Big heads on small people - Schopenhauer on books and reading

This is the post where I let Arthur Schopenhauer insult me.  This is all from the Penguin Essays and Aphorisms.   For example:

The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for yourself and that produced by reading is incredibly great, so that the original difference which made one head decide for thinking and another for reading is continually increased…  The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.  (89-90)

Although the idea sounds familiar – did not Georg Christoph Lichtenberg condense it to “Much reading is harmful to thinking.”  He did.  Schopenhauer is writing in the classic aphoristic tradition, which in its German form, for whatever reason, is especially concerned with books.

Even among the small number of writers who actually think seriously before they start writing, there are extremely few who think about the subject itself: the rest merely think about books, about what others have said about the subject.  They require, that is to say, the close and powerful stimulation of ideas produced by other people in order to think at all.  (199)

This is getting personal.  Nonsense, I shout in desperate self-defense.  “Only he who takes what he writes directly out of his own head is worth reading” (200), Schopenhauer responds.

He attacks my pseudonym, too.   “[Anonymity] often merely serves to cloak the obscurity, incompetence and insignificance of the reviewer” (202) – my only objection here is that in my case the word “cloak” should be replaced by “declare.”

Almost every book blogger will wince at this aphorism:

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.  (210)

And I do not see how we can argue against at least the conclusion of this one:

The art of not reading is a very important one.  It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time…  A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.  (210)

The entire little section on “Books and Writing” is easy to recommend, although it omits my favorite grotesque line:

All genuine thought and art is to a certain extent an attempt to put big heads on small people: so it is no wonder the attempt does not always come off. (126)

By the way, which four novels are the “crown of the genre,” the four greatest novels according to Arthur Schopenhauer?  Guess, guess!  Yes, Don Quixote, that’s one.  Time’s up:  Wilhelm Meister, Tristram Shandy, and La Nouvelle Héloïse (165).  Schopenhauer also says nice things about Jean Paul and Walter Scott.  Good choices.  He believes that the best novels emphasize “inner over outer life…  while in bad novels the outer action is there for its own sake.”  Simple but plausible.

Maupassant's Schopenhauer - this one is more of a head scratcher

This one’ll be a little less – I don’t know – significant than the one about Nabokov.

I was puzzled by the inclusion of Guy de Maupassant in a couple of lists of writers influenced by Schopenhauer.  I can hardly think of a less philosophical writer than Maupassant.  From me, this is no criticism, but closer to a compliment.

Maupassant’s contemporaries were smitten with Schopenhauer.  A bunch of decadents and art-for-art’s-sakers, the combination of pessimism and aestheticism must have been irresistible, and I can see how someone like Stephane Mallarmé could have been deeply affected by Schopenhauer.  But I suspect much of the attraction was a confirmation of existing beliefs, a kind of received Schopenhauer.  “Ah! Schopenhauer alone was right,” writes J.-K. Huysman in A Rebours.  What I am asking is, would Maupassant’s fiction have been any different if he had never heard of Schopenhauer?  That is what I mean by “influence.”

At least one story would have been different, I acknowledge that.  “Beside Schopenhauer’s Corpse” is one of Maupassant’s “newspaper” stories, presumably one of the 250 he wrote between 1882 and 1887.  It is no more than 1,500 words, and half of those belong to the narrative frame.  Take a look for yourself, in what must be a translation from one of the century-old “complete” Maupassant sets, before I mention the inevitable twist.

Maupassant, the narrator, meets a dying disciple of Schopenhauer, a German, at a resort.  He is spending his last days reading Schopenhauer, “always the same book… all his wasting body seemed to read, all his soul plunged, lost, disappeared, in this book, up to the hour when the cool air made him cough a little.”  He is temporarily escaping his earthly torments with the assistance of  a work of genius, just as Schopenhauer suggests.

The narrator drops in his own comments on Schopenhauer here and there, calling him “[a] disabused pleasure-seeker ,” which coming from Maupassant does not sound like praise, and “the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth.”  I have seen these phrases cited, presumably by people who do not understand fiction, as evidence of Maupassant’s devotion to Schopenhauer.

The disciple tells a brief anecdote about Schopenhauer during his life (he argued “as a dog tears with one bite of his teeth the tissues with which he plays” and had “a frightful smile”), and then a longer story about his death.

Although it begins on a solemn note, “[a] feeling of mystery,” with the disciples, sitting by the corpse, feeling that they are “enveloped” by Schopenhauer’s thoughts, the emphasis shifts to the dead man’s strange laughing face, which makes the watchers “feel ill at ease, oppressed, on the point of fainting.”  It seems the story will take an uncanny turn.  “Suddenly a shiver passed through our bones…”

Well.  I will skip the mechanics, the way Maupassant builds up the scare.  What happened is the decomposing Schopenhauer’s false teeth popped out of his head.  That’s the story Schopenhauer’s devoted follower tells about his master.  “I was really frightened that day, monsieur.”

It just seems to me that, looked at from a certain angle (the direct angle), this story looks like a frivolous, disrespectful attack on Schopenhauer, or on his disciples, or, really, on the fashion for Schopenhauer.  The materialist Maupassant dismisses the elaborate idealism of Schopenhauer’s system as the fantasy of fools.  Death is not a return to another state, but simply an end of life, a stinking corpse and mortifying tendons.

For some reason none of the Maupassant collections I read a couple of years ago included this one.  It is admittedly kind of awful.

Since I skipped Monday, I believe I will write a Saturday post.  Perhaps I will spend some time enjoying the writing of Schopenhauer himself.

Nabokov's Schopenhauer - the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life

I’m still hung up on the influence of Schopenhauer.  A couple of case studies, one today, one tomorrow, cases that surprised me.

I have read biographies about Vladimir Nabokov, and criticism of his work, and his own criticism, yet I had missed his interest in Arthur Schopenhauer.  One might think that the affinity comes from the high value they both place on art, but no, only in part.  This is Schopenhauer:

To our amazement we suddenly exist, after having for countless millennia not existed; in a short while we will again not exist, also for countless millennia.  That cannot be right, says the heart: and even upon the crudest intelligence there must, when it considers such an idea, dawn a presentiment of the ideality of time.  (Essays and Aphorisms, 51)

And this is how Nabokov begins his memoir Speak, Memory (1951):

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.  Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).  (19 of the Vintage paperback)

Then the passage gets really good  (“in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated”), but I only need that first part.  Samuel Beckett has an earthier variation on the theme in Waiting for Godot.

The correspondences are between the metaphysics of Schopenhauer and Nabokov, in that both are deeply concerned with the realm beyond life.  Schopenhauer sounds a lot like Lucretius to me, arguing that our personalities dissolve back into the Will from which they came, and that if this is seen as nothingness it is only a failure of imagination.  Or so I weakly interpret him.  How about his own words:

All this means, to be sure, that life can be regarded as a dream and death as the awakening from it: but it must be remembered that the personality, the individual, belongs to the dreaming and not to the awakened consciousness, which is why death appears to the individual as annihilation.  In any event, death is not, from this point of view, to be considered a transition to a state completely new and foreign to us, but rather a return to one originally our own from which life has been only a brief absence.  (70)

Schopenhauer’s advice is to “accept the two black voids.”  That phrase is Nabokov’s.  He refuses:

I rebel against this state of affairs.  I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature.  Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life.  (SM, 20)

I have come across critics who are uncomfortable with this side of Nabokov, when the elegant aesthete reveals that he believes, or would like to believe, in ghosts, when the brilliant lepidopterist turns out to accept some form of Intelligent Design.  His fiction is full of spirits like the Vane sisters and Hazel Shade, delivering messages from beyond.  Or perhaps the messages are false, the ghosts imaginary, since his characters so often misread or cannot see the elaborate patterns being constructed around them by a force mysterious to them, but not to the attentive reader.  How many of Nabokov’s novels end with a character escaping his suffering or madness by escaping into death or art or whatever that is at the end of Invitation to a Beheading, where Cincinnatus dies and awakens from his dream?  Professor Pnin survives by fleeing his own novel, which is a good trick.

Lest anyone think a) I am making this all up, or b) there is an opportunity to write a more formal study along these lines, I will direct your attention to Leona Toker’s Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Cornell UP, 1989) which is full of Schopenhauer.  She includes (p. 120) a quotation The World as Will and Representation that neatly summarizes much of Nabokov’s work, and for that matter a great deal of fiction: “The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.”

Misfortune in general is the rule - influential Schopenhauer

I am at the end of a 1969 interview of Vladimir Nabokov by BBC-2, as published in Strong Opinions (1973):

Tolstoy said, so they say, that life was a “tartine de merde” which one was obliged to eat slowly.  Do you agree?

VN:  I’ve never heard that story.  The old boy was sometimes rather disgusting, wasn’t he?  My own life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey.  (152 of the Vintage paperback)

Sometime in the 1860s Leo Tolstoy fell under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer.  He was an early adopter, so to speak, along with Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche.  Schopenhauer picked up more major readers in the 1880s and 1890s, like Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust and Thomas Hardy and all of the French Symbolists and decadents.

The Schopenhauer entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a long list of writers influenced by Schopenhauer, some more plausible than others.  Beckett and Bernhard and Machado de Assis, certainly; Poe and Melville – really?  I have doubts about the timing; similarly, the idea that the work of Maupassant was influenced by any philosophy whatsoever seems unlikely.

But what is “influence”?  I suspect that many writers responded strongly not so much to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, to his metaphysics or arguments, but to his stance, to passages like the one that leads Essays and Aphorisms:

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental.  Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule.  (41)

Schopenhauer’s pessimism, his idea that suffering is the norm and happiness or pleasure the exception, is not, in this book at least, argued but rather assumed.  It is not clear to me how his metaphysics requires his pessimism – they seem separable.

Even the “influence” of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is questionable.  I had assumed that Hardy was a clear case of influence, but it turns out this is an issue of contention among Hardy scholars.*  Hardy did not read Schopenhauer until 1886 or later, after he had written numerous novels.  Jude the Obscure is usually identified as the most “influenced” later novel, and Schopenhauer is mentioned in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where a character has “a renunciative philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and Leopardi” (Ch. 15).

Perhaps, then, it was the great poet and essayist Giacomo Leopardi** who was the great influence on Hardy.  Leopardi makes Schopenhauer look almost cheery.  Or perhaps a creatively mature Hardy was delighted or surprised, reading Schopenhauer, to discover a kindred spirit, a philosopher who supported Hardy’s existing views.

Now, add the special place that the arts*** play in Schopenhauer’s system as one of the few ways to escape suffering, however briefly, and no wonder so many artists found Schopenhauer so interesting.  He preceded them, and he flattered them.

Curiously, a writer who I am now quite sure was influenced by Schopenhauer, even though he does not appear on any list I have seen and I had had no idea before I read Schopenhauer myself, was Vladimir Nabokov, who was not any kind of pessimist.  But I too am an optimist, and I too read Schopenhauer with pleasure.

*  For all of the details see T. J. Diffey, “Metaphysics and aesthetics: a case study of Schopenhauer and Thomas Hardy” in Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Dale Jacquettte, Cambridge UP, 1996.

**  This summer, Leopardi’s Zibaldone, a massive collection (2,500+ pages) of his notebooks, will for the first time be available in its entirety in English.  Readalong!  Am I right?  Who’s with me?

***  Especially music.  The relationship between Schopenhauer and a long line of composers beginning with Wagner seems more complex and perhaps deeper than that of Schopenhauer and most writers.

The study of the inexplicable - beginning a stroll through Schopenhauer

A wise book blogger, returning from a tiring vacation, would plan to write on a topic that is comfortable and relaxing.  If only I were wise.  I plan to ramble a bit, despite my ignorance and lack of understanding, on the subject of Arthur Schopenhauer.

I have known for a while that, however reluctant I am to spend much time with philosophy, I would have to do something about Schopenhauer.  At some point in the late 19th century he becomes too strong of a presence to ignore – a presence in art, I mean, especially in music and literature.  Although the first edition of The World as Will and Representation dates from 1818, Schopenhauer’s ideas were almost completely unknown until the 1850s, when he started to attract attention and disciples.  His writing spread rapidly among English, French, and Russian writers as well as German.

My Austrian project broke my resistance.  Austrian and German writers and composers were suffused with Schopenhauer.  Now that I have read a bit of him, I see him everywhere, although I am not sure if his presence is always so meaningful.

I believe I read Schopenhauer in the easiest way possible, in R. J. Hollingdale’s Essays and Aphorisms (Penguin Classics, 1970), a translation, abridgement, and rearrangement of the 1851 Parerga and Paralipomena.  I will proceed as if Essays and Aphorisms is a text by Schopenhauer, but it is in fact a collaboration between Schopenhauer and Hollingdale, and for all I know only a travesty of the original, but it is eminently readable and well written (clear, memorable, vigorous, even funny).  Hollingdale’s long introduction shares Schopenhauer’s virtues, e.g. “Schopenhauer thought that he alone had understood Kant correctly, and he dismissed Kant’s other successors, especially  Hegel, as charlatans” (20), which gets to the point nicely.

Also helpful is that Schopenhauer relies on only a single jargon word, “will,” although he then makes it do an enormous amount of work.

Thing in itself signifies that which exists independently of our perception, that which actually is.  To Democritus it was matter; fundamentally this is what it still was to Locke; to Kant it was = x; to me it is will. (55)

Roughly (oh so roughly) speaking, “will” is something like the natural forces of the universe, including the forces that drive us without our volition, instinct, say, or the unconscious.  The part of our selves under our control is engaged in a continual struggle with the “will” of the world, a fight to even perceive it well.

What a relief it was to read this in Christopher Janaway’s short study Schopenhauer (Oxford, 1994):

As an exercise in metaphysics, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the will as the thing in itself is so obviously flawed that some people have doubted whether he really means it – perhaps will is just a concept which explains a wide range of phenomena, and is not supposed to extend to the unknowable thing itself?  (33)

Ah ha, I am not the only one who could not see how Schopenhauer was solving his or Kant’s metaphysical difficulties (“The study of this inexplicable devolves upon metaphysics,” 117) so much as his own rhetorical problems, allowing him to quickly move on to more interesting questions, which is just what I will try to do tomorrow.

The Viennese middle class chooses art and fun - not as an ornament of life or as a badge of status, but as the air they breathed

The little Austrian aesthetic Golden Age that was magically called into being by Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer is described in some detail by Carl E. Schorske in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), particularly in Chapter VI “The Transformation of the Garden” (originally published in 1967), where Schorske actually begins with fifteen pages on Stifter’s novel.  The actual causes of Golden Age are political, social, and economic, the usual stuff – the 1848 revolution and counter-revolution, the perpetual rise of the middle class, changes in the nature and influence of the Austrian imperial court.

But it must have been strange, or satisfying, for a Viennese burgher, circa 1875 or 1885, to re-read Stifter’s idealistic account of moral and aesthetic development.  My son will be Heinrich, he could think to himself.  The parallels between Stifter’s character and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, an aesthetic Tiger Woods, trained from childhood to be a great artist, are especially striking.  As Schorske describes the time:

Beginning roughly in the 1860’s, two generations of well-to-do children were reared in the museums, theaters, and concert halls of the new Ringstrasse.  They acquired aesthetic culture not, as their fathers did, as an ornament of life or as a badge of status, but as the air they breathed. (298)

The Vienna State Opera (opening 1869), the Burgtheater (an 18th century institution, but in a new building in 1888), and the Kunsthistorisches Museum (1891) are still central to Viennese culture.

I have been going back and forth about the uniqueness of the period compared to earlier Golden Ages, or to contemporary cities all Europe and America that were also building museums and opera houses.  Heian Japan, for example, or Medici Florence, or the Ferrara of the Estes, depicted in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) – these were all court-centered, aristocratic.  So perhaps what Schorske calls “the aristocratization of the middle classes” (296) is a real difference, with what were once court institutions like the Burgtheater not exactly democratizing but at least opening up to the bourgeois or burgher or managerial class, which really was expanding at a new pace.

That expansion was happening everywhere, though, and only in Vienna did aestheticism swallow the middle class.   As Schorske describes it:  “Aestheticism, which elsewhere in Europe took the form of a protest against bourgeois civilization, became in Austria an expression of that civilization, an affirmation of an attitude toward life in which neither ethical nor social ideals played a predominant part” (299).  In France, Flaubert and Baudelaire and their descendants set themselves against the smug, philistine bourgeois.  In England, aestheticism was intimately tangled with social reform.  I am thinking of Ruskin and Morris and the pre-Raphaelites, all of whom were direct influences on Viennese art nouveau, but with all of the politics stripped out.

The anti-bourgeois protests come later in Austria, and take on a different character. It was a challenge to make an oppositional case for advanced art against an opponent who devoutly believed in advanced art.  Flaubert and Baudelaire would have found this frustrating.

I wonder how the spread of Arthur Schopenhauer’s ideas contributed to the Viennese ethos.  Ignored for decades, Schopenhauer began to attract followers in the 1850s and his writings rapidly diffused across Europe.  The important concept here is that he argued that aesthetic appreciation, however brief, was one of the few ways people can mitigate their ordinary state of suffering and misery.  Schopenhauer argued that the more effective, more lasting path is one of asceticism and renunciation.  But that is difficult and no fun, while dancing to Johann Strauss is easy and fun.

Good choice, Viennese middle class!

But tomorrow, I begin the case against.

In general, cactus blooms are the most beautiful in the world if you except a few parasitic plants - Stifter in the greenhouse

Inorganic nature, provided it does not consist of water, produces a very melancholy, indeed oppressive impression upon us when it appears without anything organic…  [W]e derive a high degree of immediate pleasure from the sight of vegetation, but this is naturally the greater the more abundant, manifold and extensive – that is to say left to itself – the vegetation is.  The immediate reason for this lies in the fact that in vegetation the law of gravity seems to have been overcome…  (Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, Penguin Classics, p. 161)

And conversely rocks make us sad because they have succumbed to gravity.

Indian Summer is a novel that finds great pleasure in both plants and rocks.  I wonder if Adalbert Stifter had read that passage of Schopenhauer’s.  It was published in 1851; Stifter’s novel in 1857, although I assume they were both responding to scientific currents of the day.  Still, this is funny:

“Form is inextricably bound up with material.  Stone is serious, it strives upward and can’t be bent into the softest, finest, most supple figures.  I’m referring to building stones and not marble.”  (359)

Stifter's speaker, the “host,” is referring to Gothic architecture, actually.  Stone escapes gravity when assembled into a Gothic spire.

Early in the novel the narrator, Heinrich, encounters a giant greenhouse cactus, a Cereus peruvianus, that is being neglected.  He suggests it be moved to the Rose House greenhouse, which it is (the host buys it – no conflict, not in this book), and twenty pages later “the Cereus, which had to twist and wind itself along the ceiling of the greenhouse at the Inghof, now could grow straight again.  I wouldn’t have imagined that this plant was so big or that it would grow so beautifully.”  (185)

The cactus theme recedes – or I have forgotten its appearance – for a time, but it returns with one of my favorite lines in the novel: “In general, cactus blooms are the most beautiful in the world if you except a few parasitic plants and a very few other individual blossoms” (349).  Yes, Heinrich, of course.  The cactus is healing, and has changed color, from “yellowish” to “a dark blue-green which now covered the entire plant like vapor.”  Perhaps it will bloom.

Of course it does, but not until the very end of the novel, at Heinrich’s wedding.  The gardener has “’retarded it by cold’” so that it would bloom as a wedding present – “’It can unfold in just the next five minutes’” (472).

The blossom had already opened by the time we got there.  A large splendid exotic blossom.  Everyone was unanimous in its praise.

“So many people have the Peruvianus,” Simon said, “since it isn’t rare at all, but even though they can get its stem to grow tall and mighty, very few can get it to flower.  Few people in Europe have ever seen this white blossom.  Now it is unfolding, tomorrow it will be gone with the break of day.  Its very presence is a treasure.”  (472)

There are a few more symbolic utterances to go before moving to the next page when – this is very exciting – the zither theme finally resolves!

Schopenhauer wants the vegetation to be abundant and left to itself.  Stifter argues for a single flower cultivated by an expert hand.  Similarly, the sheer cliff and bare rock are aesthetically and emotionally exciting for Heinrich (“the winter is also very beautiful”), but the Gothic church or marble statue is even more powerful.  In Indian Summer, life fulfills itself in the workshop and the garden.

I have omitted the workshop side of the argument.  It is mostly about restoring antique furniture.  You might guess that another wedding present is a particularly meaningful piece of restored furniture.  Yes.