Abstract
Comparisons between the work of Freud and Schopenhauer are common in the secondary literature,1 and Freud himself recognizes the affinity of their approaches, as the epigraph indicates. But few critics go beyond the fact that they share similar conceptions of formless drives that motivate our behavior to consider what they recommend we do about it. Despite the proximity of their views of human nature and human motivations, Schopenhauer and Freud have very different ideas of what sort of life we ought to lead, or what a healthy response to this self-recognition ought to be. Schopenhauer encourages us to renounce the will and embrace nothingness, whereas Freud attempts to bring about a compromise among the competing demands in an individual’s psychological life.
You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: “That isn’t natural science, it’s Schopenhauer’s philosophy!” But, Ladies and Gentlemen, why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research?
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life”
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Notes
See W. Bischler, “Schopenhauer and Freud: A Comparison,” trans. Henry Alden Bunker, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 8 (1939): 88–97;
Nancy Procter-Greg, “Schopenhauer and Freud,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 25 (1956): 197–214;
Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Baltimore: Penguin, 1963), 176–79;
R. K. Gupta, “Freud and Schopenhauer,” in Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement, ed. Michael Fox (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980), 226–35;
Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 307–9;
Christopher Young and Andrew Brook, “Schopenhauer and Freud,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75, no. 1 (Feb. 1994): 101–18;
Marcel R. Zentner, Die Flucht ins Vergessen: Die Anfänge der Psychoanalyse Freuds bei Schopenhauer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995);
Günter Gödde, Traditionslinien des “Unbewuβten”: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1999), 282–89;
Richard Askay and Jensen Farquhar, Apprehending the Inaccessible: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 89–152;
and Robert Grimwade, “Between the Quills: Schopenhauer and Freud on Sadism and Masochism,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 92, no. 1 (Feb. 2011): 149–69.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 1:103.
See, respectively, Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 1:112–13; and Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. E. F. J. Payne (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), 52–53.
Schopenhauer recognizes that this is a departure from Kant, although he thinks that it is merely a terminological difference (World as Will and Representation, 1:418). See Charles Nussbaum, “Schopenhauer’s Rejection of Kant’s Analysis of Cause and Effect,” Auslegung 12 (winter 1985): 33–44; Robert Wicks, “Schopenhauer’s Naturalization of Kant’s A Priori Forms of Empirical Knowledge,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 10, no. 2 (April 1993): 181–96; and Paul Guyer, “Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Methods of Philosophy,” 93–137.
Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Vanity of Existence,” in Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1970), 53.
D. W. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer: The Arguments of the Philosophers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 124–33. See also Askay and Farquhar, Apprehending the Inaccessible, 136–52.
Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1966).
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth, 1973), 214.
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), §§245–48;
and G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to “The Philosophy of History”, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 20. We discuss Hegel’s distinction between humanity and animality in more detail in Chapter 7.
On the philosophical significance of evolutionary theory, see Elizabeth A. Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 129.
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© 2013 Matthew C. Altman and Cynthia D. Coe
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Altman, M.C., Coe, C.D. (2013). Schopenhauer: Renouncing Pessimism. In: The Fractured Self in Freud and German Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263322_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263322_5
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