Schopenhauer And The Wild Years Of Philosophy [Paperback]

This richly detailed biography of a key figure in nineteenth-century philosophy pays equal attention to the life and to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. R?diger Safranski places this visionary skeptic in the context of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegeland explores the sources of his profound alienation from their secularized religion of reason. He also provides a narrative of Schopenhauers personal and family life that reads like a Romantic novel: the struggle to break free from a domineering father, the attempt to come to terms with his mothers literary and social success (she was a well-known writer and a member of Goethes Weimar circle), the loneliness and despair when his major philosophical work,The World as Will and Representation, was ignored by the academy. Along the way Safranski portrays the rich culture of Goethes Weimar, Hegels Berlin, and other centers of German literary and intellectual life.

When Schopenhauer first proposed his philosophy of weeping and gnashing of teeth, during the heady wild years of Romantic idealism, it found few followers. After the disillusionments and failures of 1848, his work was rediscovered by philosophers and literary figures. Writers from Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett have responded to Schopenhauers refusal to seek salvation through history.

The first biography of Schopenhauer to appear in English in this century,Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophysucceeds in bringing to life an intriguing figure in philosophy and the intellectual battles of his time, whose consequences still shape our world.

This biography succeeds admirably in placing Schopenhauer and his work in the varied milieux appropriate to them. The intellectual scene in Europe changed greatly during Schopenhauers working lifetime, and Safranski is excellent at conveying the atmosphere of the different places and periods&The considerable learning which enables SaflcÀ