Denker gegen den Strom; Schopenhauer: gestern--morgen--heute (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 241 if sometimes in different or less developed form, in Hegel. If the presentation of Hegel as an "episode" is too fascile, Schelling is indeed shown to be worthy of the renewed interest he is receiving as a philosopher in his own right. DARRELE. CaVaSTENSEN Salzburg, Austria Denker gegen den Strom/ Schopenhauer: gestern--morgen--heute. By Arthur Hiibscher . (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1973. Pp. 355. Din. 58) Dr. HiJbscher has served since 1936 as the president of the Schopenhauer Gesellschafl and editor of that society's annual proceedings; he is the editor of the authoritative Schopenhauer Gesamtausgabe and of the Handschrifllicher Nachlass; he is the tireless compiler of Schopenhaueriana including a book of Gespriiche and a Schopenhauer lkonographie which assembles all the known sketches, portraits and daguerreotypes of the philosopher and his family. Hfibscher is, in short, the latest in the line of the great Schopenhauer "evangelists" who, beginning with Frauenstiidt, have stood ceaseless vigil over the relics of the master, and who have taken every opportunity to propagate his doctrines. But despite a life spent in the service of Schopenhauer scholarship, and although a selection of his findings has already appeared piecemeal in essay form, Hiibscher has never previously issued any sustained critical appreciation of Schopenhauer's work. Such a long reticence might be regarded as a mark either of undue caution or of a commendable seriousness of purpose, but in neither case is there any reason to expect the future to produce another study of Schopenhauer which represents a greater quantum of scholarly preparation than does the work reviewed here. Hiibscher's present venture is not, however, entirely lacking an ancestry. His own biographical sketch of 1938, Arthur Schopenhauer/Ein LebensbiId, might be regarded as a preliminary draft of the book under review, which like its predecessor is essentially an intellectual biography, albeit one assembled for heuristic reasons in the form of a montage. But this earlier work displays none of the critical ambition evidenced in Hiibscher's later study, which additionally succeeds in recording a number of previously obscure but highly suggestive details of Schopenhauer's formative period. The reader, for example, is apt to be surprised to learn that Schopenhauer's first reaction to the "Windbeutler," Fichte and Schelling, had been quite favorable, while his reverence for Kant had arisen only out of an initial stage of sharp dissent. Similarly, although Schopenhauer had extensively billed Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung as a reconciliation of "Platon der gibttliche und der erstaunliche Kant" within a unified philosophical framework , what is certainly less commonly known is that in the privacy of his study, Schopenhauer had kept his portrait of Kant in the same frame with one of the great pietists and mentor of his youth, Matthias Claudius. The true identity of Schopenhauer's rather esoteric "Plato" has always been enough of a mystery that the reader cannot but be intrigued to find his rightful place next to Kant thus usurped by the famous German exponent of pietism. It is at any rate largely through the orderly presentation of such suggestive data, not through risky flights of interpretation, that Hiibscher builds his case. Nor should it be thought that a primarily biographical orientation entails a distraction from philosophical substance in the case of a philosopher who, as Stern says, "gives so overwhelmingly the impression of being all of one piece" with his work as does Schopenbauer . But Hiibscher's aspirations in his later study, as its title indicates, cover considerably more than a simple biographical project. He sets his task as follows: 242 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Jedes Kunstwerk, jeder philosophische Gedanke stellt sich als ein Akt dcr Bcfreiung dar. Bcfreiung yon Formen und Denkweiscn der Vergangenheit und yon den Einfliissenund Hemmnissen der Gegenwart. In Widerstreit mit ihnen crhebt sich das Werk ins Ueberzeitliche. Und im Begreifen diescs Widerstreits begreifen wir das Werk in seiner Einheit und GrSsse. In dieser Weisc verstehe ich die Aufgabc, das Werden und das Wirken Schopenhauers aus dem geistigen Umkreis seines Jahrhundcrts hcrauszuhcben. Die Aufgabc ist bishcr ungelSst. But if Htibscher defines his task by this prospectus, the portrait of Schopenhauer which emerges during the course of his account shows only slight...