The Philosophy of Schopenhauer

by Bryan Magee

Book Overview

This is a revised and enlarged version of Bryan Magee's widely praised study of Schopenhauer, the most comprehensive book on this great philosopher. It contains a brief biography of Schopenhauer, a systematic exposition of his thought, and a critical discussion of the problems to which it gives rise and of its influence on a wide range of thinkers and artists. For this new edition Magee has added three new chapters and made many minor revisions and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198237227
• ISBN13: 9780198237228
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Lucky Convergence

Bryan Magee is an ideal candidate for the role of expositor of Schopenhauer. One of Schopenhauer's defining characteristics is his passion for the arts; it is a passion that Magee shares. Schopenhauer is as good a writer as you'll find among major philosophers, and Magee is an easy and graceful stylist himself. Moreover, Magee is a bit of an outsider. And Schopenhauer, for all his appeal, has never quite made it to the first team among philosophers. Indeed, one of the most intriguing points about him is that he seems to have exercised far more influence over artists: Turgenev, Proust, Mann and (most of all) Wagner. Indeed, as a kind of afterthought, Magee offers a "conjecture" that a Schopenhauerian substrate underlies Dylan Thomas' great short lyric, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower ..."It's a lucky convergence because Schopenhauer certainly needs an introduction. Not because of the style: as I said above, Schopenhauer is a wonderful stylist, exactly not what you expect from a 19th-century German. But if Schopenhauer did not end quite in the mainstream of western philosophy, he certainly started there. He venerated Kant and he hated Hegel. He set himself the task of finishing or correcting Kant, without ever modifying his admiration for the master. This means that to understand Schopenhauer you need to know something about Kant. And here, Magee does a wonderful job. Magee's introduction to Kant would, with minor emendation, stand pretty well on its own. His exhibition of how Schopenhauer fits into the Kantian framework is equally deft. In the same vein, he offers an indispensable strategy for reading Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is one of those authors who wrote only one book "The World as Will and Idea." The standard edition is two volumes: a first volume that he wrote as a self-contained work, and a second, which counts as a kind of "extension of remarks" that developed over the rest of his life." But before his great work, he wrote a dissertation, "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," which Magee declares to be "a minor philosophical classic." It is, at any rate, an integral part of Schopenhauer's lifelong project, and a reader of the major work will do well to have the dissertation (or at least Magee's summary) behind him. A couple of other "independent" essays help to fill out of the frame. One of Magee's many helpful courtesies is that he tells you just what and why.This book is so good in its own right that one is hesitant to seem to criticize Magee for not writing even more. Still, Magee's account did whet my appetite to know more about how Schopenhauer fits into the tradition of German thought to which he made himself such an outsider. That would be a project in its own right, but you do get a bit of it in the second-best book about Schopenhauer that I know of: Rudiger Safranski's "Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy." But hey-read them both, and with l

Just another five stars

I would just like to echo the wonderful reviews that others have already given for this text, and to give it another five stars. As a serious student of Schopenhauer and of his commentators, I believe that Magee's grasp of Schopenhauer is simply astounding. Magee transforms Schopenhuaer from some obscure German philosopher from days long gone into a pressingly relevant thinker for our modern understanding of the universe. Magee has convinced me that Schopenhauer's understanding of the world is one of the most persuasive candidates out there. One of Magee's finest accomplishments in the text is the way he interweaves Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant into Schopenhauer's thought in order to demonstrate that Schopenhauer truly represents the direction to which we must look for further progress in understanding this incredible mystery in which we live. This is the single best secondary treatment of Schopenhauer on the market, period, and is also one of the best books I have ever read.

Modern.

Bryan Magee has the marvellous power to arouse the interest of the reader in his books. He does it again in this one on Schopenhauer.He explains clearly the place and the importance of Schopenhauer in the history of philosophy, the strenght and modernity of his ideas, and his deep influence on later philosophers and artists. He also criticizes vigorously some aspects of his work and life.Magee shows that Schopenhauer built his worldview on the transcendental idealism of Kant. But he went further by describing the real nature of Kant's 'thing in itself' (the noumenon), which he called rather unfortunately the 'will'. For Schopenhauer, the entire world of phenomena in time and space, internally connected by causality, is the self-objectivation of an impersonal, timelessly active will. It is an unassuageable striving, which means continued dissatisfaction for the individual.Schopenhauer noticed a flaw in Kant's reasoning that we could only access to the 'thing in itself' through our sensory and intellectual apparatus. We know one material 'thing in itself' subjectively: our own body.The idea of the 'will' is very modern, because it anticipated Darwin's evolutionism, Freud's unconsciousness and Einstein's holism (everything is energy).Magee explains magisterially all aspects of Schopenhauer's penetrating worldview, like the defective intellect of mankind, because intelligence is only a late and superficial evolutionary differentiation, developed for the promotion of animal survival.His investigation of human behaviour is based on what people do in fact, not on what they 'ought to do'. His conclusion was that what traditionally had been considered moral behaviour turned out to be self-interest. For Schopenhauer, art is not an expression of emotion, but an attempt to convey an insight into the true nature of things. It must have its origin in direct perception, not in concepts.Magee stresses rightly that Schopenhauer was one of the few philosophers who integrated sex in his speculations. For him, sex is the 'very process whereby the will to live achieves life. The urge towards it is the most powerful of the will's demands, next only to the brute survival of what already exists'.He shows also his virulent atheism ('As ultima ratio theologorum we find among many nations the stake'), his misogyny and his interest in Buddhism.His criticism of Schopenhauer is also very important and to the point.Schopenhauer denies mankind free will. But if there is no free will, there is no morality.More importantly, he notices that Schopenhauer didn't live a life of someone who believed in a world of only unrelieved pessimism, dominated by the inherently evil metaphysical will. His life contradicted a part of his philosophy!This very rich book contains also excellent explanations of the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, Vaihinger and Frege, as well as brilliant demonstrations of the influence of Schopenhauer on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (the Tractatus).Magee gives us also

Schopenhauer revisited

Considerd by many as the best book in the English language to provide a comprehensive review of this great thinker's philosophy, this piece of work testifies to the indispensibility of Schophenhauer to 20th century thinking. This oft-neglected thinker provides the link between the idealism of Kant and the nihilism of Nietzche. And although he belongs to the idealist tradtion, the metaphysics inherent in Schopenhauer's philosphy should not deter one from reconsidering his great impact on later musicians and great novelists. His philosphy is the most comprhensive in the idealist tradtion and he succeeded in filling many of the gaps left by Plato and Kant. The World as Will also includes references overlooked by many but later developed into Frued's theory of the unconscious and Enistien's theory of relativity. In Schopenhauer's philospy one can easily discern the equation that changed the history of man kind E=mc. I congratulate Magee on this great feat and hope many will open their eyes to this genius philosopher who was the first to locate the sketchiness and shallowness of his contemporary Hegel.

A Great Introduction to an Important Philosopher's Work

This book is a great introduction to one of the 19th century's most important thinkers. But more than this, it clarifies many of the misunderstandings about this thinker's ideas. This is not Schopenhauer as learned through Nietzsche or any other person with an agenda of his own; it is an invaluable resource for the intelligent person who is interested in reading about the thoughts of a great thinker as he originally stated them. Through the large amount of direct quotes from Schopenhauer's work, one can begin to appreciate his style and clarity as a writer. Magee has done a terrific job, and I hope that this book will continue to help more people encounter the wonderful ideas of Schopenhauer.