SCHOPENHAUER AND HIS PLACE IN HISTORY

I interrupt my ongoing sequence of entries, to commemorate the 225^th anniversary of the birth of the great German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (22^nd February 1788 – 21^st September 1860). This is the opening entry of my Schopenhauer series. Three more entries are to follow.

Schopenhauer’s lofty place in history, strangely enough, has been disputed. In his Introduction to the 1928 American edition of Die Welt, the American philosopher-scholar Professor Irwin Edman (1896-1954) calls him, rather patronizingly and unpleasantly, “one of the very great second-raters in the history of European thought.” Bertrand Russell, although considerably less unpleasantly, attributes a certain “shallowness and inconsistency” to his philosophy (name me one great philosopher who can be called consistent through and through!), but redeems himself, however, by consistently putting Schopenhauer’s name among the greatest.

Every Russian, who is spiritually a Russian, ranks Schopenhauer among the very greatest and reveres him as Nietzsche’s direct precursor. Nietzsche himself gives him the highest distinction: “Schopenhauer is the last German to be really reckoned with. He is not a mere local or national phenomenon, but a European event, like Goethe, Hegel, and Heine.” (Götzen-Dämmerung: Skirmishes #21.) Needless to say, Schopenhauer is among the most quoted persons throughout Nietzsche’s works, and he is also the subject of his long essay Schopenhauer as Educator.

Some things said about Schopenhauer by Russell in his History of Western philosophy deserve a mention, and here are a couple of important excerpts.---

“Schopenhauer is in many ways peculiar among philosophers. He is a pessimist, whereas almost all others are in some sense optimists. He is not fully academic, like Kant and Hegel , nor yet completely outside the academic tradition.” (He certainly writes much better than Kant and Hegel, and if good writing is a mark of academic outsiders, more power to these, then!) “He dislikes Christianity, preferring the religions of India, both Hinduism and Buddhism. He is a man of wide culture, quite as much interested in art as in ethics.” (In Russia, such is the mark of the Intelligent. Art is an essential part of the Russian intellectual and spiritual outlook.) “He is unusually free from nationalism, and as much at home with English and French writers as with those of his own country.” (On numerous occasions I have mentioned the peculiar Russian eclecticism, which, however, should not be mistaken for a lack of nationalism, on the contrary, Russia sees all the best in Western Culture as her own, and sees herself as the repository of the best.) “His appeal has always been less to professional philosophers…” (who are they, I wonder, after Nietzsche, who was of course, a great admirer of Schopenhauer!) “…than to artistic and literary people in search of a philosophy, which they could believe. He began the emphasis on Will, which is characteristic of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy; but for him Will, though metaphysically fundamental, is ethically evil,-- an opposition only possible for a pessimist.” (Curiously, Nikolai Gumilev counts “renunciation of the Will for the sake of contemplation” as one of Schopenhauer’s most admirable achievements!) “He acknowledges three sources of his philosophy-- Kant, Plato and the Upanishads, but I do not think that he owes as much to Plato as he thinks he does. His outlook has a certain temperamental affinity with that of the Hellenistic age; it is tired and valetudinarian, valuing peace more than victory, and quietism more than attempts at reform, which he regards as futile.”

“…Historically, two things are important about Schopenhauer: his pessimism, and his doctrine that Will is superior to knowledge.” (Not in the moral, but in the physical aspect only.) “His pessimism made it possible for men to take to philosophy without having to persuade themselves that evil can be explained away, and in this way as an antidote it was useful. More important than pessimism was the doctrine of the primacy of the will. It is obvious that this doctrine has no logical connection with pessimism, and those who held it after Schopenhauer frequently found in it a basis for optimism. In one form or another, the doctrine that Will is paramount has been held by many modern philosophers, notably by Nietzsche, Bergson, James, and Dewey. It has, moreover, acquired a vogue outside the circles of professional philosophers.” (But certainly not to the exclusion of the “professionals”! If non-A has a certain quality, it does not follow that A, out of spite or out of something, does not possess it.) “And in proportion as Will has gone up in the scale, knowledge has gone down. This is, I think, the most notable change which has come over the temper of philosophy in our age. It was prepared by Rousseau and Kant, but it was first proclaimed, in its purity, by Schopenhauer. And for this reason, in spite of inconsistency and a certain shallowness, his philosophy has considerable importance as a stage in historical development.”

It is thus obvious now, even from Russell’s rather reserved assessment, that Schopenhauer was a trailblazer of the first magnitude, and, as such, he belongs to philosophy’s crème de la crème, no matter what anybody might say about his depth or shallowness, consistency or inconsistency, and my personal partiality for him has nothing to do with this objective assessment of his historical legacy.