Compassionate Curmudgeon: Why we must root ourselves in the real world

Summary

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods; University of Chicago Press, 296 pp., $30 A little more than 200 years ago, Arthur Schopenhauer arrived at the University of Berlin to offer a course on philosophy—his own philosophy, to be precise, based on a book he had just published, The World as Will and Representation. The class was a miserable flop, drawing fewer than half a dozen students. In part, this was because the book—to cite what one of Schopenhauer’s heroes, David Hume, said about his own first book—fell stillborn from the press. But it was also because the 30-something philosopher decided to offer his course at the same place, day, and time as G. W. F. Hegel, the superstar of German philosophy, had scheduled his class. What was Schopenhauer thinking? One of the many merits of David Bather Woods’s new biography is his superb effort to convey exactly what Schopenhauer was thinking in his challenge to Hegel. In a (German) word, it was Selbstdenken: thinking for oneself, and not simply agreeing with what a professor tells you to think. In his portrayal of this famously prickly, private, and pessimistic man, Woods presents a thinker committed to the daunting vocation of pondering the human situation, and he does so with compassion and an appreciation for the comic. Woods is not alone in this regard. Schopenhauer’s life and thought have made him an inviting target for comedians. In an iconic Monty Python sketch, Schopenhauer plays on the German philosophers’ football club in its epic battle against the Greeks. (Spoiler: Socrates heads the winning goal past Leibniz, who is pacing absent-mindedly in front of the net.) The dour German also makes a cameo in Woody Allen’s short story “My Philosophy,” in which a doctor diagnoses Schopenhauer’s will to live as nothing more than a case of hay fever. Not surprisingly, humor seems the best response to a thinker who concludes that life—an unrelenting experience of dis...