Schopenhauers philosophy has been widely influential, partly because his outlook acknowledges traditional moral values without the need to postulate the existence of God. His view also allows for the possibility of absolute knowledge by means of mystical experience. Schopenhauer also implicitly challenges the hegemony of science and other literalistic modes of expression, substituting in their place, more musical and literary styles of understanding. His recognition — at least with respect to a perspective that we typically cannot avoid — that the universe appears to be a fundamentally irrational place, was also appealing to 20th century thinkers who understood instinctual forces as irrational, and yet guiding, forces underlying human behavior. Schopenhauers influence has been strong among literary figures, which include poets, playwrights, essayists, novelists and historians such as Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacob Burckhardt, Joseph Conrad, André Gide, George Gissing, Franz Grillparzer, Thomas Hardy, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Friedrich Hebbel, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Joris Karl Huysmans, Ernst Jünger, Karl Kraus, D. H. Lawrence, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Stephane Mallarmé, Thomas Mann, Guy de Maupassant, Herman Melville, Robert Musil, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Arno Schmidt, August Strindberg, Italo Svevo, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Frank Wedekind, W. B. Yeats, and Emile Zola. In general, these authors were inspired by Schopenhauers sense of the worlds absurdity, either regarded in a more nihilistic and gloomy manner, or regarded in a more lighthearted, absurdist and comic manner. Among philosophers, one can cite Henri Bergson, Julius Bahnsen, Eduard von Hartmann, Suzanne Langer, Philipp Mainländer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hans Vaihinger, who tended to focus on selected aspects of Schopenhauers philosophy, such as his views on the meaning of life, his theory of the non-rational will, his theory of music, or his Kantianism. Schopenhauers theory of music, along with his emphasis upon artistic genius and the world-as-suffering, was also influential among composers such as Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvorák, Gustav Mahler, Hans Pfitzner, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakoff, Arnold Schönberg, and Richard Wagner. Schopenhauers 19th century historical profile is frequently obscured by the shadows of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Darwin and Nietzsche, but more than is usually recognized, in his rejection of rationalistic conceptions of the world as early as 1818, he perceived the shape of things to come. The hollow, nihilistic laughter expressed by the Dada movement at the turn of the century in the midst of WWI, reiterates feelings that Schopenhauers philosophy had embodied almost a century earlier. Schopenhauers ideas about the importance of instinctual urges at the core of daily life also reappeared in Freuds surrealism-inspiring psychoanalytic thought, and his conviction that human history is going nowhere, became keynotes within 20th century French philosophy, after two World Wars put a damper on the 19th century anticipations of continual progress that had captured the hearts of thinkers such as Hegel and Marx.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 17:52:57 +0000
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