Abstract
This chapter examines the writing of Arthur Schopenhauer as an exploration of the discontents of German idealism. Anticipating a poststructuralist concern with thought as the undoing of system, meaning, and the subject, Schopenhauer’s philosophy, rooted in an ethics of pessimism, forecasts how to survive a life facing possible extinction.
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Notes
- 1.
Cited in Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World, ed. Eugene Thacker (London: Repeater Books, 2020), 54.
- 2.
Agatha Novak-Lechevalier, “Preface,” in Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), ix.
- 3.
Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer, 7.
- 4.
Ibid., 13.
- 5.
I am indebted to Tyler Tritten’s early version of his chapter for this volume at a workshop on “German Idealism and Post-Structuralism” organized by Tilottama Rajan and Gabriel Trop, on March 27and 28 and April 10 and 11, 2021.
- 6.
Werner Hamacher, Pleroma—Reading in Hegel, translated by Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 65. I am deeply indebted to Kristina Mendicino for the nod to Hamacher and to her paper “Reading Hegel” for this volume, also presented at the “German Idealism and Post-Structuralism” workshop. I also recognize the irony of using the idea of reading Hegel to read Schopenhauer, who was no fan of Hegel, as we’ll see.
- 7.
Kristina Mendicino, e-mail exchange with author, March 28, 2021.
- 8.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1958), 1:xxiv. Hereafter all references to this work will be cited as WWR. As Robert Bretall reminds us in his introduction to Kierkegaard’s most sustained attack against Hegelianism, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1846), Kierkegaard famously noted that if Hegel had called his system of philosophy “only a ‘thought-experiment,’ he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived; as it is he is ‘merely comic’” (in Søren Kierkegaard, A Kierkegaard Anthology [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946], 191).
- 9.
The statement is rather ironic since, as Eugene Thacker notes, “Schopenhauer adamantly refuses any therapeutic functions to his [own] writing.” (“Introduction: A Philosophy in Ruins, An Unquiet Void,” in Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World, ed. Eugene Thacker [London: Repeater, 2020], 20).
- 10.
Stanley Corngold, “Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Cannibalism,” Qui Parle, 15, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2004): 1. Corngold continues: “[i]f it is Hegel who is taught in universities today, and not Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer nonetheless survives … in the bodies, so to speak, of literary works that are taught. This canon is his faithful corps.”
- 11.
Schopenhauer calls his loyalty to Kant’s philosophy an “excessive preoccupation” (WWR 1:xiv) and reveres Kant as “the most important phenomenon which has appeared in philosophy for two thousand years” (WWR 1:xiv, xv).
- 12.
Thacker calls Schopenhauer a “depressive Kantian” (“Philosophy in Ruins,” 21).
- 13.
Ibid., 21, 24.
- 14.
Ibid., 24, 24, 24, 12. This thought tracks what Schopenhauer, in the second volume of Parerga and Paralipomena, calls “restlessness [Unruhe] [as] the original form of existence” (cited in ibid., 93). Thacker’s collection of Schopenhauer’s late writings in On the Suffering of the World uses the E. F. J. Payne translation in Parerga and Paralipomena, vols. 1 and 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). The Cambridge edition reads, “unrest is the prototype of existence” (Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, vol. 2, trans. and ed. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015], 256). I prefer “prototype,” which suggests a germ whose incompleteness is its generative form, to “original,” which suggests grounding rather than groundlessness. In his reading of Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of the “restlessness of immanence” in which the “self is what does not find itself” (Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020], 5, 56).
- 15.
Thacker, “Philosophy in Ruins,” 24.
- 16.
Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 10–11.
- 17.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1993), 87, 27.
- 18.
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. E. F. J. Payne (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1977), 42, 115.
- 19.
By Vorstellung, Schopenhauer means less the Idea in Plato or Kant than the result of a neuronal impulse, which is why he prioritizes perceptions over concepts. Schopenhauer writes: “every perturbation of the will, and with it of the organism, must disturb or paralyze the function of the brain, a function existing by itself, and knowing no other needs than simply those of rest and nourishment” (WWR 2:216).
- 20.
As Terry Eagleton writes, while Schopenhauer “privileges the inward in Romantic style, he nevertheless refuses to valorize it” (“Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic,” Signature, 1 [Summer 1989]: 17).
- 21.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 66.
- 22.
Eagleton writes that an “idealist philosophy which once imagined that it could achieve salvation through the subject is now forced to contemplate the frightful prospect that no salvation is possible without the wholesale abnegation of the subject itself, the most privileged category of its entire system” (“Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic,” 17).
- 23.
As Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clark argue, “Schopenhauer is himself divided on the nature and goal of aesthetic representation, at once affirming art as a metaphysically independent category, a triumph over life, and demystifying art as a sublimatory fiction projected upon the abyss” (“Speculations: Idealism and its Rem(a)inders,” in Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory, ed. Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clark [Albany: SUNY Press, 1995], 31).
- 24.
Eagleton, “Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic,” 13.
- 25.
See Schopenhauer, “On Suicide,” in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, vol. 2., trans. and ed. Adrian del Caro and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 276–80. As Schopenhauer writes with deadpan irony, “Suicide can also be regarded as an experiment, a question one poses to nature and to which one tries to force an answer, namely what change in the existence and cognition of human beings is experience through death. But it is a clumsy one, since it suspends the identity of the consciousness that would have to hear the answer” (ibid., 280).
- 26.
Such thoughts are “often unbearable to us” because they “lie[ ] for the most part not in the real present” (WWR 1:299). For Schopenhauer, “Real soundness of mind consists in the perfect recollection [of the past]” (WWR 2:399).
- 27.
Elsewhere I have explored how WWR must speak what it cannot know and, in telling, expose more than it knows without then having, or by no more desiring, access to this knowledge. See Joel Faflak, “Schopenhauer’s Telling Body of Philosophy,” in Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 161–80.
- 28.
Thacker, “Philosophy in Ruins,” 12.
- 29.
Robert Smith, Derrida and Autobiography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19. Smith argues that philosophy is essentially autobiographical, telling its own identity in order to eliminate the chance or contingency that threatens its rational borders.
- 30.
Maurice Blanchot writes that anticipating the cure of analysis “amounts to saying that one must wait for the end of the story and the supreme contentment that is the equivalent of death.” This means that analysis is “always both ‘finite and infinite.’ When it begins, it begins without end. The person who submits to analysis enters into a movement whose terms are unforeseeable and into a reasoning whose conclusion brings with it … the impossibility of concluding” (The Infinite Conversation Blanchot, trans. Susan Hanson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 236).
- 31.
Sonu Shamdasani writes, “Philosophical systems, which purported to portray the constitution of the world, were in fact involuntary confessions of the psychological peculiarities of their authors” (Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 60).
- 32.
Stanley Corngold, “On Death and the Contingency of Criticism: Schopenhauer and de Man,” in Rajan and Clark, Intersections, 364.
- 33.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1.
- 34.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, vol. 18, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 23 vols., trans James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974; London: Vintage, 2001), 49–50. See Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1963); R. K. Gupta, “Freud and Schopenhauer,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 36.4 (October/December 1975): 721–28; Sebastian Gardner, “Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 375–421; Christopher Young and Andrew Brook, “Schopenhauer and Freud,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75 (1994): 101–18.
- 35.
Wille entrenches itself in the very materiality of things, in the first instance the body as the crucible in which the will comes to make itself visible to itself, to know itself as representation. Schopenhauer writes: “the whole body must be nothing but my will become visible” (WWR 1:107).
- 36.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 111.
- 37.
In this way, incompossibility derives partly from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of schizoanalysis, which critiques Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis as evincing the logic of late capitalism, of the unconscious or desire as tools of a capitalist psyche. In Anti-Oedipus and later A Thousand Plateaus, they explore the unconscious, not as the inscrutable territory to be colonized and mapped through the authoritative and restrictive concepts of psychoanalysis, primarily the Oedipus Complex, but as the infinitely complex, differential, and heterogeneous space of a psychic production deterritorializing capitalist claims. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
- 38.
Claire Colebrook, “Disjunctive Synthesis,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, rev. ed., ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 80. See also Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994).
- 39.
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 46.
- 40.
Cited in Russell Jacoby, “When Freud Came to America,” The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 21 (September 2009), http://www.chronicle.com/article/Freuds-Visit-to-Clark-U/48424.
- 41.
Bersani, 25.
- 42.
Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 3.
- 43.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 75.
- 44.
Ibid., 75.
- 45.
Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 127.
- 46.
Ibid., 130.
- 47.
The term “distributed cognition” is usually attributed to Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (1995). “Distributed cognition” is a general signifier for recent accounts of cognition as at once embodied in our individual sensoria and extended into and an extension of our lived environments. The work of thought suspended between will and representation I take to be both signifier and matrix of this expansive, viral terrain. See also David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 48.
Thacker, “Philosophy in Ruins,” 38. Thacker’s phrase “ugly feelings” may be a nod to Sianne Nagai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
- 49.
A key contemporary source for this exploration is the work of Silvan Tomkins. See Eve Kosofsky and Adam Frank’s editing of Tomkins’ work in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Such work does take a more poststructuralist approach to the study of affect as a kind of implicit critical riposte to studies of the economics of happiness. See my “Can’t Buy Me Love: Psychiatric Capitalism and the Economics of Happiness,” in The Economy as Cultural System: Theory, Capitalism, Crisis, ed. Todd Dufresne and Clara Sacchetti (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 35–50.
- 50.
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 30, 40.
- 51.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
- 52.
For Vivavsan Soni, the eighteenth century encrypts the impossibility of happiness within something like the trial narrative as a guidebook for overcoming failure. See Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). Speaking of terror, Slavoj Žižek argues that happiness has become our “supreme duty” (In Defence of Lost Causes [New York: Verso, 2008], 40), which we accept, Brian Massumi suggests, as terror’s future affect—holding out the carrot of bliss and using the twin sticks of homeland security and capitalism to police and discipline our access to nirvana. See Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 52–70.
- 53.
Gary Greenberg, “The War on Unhappiness: Goodbye Freud, Hello Positive Thinking,” Harper’s Magazine, vol. 321, 1924 (2010): 27–35.
- 54.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
- 55.
Chris Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” Literature Compass, vol. 12, no. 9 (2015): 451.
- 56.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 5.
- 57.
Ibid., 7.
- 58.
Cited in Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” 450.
- 59.
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 112.
- 60.
Ibid., 10.
- 61.
Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” 450.
- 62.
Thacker, “Philosophy in Ruins,” 49.
- 63.
Ibid., 51.
- 64.
Ibid.
- 65.
Ibid.
- 66.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005).
- 67.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Anne Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 7.
- 68.
Ibid., 40.
- 69.
Jacques Derrida, “My Changes/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonics,” trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 28.
- 70.
Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 86, 118.
- 71.
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, rev. ed. (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013), 285.
- 72.
David. L. Clark, “‘The Necessary Heritage of Darkness’: Tropics of Negativity in Schelling, Derrida, and de Man,” in Rajan and Clark, Intersections, 110.
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Faflak, J. (2023). Reading Schopenhauer. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_9
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