On Schopenhauer...

 

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is a surprisingly relevant philosopher for the 21^st century. Almost the first major western thinker not try to justify the ways of God to men - because he had no personal god - he was the very first to appreciate Hinduism and Buddhism and so reject the dualism of mind and body axiomatic in western philosophy since Plato. This led him, among other things, to recognise with a startlingly modern honesty the centrality of sex in human life. ‘Sexual desire… is not only the strongest of desires but is even specifically of a more powerful kind than all the others’, he declared. Yet the blighting shadow cast by the man himself – who was not just philosophy’s greatest misanthropist with no real friends or family, but a misogynist without rival in the hardly feminist annals of western thought and an unashamedly selfish reactionary, stingier and grumpier than any Scrooge – has always tended to obscure the brilliance of his philosophy. For Schopenhauer was by his own admission prone to ‘mistrust, irritability, violence and pride’.  Unsurprisingly given such a confession, he never married and lived completely alone almost all adult his life. Nearly paranoid about being robbed, he distrusted everybody, starting with his own bank. He used to insist that a bank clerk should bring the interest on his (large) wealth to his lodgings every week to be counted. He hid piles of gold coins under his ink cellar and dividend vouchers in the pages of his diaries or books, swore dreadfully at his housekeeper if he thought she had moved or even dusted anything of value, and ‘walked trembling’ each day to be shaved by his barber, fearful that the latter might suddenly decide to cut his throat. During the abortive Liberal revolution of 1848 in Frankfurt, he welcomed government troops into his apartment so that they could shoot down on demonstrators –  the canaille or rabble who potentially threatened his unearned income. He thought authoritarian government essential and that attempts to improve life politically and socially were futile considering the ineradicable evil of humanity itself. ‘The chief source of the most serious evils affecting man is man himself: homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man)…. The conduct of men towards one another is characterised as a rule by injustice, extreme unfairness, hardness and even cruelty… the necessity for the State and for legislation rests on this fact’.

 

 

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