David Bather Woods is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, particularly philosophical pessimism, ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of evil. He has taught widely across the history of philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and ethics. In this spotlight, Woods discusses his book Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist, a philosophical biography that explores the life, ideas, and enduring relevance of one of the nineteenth century’s most provocative thinkers. Reflecting on themes such as suffering, compassion, suicide, solitude, and the challenge of living well under the shadow of pessimism, Woods shows why Schopenhauer’s thought continues to speak powerfully to contemporary readers.
What is your work about?
My book, Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist, is about the life and thought of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who is the main subject of my academic research. It’s a short philosophical biography that presents events from Schopenhauer’s life in relation to a selection of ideas from his work.
As the subtitle indicates, Schopenhauer is perhaps best known for developing a philosophical defense of pessimism. Here, pessimism doesn’t simply mean a tendency to focus on the negative side of life (although Schopenhauer could certainly be accused of that). Advocates of philosophical pessimism, like Schopenhauer, argue that many of the negative aspects of life are not merely accidental but deeply embedded in our existence. For Schopenhauer in particular, it’s the inevitability of suffering: he argues that suffering is essential to life, including nonhuman animal life, too. Occasionally, he uses this claim as the grounds for an even more pessimistic conclusion: that non-existence would be preferable to existence.
But my book is not too downbeat! Seen in the correct light, Schopenhauer is a compelling character living in interesting times. He can even be quite entertaining. Plus, I wanted to introduce the light that floods into Schopenhauer’s philosophy through his moral philosophy. For Schopenhauer, the only proper moral response to the suffering that essentially characterizes all of life is compassionate forms of loving kindness and justice. You can even interpret his pessimism as itself based on a deep—if abstract—sympathy for humankind.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
There are already a few biographies of Schopenhauer in English, German, and other languages. There’s an excellent academic biography by the Schopenhauer scholar David Cartwright, which was published in 2010. I used it a lot as a source. But I still saw some room for a short philosophical biography that introduces a selected set of interesting and unusual topics in Schopenhauer’s work and attempts not only to explain their origins in terms of his life story, but also to read the events of his life in their light.
In particular, there’s a certain genre of philosophical biography that presents the philosopher’s life—that is, the specific subject of the biography and also the philosophical life in general—as a model for how to live well. A good example is Sarah Bakewell’s book on Montaigne, which is even titled How to Live. I love reading those sorts of books, and I hadn’t seen a good one on Schopenhauer. Additionally, and ironically, Schopenhauer raised many of the characteristically pessimistic questions about the whole idea of living well, especially when this means living happily. He was not himself a paragon of virtue, and some of the stories from his life put him in an unflattering light. It seemed like an interesting challenge to come at Schopenhauer’s life and thought from that perspective. Is it possible to live, and live well, under the cloud of pessimism?
What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?
The topic selection was a very important part of this book’s structure. While the book takes the reader through the events of Schopenhauer’s life, it doesn’t strictly follow a chronological order. That’s because the chapters are organized by topic, and each topic is usually illustrated by an example event from Schopenhauer’s life, but the chapter is also free to include relevant details from his life and work before and after the event.
A very good, and very important, example is Schopenhauer’s views on suicide. This was an unavoidable topic because Schopenhauer’s father died by what his family strongly suspected was suicide (though they did not make it public). Schopenhauer was only seventeen and a life as a philosopher was not yet on the cards—although he was academically bright, his education was geared towards working as an international merchant like his father. Schopenhauer repeatedly returned to the question of suicide in his work, and he developed a position that, on the one hand, discourages suicide, but on the other does not morally condemn it. He was deeply critical of stigmatizing attitudes toward suicide from different corners of society, particularly religion and law. Although I don’t want to propose this as a simplistic origins story—“Schopenhauer thought about suicide more sympathetically than others because that’s how his father probably died”—it’s still an area where Schopenhauer’s life and work do shed light on one another.
Other topics include solitude and society, madness, fame, punishment, education, death, sex, sexuality and gender, love and marriage, and more. For all these topics, there are stories to tell that put Schopenhauer’s life in the light of his ideas and vice versa.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
As the work on the book progressed, I realized I had the material to include some biographical details that hadn’t previously featured in English biographies of Schopenhauer. For example, it always struck me as significant to our perception of Schopenhauer that photography was invented in his lifetime. Schopenhauer was among the first major philosophers ever to be photographed. It must have had an impact on his thoughts on visual perception and visual culture, and, sure enough, in his later work, references to photographic technology start to appear. It was fascinating to research Schopenhauer’s experiences of being photographed, what happened with those images, what he thought of them, and how they might have determined our perception of Schopenhauer. I discuss all these things in the chapter on Schopenhauer’s rise to fame in the last decade of his life (after a long period of being basically unknown).
I also found myself in a position to draw a conclusion about whether Schopenhauer lived well. I do think he lived well, but not because he discovered the secret of happiness or anything like that. I think Schopenhauer was true to himself, true to his vocation, and—if I can put it this way—true to truth. He said and wrote what he thought, even though for a long time it got him nowhere with the public or his peers. Being so intellectually honest sometimes got him into trouble, socially and professionally: he could be too frank with his opinions and criticisms. It must have been tempting to buckle to public opinion sometimes, but he never did. And eventually, by not compromising, he found his audience of readers, who to this day take a lot of comfort, ironically, in his sometimes dark and always unflinching picture of life.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
Although I occasionally mention features of the contemporary world, and sometimes can’t resist judging Schopenhauer from the standpoint of contemporary values, mostly in the book, I try to leave it to the reader to realize how Schopenhauer is relevant to us today.
An obvious connection—though sometimes overplayed, I think—is that there are many reasons to be pessimistic about the world, politically, sociologically, economically, ecologically, etc. Schopenhauer’s pessimism isn’t meant to be a comment about the times; in fact, the grounds for his pessimism aren’t historical and instead tap into timeless facts about life. But still, people are bound to see the dark times reflected in Schopenhauer’s work.
A less obvious, and dare I say more optimistic, point of relevance is as follows. Schopenhauer’s ethics argues that compassion is the basis of morality. He conceives of compassion as the only proper moral response to the suffering of others. Importantly, this sort of compassion is not conditional on, say, respect, and certainly not on likeability. Compassion in its purest form is not a merit-based moral emotion. Applying this to Schopenhauer himself, I didn’t have to present him in the book as consistently likable in order (hopefully) for the reader to feel some sympathy for him. Applied to the contemporary world, I think there’s an important message about being compassionate even toward people whom you don’t respect or like, and who you may even disdain and hold in contempt. Schopenhauer himself, in some respects, had a lot of contempt for humankind—that human beings can be cruel, depraved, greedy, stupid, etc.—and yet, at the same time, he encouraged an attitude of compassion toward our pains, sufferings, miseries, and torments. This sort of compassion, if we can achieve it, puts limits and restraints on what we are willing to do to people we don’t get along with. I think this is worth keeping in mind in times of deep division.
What writing tips do you have?
Read! And read widely. Especially if you are an academic writing for a wider audience. If you only ever read academic prose, then you’re never going to appreciate what can be done with language, form, and style.
An old chestnut: choose your verbs wisely. Academics tend to pick from the same limited range of quite bland verbs, partly because we have such a wide range of impressive nouns and adjectives to choose from. (I revised that sentence because I originally wrote: “Academics have a tendency to…”—why use a verb-noun form when a verb is right there?) A well-chosen verb is a beautiful thing, especially in narrative writing. It injects—imbues, enlivens—your writing with action and movement.
How has your work influenced your teaching?
I teach an entire module on Schopenhauer for undergraduates at the University of Warwick. Studying Schopenhauer’s life lets me bring him to life and present his ideas in context.
But it has also been fascinating to discuss some of the more “problematic” aspects of Schopenhauer’s life and work with young people. For instance, as I discuss at length in the book, Schopenhauer had notoriously sexist and misogynistic views, which are evident both in some of his behaviors toward women and in his printed work. There’s a myth about today’s university student that they can’t tolerate nuance and context: this has not been my experience. In fact, it has been heartening to see how well today’s students, once you sit down and talk with them, can, on the one hand, adopt a strong stance against what is patently unacceptable, but on the other, not allow this to eclipse everything that might be of value in a person’s work.
On this particular topic, for example, my students find it fascinating that, ironically, sections of Schopenhauer’s work were read by feminists later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Why? Because Schopenhauer raised serious question marks about the way that social equality for women (which, regrettably, he thought was a mistake…) was attached to the institution of marriage. This condition pushed unmarried women, like his sister and his widowed mother, into even more vulnerable social and economic positions. My students can appreciate that Schopenhauer invites us to review how gender relations are structured in society, even as they judge for themselves where else his proposals go wrong.
David Bather Woods
David Bather Woods is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, especially his philosophical pessimism and his moral and political philosophy. He has taught a wide range of topics in philosophy, including the history of philosophy (esp. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), philosophy of religion, ethics, aesthetics, and, most recently, the philosophy of evil.
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
