David Bather Woods, "Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

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Welcome to the new books network.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to another episode of new books network.

This is Morteza Haji Zadeh, your host from new books network.

Today, I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. David Baker Woods about his most recent book,

Arthur Schopenhauer, the life and thought of philosophy's greatest pessimist,

which was published by Chicago University Press in 2025, just a few months ago in November.

Dr. David Baker Woods is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick.

David, welcome to new books network.

Hi, it's a pleasure to join you.

Before we start, I'm talking about the book.

I would appreciate if you could just very briefly introduce yourself,

tell us how you were attracted to philosophy,

your free love expertise, and specifically Arthur Schopenhauer,

what piqued your interest to read about him and write about him.

Yeah, so I, David Baker Woods, I work at the University of Warwick as an associate professor,

and I first became interested in philosophy because it felt that philosophical questions naturally

occurred to me. I was interested in big metaphysical questions, ethical questions,

and one of the first areas that I became interested in, which is kind of a combination of

metaphysical and ethics, was the question of free will and responsibility in a causally

deterministic universe that was the first kind of philosophical puzzle that really interested

me, and it turned out that there was this book that I found called The Prize Essay on the

Freedom of the Will, which was written by this guy, Arthur Schopenhauer, and I started reading

that in my late teens. Sort of before I decided that I was going to study philosophy at university,

it was more of a sort of self-guided discovery, and I'd been reading other philosophers at the time,

really hard to read philosophers like Kant, and even trying Heidegger, and bits of

Leibniz, and bits of Chomsky, and none of it was really sticking very well until Schopenhauer,

and I found that everything he said I could understand, and everything that I could understand,

I could relate to. I felt like he was communicating thoughts that I hadn't quite articulated,

as well, and going really deeper, farther deeper than I could. So it was that really. He was a

philosopher I found to be accessible, and also expressing ideas that I was interested in,

and so that's what hooked me into Schopenhauer. So I ended up doing my undergraduate dissertation

on Schopenhauer, my PhD on Schopenhauer, and so many years later, I ended up writing this book

on Schopenhauer. Wow, that's a long-term relationship, let's say it's Schopenhauer.

That's right, yeah. And I guess when there's a book on philosophy, a book published on philosophy,

especially the book on life and thought of a famous philosopher like Schopenhauer, the question

that comes to my mind, and I guess a lot of other people is that what is different about this book,

there I'm sure lots and lots of books about Schopenhauer, but I'm kind to know how do you approach

this is life and thought of, so it's right about it, it's a bit of a biography, a bit of his

philosophy, how is it different from other available books on him? Yeah, that's a good question.

There are many, many books on Schopenhauer. After his death in 1860, he became very popular across

Europe in German speaking countries, in English speaking countries and further, and since that time

always been books on Schopenhauer, short books, long books, and biographical books, and so one of

the earliest books to come out about him in English was a biography in 1876 by a German British

woman named Helen Zimmern, and that's a short biography that looks at the life and the idea, so

that's closer to what I've tried to do in this book, but more recently there's been a biography

in 2010, a very long academic biography that kind of covers as many details as possible about

about the life and elements of the philosophy. This book is different, I think, because firstly,

it's supposed to be a brief or account of Schopenhauer's life for the person who wants to just

become introduced to him, but also I think introduced to a different side of him, so the Schopenhauer

of my book isn't necessarily the grand metaphysician, even though I do touch on his overall world view,

instead it's structured around different topics that I think are quite worldly topics that would

interest the reader, stuff about gender and sexuality, stuff about life, death, and about the end

of life, suicide, which he was personally touched by, his interactions with fame, his thoughts on

solitude, his thoughts on punishment, and how these became metaphors for the way he expressed his

metaphysical and ethical ideas, and so once I had those topics in view, I thought, well, I can

arrange a life story around those topics and how we can use them to interpret some of the events

of his life, some of his thinking around the events of his life, so it's in that sense a philosophical

biography, and I didn't think that I'd been done with Schopenhauer yet, that type of biography,

because one of the interesting things about those sorts of biographies is they're often pursuing

the question of how should we live, how to live one's life well, and the great thing about Schopenhauer

or the irony is that he was very skeptical about the possibility of living well, at least the

according to a certain concept of what it is to live well, especially with regards to happiness,

so whereas other philosophical biographies you could look at their life of the philosopher and

think, oh, I'd like to emulate that and live happily ever after, with Schopenhauer that's kind of

out of the question, so then it becomes the question of did Schopenhauer live well,

is it according to his own standards or some other standards, and for him, how does one live well,

given all the challenges to a good life that he was spending all this philosophy,

constructing and examining? Let us talk a little bit about the book, and I must say that when I,

before we start, I must tell our listeners that it's not all the dark and pessimism,

I'm sure there are a lot of uplifting things they can't find in the book, and to be honest,

I was pleasantly surprised when I read your preface, because that's where you suggest that people

often laugh at Schopenhauer's darkest lines, and you're absolutely right, I think as a person,

I'm talking about myself as a person who's not really well trained in philosophy, I'm an enthusiast,

I read different philosophers and I deliberately look for their darkest lines maybe,

but I do that with a sort of a sense of pleasure, and again in the book you say that people

often laugh at his darkest lines, but you also frame compassion, compassion is also a moral core

of his philosophy, but how do you think human compassion coexist in Schopenhauer's philosophy

and thought, a philosopher who's famous for his pessimism? Yeah, I was quite keen to include

Schopenhauer's ideas on compassion in the book, because otherwise the picture of the world,

according to Schopenhauer, is a very dark one, he famously thought that life is characterized

by suffering and that even to the extent that it would be better never to have been born, and so,

although I do put that in the title that he is probably best known for being a pessimist,

I think his world you would be much darker and harder to tolerate, much even more

hopeless if it wasn't the case that we could do something about it, and the thing we can do about it,

well one of the things we can do about it in his view is take a compassionate action towards each

other in our attitude and our behavior, and so for him the fundamental basis of ethics is

treating the suffering of others as though it were your own, being motivated and incentivized to

relieve the suffering of others or at least not to add to their suffering any more than is already

the case, and to me that does bring out a bit of a lightness in Schopenhauer, and also it can

thread through a lot of the topics that I became interested in the book, like for instance his

attitude towards animals, both as a philosopher, he was a strong champion of animal rights and the

animal protection movement, and knew some of the activists working in those fields in the mid 19th

century, but also in his personal life, one other thing he's quite well known for is being a dog

lover, he kept crudals, and they were his genuinely his closest companions, more like his

children even, the love and affection and respect, he shouted on them, so there was that as well

that could become a nice, I don't know, softener in the way that Schopenhauer has perceived.

And another part of the book that I enjoyed was, it was in your introduction where you talk about

his influence, so you kind of map a white reception arc, let's say, to a novelist such as

Thomas Mann, Proust, Borhei, Hubert Martin's style, other philosophers such as Nietzsche,

Horkheimer, Adorno, they were all influenced by him, so you kind of see his footprints,

fingerprints everywhere, I've told you to bake it even, philosophers such as Nietzsche,

Bingenstein, what is it, what do you think it is, that what did they, let's say, find in him

in terms of his style, his style of writing, the problems that they needed to wrestle with,

that they found some sort of answer in Schopenhauer's philosophy, why do you think he had such a huge

influence on both philosophers and also novelists? I think one of the things that was attractive

to writers, artists, as well as philosophers is the same thing that attracted me to him,

which is that he's very clear and readable. I think that from the outside, a lot of philosophers,

unless you're willing to spend a huge amount of time puzzling out their use of language,

a lot of philosophers are quite hard to get to know, whereas Schopenhauer, you can pick him up

and start reading almost anywhere and get something out of him pretty much immediately,

and that doesn't I think make him superficial, I think it just means that he was, that was one of the

things that mattered to him, that people could already see what he was talking about, and may have

even thought it before, but just not heard it put that way. And so when people do discover him,

they really seem to, some people anyway, take to him very strongly. It's a very famous story

about Nietzsche discovering Schopenhauer and basically devouring his books as soon as he could get

his hands on them. There is often stories like that of a very strong and almost obsessive reaction.

I tell the story in the book about the writer he mentioned, Jorge Luis Borges, and

who said that the reason why he never needed to write philosophy himself was that Schopenhauer

already did it for him. And a similar thing actually was said by by Wittgenstein, oddly,

even though if you were to put Schopenhauer's philosophy side by side with certain phases of

Wittgenstein's philosophical trajectory, they would look very, very different. So I think there's

that. I think that he was accessible and and and provoke just strong reaction. I think the other

thing is that he had maybe similar sensibilities and aspirations to a lot of artists. So similar

sensibilities. And he mattered to him. Style mattered. It mattered that his language was vivid.

And he mattered and he allowed himself to use certain rhetorical effects of kind of

humor and irony. But also he aspired to kind of build a world. He's one of the kind of

philosophers of the 19th century. We think of when we think of somebody who tries to come up with

a theory of everything really and tries to account for every part of reality, nature, human

culture. And so his aspirations were very, very grand in that respect. And then I suppose finally

the other thing, particularly with artists, is that he himself respected artists very deeply.

Of pretty much all kinds, especially musicians. And he was influential on some musicians,

including for instance, in particular, Richard Wagner. But also painters and poets. He

absolutely adored poetry. And so I think there was a kind of mutual respect there. And also a kind of

his veneration emboldened them to become the artists that they were. And so yeah. So all those

reasons put together, I think makes him a good match for literary and visual artists and musical

artists as well as philosophers. Let us talk about one of his famous fables. So he poor cubine

fable. First, let's just to get a lay off the land. Would you please tell us what is that

poor cubine fable? And your argument in your book when it comes to that fable is that he may

have mistreat his own parable. Can you tell us what is that fable? And how do you think Chopin

Hauer has mistreat his own fable? What do you mean by that? Yeah. So Schopenhauer's porcupines,

it comes in a book, his last book, Perega and Paralapomena. In fact, one of the last chapters,

there's a just a set of fables, stories, tales, sort of like esop's fables. And one of them,

well, the most memorable is this one about a community of porcupines who are huddled together

on a cold winter's day. And they, the cold forces them to draw closer together for warmth.

But then when they get too close to each other, the quills on their backs start to prick

each other. And so they have to disperse again. But then once they've disperse, they start to get

cold again, and they come together again, and then they prick each other and draw back again,

they end up in this kind of oscillation until they reach maybe a kind of happy medium, a

medium distance where they're not close enough to stay warm, but not so close that they prick each

other. And so I think that's, yeah, it's a lovely metaphor. There's even a book in a psychotherapy

called Schopenhauer's porcupines and Freud references it in Freud's work on group therapy.

And so it's a lovely image. That's why it's like a perfect kind of esopian fable.

The thing I think where Schopenhauer, well, I don't want to say he goes wrong, but you think

that the moral of the story here is that people are indosolubally social, and that that is a

difficult dynamic for us to manage. We want to be around each other, but sometimes we become too

close for comfort. And so one of the difficulties of human life is figuring out the right level of

proximity, the right level of distance to maintain, and that's probably going to always be changing.

That I think is, well, I guess the reason why it isn't a great ending for a fable or a

parable is that the moral isn't clear. It's more of a conundrum, like how should we live with this

problem? And so instead Schopenhauer draws what I think is, I guess, quite a simplistic moral,

but one that served him well, which is that there's a few lines at the end of the parable way,

he sort of says, but those, there may be one or two porcupines who have enough inner warmth

that they can withdraw, move away from the others without, and therefore not be pricked by them and

not pricked them back. So for him in the end, it's a parable about the importance of self-reliance,

not about the about the social needs that we that we have. And I think that makes it a slightly

less universal story, because of course there may be, and Schopenhauer might be an example of this,

there may be people who who can withdraw from society and live by themselves, or at least appear to,

of course, Schopenhauer wasn't a hermit, he didn't go off grid, but socially speaking, he didn't

have very many close friends and things like that and protected himself in that way, like the

the porcupine of inner warmth does. But that's not the case for everybody. Not everybody lived the

solitary life that Schopenhauer did, or not even close to that. And so I think for the rest of us,

it's the dilemma that's more appealing. That's why it's called Schopenhauer's porcupines,

we're more interested in the message about the society, about community. We're less interested,

I think, we don't tend to remember that story for the actual ending that Schopenhauer gives it,

which is that there are these few porcupines who can opt out, I think we're more interested in

where that leaves us when we can't opt out. I think this one speaks cogent with us even today,

given that more or less in the West people prefer to have this individualistic approach. But again,

there's been research interest in more collective forms of community building,

at least among more progressive communities, people seem to be prefer, and it's a conundrum,

I'm not saying one is good or the other one is not. But I guess it's that that favor speaks to us,

I mean, without coming to this, without let's say warning you down to one final conclusion,

which I agree with you in terms of that this is not really, the point is not to keep a

courteous distance as, you know, to direct the quote from Jürgen and Schopenhauer. But I guess

it's still very much alive in terms of the conundrum that we are left weak. Yeah, I agree. I think

that it's a metaphor that can summarize social relations even in an era that Schopenhauer could

barely have imagined the idea of the internet, where we are bumping up against each other in

virtual ways that we never could have anticipated. We ought not to take this parable too literally

and think it means about anything about living in physical proximity to our fellow human beings,

even living in virtual proximity to our fellow human beings. We don't know exactly. We haven't

figured out what the right distance is and what the boundary should be, and we're not good at

knowing when to withdraw, we're not good at knowing when we are imposing on others. So I think

you're right. It's still a resonant metaphor, this idea of Schopenhauer's porcupines. It is

tapping, I think, something into the human condition. Yeah. Let's talk about the idea of boredom and

pain. He witnessed some really grueling scenes when it was a teenager in terms of London hangings,

for example, the witnesses, London hangings, and later on, he also writes about the judiciary system

and the penitentiary system. You argue that to Schopenhauer boredom was a profound human suffering

rather than pain, which many other philosophers have highlighted pain, maybe, but to Schopenhauer

was boredom. And that sort of shaped his critique of solitary confinement in early American

prisons. Can you tell us what he got right about that punishment solitary confinement that still

speaks to us today and also that still tells us something about the human condition in modern times,

boredom? Yeah. So Schopenhauer thinks that there are two kinds of pain. There is suffering, which

is when the will is frustrated, when it's trying to achieve something and there are obstacles in

its way, it doesn't get what it wants, etc. But then there is boredom, which is the opposite,

which is when the will has gotten what it wants. But that doesn't end up in a state of constant

satisfaction, but we seem to miss the longing or we long to long. We kind of think, I don't know

what to do at myself. I want something to do at myself when I don't know what to do.

Now, of the two, the suffering is the kind that we tend to pay more attention to because it's so

overt, because when somebody is suffering, whether it's in a minor or a major way, it's so obvious,

and so unpleasant. And so this boredom, which is a bit more existential, a bit more subtle,

a bit less showy, tends to go unnoticed, but Schopenhauer's message here is to say,

do not underestimate how seriously damaging suffering of the boredom kind can be. And an example

he gives of that is he makes kind of what seems like a throwaway reference to the American

prison system. He says that boredom is so terrible that it's been turned into a form of punishment in

the Pennsylvania or the Philadelphia prison system he refers to specifically. And I got curious

about what he is referring to there, because it could just be a throwaway reference, but then

it's so specific, it's not just any old penitentiary. Now, it turned out in 1829, this prison

opened in Philadelphia called the Eastern State Penitentiary, and it was the kind of culmination

of a system of prison discipline called the Pennsylvania system, which was based around 24-hour

solitary confinement. And so people were held in the solitude of their cells around the clock,

and within a decade or so, the results of this policy were shown to be absolutely disastrous

for people's mental and spiritual well-being. It was seen to be even more punishing than the kind

of traditional forms of hard labor, group labor, corporal punishment, and so on, which suggested,

well, I suppose this is this is the thing. Nowadays, we would again analyze the harm there in terms

of social harm, social damage. We would think that well, since human beings are indesolibly

social, when you dissolve that social bond, you break the human in a way that's maybe not

expected, but when it happens, it's really noticeable. The thing is, as we said earlier in this

conversation, Schopenhauer wasn't so convinced that human beings are intrinsically social creatures,

he thinks it's human beings if they want to, if they're capable of it, they can withdraw from

society. So he had to analyze those sorts of punishments, the harms of those punishments,

in an alternative way, and so instead, he analyzed them in terms of this sort of existential

harm of boredom, which is that rather than thinking that human beings need other human beings,

he's really thinking human beings need something to do. Since human beings are kind of defined by

what he called the will to life, when that will to life doesn't have an outlet, when it's forced

to a stop, that has a tremendously damaging effect on the person. And so from that viewpoint,

Schopenhauer found a kind of novel way, I think, to analyze and critique, in passing,

these American prison systems that were cropping up, and there were being copied in European

prisons, including in the UK. I mentioned in the book that there was a prison inspector,

William Crawford, who goes over to Eastern State to inspect it in order to, for that to

the designs of the Pensonville prison that was being constructed in London. So these were really

important things. I think that's a good example, in my view, of where there's this hidden connection

between Schopenhauer's theories and abstract thoughts on phenomena like suffering and boredom.

And then there's a touch point with these real world and very 19th century inventions, where

they're supposed to be a matter of progress, that the idea of solitary confinement was supposed

to be a humane development. It wasn't supposed to be more punishing, but accidentally they end up

enforcing what turned out to be one of the most punishing things you can do to a person,

once you see the results. Yeah, so there's the connection there between Schopenhauer's analysis

of boredom on the one hand and his views on solitary confinement in the prison system on the other.

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in the credit karma app. Given that we are talking about a philosopher who was a pessimist,

I think obviously one of the topics is life and death and you have a whole chapter about suicide.

The type of the chapter is destigmatizing suicide without endorsing it. I love the title of the

chapter. I enjoyed the content where you navigate through Chopin Hours ideas, how he engages with

Kant's idea of suicide in the Humes. I think the book treads the line between that

Kantian prohibition and Humes permission of suicide. Let me ask you how do you

articulate? There is a balance there, right? There's a balance there in that chapter

discussing Chopin Hours ideas and also engaging with Kant and Humes idea. How do you articulate

that balance? That suicide is not it to be morally shamed but not also philosophically

recommended or endorsed? How do you articulate this balance and how it's Chopin Hours engage with

the idea? To be honest, I like the way you put it. That is the essence of it. To summarize,

Chopin Hours thinks there is a right to suicide but a reason against it and the grounds for the right

are to suicide are sort of as follows. So Kant was a critic of suicide or at least one of the

examples he gives when talking about violations of the categorical imperative as he puts it,

is the ending of one's own life in order to get out of a difficult life. For Kant, that one

way of thinking of that is that it's a failure to observe a duty we have to ourselves. Now,

Chopin Hours is very skeptical of the very idea of a duty to oneself in that sense that

we owe something to ourselves morally. He does think it's potentially important to look after

yourself but he doesn't think there's a moral duty to do so. In fact, his conception of

right and wrong really is you wrong someone when you violate their will and for Chopin Hours,

somebody chooses to end their life or they're not violating their own will, they're acting

in accordance with their own will. So they're not perpetrating a wrong on themselves. In fact,

he thinks the possibilities for perpetrating wrongs on yourself are very limited because of the

structure of what a wrong is. So he doesn't think we do any wrong morally speaking by

ending our own lives. In that respect, he's more aligned with David Hume, who in his essay of suicide,

Hume defends suicide and thinks that somebody doesn't violate if they've considered it carefully

and that's what they choose for themselves, that somebody doesn't violate any moral law.

And also another thing that's the tomb impressed upon Chopin Hours, that therefore the religious

and legal prohibitions as well as the social shame and stigma of suicide should also be deconstructed.

We kind of, I mean, if you read, I was actually light on the details but if you read some of the

accounts of what was done to the bodies, the corpses of people who had died by suicide,

it's really horrendous that people would take out punishments on people who had already died.

And if they couldn't do it, then it would transfer to the family who were also sort of had to live

in shame. Chopin Hours thought that was a tremendously wrong and pigheaded and unsympathetic thing to do

to a person who had already clearly been pushed beyond their limits. So that's the side of him

thinking there is a right to suicide and it shouldn't be stigmatized. Where is then the reason

not to do it? Well, this is where Chopin Hours, the specifics of Chopin Hours ethics start to

come into play because for Chopin Hours, there is a way out of suffering that is not suicide.

For Chopin Hours, human beings, he thinks, can aspire to achieve a different form of relief

from suffering, which he actually identifies with the spiritual practices of a lot of

classical Indian philosophies like Buddhism and Hinduism, but also identifies it in other world

religions and philosophies, which is a kind of self-denial, a kind of asceticism, a willlessness,

there's various ways of putting it, negation of the world to life, extinguishing the flames of

desire, which he thinks are the source of a lot of our sufferings. And so he kind of suggests that

the person who is considering suicide is on to something. They've noticed something that

life is full of suffering, not accidentally, but as part of its very structure. The thing is,

he doesn't recommend a suicidal response because he doesn't think that gets to the root of it.

In fact, he thinks that it leaves things as it were exactly as they were, whereas he

recommends, instead, persevering with life in order to almost break through to the other side and

use that experience of suffering as to have a direct effect on the will to life and start to

tranquilize the will to life, he thinks. Now, of course, not many people will be compelled by that,

if you were trying to convince or encourage a person who is considering suicide, not to do it,

I don't think Shobunhau's willlessness is particularly going to give them a strong incentive

to carry on living. And so I think there's a different way and more abstract way of thinking about

what Shobunhau is getting at here, which is that when people are considering suicide, what they

really want is not an end to life itself, but an end to life, to living miserably. And Shobunhau

is saying, if you want an end to living miserably, well, in my view, my philosophy here is the way,

which is willlessness. But I suppose in this day and age, or if you're not convinced by that,

you might think of other ways of not living miserably that would not involve actually ending your life.

And that, I think, is a very important sensible thought when we think about suicide,

when we're thinking about somebody who's considering it, and if we can think of a way that they

can continue to live, but live less miserably, if that's what's motivating them to consider suicide,

well, then that might be a genuine incentive for them to carry on living, and also if we can

actually implement it, then a way that we can make our lives actually better. One last thought on

this, which is, I mentioned, I briefly mentioned earlier in our conversation that Shobunhau's family

had personal experience of suicide. I should flesh that out, which is Shobunhau's father died when

Shobunhau was 17 in what the family privately suspected was, suicide. He was found in the canal behind

the family home in Hamburg, where they were living at the time. It's hard not, especially when you're

looking at it from a biographical perspective, to relate these ideas. Shobunhau wanted to

destigmatize his father's actions, his father, although he didn't have a warm relationship with

certainly he venerated even to the point of slightly feared. I think his family did feel

ashamed. They didn't openly discuss it. Certainly, they didn't communicate publicly about the

circumstance of the always in public characterized it as accidental. So I think felt suppressed and

shamed by it. At the same time, though, he wants to not characterize it as anything other than a

mistake. He seems to be trying to find a way to think of suicide where you can say, look, I don't

think that person should be shamed and blamed, but on the other hand, I do think that they

should have chose otherwise. I think that again is a very realistic and common experience of people

who have been touched by suicide in their lives, especially from family members. They want a way

of thinking about them so they can understand that the person in their view made a mistake,

but also understand that that person is not some kind of hideously immoral person that they

were actually a person in pain often and that they deserve our sympathy rather than any sort of

stigma. Another topic, and I must say that as a person who wasn't really that much familiar

with Chopin Abraham, I was just reading your book. I was impressed with the with and breadth of

topics that he talked about and discussed. We talked about his influence on other writers about

boredom. He talks about suicide and I did not know. He's theory, let's say, about

mental illness or madness, let's say. When he was a student in Berlin, you mentioned that he

interviews patients. I don't know, I saw him. If I'm not mistaken, the name is Charity.

My French or German is horrible, but anyhow. There was this theory that madness is subhuman,

but he rejects that and he develops a more memory-based account of madness.

If I'm not mistaken, he believes that to protect the will, we patch those unbearable gaps

with fiction and this is something that even Freud acknowledged. Towards the beginning of the

interview, you did mention that Freud was also one of the people who was influenced by him.

So my question is that when when he visits these assignments and he develops these thesis that

madness is a torn threat of memory, how far can we claim or stretch this claim that Chopin

Abraham was actually a pre-Freudian thinker? Yeah, good. So I think that's another really

interesting place where the life and the thought come together. It was one of the places where you

can really begin to trace where Chopin has thinking on a given topic is coming from in his life

experiences. So when he was a student at the University of Berlin, when he was in his late teens

to early 20s, he started visiting the patients in the psychiatric wing of the Berlin charity,

as you mentioned, which was the hospital and it wasn't unusual for people who were students,

particularly if they were medical students but others to visit the hospital and examine the

patients, I guess the difference is that not all of them came away with this proto-Freudian

theory of madness and not all of them employed the method that Chopin Abraham did, which I think

is one of the most remarkable things about it. So the important thing is if you look at his work,

his published works, he authorised life, he reports direct interactions with people who were

classified as being mad, which is not a clinical term nowadays, of course, but that's the way it

was spoken of. And he talks about their life stories and what led them to this breakdown,

what led them to be in these institutions. And I think already that's remarkable because

he's not going in and observing their behaviour. He doesn't talk about what they do,

like the kind of behavioural things that mean that they might be where they are. He talks about

what they say and the stories they tell about themselves. He actually interacts with them,

and I think firstly that is an interesting source of evidence that how does the person who's

characterised as mad talk about themselves, that's interesting. And secondly, it is deeply humanising

to be spoken to and to be treated like a human. There's nothing more humanising than that,

rather than being observed like a specimen or showcased. These seem to be one-to-one conversations

that Chopin Abraham was having with people in these institutions. And so yes, the theory that

he comes up with is the idea that he noticed the stories that these people would tell about

themselves. They're often told sincerely and in earnest. They seem to be stories that they

really believed about themselves, but they were evidently false. There was evidence to believe

otherwise, or the stories were inconsistent. There was attention in them that meant that they

couldn't be true. Or there was something absurd about them, like the precipitating event that

might have caused their madness seemed to be something that was very insubstantial. It shouldn't

have actually occurred that way. Therefore, it suggests that there should be there's probably

something deeper going on below the surface. And so he begins to think that maybe that's what

madness consists in is a disrupted sense of self through the distortion, perhaps unconsciously,

but deliberately distortion of memory, of who you are, of what has happened to you.

So that's how he ends up talking about madness as the torn thread of memory. And his proto-affording

because he even starts to use words like repression. He seems to think that people take memories that

they can't assimilate because they're threatening, they're shameful, they're humiliating, they're

traumatic. And they push those down or cut those out and fill them in with fictions or what have

you so that there's an appearance of a coherent sense of self, but it's really based on

something untruthful. And now Freud denies direct influence. He was quite, I think, did this

quite a lot, which is that he thought that he even says that his ignorance enabled him to make

another discovery. That is, had he read Schopenhauer sooner, which he did eventually read Schopenhauer

on these topics, but he claims to have read Schopenhauer after he'd made his discoveries. And so

had he read him sooner would have deprived him of a discovery because it would have been the

theory of repression or the disease of that theory would have been there and Schopenhauer for him

to see. Of course, by then, Schopenhauer, by the turn of the 19th, you know, 18th into the 19th,

sorry, the 19th into the 20th century, Schopenhauer would have been kind of in the air,

in certainly in German speaking cultures. So probably Schopenhauer is already having his

influence on Freud in the kind of development of deep psychology through nature and so on,

before even though Freud, you know, up to that point, and he called into his own story,

had never read Schopenhauer. I do, you know, I won't go into it now, but in the book, I talk in more

detail about, actually, there is a kind of common ancestor here, which is that both Freud and

Schopenhauer were quite interested in the French approach to mental health and Freud trained in

France and Schopenhauer himself read a lot of French theorists like Esquirell and Pignale and

others who started taking a more humane and sort of psychosomatic approach to mental health.

So there is a bit of a common ancestor there, but that's the, anyway, that's the thread that links them.

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And another part of the book was chapter 6 and 7. I guess we were talking about

love, sex, and gender in Chopin Howard's thoughts. And you discuss these thoughts and

where he reduces, for example, romance to species, driven procreation, and he had some,

maybe not some popular thoughts on same-sick relationships, but he revised his

some of his dismissals of that same-sex relationships. Can you talk about his ideas and metaphysics

of sexual love? And whether his early ideas about same-sex desire and why did he revise and

how did he revise those ideas later on? Yeah, sex is quite important or becomes a quite

important topic to Chopin Howard because as I've mentioned in passing a couple of times,

Chopin Howard thinks that all natural life is the manifestation and sometimes literal embodiment

of the will to life. And there is no more keen embodiment of that than sexual desire because

there it really is the will to life rather than the living individual organism. There you're kind

willing life at large by engaging and desiring deeply the propagation of the species. So it becomes

quite important to him. And again, in a way that it was important to late 19th century thinkers.

So we could talk here about Darwin, for instance, or Freud again about the roles of sexuality

and sexual reproduction in their theories. And so for Chopin Howard though, he has a quite

unromantic theory of sexual desire, which is that it does reduce down to the sex drive.

But what's quite interesting is that that becomes a bit of a puzzle for him because

he notices that not all sex acts seem to be directed towards procreation.

And we're not talking here about the fact that later in human science and history,

there would be contraceptive methods that could make a divide between sexual pleasure and sexual

reproduction. But he's talking about sexualities that are not directed towards the production of

children. So for instance, in particular, same sex relationships. If sex is about producing offspring,

well, what about the kinds of sex that don't produce offspring, the human beings?

And this is I think one of the admirable things about Chopin Howard that he kind of had to admit

that it must be natural for human beings to choose same sex partners. If it's been happening

throughout history, throughout the world, throughout culture, there have always been same sex

relationships. And they may have occupied different roles in the culture. They may have been

venerated in certain parts of ancient Greece, for instance. And up until the 19th century,

there were particularly in Italy where Chopin Howard spent a good few years of his life in total.

They were tolerated in a way that was different from say Northern Europe or Northern parts of Europe.

And so he had to explain that. Now, the explanation he gives is quite uncomfortable for us to hear

because it doesn't sound right to us these days. He seems to think that, yes, same sex relationships,

particularly has in mind, pedorestes, he calls it, which is the Greek model of young boys and

older men having sex with one another. He seems to think that serves a natural function, which is

that the younger men in those relationships are too immature to procreate and the older men are

kind of over mature. And so if the sexual desire lives on after sexual reproduction is advisable,

then instead, you know, he thinks that the kind of natural arrangement is that these two groups

have sex with each other, which is not a great theory for lots of reasons. It doesn't make sense

in certain parts and it doesn't cover certainly all forms of same sex relationships. It only covers

male age differentiated sexualities. It doesn't cover the whole range of male same sexuality

relationships. And it also doesn't even mention female or other gender. So it's

insufficient in that respect. But I suppose it's important that somebody in the mid-19th century

was publishing about this. This isn't a notebook that Schopenhauer never published like some of the

essays, say, of Jeremy Bentham, who actually in a way had, you know, well, definitely had more

progressive use than Schopenhauer on sexuality, but felt fit to self-centre them. For Schopenhauer,

he published them in an appendix to his chapter on the metaphysics sexual love in the last volume

of the world as a representation is his main book. So I think there was that. He was the willingness

to be open about the possibility that same sex relationships shouldn't be socially suppressed

because they have a natural function. I think that alone is, yeah, I'll call it progress,

or at least something that later in the 19th century, and certainly in the early 20th century,

German theorists of sex who are kind of leading the way in certain fields were taking,

took some encouragement from, even if they had to correct Schopenhauer's theories.

Yeah, that's why I think it was a step forward, even though there are definite limitations

with this theory about same sexuality. We talked about his thoughts on sexuality, but can

also tell us a little bit about his thoughts on gender and women as well? Yeah, good. So Schopenhauer,

one thing he's also known for, unfortunately, is that he had sexist and misogynistic views

on women. So in certain respects, as I've just been saying, on certain debates in the mid-19th

century, he was ahead of his time, or at least moving along with them, like his views on animals,

like some of his views around same sexuality, but his views on women were kind of deeply stuck

in the past, unfortunately. And we can't really just characterize him as a man of his times,

because to compare him with John Stuart Mill, who's another mid-19th century figure,

John Stuart Mill, of course, was publishing views on the rights of women in collaboration with

Harriet Taylor Mill. And so it's a pity that Schopenhauer thinks this way, that the source for

his views on women is this essay, again, in Perega and Parallel Apomena, which is called on women.

And in that, he gives basically the view that women are in most, if not all, respects naturally

inferior to men, and that they should have very limited rights to decide how society

occurs, and what happens in society, and that they can't be trusted and make decisions for

themselves, and all this terrible, terrible stuff. Now, the reason, so you might think, well,

so much for that, let's not talk about that, because it's a horrendous way to think about the

world, but the irony is that Schopenhauer was actually read by feminist thinkers, and even included

in some feminist anthologies on certain topics, including actually among the generation after

John Stuart Mill, that the generation in Britain, who saw themselves as kind of reformers

looking for a new life, a new ways of living, and so on, and the so-called new woman, as well,

was Schopenhauer's popular among that readership. So the question then becomes, well, why? When

Schopenhauer is so sexist and misogynist, why is he being taken seriously by anyone, much less

by women and feminist thinkers? Well, the reason is that there are certain parts of that essay on

where Schopenhauer begins to raise skeptical questions about the institution of marriage.

He seemed to think that marriage and its current form on the current model in mid-19th century

Europe was doing a disservice both to men and to women, and in particular, the ways it was doing

a disservice to women imposed really severe challenges to their lives. The reason being

that equal rights for women or equal treatment or the progress towards equal treatment was

conditional upon one thing, which is marriageability. In order to be a respectable woman,

in mid-19th century Europe, you have to be a married or about to be married woman, which meant

that certain subgroup of women, particularly unmarried women like women who never get married,

like, for instance, Schopenhauer's sister, women who were married and lose their husbands

like Schopenhauer's mother, they get pushed into socially vulnerable positions. Schopenhauer says

that they end up having to do harder labor or sex work. So he talks about the relationship

between the monogamy ideal that's enshrined in the institution of marriage in mid-19th

century Europe and its relationship to the sale of sex, which was available to men who on the

surface were pursuing monogamous relationships, but behind the scenes were actually practicing

a form of polygamy because they would have mistresses, they would visit sex workers, and so on.

And so now this is where it gets dicey again, which is that Schopenhauer proposed as a solution,

not the abolition of marriage, but the reforming of marriage on a model of polygamy.

Now, again, that starts to sound suspect again because it sounds like he's trying to legitimize

the kind of the CD underbelly of the marriage institution in mid-19th century Europe.

I've actually, and this is not original to my book, it's in other biographies of Schopenhauer,

have made a point about how in his notebook he was experimenting with a more

equal-sided model of polygamy, which was tetragamy, the idea of a marriage of four partners,

two men and two women, which was modeled on their abilities, the abilities of men and women to

help meet each other's needs. Let's put it that way, both socially, financially, and sexually.

And so he wasn't exclusively attracted to the kind of models of say,

Mormonism, which you also knew about where you'd have one man and several wives. He was also

interested in models of polyandria, as well as polygaini, that is multiple men, as well as multiple

women. So anyway, now, where does that stand with feminist literature? Well, it means that even though

his route into this was based on a wrong conception of natural inferiority of women, which is

terrible, but it led him to raise skeptical questions about the way the gender relations

are structured in 19th century Europe. And it rose, brought to attention, the fact that the

marriage institution is a social and cultural phenomenon that has a history, and there to cross

the world and across culture, marriages done differently. And the model that was

dominant in 19th century Europe was not the only way to structure love, sexuality, and gender

relationships. And that alone made him, in part, someone who was attractive to read, even to people

who didn't agree with the sexist part of his views. So again, it's a complicated legacy there,

mixture of of Schopenhauer being wrong on certain points, and then having the insight and

the observations to be in a way ahead of his time on other points.

Let us talk about politics and other politics and ethics. And again, I'm just going to

guess repeating myself yet, that I've always been amazed by this, just the wide variety of

topics he discusses. Now this is topic ethics on politics, which is which was my favorite part of

the book, where you highlight compassion, even compassion for animals, as you mentioned

towards the beginning of the interview. But then he also argues for deterrence in justice.

So he argues for compassion, but also argues for deterrence in justice. What does that mean?

What does that argument deterrence in justice mean? And he also always, as a pessimist,

state skeptical of perfectability of justice here. How do these commitments sit with his pessimism?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think on its face, there's a bit of attention

between Schopenhauer's politics and ethics. So to start with his politics, his politics

is more in the lineage of, say, theorists like Thomas Hobbes, who thought that the business

of politics is really the protection against harm based on a socially agreed use of force,

namely punishment. So the reason why we enter into a social contract that is the foundation of

civil society is that we are afraid of being harmed by others. And so we limit our freedoms on

the understanding that they will limit their freedoms too. Now, the thing that possible limitation

with that, and one of the big criticisms of that sort of model of contractarian political philosophy,

is that it potentially excludes a lot of vulnerable members of society, who the more

real historical, powerfully endowed members of society have no interest in making contracts with,

because they can only stand to lose something. So if you have a sort of dominant class of society

in a kind of pre-civilized world, and so a vulnerable group says, well, I'll limit my freedoms

on the assumption that you limit yours, and we won't harm each other. Well, the dominance

group is going to say, well, I'm not going to be harmed by you anyway. So I stand to gain nothing,

only you will gain something from this bargain, where we limit our freedoms mutually and reciprocally.

And so it could end up, the social contract could end up enshrining real historical

power imbalances that would therefore exclude lots of people who should be covered by political

justice, including, for instance, women, including, for instance, animals, including, for instance,

people have colonized nations, and so on, or marginalized groups. So that's the politics,

on the one hand, it falls into a very established political tradition. On the other,

seems to have these limitations. And then the ethics is, by contrast, almost like the total reverse,

which is, the Schopenhauer's ethics is very universalistic. Schopenhauer's ethics is based on,

as I mentioned very early in the conversation, the idea of compassion, and compassion for any

sort of being that suffers. And of course, the same vulnerable beings that are potentially excluded

from the realm of politics on the contractarian theory are very much included in this fear of moral

concern from a compassion-based standpoint, because animals suffer and human beings all suffer

regardless of gender or ethnicity or race or nationality or all these other social categories.

And so for that reason, Schopenhauer thought it was an advantage of his theory that it could make

sense of the moral status of animals, and animals as morally important beings, and social movements

that would protect animals. And similarly, Schopenhauer took a deep interest in

humane movements that were trying to protect human beings from one another. So one thing I

mentioned in the book in some detail is, and other scholars have written about this now,

is Schopenhauer's attention to the transatlantic slave trade. So there is a very clear case

of where Schopenhauer thought that although, in some respects, he did have views that were

retrograde. He definitely, in terms of his characterization of black people, his characterization

of Jewish people, with sometimes racist or anti-Semitic, which again is regrettable, and similarly

to his views on sex and gender. But on the other hand, he thought that none of that mattered

when it came to the politics and ethics of slavery. He thought that slavery was a horrendous

stain on human history, and that the suffering of black people, in particular, who'd been enslaved

in America, was a moral outrage and a moral travesty. And so for him, again, the social boundaries,

the social categories of race and species even, meant nothing to his ethics. His ethics in that

respect was deeply universalistic, and was a point of view from which, if we couldn't quite

protect these groups from the point of view of Schopenhauer's politics, we could at least

criticize current real politics through an ethical point of view of compassion.

We're kind of coming back to the same point here, which is that Schopenhauer is often a

ambiguous figure in these debates, like he has some views that we wouldn't tolerate today,

and he has other views that were other people of his time were unable to occupy because of the

blind spots in their own theoretical perspectives. As a last question, Schopenhauer is quite famous

these days. He's won a lot of recognition, he's become a more or less public philosopher as well,

a lot of people read. And I'm keen to know in your retelling, how do you think

his reputation, his mortality, his image as a pessimist philosopher, convert? And why do you think

for the public, he's still relevant? What can we take with him, let's say, after reading your book,

special when it comes to dealing with the most substantial or existential crisis we face

these days, environmental crisis, you know, people are faced with lots of people around the world,

are faced with war and devastation. What can we take from Schopenhauer, and why do you think

he still speaks to the public? Good, I've got a few thoughts on this. So just to start with

Schopenhauer's rise to fame, one thing that I'm particularly proud of and happy within the book

is that I hadn't seen in other biographies, certainly not in English, any treatment of the use

of photography to help cement Schopenhauer's very distinctive physical image, almost iconic,

you could recognize him in silhouette because of these tufts of hair that he kept on the

sides of his head even though he was very much balding on top with a very large forehead. And I'm

looking quite old and grizzled because photography, when it was invented, he was in his 50s by then,

and his last photograph was taken when he was in his 70s. So our image of Schopenhauer, the

imagery we receive of him is an old, is an old wizard man looking quite grumpy. And I think that

does affect the way we perceive him. Having said that, it's important that he was photographs. I

think he absolutely has to be one of the first, a lot of major philosophers ever to be photographed

because he took a real keen interest in it as a scientific development, more or less exactly as

it was announced in the late 1830s, early 1840s. And so he feels modern in that respect, he's one

of us. He's somebody we can actually perceive through the medium of photography. And we can't say

that about the philosophers of the previous generation really. There was a photograph of shelling,

for instance, that he makes it into the world of photography, but certainly not haggle and

certainly not getter and certainly certainly not canned. So he feels like a flesh and blood

person to us in that respect. And I was pleased and I was very glad that Chicago allowed us to

include a couple of photographs in the book with the permission of the Frankfurt archive, which holds

a lot of these images. And in terms of his legacy and the thing he can say towards today,

I think, well, I don't want to keep coming back to the same thing, but I do think the message

of compassion is a really important one. But perhaps I can make a slightly different point

about it. A point that actually only came to me after having written the book really. And so I

don't really make a big overt theme of it. But one thing that I am interested in in the book is

about whether Schopenhauer was likable. I mean, I say in the first chapter actually that certainly

some people found him very unlikable. Some members of his family found him very unlikable. His mother

famously didn't hold back in her letters when she was sort of explaining why she didn't want to

live with him when he was thinking of moving to her residence in Weimar after his father's death.

And yeah, he does some very unlikable things in his work and his life as well as doing some

very admirable things as well. But then I guess the interesting point, I think, is that for Schopenhauer

compassion is not at all about likability. For Schopenhauer, looking at it the other way,

he found lots of people. In fact, most human beings, four fifths he was often say, for some

reason he picked that fraction, four fifths of human beings are just hard to be around. They're rude

or they're spiteful or they're stupid or they're unkind or whatever. He found humanity very

unlikable in the way that a lot of humanity found him unlikable. And nevertheless, he thought that

compassion transcends that, that you can have a lower opinion of a person and still take their

suffering deeply seriously and feel for them when they when they are in pain. And so how does

that relate to this book? Well, one is that I wanted to paint a sympathetic portrait of Schopenhauer

without necessarily having to present him as likable. And that way of thinking was a framework

for doing so. You can sympathize with somebody even if you don't, even if you find them in some

respects, you know, not a very likable person. But for us today, one of the difficulties of

getting through life is that everybody is so divided socially and everybody finds it so hard to

like one another or even to, you know, respects one another. But the boundary is Schopenhauer

things that we ought not ever to cross is is the boundary of compassion that the matter how much

you dislike a person or or or another living being, you've got to find a way to resist adding to

their suffering to their undeserved suffering. You've got to find a way to maybe even alleviate

their suffering, even if you disagree with them, you know, very deeply on certain points. So

I'd say that's the thing that we can take from Schopenhauer today. And I think that's a bit

different from the message you might one might have thought we would get from Schopenhauer because

I think people might have got more of a diagnostic method, you know, or message from Schopenhauer,

which is, oh, we live in dark times. Well, that's not surprising given that, you know,

suffering is embedded in the human condition. So this is one dark time of kind of an endless

series of dark times of humanity, but that would be a dark diagnostic message to take away.

Instead, I'm looking more actually at the kind of, I don't know whether it's a cure, but the

treatment at least, which is, which is compassion for Schopenhauer. That's a treatment we can practice

on a daily basis, even if we can't resign from the will to life altogether. We can, we can do our

bit to minimize the sufferings we impose on others. And so yeah, that's the thing that I would leave

people with and what I think people can take away from Schopenhauer in the kind of way that the

world is today. Before we come to the end of this interview, I'm keen to know another of you

recently finished this book. Is there any other book or project you're working on? Anything

you might expect to see sometime soon? Oh, that's a surprise question. Maybe. I mean, actually

one thing listeners could look up is that my last, since publishing the book, I've published

two academic papers, but they are both open access. So there's no paywall, there's no subscription

charge. So I have an article in the British history, sorry, the British Journal for the history

of philosophy called Schopenhauer's worst of all possible worlds, which is an article about one

of Schopenhauer's arguments for pessimism, which kind of takes the diametrically opposed

approach to to livenits, a livenits famously said, this is the best of all possible worlds. And

Schopenhauer said, this is the worst of all possible worlds. So people can read that. The other

is that I have a piece that's come out in in mind called How Not to Hage Humanity. And the

subtitle is Schopenhauer's response to Miss Anthropy. And actually it picks up on the themes

that I was talking about just then, which is about the relationship between compassion and

respect and how we, if we were to evaluate human beings with respect to their merits,

then we would have a quite low valuation of them for Schopenhauer because human beings are

kind of characterized in such kind of poor terms. And to that extent, he's a philosophical

misanthrope. But nevertheless, he resisted the idea that that should lead to a position of

kind of destructive hatred towards humanity because he thought that if we evaluate as human beings

not towards their merits, but towards their suffering, their distress, their misery,

then that will generate a feeling of moral compassion instead. And so yeah, so I'd recommend

reading that paper as I say, they're both open access. So people can read them for free online

in those journals. So yeah, that's something that I can direct people towards.

After, if they've read the book and they want to know more, they can go there.

Fascinating. Dr. David Beather Woods, I'd like to thank you very much for your time on new

books network and setting hope to be able to speak to you soon again about your future books.

Thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure. I've enjoyed speaking with you today.

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