Judaskyssar

This paper seeks to differentiate the view of the reception of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy around the turn of the 20th century by investigating how a programmatically biographical mode of reading him, first employed by his friends and disciples, was later turned into a weapon used against him. After Schopenhauer’s death in 1860, something of a dispute arose between Schopenhauer’s friends as to who was his true disciple. People such as Julius Frauenstädt, Wilhelm Gwinner and Ernst Otto Lindner published books and articles in which they each argued that they had a privileged position vis-à-vis Schopenhauer thanks to their friendship with him. By presenting their own relation to Schopenhauer as particularly intimate (and in the process implying or stating that Schopenhauer’s other friends stood in a less intimate relation to him) they tried to give their readings of Schopenhauer more credibility. In this paper I argue that this strategy goes against the grain of Schopenhauer’s notion of philosophy, since he regarded philosophy as a purely theoretical enterprise. Furthermore I seek to demonstrate that the arguments and mode of reading employed by in particular Frauenstädt (who tried to reduce the importance of Schopenhauer’s pessimism with reference to his personality) and Gwinner (whose several biographies of Schopenhauer sought to explain his thinking with reference to events in his life), were later used by Schopenhauer’s fiercest critics, exemplified primarily by a discussion of the historian of philosophy Kuno Fischer. It thus turns out that the disciples who tried most ardently to spread Schopenhauer’s thinking after his death actually gave him a Judas’ kiss