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The Routledge Philosophers
Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was one of the greatest writers and German philosophers of the nineteenth century. His work influenced figures as diverse as Wagner, Freud and Nietzsche. Best known as a pessimist, he was one of the few philosophers read and admired by Wittgenstein.In this comprehensive introduction, Julian Young covers all the main aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Beginning with an overview of Schopenhauer's life and work, he introduces the central aspects of his metaphysics fundamental to understanding his work as a his philosophical idealism and debt to the philosophy of Kant; his attempt to answer the question of what the world is; his account of science; and in particular his idea that 'will' is the essence of all things.Julian Young then introduces and assesses Schopenhauer's aesthetics, which occupy a central place in his philosophy. He carefully examines Schopenhauer's theories of the sublime, artistic genius and music, before assessing his ethics of compassion, his arguments for pessimism and his account of 'salvation'. In the final chapter, he considers Schopenhauer's legacy and his influence on the thought of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, making this an ideal starting point for those coming to Schopenhauer for the first time.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
292 pages, Paperback
First published April 18, 2005
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March 4, 2012
Overall, a very good introduction to Schopenhauer's thought. I felt the author, Julian Young, made a few poor decisions, but they interestingly mirrored the problematic aspects of Schopenhauer's own work.
Here's what I picked up from Young's elucidation of "The World as Will and Representation." Schopenhauer was inspired in part from sheer negativity towards his German philosophical contemporaries. He had utter contempt for Hegel, whose "absolute spirit," Schopenhauer pointed out, could not actually be conceived of in relation to actual lived experience. Not even Hegel could deny this, as the absolute spirit was the totality to come, "predicted" but not actually experienced even by Hegel himself. (Although the underlining suggestion is that Hegel- and the society that produced him- his benefactors- IS the Absolute Spirit.) Schopenhauer insisted that a concept could only be considered valid if it could be traced back to experience, or at least imaginable experience. I have never seen a unicorn but I can imagine one, so "unicorn" is valid as a "concept". But can I objectively claim to be able to imagine exactly what "absolute spirit" is? Not exactly, and so for Schopenhauer it is an invalid concept. This makes Schopenhauer one of the fore-runners of "analytic" philosophy. That Schopenhauer does not, I think, adequately differentiate his ultimate findings from those of the likes of Hegel is a telling commentary on what I see as the "objective" posturings of "analytic" philosophy.
Schopenhauer's philosophical project could be described as an attempt to reconcile Kant's claim that the knowing mind actively constructs the world of consciousness, a world that is not (necessarily) identical with the world-in-itself, with Plato's claim that there is a higher, more "real" reality than that of everyday consciousness that certain brilliantly enlightened philosophers can perceive and effectively live in. Schopenhauer wants to discover, in other words, the nature of Kant's thing-in-itself, precisely that which Kant claims cannot be known by human consciousness.
Schopenhauer is, then, awkwardly positioned between idealism and the most analytically ontological demands. He tries to suture these impulses by inventing "evolutionary idealism," one of his most influential concepts. The primordial human-in-the-jungle does not seek Truth. (S)he needs to perceive just enough to survive, just enough to know which direction to most effectively escape the predator or capture the prey. Such thinking does not lead to "objective truth"- which would lead to empathy with both predator and prey. It leads to survival in the jungle. Life, then, does not naturally lead a human to truth, but to survival, a (perceived) world in which we can endure, if not rejoice.
Schopenhauer lived in a moment in which science was threatening to deface the necessity of both religion and philosophy. Schopenhauer denied that science could disqualify the latter because science could only describe the rules of the world of perception. It was really an "academic" jargon for the "truth" of the jungle, which is a partial, self-obsessed and primitive truth. Science is simply the study of causal laws. But, Schopenhauer claims, such laws are merely descriptive. We can say, "Things don't float off into space because of 'gravity,'" but do we really know what "gravity" means? Can we experience it? Is "gravity" really so different from "absolute spirit"? Are they not, left to themselves, both empty terms?
Science, for Schopenhauer, needs philosophy to "complete" it. If we stop at terms like "gravity" then we have learned nothing. We must get "inside" gravity. But how is this possible? I see a rock, it does not float off into space, and science assures me that this is due to "gravity." How is this to be made meaningful? I cannot, after all, get inside the rock and experience gravity acting upon it.
What I can do, indeed what I cannot help but doing, is be inside my own body. I can experience and describe what makes it "tick." Schopenhauer reports that what makes his body tick is "will" and, following Kant, he asserts that we can either universalize this observation, or make no claims about the world at all. Since, according to Schopenhauer, the latter is against human nature, we must ascribe will to all things, though not will as it is experienced by individual humans. We must ascribe will to the world. Everything exists as it must to compliment everything else, to make it all "fit together" as an eco-system. At this point, Schopenhauer's thought sounds a lot like that of Leibnitz and Spinoza and, indeed, he is rather indebted to both of them.
However, instead of seeing a perfection in this world, Schopenhauer sees a horror film come to life. Life is animals eating other animals. Life is fear, pain, coveting, envy... suffering. The World-Will is demonic.
Schopenhauer again turns to Kant. The nature of humanity is rationalistic. Ration, for Kant, leads wise humans to will that all people be treated as an end, not as a means. But the World-Will demands that humans, to survive, treat others as a means, not an end. So humanity's nature is such that it leads it to self-loathing. And humanity is simply the consciousness of the World-Will itself. It is monstrously cruel, but it hates itself for it. World-Will is monstrously cruel, then, to itself. When we hurt the Other, we hurt ourselves, because we are all simply the illusionistic individual manifestations of the World-Will.
Given the horrific nature of being, philosophy is obliged to complete humanity's understanding of the world by trying to find some kind of consolation, some kind of escape from the "horror-of-the-world." That the last sentence could even articulate something meaningful (assuming it could) Schopenhauer takes as proof that the Kantian thing-in-itself must lie beyond the horrific World-Will. By what means can we experience even the trace of this thing-in-itself?
Schopenhauer thinks the “mediocre” (neither base nor brilliant) human (which is to say illusionistic individual manifestation of the World-Will) can experience a few seconds of release from itself through aesthetic experience, through the recognition of “great art.” In “great works,” Schopenhauer claims, the object of the “individual's” scrutiny is transformed into pure Platonic Ideality. It is not a “waterfall” it is “Waterfalls.” And the “individual” is not “william” but the ideal “Aesthetic Observer.” It recognizes the purity of form, of Ideality, in the aesthetic. The mediocre human is released from (self-loathing) self-interest and becomes absorbed, for a few moments, in pure observational positivity.
What differentiates the mediocrity from a genius such as Schopenhauer, according to Schopenhauer, is that the latter can learn from aesthetic experience that a higher state than that of individual will is possible as a permanent state, that one can achieve an ascetic relationship to life.
What the aesthetic state demonstrates to the genius is that the difference between observed and observer, self and other, is only an illusion. To care for oneself over the other, or the other over one-self, is foolish. (Here the influence of Buddhism on Schopenhauer comes into play.) Wisdom comes with the realization that caring for the world of will is pointless whether this care be directed at Self or Other because the natural state of the World-Will is suffering, and the World-Will, characterized by the distinction of self and other, is an illusion. The thing-in-itself is the unity of all things, (no)thing- Nirvana, the “analytic” that-which-is-is-that-which-is.
I really enjoyed reading Young's book on Schopenhauer. But I have criticisms of both Schopenhauer and Young. My first to the subject of the book.
My first criticism is simple and un-controversial. Schopenhauer claims that, underneath appearance, each individual, which is only an appearance, chooses its own nature. In so far as the World-Will wills its own appearance this would seem to be the case. But Schopehauer claims this is the "true" nature of individuality underneath appearance. This seems to me to negate much of the pre-supppositions of his own thought. It seems to me impossible in the Schopenhauerian universe. If World-Will is such that it has to appear the way it appears, freedom of the individual can appear, contra-Schopenhauer, to be possible, but it cannot be possible in essence. The illusory individual relates, for Schopenhauer, only to others in the way that makes the World-Will maintain the appearance of constancy. This precludes individual freedom. I was releaved to read that Young agreed with me on this point.
Despite agreeing with me, Young continuously characterizes Sartre as a "neo-Schopenhaurian." I strongly disagree with this characterization. For Sartre, there was no "plan" behind the world. We were at the mercy only of the absurd which granted us the freedom to invent and re-invent ourselves. In this way, I hold Sartre to be a neo-Cartesian, not Schopenhaurian figure.
Another criticism of Schopenhauer: Is “nirvana”- that which, as described, I acknowledge can be momentarily glimpsed through aesthetic experience as a dissolution of “self”- as a permanent state, the actual “seeing” of the dissolving of the world of experience, any less cut off from actual, lasting experience, than the “absolute spirit” of Hegel? Is “absolute spirit,” as I read it, not just a less brash description of the unity of all things in a mind to come as that which Schopenhauer describes as a mind-writing-and-thinking-right-now in his description of “ascetic experience”? Is one really more concrete to us “mediocrities” than the other? And thus, are Schopenhauer's claims not actually more elitist than those of Hegel and “continental” philosophy? I think not. I think both inhabit a similarly “dreamy” terrain that one can choose to embrace as an aspect of intellectual freedom (“philosophizing!”) or not. I am therefore skeptical of absolutist distinctions between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy. I think Schopenhauer's criticisms of Hegelianism simplistic and puerile.
I think Young can be similarly criticized. He wrote the book when “post-structuralism”- he refers to it as “post-modernism”- was on its way out, but still in the vogue as a philosophical school, much as Hegelianism was in Schopenhauer's life-time. Young dismisses “post-modernism” as if it was all of one character- as if all that could be called “post-modern” philosophy and art, the thought of Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard, the art of Kiki Smith, Basquiat, and Gilbert & George, could be dismissed, rightly or wrongly, by a single phrase.
There is much of Hegel's work that seems silly today, and much that influenced other work that is indispensable to an understanding of the contemporary intellectual terrain. The same can be said of “post-modernism” now that its moment is over. Some of the worst writing I've encountered in my life came from pseudo-Derrideans who used the hermeneutics of their idol's writing style to camouflage the pathetic vapidity of their own “ideas.” Yet much of Derrida's own work remains, I feel, beautiful and vital.
Intellectual relevancy has also been found in inverse scenarios. I have little use for most of Freud's own work, yet the intellectual edifice known as “Freudianism” has produced what I feel to be some great thought and writing- that of Lacan and Zizek, for instance. Both author and subject of this book can, I think, be criticized for their negation of false “schools” of thought, where there was really no “schools” but only constellations constructed by historians looking at “historical moments”.
But even if we grant Young his simplistic "schools" his historicity of "post-modernism" is philosophically unsound. He traces the "disaster of post-modernism" to Nietzsche's perspectivalism, which he simplistically dismisses by arguing that it claims that because two perspectives of the same event/object cannot be identical they cannot be compatible. In fact, Nietzsche does not argue this. Nietzsche claims merely that two different views of the same "thing" cannot be identical, and thus that each view is, on some minute level, a new invention that re-introduces the thing-in-itself, the existence/relevance of which Nietzsche never denies, back into history/discourse with every re-viewing.
Here's what I picked up from Young's elucidation of "The World as Will and Representation." Schopenhauer was inspired in part from sheer negativity towards his German philosophical contemporaries. He had utter contempt for Hegel, whose "absolute spirit," Schopenhauer pointed out, could not actually be conceived of in relation to actual lived experience. Not even Hegel could deny this, as the absolute spirit was the totality to come, "predicted" but not actually experienced even by Hegel himself. (Although the underlining suggestion is that Hegel- and the society that produced him- his benefactors- IS the Absolute Spirit.) Schopenhauer insisted that a concept could only be considered valid if it could be traced back to experience, or at least imaginable experience. I have never seen a unicorn but I can imagine one, so "unicorn" is valid as a "concept". But can I objectively claim to be able to imagine exactly what "absolute spirit" is? Not exactly, and so for Schopenhauer it is an invalid concept. This makes Schopenhauer one of the fore-runners of "analytic" philosophy. That Schopenhauer does not, I think, adequately differentiate his ultimate findings from those of the likes of Hegel is a telling commentary on what I see as the "objective" posturings of "analytic" philosophy.
Schopenhauer's philosophical project could be described as an attempt to reconcile Kant's claim that the knowing mind actively constructs the world of consciousness, a world that is not (necessarily) identical with the world-in-itself, with Plato's claim that there is a higher, more "real" reality than that of everyday consciousness that certain brilliantly enlightened philosophers can perceive and effectively live in. Schopenhauer wants to discover, in other words, the nature of Kant's thing-in-itself, precisely that which Kant claims cannot be known by human consciousness.
Schopenhauer is, then, awkwardly positioned between idealism and the most analytically ontological demands. He tries to suture these impulses by inventing "evolutionary idealism," one of his most influential concepts. The primordial human-in-the-jungle does not seek Truth. (S)he needs to perceive just enough to survive, just enough to know which direction to most effectively escape the predator or capture the prey. Such thinking does not lead to "objective truth"- which would lead to empathy with both predator and prey. It leads to survival in the jungle. Life, then, does not naturally lead a human to truth, but to survival, a (perceived) world in which we can endure, if not rejoice.
Schopenhauer lived in a moment in which science was threatening to deface the necessity of both religion and philosophy. Schopenhauer denied that science could disqualify the latter because science could only describe the rules of the world of perception. It was really an "academic" jargon for the "truth" of the jungle, which is a partial, self-obsessed and primitive truth. Science is simply the study of causal laws. But, Schopenhauer claims, such laws are merely descriptive. We can say, "Things don't float off into space because of 'gravity,'" but do we really know what "gravity" means? Can we experience it? Is "gravity" really so different from "absolute spirit"? Are they not, left to themselves, both empty terms?
Science, for Schopenhauer, needs philosophy to "complete" it. If we stop at terms like "gravity" then we have learned nothing. We must get "inside" gravity. But how is this possible? I see a rock, it does not float off into space, and science assures me that this is due to "gravity." How is this to be made meaningful? I cannot, after all, get inside the rock and experience gravity acting upon it.
What I can do, indeed what I cannot help but doing, is be inside my own body. I can experience and describe what makes it "tick." Schopenhauer reports that what makes his body tick is "will" and, following Kant, he asserts that we can either universalize this observation, or make no claims about the world at all. Since, according to Schopenhauer, the latter is against human nature, we must ascribe will to all things, though not will as it is experienced by individual humans. We must ascribe will to the world. Everything exists as it must to compliment everything else, to make it all "fit together" as an eco-system. At this point, Schopenhauer's thought sounds a lot like that of Leibnitz and Spinoza and, indeed, he is rather indebted to both of them.
However, instead of seeing a perfection in this world, Schopenhauer sees a horror film come to life. Life is animals eating other animals. Life is fear, pain, coveting, envy... suffering. The World-Will is demonic.
Schopenhauer again turns to Kant. The nature of humanity is rationalistic. Ration, for Kant, leads wise humans to will that all people be treated as an end, not as a means. But the World-Will demands that humans, to survive, treat others as a means, not an end. So humanity's nature is such that it leads it to self-loathing. And humanity is simply the consciousness of the World-Will itself. It is monstrously cruel, but it hates itself for it. World-Will is monstrously cruel, then, to itself. When we hurt the Other, we hurt ourselves, because we are all simply the illusionistic individual manifestations of the World-Will.
Given the horrific nature of being, philosophy is obliged to complete humanity's understanding of the world by trying to find some kind of consolation, some kind of escape from the "horror-of-the-world." That the last sentence could even articulate something meaningful (assuming it could) Schopenhauer takes as proof that the Kantian thing-in-itself must lie beyond the horrific World-Will. By what means can we experience even the trace of this thing-in-itself?
Schopenhauer thinks the “mediocre” (neither base nor brilliant) human (which is to say illusionistic individual manifestation of the World-Will) can experience a few seconds of release from itself through aesthetic experience, through the recognition of “great art.” In “great works,” Schopenhauer claims, the object of the “individual's” scrutiny is transformed into pure Platonic Ideality. It is not a “waterfall” it is “Waterfalls.” And the “individual” is not “william” but the ideal “Aesthetic Observer.” It recognizes the purity of form, of Ideality, in the aesthetic. The mediocre human is released from (self-loathing) self-interest and becomes absorbed, for a few moments, in pure observational positivity.
What differentiates the mediocrity from a genius such as Schopenhauer, according to Schopenhauer, is that the latter can learn from aesthetic experience that a higher state than that of individual will is possible as a permanent state, that one can achieve an ascetic relationship to life.
What the aesthetic state demonstrates to the genius is that the difference between observed and observer, self and other, is only an illusion. To care for oneself over the other, or the other over one-self, is foolish. (Here the influence of Buddhism on Schopenhauer comes into play.) Wisdom comes with the realization that caring for the world of will is pointless whether this care be directed at Self or Other because the natural state of the World-Will is suffering, and the World-Will, characterized by the distinction of self and other, is an illusion. The thing-in-itself is the unity of all things, (no)thing- Nirvana, the “analytic” that-which-is-is-that-which-is.
I really enjoyed reading Young's book on Schopenhauer. But I have criticisms of both Schopenhauer and Young. My first to the subject of the book.
My first criticism is simple and un-controversial. Schopenhauer claims that, underneath appearance, each individual, which is only an appearance, chooses its own nature. In so far as the World-Will wills its own appearance this would seem to be the case. But Schopehauer claims this is the "true" nature of individuality underneath appearance. This seems to me to negate much of the pre-supppositions of his own thought. It seems to me impossible in the Schopenhauerian universe. If World-Will is such that it has to appear the way it appears, freedom of the individual can appear, contra-Schopenhauer, to be possible, but it cannot be possible in essence. The illusory individual relates, for Schopenhauer, only to others in the way that makes the World-Will maintain the appearance of constancy. This precludes individual freedom. I was releaved to read that Young agreed with me on this point.
Despite agreeing with me, Young continuously characterizes Sartre as a "neo-Schopenhaurian." I strongly disagree with this characterization. For Sartre, there was no "plan" behind the world. We were at the mercy only of the absurd which granted us the freedom to invent and re-invent ourselves. In this way, I hold Sartre to be a neo-Cartesian, not Schopenhaurian figure.
Another criticism of Schopenhauer: Is “nirvana”- that which, as described, I acknowledge can be momentarily glimpsed through aesthetic experience as a dissolution of “self”- as a permanent state, the actual “seeing” of the dissolving of the world of experience, any less cut off from actual, lasting experience, than the “absolute spirit” of Hegel? Is “absolute spirit,” as I read it, not just a less brash description of the unity of all things in a mind to come as that which Schopenhauer describes as a mind-writing-and-thinking-right-now in his description of “ascetic experience”? Is one really more concrete to us “mediocrities” than the other? And thus, are Schopenhauer's claims not actually more elitist than those of Hegel and “continental” philosophy? I think not. I think both inhabit a similarly “dreamy” terrain that one can choose to embrace as an aspect of intellectual freedom (“philosophizing!”) or not. I am therefore skeptical of absolutist distinctions between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy. I think Schopenhauer's criticisms of Hegelianism simplistic and puerile.
I think Young can be similarly criticized. He wrote the book when “post-structuralism”- he refers to it as “post-modernism”- was on its way out, but still in the vogue as a philosophical school, much as Hegelianism was in Schopenhauer's life-time. Young dismisses “post-modernism” as if it was all of one character- as if all that could be called “post-modern” philosophy and art, the thought of Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard, the art of Kiki Smith, Basquiat, and Gilbert & George, could be dismissed, rightly or wrongly, by a single phrase.
There is much of Hegel's work that seems silly today, and much that influenced other work that is indispensable to an understanding of the contemporary intellectual terrain. The same can be said of “post-modernism” now that its moment is over. Some of the worst writing I've encountered in my life came from pseudo-Derrideans who used the hermeneutics of their idol's writing style to camouflage the pathetic vapidity of their own “ideas.” Yet much of Derrida's own work remains, I feel, beautiful and vital.
Intellectual relevancy has also been found in inverse scenarios. I have little use for most of Freud's own work, yet the intellectual edifice known as “Freudianism” has produced what I feel to be some great thought and writing- that of Lacan and Zizek, for instance. Both author and subject of this book can, I think, be criticized for their negation of false “schools” of thought, where there was really no “schools” but only constellations constructed by historians looking at “historical moments”.
But even if we grant Young his simplistic "schools" his historicity of "post-modernism" is philosophically unsound. He traces the "disaster of post-modernism" to Nietzsche's perspectivalism, which he simplistically dismisses by arguing that it claims that because two perspectives of the same event/object cannot be identical they cannot be compatible. In fact, Nietzsche does not argue this. Nietzsche claims merely that two different views of the same "thing" cannot be identical, and thus that each view is, on some minute level, a new invention that re-introduces the thing-in-itself, the existence/relevance of which Nietzsche never denies, back into history/discourse with every re-viewing.
June 2, 2022
A great introduction to Schopenhauer's philosophy. It reads like the transcript of a university course on Schopenhauer and does a great job of making the philosophy accessible to someone who hasn't read Kant or Hegel such as myself. Of course, Schopenhauer's own belief that philosophy should be plain-spoken and intuitive does a lot to help.
July 22, 2020
Exceptionally clear, and presents many original angles. Does not dwell much on AS reading of the Upanishads though
August 24, 2025
Una molt bona introducció de Schopenhauer, que fila molt bé un sistema força enrevessat que demana a crits ser esquematitzat, en què s’uneix la metafísica amb l’ètica i l’estètica. En fi, la reducció de Schopenhauer a un rara avis o a un mer pessimista resulta ser, com tota reducció, errada: el pessimisme de Schopenhauer s’ha d’afirmar com a necessàriametn certer des del punt de vista del judici moral humà, i precisament per això fals, perquè el funcionament del Món, la Voluntat-món escapa del judici humà i la seva estreta moralitat. Al cap i a la fi, el que demostra Schopenhauer és una gran sensibilitat que queda demostrada en una estètica absolutament meravellosa, de la qual Deleuze se servirà abastament. En fi, que ha resultat d’aquells llibres-introducció que són prou bons com per a fer desitjar a la lectora disposar de temps suficient com per a llegir al propi Schopenhauer. Algun dia, tal vegada.
September 17, 2017
Leaving aside the positive aspects, I want to note the point that disappointed me, that I disliked: The book looks like a generally hostile criticism of Schopenhauer's thoughts, as if written so as to make his systematical thought collapse. Most effort and place is devoted to refutation of his arguments. Nearly all major points are attacked. In case the author agrees with Schopenhauer, he usually needs to qualify his agreements.
October 13, 2024
Julian Young's biography of Nietzsche is one of the best. Here too he delineates Schopenhauer's philosophy in a very lucid manner. It is thrilling to see how often Schopenhauer very nearly touches 'The Truth'. Highly recommended.
November 8, 2014
Decent, but the biography seems rushed. Also, some less widely-known ideas of Schopenhauer are neglected for the more recognizable ones.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews