SCHOPENHAUER AND LITERARY AUTHORS

That Schopenhauer is among those philosophers thought to have had a considerable influence on or particular appeal to literary authors, to say nothing of his influence on Wagner, is well known. Bryan Magee names the following writers as in some way or other indebted to Schopenhauer: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Zola, Proust, Hardy, Conrad, Maupassant, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Rilke, Pirandello, Somerset Maugham, and Borges.

What has interested writers in Schopenhauer, apart from his powerful literary style, is his metaphysics (and to some extent his ethics). The point as it concerns metaphysics seems too obvious to be worth making but nevertheless deserves pausing on for two reasons: first and again almost too obvious to be worth saying, speculative metaphysics is out of fashion with academic or professional philosophers. It follows therefore that if, as I am, we are concerned to understand how philosophy and literature might relate and interact, we have to face the fact that literature is likely to be concerned with those aspects of philosophy least acceptable to the professionals. This should put us on target for some ripe misunderstandings to arise between students of philosophy and students of literature.

Schopenhauer himself is not to be included in the category of the “we” who are interested in relationships between philosophy and literature. He has something to say about how the arts and philosophy might relate but, not surprisingly given his time, he evinces no interest in the category of literature. In the index to Payne's translation of the World as Will “literature” is not to be found; “poetry” and “poets,” “authors” and “drama” and the names of many particular writers are.