George Hunka

Notes and comment

Tag: Arthur Schopenhauer

  • Four by four

    Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

    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.

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  • 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.

     

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  • 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.

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