Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy

Rating:
Summary: Translations
Review: arlodriver is rightly concerned with the wooden style displayed in this book and the volume on Heidegger. The fault, however, is not Safranski's but rather that of his translator, Ewald Osers, as Shelley Frisch's fine rendering of Safranski's biography of Nietzsche conclusively proves.

Rating:
Summary: This will have to do
Review: I'm torn in reviewing this item, only because the subject is so damn interesting that any modern scholarship is appreciated. However, for me, Safranski is one of those writers who either suffers from poor translation or simply a wooden style. Very few authors can get in my way of enjoying a philosophical biography the way Safranski can (I felt this with his treatment of Heidegger as well). He would benefit from a more transparent prose to go with his fascinating subjects. However, this is a book that attempts to chronicle the life of that wildman of thought, Schopenhauer, and even a rough attempt is indispensable. The facts are here, copious, and surrounded by pertinent details of Arthur's time, and for that reason alone it's probably a must have for fans of this philosopher. For a more biased but better written account of his ideas, I'd probably recommend Magee's "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer".

Rating:
Summary: This will have to do
Review: I'm torn in reviewing this item, only because the subject is so damn interesting that any modern scholarship is appreciated. However, for me, Safranski is one of those writers who either suffers from poor translation or simply a wooden style. Very few authors can get in my way of enjoying a philosophical biography the way Safranski can (I felt this with his treatment of Heidegger as well). He would benefit from a more transparent prose to go with his fascinating subjects. However, this is a book that attempts to chronicle the life of that wildman of thought, Schopenhauer, and even a rough attempt is indispensable. The facts are here, copious, and surrounded by pertinent details of Arthur's time, and for that reason alone it's probably a must have for fans of this philosopher. For a more biased but better written account of his ideas, I'd probably recommend Magee's "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer".

Rating:
Summary: In the wake of Kant
Review: Like particle tracks from an atom smasher the Kantian heritage splits into a multiplicity of outcomes of which Schopenhauer's line, beside the Fichte to Hegel sequence vociferously denounced by the philosopher, is the clearest and yet most mysterious. As if attempting to recover from the sudden ambiguity of the conceptions of the noumenal yet reinstating its foundations in the distractions of Hegelian dialectic, Schopenhauer in his brilliant grasp of all the fundamental issues recasts the Kantian basics into his own more streamlined perspective of the breakthrough, or breakdown, of transcendental idealism.
This biography tells the exciting tale of this exile in the generation of Hegel, where the unity of the original discourse suffers its passage through the rapids in the disintegration of a creative era of philosophy, the mirror image of Marx. The story told by Safaranski evokes perfectly the strange charm surrounding this irrascible and one-pointed genius, whose absurd dismissal by too much modern thought as some eccentric antique only shows philosophy has lost its way, and forgets the clear strains of his melody streaking a host of successors, beginning with Nietzsche, whose intoxication with the dangerous elixir of the noumenal exteriorizing as a concept of will, like a rock star on drugs, is a harbinger of the reversal of the source, in a tragic finale. Schopenhauer remains a great test of one's understanding of Kant, for he dared a further critique, with a result that demands a clear vision of the original critiques, without mesmerization of the texts. He also saw the direct connection, obvious, yet elusive, with the greater traditions of the Indian yogas and Upanishads as the European Enlightenment moves instinctively to grope beyond its victories to compensate for its limitations. Each will follow here, because he must, in the void between Hegel and Schopenauer, seeking the unity from a bifurcation, to which the philosopher bore constant witness, through these wild years.