Arthur Schopenhauer: His Life and His Philosophy

"Helen Zimmern’s biography Arthur Schopenhauer: His Life and His Philosophy , published in 1876, only 16 years after Schopenhauer’s death. No. The closest connection is that she was born in Hamburg, which is where Schopenhauer spent a lot of his childhood. But they never crossed paths. She’s the same generation as Nietzsche, a couple of years younger. She did know Nietzsche personally. She was born in Hamburg, as I said. But then, in 1850, the family moved to Nottingham and then, in 1856, to London, after fleeing the revolutions of 1848 in mainland Europe. She becomes a naturalised British citizen when she comes of age. So, she’s a German-born, German-speaking British person. Yes. She turned her hand to everything. Before she wrote biographies and criticism, she was writing short stories. She was a writer above all. She wasn’t specifically a biographer or historian. She wrote all kinds of things. And she was a translator. Eventually she translated Nietzsche. Yes. There was already a biography of Schopenhauer in German by someone who did know Schopenhauer personally, Doctor Wilhelm Gwinner, and the biographical details of Zimmern’s book are based on Gwinner’s book. A lot of it is almost anecdotal, as if she did know Schopenhauer, because it’s taken from a source that was anecdotal. You get a lot of nice little morsels, the real minutiae of Schopenhauer’s life. It still holds up. It’s much shorter than some of the biographies that came later, but it’s accurate about the life, and even the presentation of the philosophy is reasonably accurate, given that not many people knew Schopenhauer’s philosophy at that time. One of the criticisms she got later was that, when she translated Nietzsche, people thought it was done in this high Victorian style. Sometimes people find that her style isn’t so digestible. In this biography, when it’s not her translating anyone else, but just her own writing, I think she’s really interesting in the way she writes about Schopenhauer. And she’s writing in a specific moment, when people in Britain are just beginning to hear about this fascinating German philosopher. She mentions in her preface a review in the Westminster Review by John Oxenford, which was originally published anonymously in 1853. Schopenhauer knew about this review and actually made a point of finding out about who wrote it, because he loved praise. Oxenford’s review, which was called “Iconoclasm in German Philosophy,” said that Schopenhauer would suit British tastes in a way that Hegel never did, because you can understand what Schopenhauer is saying. You know when you agree with him and when you disagree with him. You’re not left uncertain about what he’s saying. The only thing Oxenford disagrees with is his so-called ‘ultra-pessimism’. He thinks that ‘Englishmen’, especially at that time of Victorian liberalism, will not take kindly to this anti-progressive message in Schopenhauer, but the rest of it they will get on with. Zimmern references that, but she also references the fact that there hasn’t been this kind of systematic elaboration of the thought in English. There’d been at least one in French and some in German, but not in English. For a long time, this biography was the only place to go for translations of Schopenhauer into English. That’s right. It wasn’t until later that there were some translations of Schopenhauer. There’s the Kemp and Haldane translation, which came out about a decade or so afterwards, which is still being published in the Everyman series. It gets published as The World as Will and Idea . There are other translations, too. T Bailey Saunders translated essays from the Parerga . There’s an interesting one, which is The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason , which was Schopenhauer’s very first book and his doctoral dissertation. This got translated by a woman called Jesse Taylor, who had to publish under her husband’s name, Karl Hillebrand. She’s the first person to translate Vorstellung —which is the word translated by Kemp and Haldane as ‘idea’—as ‘representation’, which is what scholars use now. It might be Zimmern. If it’s Human, All Too Human or Beyond Good and Evil . Yes. And there are a few similar cases. There’s a Mrs Rudolf Dircks—I don’t know what her real name was—but she went under her husband’s name as well. She published some of Schopenhauer’s translations into English, including ‘The Metaphysics of Sexual Love’, which she translated as ‘The Metaphysics of Love’. That was D.H. Lawrence’s first introduction to Schopenhauer. Obviously, Lawrence was obsessed with ideas about sexual love and found it refreshing to hear somebody talking so frankly about sexuality. But even that translation is somewhat prudish: for instance, it omits the word ‘sexual’ from the title. It’s interesting to speculate what Lawrence would have made of the real unadulterated version of Schopenhauer’s views on sex. Here’s another one: Olga Plümacher, who wrote in one of the first issues of the journal Mind . There were a couple of essays on pessimism in Mind because it was right in the middle of the so-called ‘pessimist controversy’ that Schopenhauer basically kicked off. Plümacher, who was of Russian origin, was another woman writer who was bringing Schopenhauer to the general public. So, in the late 19th century—ironically, given Schopenhauer thought that women couldn’t aspire to an intellectual life—he was being written about and translated by all these amazingly talented women. I don’t know. Maybe. There are other biographies. The most authoritative English biography now is David Cartwright’s Schopenhauer: A Biography . That’s an incredibly detailed piece of scholarship. One of its sources is Gwinner, who is Helen Zimmern’s main source too. Cartwright’s book is incredibly detailed. There are also English translations of Rudiger Safranski’s Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy . So, there are others. But the good thing about Zimmern is that it’s so short, and it’s got everything you need about the basics and some more. I did a little comparison. There’s a great anecdote about Schopenhauer going to Frankfurt Zoo in the 1850s and seeing an orangutan—this is in the years just before On the Origin of Species —and saying that we must be descendants of these. So, I had a look to see if the orangutan made it into Cartwright’s book and I couldn’t find it there. That’s what I mean. Yes, it’s quite specific. I’ll go back and check now, but there are nice little incidents that, I think, are from the original source having had direct access, being literally in the room. You get this humane picture of Schopenhauer as he was, as a person, maybe almost too flattering because, by all accounts, he could be a really difficult person to be around. Famously, his mother couldn’t spend much time with him."