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Posted: 17 May 2022

Taken: 17 May 2022

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The Story of Philosophy •
Bryan Magee •
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Excerpt page 91 •
The Cult of Nothingness •
Roger-Pol Droit •

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The LEGACY of SCHOPENHAUER

The LEGACY of SCHOPENHAUER
AN UNPARALLELED DEPTH OF INSIGHT INTO THE HUMAN CONDITION

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
An unusual thing about Schopenhauer is the scale and quality of the influence he had on people who were themselves famous, or about to become famous, or about to become famous, in most cases outside philosophy. The composer Richard Wagner said that he wrote what many regard as his greatest opera, Tristan and Isolde, partly in response to his reading of Schopenhauer. The score was published in 1859, and therefore before Schopenhauer’s death in 1860; but it is almost certain that the philosopher never knew of its existence. Sigmund Fredu acknowledged that the analysis of repression that is the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory had been spelled out before him by Schopenhauer. Later, references to Schopenhauer were frequent in the work of Freud’s best-known successor, Jung

Perhaps the most extensive field in which Schopenhauer’s influence made itself felt was that of the novel. The supreme Russian novelist Telstoy and Turgenev; the great French writers Proust and Zola; perhaps the greatest of all German novelists, Thomas Mann; and in English the novelist Hardy and Conard; all acknowledged that their own books had been actively nourished by their reading of Schopenhauer. The philosopher is even mentioned by name in some of their novels, for instance in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), and in Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ (1891). What may be claimed as the best all short story writers -- Maupassant, Chekhnov, Maugham, and Broges -- reveal similar influence. And this extraordinary effect of Schopenhauer’s on creative writers was to continue well into the 20th century. He is mentioned by name in more than one of Chekhov’s plays, and after Chekkov’s his influence is felt in the plays of Bernard Shaw, Pirandello, and Samuel Beckett. It brushed the wings of even the greatest of 20th century poets, Rilke, and T.S. Eliot.

There is no other philosopher, at least since Locke, of whom anything like this can be said. Not even Marx, whose effect on art and artists was very great, can count so many stars of such magnitude among those whose works he influenced. And of course the influence was felt by philosophers was Nietzsche, the outstanding philosopher of the 19th century after Schopenhauer’s death, said that it was the reading of Schopenhauer that had turned him into a philosopher. And in the first part of the 20th century Wittgenstein began his philosophizing from a starting point provided to him by Schopenhauer.

The reasons for his unique range of influence are many and complex, but perhaps chief among them are Schopenhauer’s combination of an unparalleled depth of insight into the human condition with a literary style of exceptional quality ~ Page 145
23 months ago. Edited 23 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
23 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
All doctrines of Hinduism and Buddhism that have been cited here are among those which are central to those religions, and they also have obvious counterparts in Kantian-Schopenhauerian philosophy. The starting point of Kant’s assertion that these antinomies are insoluble by the use of reason alone. Both Kant and Schopenhauer regard the empirical world as something in which formation the experiencing subject is activ ely involved, and therefore as something that does not exist in that form at all independently of being experienced. Being so, it must, of its nature, be less permanent than us, or so both philosophers believed. ` Page 148
23 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Schopenhauer was generally thought to be a Buddhist. Contrary to his coontemporaries, the Frankfurt philosopher spoke in laudatory terms about the teachings of the Buddha. He emphasized the “excellence” of the religion; he wrote that it was “perfect”. The high priest of pessimism opined that the Buddhists’ idea of the world should be placed “above all others,” and considered that, on the honor roll of spiritual beliefs, it could rise to the “top of the list.” In short, he was not sparing in his positive evaluation. Such assertions do not mean that Schopenhauer completely shared Buddhist beliefs, or even less so that he worshiped as Buddhists did. It was not a question of affiliation, but rather of declared agreement. Later in his life, and not without surprise, Schopenhauer thought he recognized some of his favorite themes in the fundamental positions he attributed to Buddhism: renunciation, compassion, negation of the will to live. And the choice of nothingness. ~ Page 91

THE CULT OF NOTHINGNESS
23 months ago. Edited 23 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1831) is popularly known as a “pessimist,” a characterization that refers commonly to those who harbor a downbeat and defeatist attitude of resignation and hope should still remain alive. His work can induce this interpretation, for he indeed states that it would have been better in the first place that this world never existed. Schopenhauer practical message though, is to do one’s best to live at peace, both with oneself and others; to feel compassion for others living things; to appreciate the beauty of art and music; to try to rise more objectively and tranquilly above the petty disputes, desires, and concerns that tend to absorb the lives of so many; to apprehend that we are all essentially of the same substance and endure the same kinds of sufferings; and, ultimately, to achieve transcendent state of consciousness of such profundity that it renders into unimportance of ordinary spatio-temporal world in which we live, laugh, suffer, and die. ~ Introduction ~ “The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer” ~ Robert Hicks

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF SCHOPENHAUER
23 months ago. Edited 23 months ago.

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