I read Schopenhauer during my summer vacation

 

Rūdiger Safranski’s Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy might not have earned the Master’s approval, title-wise. In his view, Philosophy, the high thought of the sages in Athens, India and Königsberg, was being declawed and domesticated in his own age of “university philosophy”.  Of course, the reason Schopenhauer could adopt Plato’s contemptuous view of the sophists to his struggling contemporary junior professors was because he himself was the heir of a prosperous Danzig merchant. In his lifetime, his habit of pouring the vials of his wrath on Hegel and the Hegelians and all the other “functionaries” teaching philosophy, even as they married and procreated, kept him from having a hearing until the end of his life, when an article about him in an English journals was translated and printed in a Berlin newspaper.  But such odd ricochets his star was born.  As well, on the minus side of his ledger,  there was the disparagement of his mother Joanna, a writer and bosom friend of Goethe, who had brought him into the great man’s orbit but in her son’s view had not encouraged a friendship,. Until the 1850s, when you said Schopenhauer in learned circles you meant Joanna and her novels. 

However, by the Wild Years Safranski means the years of the Romantic era. Schopenhauer was certainly a product of that era. In fact, his main work was published in 1819, and his rediscovery in 1850, which is when it was reprinted, and his subsequent book of essays, Parerga and Paralipomena, made it seem as though a certain relic from the generation before was being rediscovered. Such are the achronic tricks of reputation - sometimes you do live to enjoy your posthumous status. 

The Romantics do give us a sense of what Schopenhauer was doing. It was through the influence, especially, of Herder that German culture deprovincialized itself by looking to the Orient. Through a teacher who was taught by Herder, Schopenhauer discovered Indian Vedic philosophy. In Dresden, in 1817, his name and friend, Karl Christian Krause, was not only a translator of Sanskrit but a practitioner of meditation – which is a thing to marvel at a bit: an Indian besotted practitioner of breathing exercises in the midst of the German bourgeoisie of the early 19^th century. The “plague” – the hole opening in the dissolution of a Christendom that was even then getting its second, colonialist wind – reminds one of the great experimenters, such as Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, the man who turned Goethe onto Hafiz, and  Doctor Moreau, who turned Baudelaire onto hashish.

I’ve been reading Schopenhauer this summer, patching up the hole in my own reading. When I was an adolescent, I read a bit of The World as Will and Representation. I remember most its cover – an indigo blue, with the title in golden script. Two volumes. Decatur Public Library. But I have no memory of what I thought of the text. I am a man perpetually impressed by book covers.

This time, I’ve been reading WWR in German instead of the Haldane and Kemp translation  and thinking that I must have been hella lost as a teen going through this bushy work. Schopenhauer, for one thing, is always referring you to other tomes he’s written, which makes for an annoying experience – you don’t want to read that what you are reading is not what you should be reading if you are reading it because it has been written better by the author elsewhere. However, if you march onwards past this annoying tic – if, in other words, you skip around – you can find a lot of pleasure here.

As reading and skipping are my instruments for understanding S., I’ve also been going through the Parerga and Paralipomena – a title I truly admire. This is how I found one of the great essays: Over the apparent intendedness [Absichtlichkeit] in the fate of the individual, which has been Englished as: “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual.”

It is Schopenhauer at his wildest. In it, he approaches the claim that “second sight”, or déjà vu, which is a talent shown in particular by certain mesmerized subjects, somnambule (cut to Dr. Caligari here) shows the “strict necessity” of everything that happens in life. Déjà vu is a moment, in Schopenhauer’s reading, when the true,  necessary course of a life, with all its seemingly chance elements, is seen, as though in a flash.

Schopenhauer had a weakness for optical devises – the kaleidoscope, the microscope, the mirror. In this case he uses as a metaphor and model anamorphosis – the same reference that would be used by Lacan in his seminar on the Four Basic Concepts of Psychoanalysis (a title that, perhaps intentionally, echoes Schopenhauer’s first book, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Reason). Lacan’s seminar summons a painting, Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which is a double portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, two ambassadors at the court of Henry IV, who are portrayed standing in their regalia, facing the spectator. In the foreground there is a strange blob looking like someone had smeared the painting with bubble gum. It isn’t bubble gum, it is a skull. You use a conic mirror to see the skull shape. Lacan references Duerer’s Perspectograph, a screen that helps the artist arrange an image – and to distort an image so that its “true” appearance can only be achieved by putting the canvas on which one paints it at a certain angle.

“All this shows that at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometral optics was an object of research, Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated—annihilated in the form that is, strictly speaking, the imaged embodiment of the minus-phi of castration, which for us, centres the whole organization of the desires through the framework of the fundamental drives.

But it is further still that we must seek the function of vision. We shall then see emerging on the basis of vision, not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such, in its pulsatile, dazzling and spread out function, as it is in this picture.
This picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze.”

Is there an anamorphosis in the foreground of Lacan’s seminar on anamorphosis? I tread lightly when I write about Lacan, since the very name summons armies. Nevertheless, it is of interest to place the non-place of castration, the place of the death-in-life of the skull, against Schopenhauer’s sense that the intendedness – the working of the will – in the lifestory has to be read by way of instruments to de-cipher the path of apparent accidents to see the nameable necessity that runs through it. Nameable as your name, or mine – nameable as the individual. “Than it is not in world history, as the Professor Philosophers claim, delusionally, that there is a plan and wholeness, but in the life of the individual. Peoples exist simply in abstracto: the individuals are the real.”

But that real – which transcendental fatalism reveals to us – has to be understood by taking an unusual stance. There is a secret tug that moves everyone on their appointed path.

“Yet it seems that one is, against the mighty influence and great power of circumstance, not enough: and thus it seems incredible that the most important thing in the world, purchased through the plagues and suffering of the human life-course, and even the unknown links to come, must be sustained so completely out of the hand of a blind to itself inexistent being, an organization divested of all accident.

One is much more tempted to believe that – as in certain pictures, named anamorphoses, which are crippled and distorted shapelessnesses to the naked eye, yet shown to be human figures when one looks at them reflected in a conic mirror – that the purely empirical conception of the world-course is like the picture seen by the human eye; meanwile, the tracing of the intendedness of fate is like a glace into the conic mirror, showing the connectedness and order of the thrown together image. This can be contrasted with what we believe to see in the course of life, which proves it to be the unconscious effect of an ordering and schematizing fantasy, similar to the situation in which one sees human shapes and figures on a wall spotted with flecks, which is the effect of bringing into those flecks our plan-like sense of connection, though they have been distributed there by the blindest accident.”

Schopenhauer’s comparison of the anamorphic effect and what we would now call the Rorschach card has a complexity not dissimilar to Lacan’s thesis of the gaze that sees the phallic object in all its death drive distortion. Where Lacan’s notion leads us to a level of looking that will see the drivers of fate, not unlike Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer, rejecting the Gestalt, the world-historical fantasy, brings us back not to the subject but to a blind-to-itself organizing power unique to the individual, all of whose circumstances from birth do death are necessary – and yet, troping St. Paul, seen in a mirror, darkly.

2.

In the World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer mentions Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste in the context of a discussion of the present – which is both the real and the foundation of our illusion of the past and the future. Here the Eleatic notion that there is actually no coming forth and going away – Entstehen and Vergehen – but, in truth, an unmoving whole.

“… one should mention that curious and surprising place in Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste: an immense castle, on the face of which is written: I belong to nobody, and I belong to everybody; you were here before you entered, and you will still be here when you leave.’

“Of course, this signifies that man at his creation comes from nothing and at his death becomes nothing. To actually meet this nothing personally would be very interesting;  even a moderately clever person can see that this empirical nothing is in no way absolute, but is nothing in a different sense.  We are lead to this insight by the empirical observation that all the properties of the parents are reproduced in the children, and thus have withstood death.”

Schopenhauer’s rather odd mixing of an ontological category – nothing – and a folk biological fact – inheritance – gives us a sense that Schopenhauer has a very different sense of the metaphysical categories of everyday life. Or perhaps I should say transcendent categories. One can see this in his casual mix of references to mesmerized subjects, somnambules, and the notion of necessity that mark his arguments about the seeming intentionality of events in a person’s life.

It is not just argument that moves us along in the Fate essay. Schopenhauer is also a good man, a genius, at springing out passages in literature: the castle reference in Jacques le fataliste (which went on to influence Kafka, or so the secondary literature says) is just another example of Schopenhaurian sampling. To read Schopenhauer, one must keep an eye on the quotations, even though they are often in Latin or Greek. There is something very 17^th century about this nineteenth century writer – there’s a feeling that he would be very comfortable in the society of a Robert Burton, and would get all the references in Anatomy of Melancholy .

The essay on fate is built upon a powerful claim: “Purely and objectively we see that though all things without exception there is and remains a causal connection, by the means of which everything that happens is completely and strictly necessary.”

This is both a strong claim and, in a sense, a very vacant one. Schopenhauer is seemingly identifying the necessary with the caused. Causality here references the “and then” structure of time. Each moment necessitates the next moment, and has been necessitated by the moment before. “Moments” here designate the largest blocks of the world. But the world that fills those blocks is, as Schopenhauer knows, an endlessly various thing. It is that endless variation to which we refer when we are talking about accident – and not something external to the temporal order.

That I walk down the street in one bit of the world, Moment x, and that a piano falls off a roof, too, in Moment x, might result in me being squashed under a piano in Moment y. In the largest sense, as we are both in the world where Moment x must be followed by Moment y, my squashing is necessary. “Every given element is a link in the chain of cause and effect, which progresses in the direction of time.”

This is true, but insufficient.

During Schopenhauer’s lifetime, a new social temporality was talking hold in Germany – and in France and Britain and America, etc. – the temporality of the contemporary. It was made up of the news, of public opinion, of fashions of all kinds, and it was the sphere in which the literate population found itself. Increasingly. As a follower of Schopenhauer, Karl Kraus, would put it in 1914, freedom of the press has abolished freedom from the press.

Schopenhauer’s model of the temporal and the causal would invoke a kind of synchonicity – but not that of the newspaper. He reached into Vedic and Greek thinking for the image of the net.  And with that fabric of overcrossing cords in the background, Schopenhauer has a go at the problem of the piano squashing and every “event”: If we imagine individual causal chains run through by meridians that lie in the direction of time, we can thus indicate the synchronic and that which does not stand in direct causal connection through parallel circles.”

The meridian idea has a strange heritage. It seems to show up in Quine’s philosophical explanation of event lines that striate through different worlds. And is it possible that Celan pulled out the idea of the Meridian that entitles his famous essay on poetry from Schopenhauer?

But to get back to Schopenhauer’s model: “these circles, though not dependent on one another, overlap as the whole net inflects, which makes their simultaneity necessary.”

Upon this here rests the accidental encounter of all conditions of a, in a higher sense, necessary given; the occurrence of this is what fate has willed.”

Fate, the fisherman, with all of us flopping in the net. Or the net is in the individual fish.  Or the fish is made of netting.

Can all these be true?  Hasn’t necessity gone from being empty to being too full?

 

Can we co-dream?

Near the end of Schopenhauer’s essay on the appearance of intendedness in the fate of the individual, he considers the dream from the point of view of will and representation. At the end of considering the dream as a very good model of the individual’s life, he considers that life is not a dream – for the dream is an event in the individual’s life, whereas the exterior world is not confined to the precincts of the individual’s experience of the external world.

Here are the rules of the game:

“All events in the life of a person stand accordingly in two fundamentally different kinds of connection. Firstly, in the objectively causally linked one of nature, and secondly, in that of subjective connections that have a presence only in relation to its experiencing individuality, and so subjectively as its own dream, in which its succession and substance is as necessarily determined as the first kind, but in the way the scenes of a drama succeed each other according to the plan of the dramatist.”

This would seem to neatly store the dream in the “experience” – Erlebnis – of the individual, and make the dream only a fact in the natural history of the individual from the objective point of view.

Thus, we have a model that would make the idea that “life is a dream” – the title of Calderon’s play, which Schopenhauer probably saw in Goethe’s production of it in 1813, when Schopenhauer’s book, the World as Will and Representation (WWR) was in the process of getting itself into ink and pages outside of Schopenhauer – seem a mistake.  I should point to a play that was withdrawn from the Berlin theatre two years before – Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg – which also addresses dream and reality, and which I don’t think Schopenhauer read. In Safrinski’s biography of Schopenhauer, he compares the disastrous encounter of Kleist and Goethe, which wounded Kleist’s sense of himself,  to Schopenhauer’s healthier encounter with the great man – Schopenhauer, who remained out of his orbit, but with a vivid sense of his personality. There’s a famous conversation remembered by Schopenhauer: “But this Goethe… was so entirely a realist that it simply would not dawn on him that objects as such only exist insofar as they are represented by the cognizing subject. “What!” he said to me once, staring at me with his Jupiter eyes, “light is supposed to exist only insofar as you see it? No, you wouldn’t exist if light did not see you.”

But back to the dream. The heady idea here is that the external compulsions – time, space, relationships, particulars, generals – are in a distant sense composed by us – or rather to the will to which we have blindly subscribed by being born. Or, on a lesser plane, by falling asleep. That sleep to which all humans are heir. This is where the dream analogy makes some sense. And where, as Schopenhauer says at the end of his essay, the ominious, that mood or epiphenomenon, has its place – an irreducible place, even in the most materialist of worlds. Freud does not, I think, quote Schopenhauer much, although he read him, has a similar notion: every subject has a tendency, at one point or another in life, to sense the uncanny. A certain panic.

Bringing us to the heady and impossible thought of the co-dream.  A quote (remember, I am doing the translating, here):

“As well, our horror of that great universal thought might lessen when we remember the subject of the great dream of life is the same as that of the will to life, and that all the muchness of appearance is conditioned by time and space. It is a great dream, dreamt by one thing: but it is such that all its persons co-dream it.”

Haven’t we reached, here, a violation of the model or the metaphor of the dream? Isn’t it, by its nature, a thing that cannot be co-dreamt?

It is at this point that Schopenhauer’s very literary references seem to lead him astray – or seem, at least, to anthropomorphize the will. I am interested in this “slip”, so to speak, because it speaks to the register in which Schopenhauer’s rhetoric moves us.

My argument is this: the notion of destiny or fate, as Schopenhauer signifies it, is rooted not in the society growning up around him – the society of contract, to use the Weberian vocabulary – but the more archaic, the classic society of status. In the latter, as know all to well, the causal logic of the dream applies to the cosmic whole via the acts and thoughts of the King, or those of monarchical status. The king sins – for example, King David falls in adulterous love with a married woman and arranges to have her husband killed – and a natural event occurs – a drought, or a plague – which is “caused” by that sin. The ultimate actor, here, is another monarch, God. The causal chain links the sin to an event that has nothing whatsoever to do with the sin. And that “nothing whatever” is filled in by the logic of punishment and reward.

This is a very deep total social fact. Freud found, among his patients, similar pseudo-causal thoughts – I masturbate and my mother dies; I have a wet dream and my teacher gives me a failing grade in Math. And so on. Fate, or the apparent intendedness in the individual’s life, goes back to that archaic strata. Which is a strata that continues unabated in the society of contract. One has only to look around to see how action is causally related to a whole schema of punishment and reward, which plays out within the political unconscious. We co-dream – even though this is impossible – and we look around at the world in terms of our co-dream. The American dream. Or the dream of a better world. Dream upon dream, all of which depend upon a dream logic of a collectivity that, by definition, cannot co-dream. Call this the antinomy of fate.

 

Call it what you want, but try to get out of it. I, one of your co-dreamers, dare you to.