13 - Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein

Summary

It is common to complain that Schopenhauer has not received the recognition he deserves. At first sight, this complaint may seem unfounded. Over the past 150 years, Schopenhauer has reached a wider general public than most great philosophers. He has also in- fluenced leading artists such as Wagner, Thomas Mann, and Proust. Finally, he has had a tremendous, if often indirect, influence on continental philosophy. His emphasis on the will and his anti-intellectualism were the driving forces behind life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), a movement which, through Nietzsche, influenced existentialism and post-modernism. His pessimism was appreciated by unorthodox Marxists like Horkheimer. And his discussion of the unconscious has obvious parallels with psychoanalysis, which itself has exerted a significant collateral influence on continental philosophy.

Nevertheless, the worry that Schopenhauer may be unduly neglected is not without foundation. In the current climate, professional philosophy, as opposed to cultural studies or literary theory, is increasingly dominated by analytic philosophy, even on the Continent. And Schopenhauer’s influence on analytic philosophy in general has been even smaller than that of other nineteenth-century German philosophers like Hegel and Nietzsche. This is unjust, since his work features at least as many analytic arguments as theirs.