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Customer Reviews of The Philosophy of Schopenhauer

A Lucky Convergence
Bryan Magee is an ideal candidate for the role of expositor of Schopenhauer. One of Schopenhauer's defining characteristics is his passion for the arts; it is a passion that Magee shares. Schopenhauer is as good a writer as you'll find among major philosophers, and Magee is an easy and graceful stylist himself. Moreover, Magee is a bit of an outsider. And Schopenhauer, for all his appeal, has never quite made it to the first team among philosophers. Indeed, one of the most intriguing points about him is that he seems to have exercised far more influence over artists: Turgenev, Proust, Mann and (most of all) Wagner. Indeed, as a kind of afterthought, Magee offers a "conjecture" that a Schopenhauerian substrate underlies Dylan Thomas' great short lyric, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower ..."

It's a lucky convergence because Schopenhauer certainly needs an introduction. Not because of the style: as I said above, Schopenhauer is a wonderful stylist, exactly not what you expect from a 19th-century German. But if Schopenhauer did not end quite in the mainstream of western philosophy, he certainly started there. He venerated Kant and he hated Hegel. He set himself the task of finishing or correcting Kant, without ever modifying his admiration for the master. This means that to understand Schopenhauer you need to know something about Kant. And here, Magee does a wonderful job. Magee's introduction to Kant would, with minor emendation, stand pretty well on its own. His exhibition of how Schopenhauer fits into the Kantian framework is equally deft.

In the same vein, he offers an indispensable strategy for reading Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is one of those authors who wrote only one book "The World as Will and Idea." The standard edition is two volumes: a first volume that he wrote as a self-contained work, and a second, which counts as a kind of "extension of remarks" that developed over the rest of his life." But before his great work, he wrote a dissertation, "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," which Magee declares to be "a minor philosophical classic." It is, at any rate, an integral part of Schopenhauer's lifelong project, and a reader of the major work will do well to have the dissertation (or at least Magee's summary) behind him. A couple of other "independent" essays help to fill out of the frame. One of Magee's many helpful courtesies is that he tells you just what and why.

This book is so good in its own right that one is hesitant to seem to criticize Magee for not writing even more. Still, Magee's account did whet my appetite to know more about how Schopenhauer fits into the tradition of German thought to which he made himself such an outsider. That would be a project in its own right, but you do get a bit of it in the second-best book about Schopenhauer that I know of: Rudiger Safranski's "Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy." But hey-read them both, and with luck, they will carry you on to Schopenhauer himself.

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Comprehensive and Clear Analysis of a Difficult Thinker
Just having read Magee's brilliant book about Richard Wagner -- THE TRISTAN CHORD -- I decided to check out his book about my favorite modern phlosopher. I don't have too much to add to what others have said, except to say that if you're not going to take the time to read Schopenhaur, then this is perhaps the best way to become acquainted with his ideas, which still have relevancy almost a century and a half after his death. Just as Schopenhauer was an unusually clear and gifted writer among philosophers, Magee possesses the same qualities as an explicator. Furthermore, his analyses of Schopenhauer's postumous influence really helps contextualize his importance historically (Sigmund Freud, who stole some of his best ideas from Schopenhaur, considered him one of the five greatest men who ever lived. There is also much in Jung -- not to mention Albert Einstein -- that has its origins in Schopenhauer).

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Just another five stars
I would just like to echo the wonderful reviews that others have already given for this text, and to give it another five stars. As a serious student of Schopenhauer and of his commentators, I believe that Magee's grasp of Schopenhauer is simply astounding. Magee transforms Schopenhuaer from some obscure German philosopher from days long gone into a pressingly relevant thinker for our modern understanding of the universe. Magee has convinced me that Schopenhauer's understanding of the world is one of the most persuasive candidates out there. One of Magee's finest accomplishments in the text is the way he interweaves Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant into Schopenhauer's thought in order to demonstrate that Schopenhauer truly represents the direction to which we must look for further progress in understanding this incredible mystery in which we live. This is the single best secondary treatment of Schopenhauer on the market, period, and is also one of the best books I have ever read.