May Sinclair, Novelist and Philosopher

May Sinclair

Late in April on the Pea Soup blog, there was a query about philosophy in novels. I discovered that one such book was by Mrs. Humphry Ward (aka Mary Augusta Ward). The book, which appeared in 1888, was called Robert Elsmere. It was a bestseller and was reviewed by Gladstone. The novel amounted to a popularization of T. H. Green's philosophy.

Around the same time that Ward was at work on this novel, another British, female novelist was developing her own interpretation of Green. May Sinclair (1863-1946) had begun reading philosophy before she entered Cheltenham Ladies' College, but it was during her time there under the tutelage of Dorothea Beale that she took up philosophy in earnest. Sinclair's first publication, on Descartes, appeared in the college's journal in 1882. She published her first book (of poetry) in 1886 under the pseudonym 'Julian Sinclair'. She was the first female member of the Aristotelian Society, joining in 1917. In 1923, Sinclair presented a paper to the Aristotelian Society. It was called 'Primary and Secondary Consciousness'. Among those who commented on her paper that evening were Alfred North Whitehead and our old friend C. E. M. Joad.

It was Dorothea Beale who encouraged Sinclair to read the works of T. H. Green, who was the subject of 'The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism', which Sinclair published in New World in 1893. Green confirmed Sinclair's interest in the German idealists, including Schopenhauer, whom she read avidly.

Sinclair published her first novel (Audrey Craven) in 1896. She had a blockbuster hit with Divine Fire (1904) (reviewed here), the popularity of which led to her tour of the United States in 1905. While in the USA, she met William James and visited President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House.

Sinclair's intensive study of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann left her receptive to Freud's new science of the unconscious. She was among the first novelists to incorporate such themes in her fiction, and she helped to establish one of the first psychoanalytic institutions in the UK (the Medico-Psychological Clinic) in 1913. According to Sinclair's entry in the Oxford DNB, she wrote the prospectus for the Clinic and was elected as one of its twelve founder members. She also sat on its Board of Management.

Sinclair is also known for being the first person to use William James' phrase 'stream of consciousness' in characterizing a work of fiction.

Her most highly regarded novel seems to be Mary Olivier. Here's a quotation from this work:

There was Schopenhauer, though. He didn’t cheat you. There was ‘reine Anschauung,’ pure perception; it happened when you looked at beautiful things. Beautiful things were crystal; you looked through them and saw Reality. You saw God. While the crystal flash lasted ‘Wille und Vorstellung’ the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy. --Mary Olivier, pp. 292-3; quoted from James Thrall, 'May Sinclair: Mystic Modern' (pdf).

While philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, literary scholars have. Some of them address the philosophical themes in her work. James Thrall, for example (in the above-linked work), focuses on Schopenhauer's influence. Christine Battersby, while acknowledging Schopenhauer's importance, argues that Spinoza is the philosopher whose thought is most evident in Sinclair's fiction (pdf). Two dissertations of interest in this connection are Leigh Wilson's 'It was as if she had said....': May Sinclair and reading narratives of cure and Justine McCarthy's Edges of the mind : psychic margins and the modernist aesthetic in Vernon Lee, Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, Dion Fortune and Jane Harrison.

Philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, but some have written about her. Bertrand Russell reviewed both of her books on idealism. He reviewed Sinclair's A Defence of Idealism in The Nation (August 31, 1918) and her The New Idealism in Nation and the Athenaeum (August 5, 1922). Both reviews appear in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays: 1914-1919.

It's unsurprising that Russell would be critical of books by an exponent of idealism, mysticism, and Jungian psychoanalysis. Still, he wrote to his mistress of the day, Lady Constance Malleson, that Sinclair's book 'was not very bad'. Russell took a generally respectful tone in both his reviews. He also corresponded with Sinclair about her defence of idealism.

Finally, we should admire Sinclair's courage in taking on Sir Almroth Wright, who had published an odious tract in which he opposed women's suffrage on supposedly scientific grounds. This prompted Sinclair not only to write a brief reply in the Times (of London) but also to produce a pamphlet called 'Feminism'. The details of this conflict are recounted by Jim Gough in 'May Sinclair: Idealism-Feminism and the Suffragist Movement' (pdf). Sinclair was a member of both the Women Writers' Suffrage League and the Women's Freedom League.

Sinclair's obituary in the Times (Nov. 15, 1946) appeared, suitably, under the heading 'Philosophy and the Novel'.
 

A Kierkegaard bicentennial roundup

Sketch by Christian Olavius Zeuthen (1843)

May 5 was the 200th anniversary of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard's birth, as was noted by Julian Baggini. The anniversary was also the occasion for this piece by Andrew Torrance at Per Crucem ad Lucem.

I rounded up some Kierkegaard links a couple of years ago, including one for Hubert Dreyfus's paper on why Kierkegaard would have hated the internet. (I'm sure Kim Kierkegaardashian would disagree.) Dreyfus spoke about Kierkegaard earlier this month on Philosopher's Zone, hosted by Joe Gelonesi. The other speakers were Patrick Stokes and Tim Rayner.

Three older podcasts on Kierkegaard from: a 2008 episode of In Our Time; a 2010 one from Partially Examined Life; and a 2008 episode of Philosophy Bites.

A collection of videos about Kierkegaard. You can find others, by Dreyfus, on YouTube.

From the University of Edinburgh, Sean Turchin's on-line dissertation about the relation between Kierkegaard and Karl Barth.

W. H. Auden's Introduction (pdf) to The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard.

'The Oddest Prophet' -- Malcolm Muggeridge on Kierkegaard. 

A chapter on Kierkegaard and Sartre from Jacques Maritain's book called Moral Philosophy.

The text of Lev Shestov's Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy.

From a 1945 issue of The New Republic, Jean Wahl's 'Existentialism: A Preface'.

Two pdf's: Merold Westphal's 'Commanded Love and Moral Autonomy: The Kierkegaard-Habermas Debate' and Alastair Hannay's 'Kierkegaard: the pathologist'.

William McDonald's 'Love in Kierkegaard's Symposia'.

John Updike's 2005 review of a Kierkegaard biography in the New Yorker. The first part of Joakim Garff's biography.

From First Things in 2004: 'Kierkegaard for Grownups' by Richard John Neuhaus. Earlier this May, William Doino, Jr. has a piece on Kierkegaard in the same journal.

'Kierkegaard the Novelist and Three Kierkegaardian Novels: The Moviegoer, The Sportswriter and Rabbit, Run'.

Two items of interest in the NY Times.

Several volumes edited by Jon Stewart on Kierkegaard's influence.

A lot more Kierkegaard links.
 

Confusion in the learning process

Derek Muller has created some great videos for science education. He posts them at Veritasium on YouTube. He summarizes one of his studies in the clip that appears below.

In this study, Muller had students complete a quiz about the force that acts on a basketball once it is thrown upwards. He then showed them a 10-minute video (actually one of a variety of 10-minute videos) in which a narrator presents the truth about this force. After viewing the video, the students completed the same quiz again and were asked what they thought about the 10-minute clip. Students seem to have liked the video, characterizing it as 'clear' and 'easy to understand'. However, their results on the post-video quiz weren't much better than on the pre-video quiz. It turns out that the students didn't learn much at all from the video even though they thought highly of it.

Muller decided to make a video that followed a different strategy. Instead of presenting a straightforward explanation of the force that operates on the ball, Muller's new clip showed one actor giving a popular but false account of this force. This was followed by another actor's correction of the first one's erroneous claims.

The pre- and post-video quizzes indicated that students learned more from this second clip. That's an interesting result -- students learned more by seeing an erroneous view (perhaps their own) exposed and corrected than by viewing a straightforward, correct explanation.

What strikes me as even more interesting is that the students didn't think as highly of the second video. They thought it was 'confusing'. The better learning experience was correlated with a more negative affect.

I guess this shouldn't be so surprising. Learning challenges preconceptions. Challenge and correction of an initial opinion are unsettling, breeding confusion as one realizes that one doesn't know what one thought one knew. Apart from the sense of embarrassment that can follow the exposure of an error in one's thinking (even if no one else knows about it), correction of an error goes against inertia, requiring more effort on the part of the learner in order to change her/his thinking.
 

Philosopher's Zone is back and other philosophy news

'School of Athens' by Raphael. Epicurus is on our left.

After Alan Saunders' death, the Australian radio show about philosophy, Philosopher's Zone, was on a hiatus. It is back, now hosted by Joe Gelonesi. In  the first new broadcast, Professor Bonnie Honig discusses democracy and public space.

On Melvyn Bragg's BBC show, In Our Time, Bragg discusses Epicurus with Angie Hobbs, David Sedley, and James Warren.

At the Guardian, Peter Thompson of the University of Sheffield has a five-part series on the Frankfurt School. Here they are: one, two, three, four and five.

On YouTube, the presentations from the 2012 Sellars Centenary Conference.

A 'journeyman Barthio-Lutheran theologian' tries his hand at translating the first part of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

On seeing Beckett in terms of analytic philosophy and 'Beckett the Nietzschean hedonist'.

Several posts on Kierkegaard by Barry Stocker.

From Truth Tableaux, 'On Fernando Pessoa’s Philosophical Essays'

On MOOCs, and more. On a 'we've-been-here-before' note, there's this.

Advice sought concerning what logic textbooks to use for a course on symbolic logic.

Help sought in listing novels about philosophers philosophical theories.

I love this couple's YouTube clips. They're from a 60's German TV show, in which Cherry Wainer and Don Storer played during the intermissions. In some clips you can see Cherry working the Hammond organ peddles with her white go-go boots. In others you can see German existentialist dancing. In most clips, you catch a glimpse of the lethargic little dog that sat next to Cherry. One of my favourite clips is this one, but I've opted to include this next clip chiefly because it shows Don in some of his best spontaneous vocal and facial expressions.
 

Tolstoy and a two-part documentary on Chechnya (2005)

Liesl Schillinger turns to Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, his final novel, which was about a Chechen warlord. Here's Nicholas Lezard's 2003 review of Hugh Aplin's translation. Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear recently completed their own translation of Hadji Murat.

The first clip (below) was posted by Juan Cole. I dug around and found the second part. At 7:54 of the second clip Tom de Waal, an English journalist, is interviewed. He appears several times in that clip. It turns out that Thomas de Waal is a brother of Edmund de Waal, who wrote The Hare with Amber Eyes. A third de Waal brother, Alex, writes on African history.
 

 

Fiddling with the whatchamacallits

There's been much fiddling of late with the thing-a-ma-jigs and doo-hickeys in the right margin. I added a blog feed for history and a new link list for on-line philosophy texts. I'm sure there are many more sites with on-line texts out there -- please let me know of any good sites that I've missed.

In a fit of Canucky patriotism, I added a link list for informative sites about Canada, esp. for Canadian literature. In that connection, I was shocked to learn from the Canadian poetry site at the University of Toronto that Canadian poetry is over -- done, kaput. To quote the site, 'Until further notice, Canadian Poetry is not accepting new poets.' Yes, the great tradition of Sir Charles 'God Damn' is now closed -- and with nary a word of protest in the House of Commons.
 

A gathering of the past -- weekend links

Professors & 4th-year graduates of philosophy at Lviv University (1904)

Source. Antoni Łomnicki is standing 3rd from left. (He was killed by Germans in the Massacre of the Lviv Professors.) Here's an article (pdf) about the people in the pic. Seated at the right is physicist and mathematician Marian Smoluchowski.

Anthea Bell's translation of Friedrich Torberg's Young Gerber is out from Pushkin Press (an excellent publisher whose website is not excellent). Here are two reviews. The book is about a tragedy in an Austrian school.

Speaking of which, Duncan Richter has a couple of posts on Musil's The Confusions of Young Törless. The novel was also the springboard for some reflections on value and culture.

Mr. Waggish has an essay on Musil's Man Without Qualities.

An interview with Susan Bernofsky, conducted while she was translating Gotthelf's Black Spider. David Auerbach (aka Mr. Waggish) says via Twitter that the book's release date is Oct. 8. It's strange that the NYRB site has no info about the book (neither does their Tumblr). The book (as Mr. Auerbach says) is on Amazon. Is it just me, or does the right half of the face on the cover look like Margaret Atwood?

Bookslut's review of Frierich Reck's Diary of a Man in Despair. It's also reviewed at the Guardian, by Common Reader, Futile Preoccupations, and Mookse and Gripes. This time, NYRB does have a site for the book. Reck, aka Friedrich Percival Reck-Malleczewen, died in Dachau. Here's a lengthy piece on him in German.

A review of Eduard Habsburg(-Lothringen)'s novel, Lena in Waldersbach.

Webern is 3rd from right

Source.

From David Wilson's review of Alain Badiou's Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy: 'Badiou’s bombast finally testifies in defense of Wittgenstein. Not that Badiou admits that Wittgenstein might be right. But this uncharitable and incomprehensible critique shows it. For silence would say so much more.'

Wuthering Expectations has several posts on Austrian writers, on Bernhard, Broch, Hofmannsthal, and Stifter (twice).

On the death of Anton Webern.

On James Joyce in Trieste.

Here are some nice old and new photos of the country houses that Patrick Leigh Fermor came across in Transylvania and Fermor's postcard from Cluj.

Neglected Books Page has an entry on You Still Have Your Head, a book by Franz Schoenberner.

Review of a newly translated French biography of Émile Durkheim.

Llosa on why Proust is important for everyone.

A podcast of John Marenbon on Boethius.

This strikes me as depressing. The Journal of Happiness Studies published this paper, 'Arthur’s advice: comparing Arthur Schopenhauer’s advice on happiness with contemporary research'. According to the Abstract, 'We summarize [Schopenhauer's] recommendations and compare these with conditions for happiness as observed in present day empirical research. Little of the advice appears to fit current research on conditions for happiness. Following Schopenhauer’s advice would probably make us unhappier, even if we had the same neurotic personality.' It's open access.

City of Lions -- Lemberg, Lwów, and Lviv

Akademicki Square, Lemberg

(Source)
The western Ukrainian city of Lviv has an impressive and complex legacy. It began the 20th-Century as Lemberg, an Austro-Hungarian outpost in the eastern reaches of the Habsburg domains. Between the world wars it was Lwów, a city in the southeastern corner of Poland. After WWII it was Lvov near the western frontier of the Soviet Union. Since 1991, it has been Lviv near the western edge of Ukraine.

Ethnic diversity was long a hallmark of the city. By the middle of the 1500's, five ethnic groups each accounted for at least 5% of Lviv's population. These groups were Polish, Ruthenian (western Ukrainian), German, Jewish, and Armenian. [Source: 'Lviv: a Multicultural City Through the Centuries' [pdf] by Yaroslav Hrytsak.] The city's environs included many Ruthenian, Jewish, and German (inc. Mennonite) villages. Here are several old maps of the city.

In its Habsburg days, Lemberg took shape as a 'little Vienna'. It was the capital city of the Austro-Hungarian crownland called (rather grandly) the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. As a provincial capital, Lemberg became a home for some lesser members of the Habsburg bureaucracy. For instance, Arthur Edler von Mises, an official in the Austrian state railway, spent part of his professional life in Lemberg. Both his famous sons, Ludwig and  Richard, were born there. So was Alexius von Meinong, whose father was a major general in the army. And then there's Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, born in Lemberg in 1836. His father was the chief of police.

Like the Viennese, the residents of Lemberg (Leopolitans) invested much in their university, a respectable, primarily undergraduate school and 'feeder' to the graduate and professional programs in Vienna. Lemberg University, which became Jan Kazimierz University in the interwar years, was the initial home of the Lwow/Warsaw School of logicians and philosophers. The members of this school who spent the most time in Lwów between the wars were Kazimierz Twardowski and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Other members of the school were there in their student days. That includes Jan Łukasiewicz, who was born and habilitated in Lemberg (his father was an army captain).

Łukasiewicz worked with the Lvov mathematicians, an impressive group whose members were based at the city's main university and at the local polytechnic. These mathematicians followed the Viennese habit of working and socializing at a café. Their favourite hangout was the Scottish café (in Akademicki Square), where they would write their mathematical problems and solutions on the marble tables. Here's a nice description of them and their café. Among the mathematicians in question were Stefan Banach, Wladyslaw Orlicz, and the Lemberg natives Stanislaw Ulam and Stanislaw Mazur.

The Scottish Café (Szkocka Café)

The medical sciences were also well represented at Jan Kazimierz University. Researchers there included Jakub Parnas, Rudolf Weigl, Boleslaw Popielski, and Ludwig Fleck. The last two were born in Lemberg. Also, the first female physician in Austria-Hungary had her practice in Lviv (though she trained in Zurich).

Other distinguished mathematicians, scientists and engineers who hailed from Lemberg were Andrzej Mostowski, Alfred James Lotka, Stefan Bryla, and Maurice Goldhaber.

Lviv natives who distinguished themselves outside the mathematical and physical sciences include Solomon Buber (whose grandson Martin spent ten years of his childhood in Lemberg), Nahum Glatzer, Leopold Staff, Stanislaw Lem, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski (one of whose poems is 'To Go to Lvov'), Ivan Franko, and Józef Wittlin (whose 1946 memoir of life in Lvov has been translated into German and Spanish but not English).

While the Ruthenians tended to live in the rural areas around the city, there were several Ruthenian Leopolitans besides Ivan Franko who distinguished themselves in the literary and other arts: Vasyl Shchurat, Volodymyr Hnatiuk, Ivan Trush, Stanyslav Lyudkevych, and the opera divas Olena Kulchytska and Solomiya Krushelnitska. Finally, there's Lubka Kolessa, an excellent Ukrainian pianist who emigrated to Canada.

A diverse university town with flourishing arts and sciences, philosophy and opera -- Lviv was a very civilized little city. But here civilization met the depths of savagery. As James Meek has said, 'Few places have been the nexus of as much evil as Lviv station.' Lviv lay in the bloodlands. It experienced the Holocaust and was only a little to the west of where the Holodmor occurred in the early 1930's. (It is alleged that a 'lesser known chapter of the Holodmor' happened in Lviv in the late 1940's).

But violence descended on Lemberg before the horrors of the 1930's and 40's. In the roughly twenty-five years following 1913, there were at least four battles named after the city. There were several battles in Lemberg's environs in 1914, when the Russians took the city, followed by the Battle of Lemberg (1915), when the Austro-Hungarians and Germans took it back.

Russian POW's in Lemberg (1915)

Bavarian King enters Lemberg with victorious troops (1915)

The end of WWI brought only more violence. Amid the collapse of the Habsburg order there was a pogrom near the end of 1918, which happened during the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918-19), which featured another Battle of Lemberg (1918). Then there was the Polish-Soviet War, which included a Battle of Lwów (1920). There was another Battle of Lwów (1939), after which the Soviets took possession of Lvov. The NKVD jailed their Ruthenian political opponents and murdered many of them before evacuating in the face of the German invasion in June, 1941. There were pogroms in 1941 and an uprising against the Germans in 1944.

Jan Kazimierz University and the nearby polytechnic were targets of the violence. In July, 1941, twenty-five Lviv professors were murdered in the Wulka hills by the Nazis. The victims included the mathematicians Stanisław Ruziewicz, Kazimierz Bartel, Antoni Łomnicki and Włodzimierz Stożek (whose two sons were also among the victims). The law professor Roman Longchamps de Bérier, who had been the rector of the university, was killed with his three sons. A descendant of another victim, the economist Henryk Korowicz, has a post about the massacre (at which I found the Nazi newsreel posted below). Later in the war, the following Lvov mathematicians were killed by the Germans: Juliusz Pawel Schauder, Herman (aka Henryk) Auerbach, Moses Jacob, Stanislaw Saks, and Max Eidelheit (who is listed among the casualties in Ingarden's memorial to Schauder).

Another mathematician, Stefan Kaczmarz, was killed by the Soviets. So, too, was Stanisław Głąbiński, a Polish government official who had earlier been the rector and dean of the law school. He was killed in 1941 by the NKVD in Lubyanka Prison. 

Before WWII, Lwów's population included 150 000 Poles, almost 110 000 Jews, and 80 000 Ruthenians. Only a few hundred Jews remained in Lvov at the end of the war. During and after the war, the Soviets deported the Poles westwards across the new Polish-Soviet border. As a result, by 1947, the city had lost more than two-thirds of its pre-WWII population.

To quote from a New York Times article that was written during the Soviet occupation in 1939, 'Lemberg is a symbol of what is happening because it stood so long as an outpost of the eastward push of western civilization and now becomes a sign of a push in the opposite direction.' ['Break-up of eastern Europe is symbolized in Lwow' by Anne O'Hare McCormick (Sept. 25, 1939).] The Times reporter here presents a trope that had been given life by Poles and other westerners, who saw Lemberg not simply as a frontier town between countries or kingdoms or even empires but, rather, as a town on a fault line between civilizations. (The trope had been promoted especially by Soma Morgenstern, an accomplished author who lived in Lemberg before WWI.)

After WWII, many of the deported Poles moved to Wroclaw. They were followed in 1956 by Lwów's monument to the Polish poet Aleksander Fredro. In his book Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wroclaw during the Century of Expulsions, Gregor Thum describes the transfer of the Fredro memorial (p.298). It used to stand opposite the Scottish café. In fact, the picture at the top of this post is from the perspective of someone standing in front of Fredro's statue. The statue was replaced in Lviv by a statue of the Ukrainian hero Mykhaylo Hrushevskyi. Fredro's statue was moved from Lwów (now Lviv) to Breslau (now Wroclaw), where it found a new home on a site that had previously been occupied by an equestrian statue of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III. The re-named cities incorporated new memorials, though none of the memories or identities were really new; they were just shifted or transposed according to Stalin's wishes.

One of the strengths of the law department at Jan Kazimierz University was international law. Philippe Sands wrote a paper about some of the more accomplished alumni of that law program. The alumni include Louis B. Sohn, Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, and Raphael Lemkin. The last two made important contributions to the Nuremberg War Trials as well as to the UN's Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Along with them, the Leopolitans Simon Wiesenthal and Philip Friedman also survived the savagery that erupted in Lviv. They, too, worked for truth and justice, ensuring that civilization would have the last word.

Peddling Schopenhauer

I found this ad folded inside a musty, old copy of The Works of Arthur Schopenhauer: 'The Wisdom of Life' and Other Essays (New York, NY: Black's Readers Service Company, Inc., 1932). The ad is for that book. Black's Readers Service was owned by Walter J. Black, Inc. The company was similar to the Book-of-the-Month-Club and was involved in similar legal cases concerning the meaning of a 'free' book. (E.g., is a book really free if I have to buy something else in order to get it?) According to his obituary (New York Times [April 17, 1958]), Walter Black established the Plymouth Publishing Company in 1923 and changed its name to Walter J. Black, Inc. in 1928. There was a brief article in the Times on Dec. 5, 1925, in which Black is said to have offered to publish Winston Churchill's stories (after hearing that Churchill didn't want to publish them since books were too expensive for most people to buy). Black's company was run by his son, Theodore M. Black (a Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents), from 1958 until 1982. I don't know what happened to the company after Theodore Black's death.

Google reveals that Walter J. Black, Inc. is mentioned on p. 181 of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (in the story 'Ghosts').

The above ad is odd for a number of reasons. First, I'm fascinated by the needless arrow after 'this amazing reason'. Next, the bit about '...more forceful and purposeful living!' isn't well-suited to the outlook of a proponent of resignation and renunciation -- it's more Nietzsche than Schopenhauer. Finally, the blurb at the bottom refers to Schopenhauer's 'delightfully fresh' views on women. On the other side of the ad are several examples of Schopenhauer's horrible misogyny.

Regarding his misogyny, there's some intriguing material in Jean Pierrot's The decadent imagination, 1880-1900. Pierrot adduces gendered bigotry as one reason for Schopenhauer's popularity among the French Symbolists. They liked Schopenhauer's conception of sex as alluring poison, and they projected the concomitant fear/resentment/neuroses onto women. The resulting strain of fin-de-siècle art is one source of the modern femme fatale.

Cheer up, Arty! It's your birthday

I recently read some of Arthur Schopenhauer's work. He was a first-rate aphorist who, unfortunately, diluted his pithy wisdom with mediocre metaphysics (a sentiment shared by Isaiah Berlin).

Here's some of George Carlin's wisdom: 'Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.' No one more clearly epitomizes this truth than Schopenhauer. He was 'cynical' in the everyday sense of that term (as opposed to the technical, philosophical sense). Schopenhauer's cynicism was an aspect of his pessimism. He held out no great hope for humankind, which is one reason why he recommended resignation and renunciation -- resign yourself to our collective failure to advance morally beyond our predecessors, resign yourself to the fact that romantic love is generally a cruel joke, etc. etc. and, accordingly, renounce your worldly hopes. Such world-denying pessimism must be grounded in idealism (Carlin's point), for only against the backdrop of very high, ideal standards can such a sweeping condemnation of worldly endeavour make sense. And Schopenhauer was an idealist with a vengeance. He damned the chilly shadow-land of history as forever farcical and, shunning it, sought the perfect luminescence of Plato's ideal forms. Since he eschewed any divine agent of vengeance, Schopenhauer took its expression upon himself. From his disillusion flew the cutting aphorisms.

Schopenhauer set his idealism in a metaphysical nightmare. He tried to bring together Kant's noumenon, the Platonic forms, and the will ... oops (cue the Beethoven) ... the WILL. A volatile mixture, to be sure -- I just hope he had good insurance. Somehow, the really real is supposed to be noumenal (hence beyond time and plurality) and ideal in Plato's sense (also beyond time but apparently plural despite the Form of the Good's best efforts) and volitional (and thus essentially temporal). Moreover, for Schopenhauer, each person's deeds arise from her character. But character, for Schopenhauer, is noumenal, which puts it beyond the reach of causation and, indeed, beyond any application of the principle of sufficient reason. So how can anything 'arise' from it? Also, being noumenal, it admits of no plurality. But then how can there be several characters, each accounting for our diverse acts? Perhaps the really real was also beyond arithmetic. Ah well, whereof one cannot speak ....

[Update (added Feb. 23): The status of Platonic Ideas in Schopenhauer's system is tricky, to say the least. They're the focus of pp. 232-4 of v. 1 of the World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer there says that the Platonic Ideas are beyond any application of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which, in his system, suggests that they're noumenal. Nevertheless, he also says that that the Ideas are essential to an objectification of the will, which suggests that they're phenomenal. The most thorough investigation of this matter that I know of is in a paper by James and Dale Snow: 'Was Schopenhauer an Idealist?' (Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (4) 1991). They conclude that Schopenhauer's 'Platonic' Ideas are meant to be in time; the Ideas are sempiternal rather than eternal.]

Still, the metaphysical train wreck should not detract so much from Schopenhauer's accomplishment. He advanced good criticisms of Kant's ethics (and anticipated some of G. E. M. Anscombe's points) and developed our notion of the unconscious (along with Fichte and Schelling). No other second-rate philosopher (but first-rate aphorist) has had such a profound influence. Among those whom Schopenhauer influenced the most are Wagner, Wittgenstein, Borges, Burckhardt, Turgenev, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Richard Taylor, and Thomas Mann. (Mann wrote an adulatory piece about Schopenhauer in 1938.) And on and on. Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Huysmans had intense Schopenhauer phases but eventually opted for more life-affirming views. And though he denied it, there has long been a suspicion that Freud must have read Schopenhauer earlier in his life. Finally, here's Albert Einstein in 1933 with one of my favourite Shopenhauer quotations:

I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense…. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humour its due.

Schopenhauer was one of the earlier western philosophers to take seriously an eastern philosophical tradition and he was among the first prominent intellectuals to take seriously the ethical status of animals. These advances, together with the list of luminaries who admired Schopenhauer, lead me to suspect that the above metaphysical objections may well derive from misunderstandings on my part.