Arthur Schopenhauer occupies an uneasy position in German idealism. Born 2 years after the B-edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is published, Schopenhauer is set a generation apart from many of the paradigmatic works of this movement. His master treatise, The World as Will and Representation, appears 12 years after the close of the so-called ‘25 years of philosophy’ (to use Eckart Förster's name for this fecund period) with the publication of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. As a medical student in Gottingen, Schopenhauer attended lectures by G.E. Schulze, author of the anonymously published Aenesidemus. This work convinced Fichte, in his commitment to ‘systematic’ philosophy, of the inability for ‘representation’ to act as a foundational principle for such a system, as Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie had argued: a subject of some kind is presupposed in all possible operations of representation. After Schopenhauer's transfer to continue his studies at the recently founded University of Berlin, and with a head full of Kant and Plato at Schulze's behest, he attended lectures given by Fichte, whose arch-subjectivism he found deeply unsatisfactory. ‘Manure’ is the shorthand evaluation we find the 23-year old Schopenhauer recording, in his notes on Fichte's 1812 lectures (p. 80). Despite a shared view with Fichte and the other prominent German idealists that systematicity could rectify the purported tensions in Kant's Critical project, Schopenhauer criticises the obfuscatory language these proximate philosopher use to present their systems. Hegel, who was on Schopenhauer's hiring committee at the University of Berlin for the position of Privatdozent, is identified as the cardinal culprit for this (p. 113–4, 202). A downstream consequence of this is that in our time, Schopenhauer finds his way onto many more undergraduate syllabi due to his friendlier prose for students who may for good reason be left bewildered by, say, Fichte or Schelling. David Bather Woods has produced an informative, well-written introduction to Schopenhauer's life and philosophy, recruiting equally friendly prose in this service. The book will be a pleasurable read also to those well-acquainted with the theoretical ambitions of Schopenhauer's system, by its putting its ideas into relief with the life from which they stem. Bather Woods will recruit insights from past biographies of Schopenhauer, especially David E. Cartwright's Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010). In keeping with the nature of the present volume, Bather Woods will often present these insights in a refreshingly breezy style, but without giving the impression that these ideas count as frivolous. Chapter 5 of the book provides a good amount of coverage of the central ambitions of The World as Will and Representation, without being exhaustively comprehensive (pp. 102–108). This proportionality is in keeping with the ordering of ‘Life and Thought’ in the book's title. There exists lots of excellent scholarship on the nitty-gritty of Schopenhauer's metaphysical views, including other work by Bather Woods. The refrain from doing likewise here is judicious. As one representative example, Bather Woods discusses the characterisation of Schopenhauer attempted by the historian of philosophy, Kuno Fischer (think a more Hegelian, nineteenth-century German version of Frederick Copleston). Fischer's claim, that more optimistic social and political conditions might have seen Schopenhauer espouse Leibnizian optimism, is rejected with the conclusive observation that Schopenhauer's pessimism was cultivated at an earlier, otherwise positive and liberatory time for Germany (p. 212). Though this is all that needs to be said in the context of this monograph, Bather Woods has much of importance to say on this topic in other, more theoretical environments—see his ‘Schopenhauer's Worst of All Possible Worlds’ as relevant evidence of this.1 The book contains much more by way of focus on the ethical import of Schopenhauer's views. The presentation of this is deft, while keeping the reader mindful of their place within a wider metaphysical programme. Some less well-known of these, such as Schopenhauer's concern for prison reform (p. 50), the proto-psychoanalytic discussion of ‘madness’ (Chapter 4), and the nuances around Schopenhauer's views on suicide (pp. 64–70), are provided emphasis. We find a Schopenhauer sympathetic to ‘Indian ethics’, adding the Upanishads in 1814 to the triune intellectual line-up he drew greatest influence from, alongside Plato and Kant (p. 101) These sympathies do not lead to any lapse on his part into sentimental Orientalism or naivety about broader Hindu customs, labelling the practice of suttee as ‘revolting’ (p. 148). Bather Woods draws our attention to a teenage Schopenhauer's visit in 1804 to the slave labour prison, the Bagne of Toulon, for awakening in him the pessimistic model of the world for which he would later construct a metaphysical system to explain (p. 36). Schopenhauer would later compare this awakening to the awakening of Siddartha Gautama as claimed in the legends of the Buddha, the prince who left his royal palace to witness the suffering of the world. Schopenhauer's acquisition of his fundamental orientation towards life appears to us as less Damascene than Nietzsche's later thought of eternal recurrence, as the product of a confrontation with the stone on Lake Silvaplana. As evidence of an outlook rooted in an increasingly grim appraisal of human experience, Bather Woods invokes an event 1 year before his experience witnessing the prisoners of Toulon, where during a trip to London, Schopenhauer witnessed an execution by hanging from the upstairs windows of The Magpie and Stump, a pub adjacent to Newgate Prison. A particular strength of the book is the discussion of the fraught, and after a certain point irretrievably acrimonious, relationship between Schopenhauer and his mother, Johanna. Bather Woods is mindful to address the often-made and justifiable charge of misogyny against Schopenhauer and the orbit between his attitudes and this relationship, while also highlighting that versions of some of these attitudes were also shared by Arthur's sister, Adele: ‘Let mother rest … What she did to both of us may be forgotten’, Adele advises her older brother, upon Johanna's death (p. 146). Bather Woods conjures up an especially sympathetic portrayal of Adele, and the volume taken in its entirety is suggestive of a far more ambivalent place of women in Schopenhauer's life, though this ambivalence is rarely expressed in the letter of Schopenhauer's writings. Of surprising biographical interest was Schopenhauer's apparent fascination with having his portrait taken. Bather Woods documents various portraits and daguerreotypes of Schopenhauer, those of greater or lesser familiarity. Schopenhauer's interest in sitting for portraits tied in with his wish for his readers to behold the man to whom the ideas stem from. Schopenhauer was candid about his aged looks, suggesting that wisdom will carve at the face in ways it is possible for others to observe (p. 199–200). The familiar likenesses of Schopenhauer are very likely with reference to these daguerreotypes. The slight curve of the lips in these portraits, just shy of constituting a smile, renders more plausible Schopenhauer's almost grandfatherly interactions with the three Schneider children who were neighbours to him in Frankfurt's Schöne Aussicht. The reader receives a glimpse of a theme that philosophers a century later might have called ‘authenticity’, exuding from Schopenhauer's discussions of character and identity. As regards the former, Schopenhauer offers a more compatibilist model for character in Volume I of the World as Will and Representation, which will distinguish between the character we are naturally endowed with, our ‘moral’ character, and a notion of ‘acquired’ character. The relation between these conceptions will be such that one exercises a degree of choice in how one allows for natural character to develop, in line with what we choose to pursue. An experimental approach to this pursuit is required to see how the qualities bound up with our character may best manifest themselves within a life (WWR I:330; Bather Woods, 163). This arguably distinguishes Schopenhauer from more Humean compatibilist accounts, on the grounds that our deepest dispositions can be experimented with, with the space to significantly alter how these dispositions manifest themselves. This experimentation is attempted by means of engraining new habits, through work, and through discipline. These claims are reminiscent of Nietzsche's claims in The Gay Science about giving ‘style’ to one's character, as a great and rare art.2 But then who am I? I am the man who has written the World as Will and Representation and has given a solution to the great problem of existence which perhaps will render obsolete all previous solutions, but which in any case will exercise the minds of thinkers in the centuries to come. (MR 4:488; Bather Woods, 163) While we may not all carry such an accolade from which we might anchor our deepest claims to self-identity, there is a proto-existentialist lesson to take from how Schopenhauer prioritises the events of his life. Schopenhauer had the personal task of not allowing his failings and insecurities to determine his life's character. In answer to this task, he could to this end use his overriding sense of his own (admittedly justified) claim to greatness. Bather Woods' exposition here leaves this idea less developed than desirable. He speaks of these self-conceptions as ‘defective’, which seems intuitive by the bare fact of the author's achievements. But it would have been useful to establish some criteria for how one might recognise these self-conceptions as defective ones. It doesn't obviously seem that a recourse to truth or honesty would be able to provide this, given the apparent truth of each of the events Schopenhauer does not wish to draw self-conceptions from. Perhaps it would rely on some notion of axiological priority to provide this evaluation: if so, the word ‘defective’ seems rather at odds with this line of thinking of it. But this marginal quibble can be set aside in light of the importance of the insights Bather Woods reveals to those interested in situating Schopenhauer as a precursor to the intellectual trends which followed him. There are less than a handful of minor issues with spelling and copyediting in the volume. In a discussion of the significance of why humans weep, and Schopenhauer's claims as to its function as a species of self-directed compassion, there is a very close repetition two pages apart on page 67 and 69, with the same passage cited. Schopenhauer uses the example of a beleaguered son weeping over the loss of his father, despite the removal of the burden from him. There is a quite minor type-o on page 132, which should read ‘In one of the few specific remarks’. On page 176, there is an ‘s’ missing from ‘manifestations’. Let these nit-picky criticisms serve to reflect the otherwise high quality of the volume. Those who have been set the task of teaching Schopenhauer to impressionable undergraduates may harbour some reservations about doing so. More so than most (if not all) other philosophers, there is a sense that Schopenhauer's worldview is not one that could be rolled out unconditionally for intellectual consumption. ‘What might such gloom do?’, so goes the perhaps elitist, but ultimately humanistically motivated, reservation. One means of staving off the gloom is to advocate reading other things in conjunction with Schopenhauer. Perhaps some P.G. Wodehouse, who in one short story has his character Bertie Wooster refer to ‘that lad’ Schopenhauer as a ‘grouch of the most pronounced description’.3 Another means of staving it off will be through wit and humour. Bather Woods can write wittily about his subject matter, as well as movingly where it is required. He has made the task of introducing Schopenhauer to others one that carries less need for reservation than before. The author has nothing to report. The author declares no conflicts of interest. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Richard J. Elliott (Sun,) studied this question.
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