The Philosophy of Schopenhauer

"Again, it was one of the books that helped me out when I was first getting into Schopenhauer. It was lucky that Schopenhauer had been picked up by the greatest populariser of philosophy of his generation in Britain, which again makes me wonder why Schopenhauer still isn’t more popular than he is. Yes. That’s a good point. And, even though now I disagree with some of the things that Magee says about Schopenhauer, at the time it was great to have this lucid exposition of the basics of Schopenhauer’s thought. Like a lot of Bryan Magee’s work, it indicates a personal investment in a thinker and included some personal elements. Magee makes connections; connections that I now dispute a bit, but connections between Schopenhauer and other parts of the intellectual and artistic world that made Schopenhauer seem like a hugely important thinker. I hadn’t really thought about there being an overlap between certain parts of Schopenhauer’s character or style and Bryan Magee’s, but it makes perfect sense. Someone whom Bryan Magee knew, Iris Murdoch, was also really interested in Schopenhauer. In her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals , she pinpoints the curious thing that’s so attractive about Schopenhauer. She calls him the merry pessimist… Yes. But Murdoch also points to the way Schopenhauer is so generous to his readers, so garrulous. Nietzsche wasn’t. Nietzsche sometimes tormented his readers and seemed to hate them. Schopenhauer appreciated being read. Murdoch describes him as more like a kindly teacher or a fellow traveller, unless you’re a woman, I suppose, given his misogyny—but then again Murdoch was a woman…Magee himself could be like a kindly teacher. He’s an enthusiast, someone who really cares about his reader. Yes. There are things I have reservations about now that I didn’t have when I first read it. For instance, he makes one pretty fundamental claim, that Schopenhauer’s general philosophy, by which I think he means his epistemology and metaphysics, is compatible with optimism. And he says that’s because you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. You can’t derive the value of something from a description of it. He looks at optimism and pessimism through the classic glass half-full/glass half-empty model. It depends on the temperament of the observer whether it’s half-full or half-empty. At one point Magee makes a vague concession, saying there are ‘some of those parts that deal with ethics and aesthetics’ that may be intrinsically pessimistic. But, to me, there’s just no optimistic equivalent for Schopenhauer’s main claims made throughout The World as Will and Representation . How do you say the world ought not to exist in an optimistic way? Yes. It does seem like it’s that. Magee’s basic point is that his pessimism can’t be derived from first principles, but I think it’s unfair to say that that means that it’s just a perspective on a value-neutral object, like a half-empty glass. For Schopenhauer, we’re not debating about how to see the glass; we’re debating about how much liquid is in the glass. His is a glass-fully-empty philosophy. Magee is right to say that we can’t necessarily derive some of these claims from descriptive metaphysical principles, but perhaps he’s wrong to say that means it’s all just a matter of perspective and temperament. He’s actually objecting to the subtitle to Copleston’s book because Copleston’s book is Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism . Magee doesn’t like the idea that what we remember Schopenhauer for is being a pessimist. Part of what he was trying to achieve in The Philosophy of Schopenhauer was to draw attention to all the other things that Schopenhauer could be famous for, other than his pessimism. Oh, yes. Totally. Some things about the fundamental parts of Schopenhauer’s philosophy he explains beautifully. And there are things we wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for Magee’s amazing connections. For example, he just drops in that he met the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Magee mentioned that he was writing this book on Schopenhauer and Borges went into ecstasy about how much he loved Schopenhauer. When Magee asked Borges why, with all his passion for intricate systems and structures, Borges had never written a philosophy, he replied that ‘he did not do it because it had already been done, by Schopenhauer.’ I wish Magee had expanded on that. He mentions Borges a couple of times in the book, but instead he expands on other things in a more speculative way. No, he wasn’t, for these reasons. One is that he thought that knowing these things had nothing to do with practising them. He said that just because a painter or a sculptor knows how to depict beauty, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be beautiful themselves. So, the fact that he knew these truths didn’t mean that he was going to live in the light of them. He didn’t practise what he preached, but he didn’t just preach what he practised either. He didn’t live up to the measures of his main ethics of ascetic self-denial, and could quite easily have argued that everyone should live just as he did. Instead, he is explicit that ultimately, people shouldn’t live as he does. I think so. Schopenhauer thought philosophical pessimism was justified, but he thought that there were all kinds of reasons why human psychology had developed in a way that didn’t acknowledge its truth—otherwise, we’d all just kill ourselves or we’d all just stop living. He’s as susceptible to the illusions of sex and hunger and the passions as anyone else. So, our natural psychology is not going to be in tune with philosophical pessimism. That’s something he recognizes, even though, at the same time, he is quite derogatory about that. We’re so deluded about the individual and pursuing, with serious intensity, these things that are never going to satisfy us. The one relevant thing I will say about his life—not that it makes a big difference—is that, like many people, he did have genuinely depressive episodes. You don’t learn this from Zimmern’s biography, but Cartwright discusses it in his. Schopenhauer would lock himself away in his room for weeks. But most of the time he seemed to be this ebullient, robust person, that Nietzsche never was. Even though Nietzsche’s philosophical stance is all about strength, Nietzsche was in fact incredibly weak, and suffered terribly from various illnesses. The other thing that comes through—again, Iris Murdoch taps into this as well—is that the one way in which Schopenhauer was an optimist was in relation to truth. He thought that it’s possible to know the truth and it’s good to know the truth. In contrast, Nietzsche was a pessimist about precisely these things. He’s not sure it is possible to know the truth and he wasn’t sure it’s good to know it. But Schopenhauer was an optimist in this respect, in that he obviously derived a great deal of satisfaction from knowing what that truth was, even if it was terrible, and being able to articulate it with such talent and genius. So that’s why I think he comes across as this so-called merry pessimist. That often confuses his readership. Murdoch finds it charming, but Oxenford finds it confusing: in that early review I mentioned he wonders how you could be so energized by truths that are so terrible. It’s the fact that Schopenhauer was able to capture those truths that gives him that quality that readers really enjoy, and, I think, he really enjoyed. That’s partly how to explain it."