is bad. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember it as being useful (at least) in pointing out passages in Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer that seem related. It is short, so its usefulness is bound to be limited, and I think it read like a dissertation, so it might not be a very mature work, but if no one else really has done much work on this then it's (much) better than the alternatives, i.e. nothing. As I recall, Schopenhauer's main themes are the world as will, the world as representation, aesthetics, and ethics. I think someone (probably Geach or Anscombe) reported Wittgenstein as saying that he once bought into the idea of the world as representation but never the idea of the world as will. So one place to look for Wittgenstein's response to Schopenhauer is his remarks on solipsism and idealism. Another place would be Wittgenstein's aesthetics and ethics, of course, where he lacks Schopenhauer's platonism and emphasis on compassion (or so it seems to me) but shares his anti-egoism. See probably everything that's been written about Wittgenstein and Buddhism. Schopenhauer also denies that theory can have value in ethics (I think), so Wittgenstein was probably in sympathy with him there too. On the other hand, Schopenhauer is a determinist while Wittgenstein not only rejects belief in the causal nexus but even identifies this belief as the very definition of superstition. And I think he later says somewhere that he had thought of this rejection as the heart of a new philosophy, or something like that. So it was important to him.
Someone should write another, longer book on the subject. In the meantime, see the links above.
"I'm (not unpleasantly) surprised to see that Ray Monk is less of a Hackerite than I had thought."
ReplyDeleteI laughed aloud at this. Monk didn't mince words about either Hacker or Glock. Joachim Schulte actually took him to task for being too cheerfully anti-Hacker in his paper -- not on a point of interpretation, but as a point about mood. I'll definitely include a fuller version of this exchange when I type up more of my notes.
"It's been a while since I read it, but I remember it as being useful (at least) in pointing out passages in Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer that seem related."
The world does not lack these sorts of works. My favorite is actually a short one of Jannik's from 1967, titled simply "Schopenhauer and the Early Wittgenstein": it's nothing but a list of resonantly similar themes, phrases, and passages, organized by topic. The hard part is: What do you DO with all of these similarities? Why are they THERE? -- So far as I can tell, nobody has a good answer to this question. Even if you want no truck with any of the New Wittgensteinians, Hacker's answer is very hard to swallow: we're supposed to buy that Wittgenstein studied diligently under Russell for years, and came out of it somehow still a transcendental idealist -- and Schopenhauer's arguments for idealism are Berkeley's, to make this even harder! It's all a big mess.
I'm actually working on a term paper on Schopenhauer at the moment (literally -- I'm putting off editing it to browse blogs, and it's due on Wednesday), so I'm neck-deep in "The World as Will and Representation" right now. I'd originally wanted to write a paper on Schopenhauer and the TLP, but that's just impossible to do well in a couple of weeks given the current state of the literature.
The quote you're thinking of is attributed to Geach in Magee's book on Schopenhauer (which you may have heard recommended before -- it has a chapter on Wittgenstein). He also notes that Wittgenstein (later in life) was fond of quoting Schopenhauer to the effect that "music is a world itself" (which isn't something Schopenhauer actually says, but the spirit is his), and I think this is where the aesthetic link lies: Schopenhauer's aesthetics makes heavy use of the "Platonic Ideas" EXCEPT in the section on music! He says they have no role to play there, and also says a great many strange things ("the world is embodied music" and "music is unconscious metaphysics" are two highlights), some of which I think Wittgenstein actually found illuminating. And the ethical link is closer than you'd think, too: Schopenhauer's emphasis on compassion is only a preliminary step -- his ethics ends is the resignation of the will and mysticism. He talks about voluntarily starving to death with cautious praise.
"Schopenhauer also denies that theory can have value in ethics (I think)"
Oh God, I don't even want to start. This is a large part of what I'm writing a paper on. It's a mess. But what is clear is that Schopenhauer thinks that a "categorical imperative" is a contradiction, and says that he has "no 'ought' or law to hold before the free will" and cannot offer moral principles (WWR 374). What exactly this amounts to is... complicated. But it's certainly a place where Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein have... something... to do with one another. Probably.
"Schopenhauer is a determinist while Wittgenstein not only rejects belief in the causal nexus but even identifies this belief as the very definition of superstition."
Schopenhauer actually makes exceptions to his determinism for a "transcendental change" that makes someone full of will-to-life resign the will. He even calls them exceptions. And Schopenhauer praises Hume's treatment of causality, just to make all of this more muddled. WWR is a really weird damn book.
Thanks for the Janik reference. I'll have to look that up. I've read the chapter in Magee, I'm pretty sure, as well as some others (does Jacquette have a Wittgenstein chapter in his book on Schopenhauer?, Young?), but, as you say, no one really seems to explain the connection very fully. Perhaps it's an impossible task. If Wittgenstein was influenced by an incoherent philosopher then it might be hard to do more than identify passages that suggest some influence. And few people seem to want to claim that Schopenhauer was coherent.
ReplyDeleteI guess Schopenhauer both is and isn't a determinist, since determinism only applies at the phenomenal level, which is pretty much illusory, right? So Hume would be (at least sort of) right: we think and experience the world in terms of necessary connections, but they aren't really there. The noumenal is not determined, and causes nothing. Talk of exceptions, though (which I had forgotten) seems like a messy mixing of the two.
I hadn't looked at Jacquette, and he does seem to have some stuff. It's a Hackerish reading of TLP, from what I see in Google Books, but he also has some interesting "anxiety of influence" material about why he thinks LW didn't acknowledge Schopenhauer alongside Frege and Russell etc. So thanks for that.
ReplyDelete"If Wittgenstein was influenced by an incoherent philosopher then it might be hard to do more than identify passages that suggest some influence. And few people seem to want to claim that Schopenhauer was coherent."
Well, let's not be hasty. Russell and Frege aren't coherent, either, on Wittgenstein's view. And it's much easier to trace the influence of Schopenhauer on Nietzsche than it is on Wittgenstein, but he's just as incoherent when influencing the one as the other.
"I guess Schopenhauer both is and isn't a determinist, since determinism only applies at the phenomenal level, which is pretty much illusory, right? "
I think he's actually pretty close to Kant on this issue (excepting that one exception I mentioned earlier): changes in phenomena are governed by exceptionless laws, and there is no causation outside of the phenomenal. The second bit is a mild revision of Kant in light of Schulze's criticisms (Schulze taught Schopenhauer Kant, and made a lot of hey over the idea that the thing-in-itself is supposed to cause experiences), but he's hardly the only Kantian to make this sort of revision. And he really does want to hold on to "empirical realism" somewhow -- he just reads Descartes (confusedly) and Berkeley (clearly) as having prefigured Kant on the realism/idealism issue. It's not a confusion to say that the phenomenal is caused, because the phenomenal isn't "really" the noumenal: the phenomenon is real on its own merits, it "really is representation" as Schopenhauer likes to say. So Hume's wrong to be a skeptic -- Schopenhauer just thinks that, read as a non-skeptic, Hume's account of causality is good. (His readings of earlier philosophers is often one-sided.)
"Talk of exceptions, though (which I had forgotten) seems like a messy mixing of the two."
Yeah, there's just really no good excuse for that. In the paper I just finished, I tried to get him out of it via weird Straussian manuevers ("Maybe the contradictions indicate that this isn't a place he wants be taken literally...") but it came out fairly forced. (In trying to help Schopenhauer dodge all of the places where he's inconsistent or paradoxical, I end up supposing he doesn't really think we can know the thing-in-itself. Despite his emphatic statement that we can, and do, every couple of pages in everything he ever wrote. But it was a fun paper to write. Also, in my defense, I wasn't originally trying to give a Straussian reading of Schopenhauer; I was just trying to make sense of his remarks on music. That paper went some weird directions.)
Yes (to most of this, and thanks), but there's incoherence and incoherence, isn't there? Or incoherence at different levels. I'm not saying that Schopenhauer is incoherent, but some (most) people seem to think he is, and I don't know how to read him as coherent. The remarks on music suggest that he shouldn't be taken too literally, but then what becomes of his (apparent) system? I tend to think that he believes we can 'know' the thing-in-itself but not know it. I'm not sure where I've got that from though, i.e. whether he says this or I am reading it into him in an attempt to make sense of what he says. Anyway, you're right that we (I) shouldn't be too hasty. But even if incoherence does not cause the same problems in every case, it seems to me that it might in some cases make it impossible to tell exactly how an incoherent influence (if that's what Schopenhauer is) has been influential.
ReplyDelete"I tend to think that he believes we can 'know' the thing-in-itself but not know it. I'm not sure where I've got that from though, i.e. whether he says this or I am reading it into him in an attempt to make sense of what he says."
ReplyDeleteI think these sorts of weird mental gymnastics are natural when reading Schopenhauer. He seems to unflinchingly endorse both the idea that all any of us can know is either our own private mental contents and what we can infer from these, and also that he has shown what the inner nature of comets and magnets is (and "The Will in Nature" just has flat-out bile for "empiricists" who don't think his wildly speculative naturphilosophie actually helps with anything). He's a speculative Lockean philosopher of nature, somehow.
A thought occurs to me: One reason that nobody's done really good work on Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein is that to do so you'd need to be comfortable with both Schopenhauer and Frege. Those two philosophers have very different appeals. It's hard to imagine someone who's equally happy with reading the Grundgesetze and "Man's Need for Metaphysics".
Yes, that's true about Frege and Schopenhauer. I like both, but I can't claim to be any kind of expert on either. And I don't know who would be an expert on both. Then there's Russell too, who I don't find nearly as pleasant to read.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. And yet Russell won a Nobel Prize for his writing. The world's a damned weird place.
ReplyDeleteYes it is.
ReplyDeletei think the main thing holding back comparisons between schopenhauer and wittgenstein is that the existing work on schopenhauer is not very good, particularly where efforts to closely track his writing in view of his own concerns (rather than kant's, or action theorists', or phenomenologists') are involved. but having spent a lot of time in the last several months working on schopenhauer, i'm convinced now that that's not obviously schopenhauer's fault. people just seem to be selective about the attention they pay him. i do not often see, for example, people connect his use of 'platonic ideas' to the early 19th-c. naturphilosophie in which it seems they would not have been all that exceptional. or: i've never read anything good on schopenhauer's philosophical methods or methodological views, even though you would think it relevant to him as a heterodox kantian, and even though he says things like about e.g. problems disappearing which should make a wittgensteinian's ears prick up.
ReplyDeleteThe one time I met Monk was back in the '90s at a conference at his own university (Southampton). Even then he put Hacker down quite unabashedly in conversation. I'm glad to see that he hasn't changed in this respect. We were supposed to have some correspondence about my paper later, but I never got around to starting it or even finishing the paper to my satisfaction, and was so embarrassed by this that I didn't even attend when Monk in turn had a paper at a conference here in Helsinki a few years ago. Too bad.
ReplyDeleteI guess there is a danger of labeling as "Hackerite" any scholar who is not fully committed to the positions held by certain high-profile opponents of Hacker's (who are not even the only ones). Someone like David Stern is clearly not "Hackerite" just because he's not convinced of the Diamond-Conant reading of the Tractatus. Much the same would seem to go for Monk.
About Schopenhauer: I just finished my Finnish translation of Wittgenstein's Koder diaries, which will be published later this summer. The large number of parallels with Schopenhauer (as well as Nietzsche) struck me quite forcefully in the first half of the diaries, from 1930-1932. Perhaps Wittgenstein's interest in certain thinkers came in periods, and he had Schopenhauerian ones in the mid-1910s and in the early 1930s.
j.: Yeah, "...but I don't think it's very good" is a thing I've heard a lot when I've asked about for literature recommendations on Schopenhauerian topics. Methodology and the Ideas are two places in particular where there's just not much good stuff out there, it seems.
ReplyDelete"he says things like about e.g. problems disappearing which should make a wittgensteinian's ears prick up."
This doesn't call any passages to my mind -- what things were you thinking of?
One thing that does come to mind (partly because I just wrote about it) is that both Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein deny that philosophy can proceed by way of proofs. Neither has any time for the idea that philosophy should immitate mathematics, and both spend a lot of time just saying things as they see them (though this is always framed by some larger purpose; they're not just diarists).
"The large number of parallels with Schopenhauer (as well as Nietzsche) struck me quite forcefully in the first half of the diaries, from 1930-1932. Perhaps Wittgenstein's interest in certain thinkers came in periods, and he had Schopenhauerian ones in the mid-1910s and in the early 1930s."
That is interesting -- I haven't heard anyone mention the middle period as a place to look before. If Wittgenstein mainly wrote on Schopenhauerian topics immediately before writing the Tractatus and immediately after returning to philosophy, that seems significant. Possibly. I'll have to follow up on this. Thanks for the tip.
j.--Yes, it's a shame. But there seems to be a growing interest in Schopenhauer, so perhaps some of the gaps in the literature will be filled.
ReplyDeleteTommi--I agree completely about the undesirability of labeling everyone who doesn't agree fully with Diamond and Conant as Hackerite. But I think it's a fair label to apply to Glock, and I had thought (quite wrongly, it seems) that Monk was very much in agreement with Glock. Stern was at the same conference, and it never occurred to me to call him a Hackerite. I wonder whether the Koder diaries are strikingly Schopenhauerian simply because there is so much there about ethics and religion, and Wittgenstein's ethics always were rather Schopenhauerian. (All of that is stuff about whose truth I wonder, that is to say.) I'm glad you're translating them--it's fascinating stuff.
Daniel--I'll try to check all the references to Schopenhauer in the Nachlass and see if there's a pattern. Although, of course, a) there might not be, b) I might not see one that is there, and c) there might be too many references for me to be able to go through them all.
I wonder whether the Koder diaries are strikingly Schopenhauerian simply because there is so much there about ethics and religion, and Wittgenstein's ethics always were rather Schopenhauerian.
ReplyDeleteThat's surely part of the matter, but what struck me especially was the Schopenhauerian undertone, or so to say. He mentions Schopenhauer by name only once (alluding to the preface of The World as Will and Representation when discussing the recently deceased Ramsey) - so a search of the Nachlass for occurrences of the proper name will have its limits. But he repeatedly employs what one could call a Schopenhauerian turn of phrase (intermingled with a Lichtenbergian, Nietzschean, Kierkegaardian and others - for instance, there are several remarks that are stylistically pure pastiches of Lichtenberg).
The vague sense hovering above everything in the diaries that this an age for cleverness and not depth, for scholarship and not philosophy, for convenience and not graft, is very Schopenhauerian. Although it's very easy to see it as something else, for instance Spenglerian (as Wittgenstein talks about Spengler explicitly quite a bit more than about Schopenhauer). Some of the diaries' imagery is also borrowed straight from Schopenhauer's works. For instance Wittgenstein complains of Spengler only seing "the giant's boots" when assessing Kierkegaard - an arch-Schopenhauerian simile nearly overused in Parerga und Paralipomena and elsewhere.
Glock - you're right of course. Don't get me started about Glock; give me Hacker any day over him. A friend of mine translated Schopenhauer's delicious The Art of Being Right some years ago for the same book series for which I now translated the Koder diaries. He also wrote a lengthy afterword which included, among other things, a brief reception history of Schopenhauer. He lamented the absence of good literature on the Schopenhauer-Wittgenstein relationship in much the same terms in which we have lamented it to each other here. But what stuck in my mind was how he specifically ticked off Glock's Wittgenstein Dictionary as being a crude attempt to portray Wittgenstein as having a mystical side separable from the rest, this mystical side as being lamentable and irrational, and Schopenhauer as having influenced only it and not any of the rest of Wittgenstein's thinking. (The entry on Schopenhauer in your own shorter Wittgenstein dictionary is of necessity quite brief, now that I looked it up, but it nevertheless compares favourably to Glock's if you ask me.)
I think, the more strongly the more I think about it, that whatever influence S. had on W. was much more comprehensive than a source for Tractarian mysticism, solipsism, etc. It may even extend to much more general matters, such as W.'s interest in language as a vehicle of philosophy or the use of the dialogue format, for instance through the aforementioned Art of Being Right.
"(alluding to the preface of The World as Will and Representation when discussing the recently deceased Ramsey)"
ReplyDeleteI'd be very interested to see this passage, if you have it ready to hand. Schopenhauer's preface was my favorite part of his book. (I'm sure I have access to the Bergen edition of the Nachlass somehow, but I haven't looked for it since I changed schools.)
Not only that, but I have Wittgenstein's Public and Private Occasions with Alfred Nordmann's superb English translation of the diaries:
ReplyDelete"R's incapacity for genuine enthusiasm or genuine reverence, which is the same, finally repulsed me more & more. On the other hand I had a certain awe of R. He was a very swift & deft critic when one presented him with ideas. But his criticism didn't help along but held back & sobered. That short period of time, as Schopenhauer calls it, between the two long ones when some truth appears first paradoxical & then trivial to people, had shrunk to a point for R. And so at first one labored arduously for a long time in vain to explain something to him until he suddenly shrugged his shoulders about it & said this was self-evident, after all. But he wasn't insincere about this." (entry of 27 April 1930, pp. 15-17)
Thanks, Tommi. I hope to be able to revise that dictionary some day, which would allow me to fix various mistakes (at least one of which I know you know about) and make it longer. I'd be tempted to comment on every one of Glock's entries, each of which seems to contain at least one thing I disagree with. That might just be a little too petty, but it could be useful too for readers of both books.
ReplyDeleteThere are only 8 references to "Schopenhauer" in the Nachlass, so you're right about that. Plus another one or two for "Schopenhauer's" and "Schopenhauerian." One's in the Koder diaries (as you quote above), one, I think, is in the PI, a couple are in Philosophical Grammar, a couple are in Philosophical Remarks, and a couple are in the Remarks on Frazer. There's at least one in the Notebooks 1914-1916, and then another couple in other notebooks. Nothing very significant that isn't already pretty well known. As you say, the main influence is probably not visible in the passages where Schopenhauer is mentioned by name.
daniel, i had in mind the last sentence of §15, though i guess i read into it a bit more than maybe i should: 'this problem itself can become perfectly clear only by its solution'. i associate it with a few things i've noticed recurring in my reading, e.g. the way that schopenhauer's key terms are contrived to be completely convertible into one another, or in the way that every impression on the body arouses the will except for exactly those impressions naturally suited to give rise to sensation and thus perception: i guess my intuition is that the tendency of what we would think of as philosophically significant terms to drop out or cancel out of schopenhauer's account at convenient points has something to do with his insistence that his method is wholly immanent, that it only has to do with coming to know what the one world we live in is. i would have to concede that it's not the most obvious of the things crying out for scholarly attention, though. maybe even just a private notion of mine. : )
ReplyDeleteanother far-undersold connection between schopenhauer and wittgenstein has got to be goethe, at least if you find e.g. m.w. rowe's paper on wittgenstein as a romantic very persuasive. but i think schopenhauer contributes to that neglect by under-selling how goethean his interest in nature and in the ideas is. i take it that has a lot to do, even if indirectly, with their similar attitudes toward things like proof and demonstration.
hey, tommi, do you still receive mail at your helsinki.fi address?
j., yes I do, as long as I don't give up my studies formally and not just de facto. I remember you sent me some query a year or two ago, but I never replied, although I kept intending to for weeks. Sorry about that. It's characteristic of me to disappear for long periods and then bounce back suddenly. But I do bounce back.
ReplyDeleteThere is some good work on Goethe and W. in addition to Rowe's deservedly cited paper: papers by McGuinness and Schulte, for instance, and there was even a volume of papers published in 2003 (already out of print). I've also seen praise for this book, but I haven't read it, and it hasn't been translated.
i guess my secret identity is all too transparent to you!
ReplyDeletei've read some or all of the papers in that peter lang volume, there are some worthwhile things in there.
Wittgenstein refers to 'ethics' as transcendental and distinguishes the 'will' as a 'phenomenon', which is only of interest to psychology... and this does indeed seem to recall Schopenhauer's view concerning the distinction between the 'intelligible' and the 'empirical' characters, and his insistence upon the idea that the true source of a man's nature lies in an 'act of the will' which takes place independently of all spatio-temporal determinations. However, whilst Schopenhauer treats phenomenal reality (to include human beings and their behaviour) as the direct external manifestation of the 'inner' will, Wittgenstein speaks in his Tractatus as if what happens in the world were always 'independent of my will', so there is no logical connection between the world and will.
ReplyDeleteYes. Thanks. It's very odd to say that what happens in the world is always independent of my will though. I would think that might be part of the ladder we are meant to throw away. Although we're supposed to climb up it before we throw it away, which means not rejecting it quite so quickly, I assume.
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