’s approach to madness and punishment; his often misogynistic conception of women is clarified through a survey of Schopenhauer’s relationship with his sister and mother; and the last chapter, of course, focuses on death, from both the biographical and metaphysical stances. I should note here that Bather Woods is especially good on Fichte’s influence on Schopenhauer, and that a chapter on Schopenhauer and photographic portraiture is a new contribution to a consideration of Schopenhauer’s thinking on aesthetics. (I admit I was a little disappointed that Bather Woods gives Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory short shrift, but this is a quibble; certainly that ground has been covered quite comprehensively in the past; aesthetic experience, and especially music, is where the Veil of Maya may be at its thinnest, though, and I would have liked to see Bather Woods’s two cents on this issue.)

Schopenhauer rarely wrote about his personal life, leaving any biographer somewhat at a loss. Also new in this book, though, is Bather Woods’s adept and insightful use of a trove of letters written by the philosopher’s sister Adele. Here we have a few tantalizing hints, too, of Schopenhauer as lover and as father (he sired two daughters who died in infancy).

What differentiates Schopenhauer from the Stoics is that the Stoics counselled an active participation in political and social activities of the day, anathema to a man like Schopenhauer who believed the solution of the world’s most important problems did not inhere in political or cultural action. Schopenhauer instead counselled, ideally, ascetic resignation, but he knew it was impossible for most men and women to achieve that resignation; next best, as Bather Woods concludes, was compassion for the suffering of one’s fellow men and women and the alleviation of their pain. I doubt that Schopenhauer would have considered this a definition of hope, since the conflict of will and world is violent, dark, and eternal. The highest form of self-help is helping others: this doesn’t call for resilience, which is aimed inward. It is a sort of love, Bather Woods muses. He’ll get no argument from me. I’ll raise a glass to him and the Sage of Frankfurt-am-Main at the Cafe Schopenhauer in March.

Metaphysical stocking stuffers

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.

Café Schopenhauer

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.