Customer Reviews

Schopenhauer (Past Masters Series)

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Concise yet engaging, this book is an excellent introduction to Schopenhauer's life and thought. The author's remarks on the difficulties and limitations of Schopenhauer's metaphysics are highly illuminating. His notes highlighting the important and influential aspects of this philosophy provide a perfect contrast to his critical remarks, and give the reader a sober, balanced view of the subject. All in all, this is a great book to read before and after delving into Schopenhauer's own works.

Janaway is a top-notch Schopenhauer scholar, so there is no question that he knows his subject forwards and backwards. The first time I tried to read this Short Introduction, I didn't get very far before setting it aside with the feeling that I just wasn't getting it. A year later, after reading a lot of Schopenhauer and a several longer treatments of his ideas, I found that Janaway's book was clear as a bell, and I read right through it. I'm not sure what to make of that, but I think that I just didn't approach this kind of material with the right attitude and that the fault was therefore entirely mine. See below.

In any case, this is a first-rate introduction to Schopenhauer, and a very well-written one, too. Schopenhauer himself was a very clear and careful writer (no Hegel, by far), and Janaway continues in that tradition. Schopenhauer's metaphysics is, of course, speculative and that can be a problem if, like me, you come to it from an analytic tradition where everything has to be provable to be considered meaningful or taken seriously. In reading Schopenhauer, or a book like this describing his philosophy, you need to suspend those criteria temporarily and to look at his system as one extremely smart man's best guess about the nature of the world. Call it a working hypothesis that is necessarily underdetermined by the possible empirical evidence. The judgment required therefore must be an overall one as to how well you think that picture fits with the world as you experience it, granting that some number of alternative systems are possible that would fit equally well. To some degree, it's an aesthetic judgment, or perhaps a decision about what kind of world view you can be comfortable with; the key question is whether you are willing to entertain the possibility that the empirical world might not be all there is.

If you are shopping around for a congenial view at that level, then Schopenhauer's ideas are well worth considering, and Janaway's introduction would be a good place to start. Or, if you just have a detached curiousity about what one of the giants of 19th-century philosophy had to say, then it's a good book for that purpose, also. One thing about Schopenhauer is that once you understand his view of things, you will have a hard time seeing the world in quite the same way as you previously did.

Janaway's little volume was the perfect introduction to Schopenhauer for me. I completed a degree in philosophy during the early 1970s. At that time, the academic world of philosophy was still in thrall to analytical philosophy. Continental philosophy was largely represented by thinkers like Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger. Habermas, Gadamer and Foucault were just beginning to be translated. My philosophy classes taught a lineage that went directly from Kant to Hegel to Marx to Husserl. Thinkers like Fichte, Schelling and Schopenhauer were ignored. Others like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were left for personal reading.

So coming into my reading of Janaway's book I had practically no background in Schopenhauer. After reading this book, I feel like I have a sense of the historical context, a grip on the main points of Schopenhauer's philosophy, and both where to go in my reading of Schopenhauer and in the secondary literature. Not bad at all for 127 pages.

The main thing I want to emphasize is that Janaway makes me want to read Schopenhauer himself. I have long had the volumes of The World as Will and Representation hanging around my bookshelf. I have now bought a copy of The Fourfold Root.. as the beginning to my further study.

All I am saying is that you couldn't ask for much more than what this book gives. All in an inexpensive paperback that you can carry around in your back pocket and pull out to read during the odd moments in your day.

The VSI series continues to impress me with their outstanding publications.

Arthur Schopenhauer remains somewhat notorious for his fervent pessimism concerning human existence. Not only does he claim that the universe and our embedded lives contain no purpose or special status, he also argues that determinism and unavoidable suffering inherently imbue our lives. Beneath this lies 'the will,' a kind of force or compulsion that drives us onwards towards life (not living, but life). This 'will to life' provides the foundation for our motivations, desires, and passions. It has no meaning or purpose apart from 'life.' Thus many cherished human institutions, including love, crumble into mere manifestations of this mysterious striving. Love becomes natures' way to get us to reproduce, not to passionately embody another person's being. It should come as no surprise that Schopenhauer remained unmarried throughout his long privileged, but seemingly bitter, life. Regardless, his work, written througout the nineteenth century but often sounding extremely modern, has influenced other well-known thinkers, artists and movements including Nietzsche, Wagner, Wittgenstein, and psychoanalysis. Some threads of our modern ethos seem to trace back to his brooding texts.

Given that the basis for much of Schopenhauer's thought rests on the rather unintuitive Kantian notion of appearances vs. things in themselves, those unacquainted with such turgid concepts should not delve will-nilly into his magnum opus "The World As Will and Representation" without a life vest. This little book will provide the uninitiated with such security. Written in clear and readable prose, concepts such as "things in themselves" and "Platonic Ideas" become almost instantly accessible. An entire chapter is devoted to the infamous "things in themselves" as well as a survey of Schopenhauer's dissertation (inhale) "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason" (exhale). The latter elucidates four ways that effects get predicated with causes. On knowledge, Schopenhauer straddles the Idealists and the empiricists. He says, like an Idealist, that reality comes from the mind (the mind-dependent and categorized appearances), but likewise says that all knowledge of this reality comes from the senses, like an empiricist. Ultimate reality, or reality as it "really is" remains mostly inaccessible to us, apart from aesthetic experiences, particularly via music (a later chapter covers his intriguing but somewhat bizarre aesthetic thoughts; 19th century artists ate it up). Thus, all we experience are representations. And our actions largely derive from the will. This book excuses this metaphysical doctrine as "obviously flawed" (as have others), but concedes that this rubbery foundation nonetheless provided the structure for the aspects of Schopenhauer's thought that still influence us today. He also had iconoclastic views on ethics and reason. Reason doesn't make a person ethical, he claims, but it can make an evil person more efficiently evil. Ultimately, reason represents a means, not an end. Ethical theories cannot produce "good people" any more than aesthetic theories can produce staggeringly beautiful eye candy. He also held surprisingly modern views towards animals and homosexuality (which he considered 'natural') given his time, but held the 19th century line on the inferiority of women. Two final chapters focus on suffering, death, denial of the will, pessimism, and Schopenhauer's influence. Much of this sounds very Eastern, particularly Vedantic or Buddhist, but the book merely grazes the surface of Schopenhauer's Eastern influences.

Given Schopenhauer's contributions to our conceptions of existence, it's surprising the existentialists didn't appropriate him as fervently as they did Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. The author points out that the early 20th century was really "Schopenhauer's Time" given the pessimism and angst that followed the First World War. Many of his ideas continue to ring true in an increasingly pessimistic world. And it remains here, not in metaphysics, that Schopenhauer continues to resonate. This little book provides the perfect introduction or thumbnail sketch of the thought of the 19th century man who systematized pessimism.

This book focuses on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860).

The author states in his preface that "This book aims to give a sympathetic but critical account of Schopenhauer's philosophy." Indeed, the book at times is certainly critical; the very last paragraph of the book begins "Though Schopenhauer's metaphysics is not credible as a system..." Janaway's basic message throughout seems to be that Schopenhauer is very important for the influence he had on others (for example, Wagner and Nietsche), for the unique and often troubling questions he raised, and for the new ideas he brought into philosophy - but he is not a Schopenhauer apologist.

The focus of the book is on Schopenhauer's ideas about philosophical topics like will, the body, the self, metaphysics, character, sexuality, the unconscious, art and aesthetic experience, ethics, and other issues. Special focus is given to Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, which is presented as his greatest work, and much is made of the philosopher's idea of the will to life and physical reality as a manifestation of this will.

All in all I would say that Janaway does a decent job in introducing Schopenhauer's ideas, although his summary at times is a bit less clear than some of the other books in the Very Short Introduction series.

Schopenhauer, a German philosopher of the early 19th century, is a greatly neglected thinker today, despite being hugely influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most notably on the thought of Nietzsche, Wagner and Freud. The latter in particular, although he denied it, was greatly influenced by him. Janaway convincingly extends the list to include Mahler, Jung, Mann and others. In fact, if you have not yet delved deeply into the work of Freud or Nietzsche, I would strongly recommend that you tackle Schopenhauer before doing so, and Janaway's is the perfect introduction. It is a well-informed, readable and balanced account, neither an apology nor a savaging. Schopenhauer's metaphysics have not stood the test of time, but his worldview, essentially pessimistic yet with promise of redemption, is still very relevant, and in many ways strikingly modern. If you are at all interested in the development of modern thought, especially that of the various German and Austrian schools, then you need to acquaint yourself with Schopenhauer, and I doubt you will find a better introduction than this book.

To pack an account of Schopenhauer's philosophy - including discussions of where he is inconsistent or where his metaphysics is questionable - into a book of 127 pages is an achievement. Such a concentrated text requires concentrated reading. I have found Bryan Magee's 'The Philosophy of Schopenhauer' of 456 pages not only more enjoyable but also more rewarding. But if it has to be done in 127 pages, it is well done here.