Is France’s leading novelist, Michel Houellebecq, conservative? His 2015 novel Submission, about an Islamic party winning French national elections, resonated with conservative anxieties about Islamic immigration and the cultural transformation of the West. Houellebecq’s In the Presence of Schopenhauer, however, helps conservatives see he is a false friend.
This is a physically small 50-page book, but there is no reason good philosophy needs to be longer. Aquinas’s On Being and Essence, Descartes’s Meditations, and Leibniz’s Monadology are works for the ages shorter than a standard academic article today. Paragraphs by Schopenhauer make up the majority of the text—Houellebecq did the translations himself—and he follows up each with a brief commentary. His principle of selection: passages personally important to him. The book is not meant as an academic overview but think of it as a primer on how to think with Schopenhauer made by one of the most acute intelligences in France today.
Houellebecq is not shy about giving his opinion. The last great philosopher, he tells us, was Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and, in consequence, “it is ultimately annoying to live in the middle of a period of mediocrities—especially when one feels incapable of raising the level… I am pretty sure that I would produce better novels if the thinking around me were a little more inspiring.” There’s plenty of content like this, which is fun, and the passages from Schopenhauer are meaty and well-chosen for pondering. In the history of thought, Schopenhauer is the great pessimist, the chronicler of the suffering of existence.
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