In the Presence of Schopenhauer (Polity), by Michel Houellebecq

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In the Presence of Schopenhauer by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq is a bright streak across the dismal sky of the post-this and post-that French intelligentsia. Courting controversy from all sides, he lacks faith in progress or belief in the shibboleths of the status quo. He plays a rough game of thought. He’s not PC. Is he always serious or is he being satirical? Both?

Houellebecq says he found his soulmate in a Paris library when he chanced upon a copy of Schopenhauer’s Aphorisms on the Meaning of Life. He presents his reflections on the 19th century German philosopher in this slender, fascinating essay. One suspects Houellebecq’s interest was fired in part by his contrarian persona. How unfashionable in Paris—a German pessimist who sometimes sounds misanthropic and seems to say that suffering is our lot in life, so live with it!

Perhaps Houellebecq identifies with what he calls Schopenhauer’s “grumpy good humor,” but his interest goes deeper than the tone of the German’s prose. In Schopenhauer he finds “a complete philosophical system which aspires to answer all the questions (metaphysical, aesthetic, ethical) that have been asked by philosophy ever since its origins.” Schopenhauer seemed to imply a postmodern variability of experience: we don’t touch the Earth; through our sensory subjectivity, we touch our representation of the Earth. He scorned “realist dogmatism” for seeking “to separate the representation from the object, whereas they actually form a unity.”

Schopenhauer urged his readers to “no longer allow abstract thought or the principles of reason to occupy our consciousness” but for “our entire consciousness [to] be filled with the peaceful contemplation” of a tree, a rock, a building, whatever we see.

Schopenhauer was not for couch potatoes. He demanded intellectual exertion even in contemplation. As Houellebecq explains, “The richness of pleasure, even sexual pleasure, resides in the intellect.” He adds that sex can’t be fully enjoyed stupidly and that our society (even more than Schopenhauer’s) values only the striving for “a mere illusion: money and fame (what we have, what we represent).”