books

The Golden Notebook is a blueprint, a dazzling experiment, and its flaws are life’s flaws – there to be interrogated and worked though. That is the take-it-or-leave-it dichotomy that Lessing explores. Looking back on the book’s initial reception, in her preface to the 2007 edition, Lessing acknowledged: ‘Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.’ However, she repeatedly distanced herself from any claim on the novel as a foundational feminist text; as she told The Guardian in 2007: ‘I’m not interested in being a feminist icon. If you are a woman and you think at all, you are going to have to write about it, otherwise you aren’t writing about the time you are living in.’

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods; University of Chicago Press, 296 pp., $30

A little more than 200 years ago, Arthur Schopenhauer arrived at the University of Berlin to offer a course on philosophy—his own philosophy, to be precise, based on a book he had just published, The World as Will and Representation. The class was a miserable flop, drawing fewer than half a dozen students. In part, this was because the book—to cite what one of Schopenhauer’s heroes, David Hume, said about his own first book—fell stillborn from the press. But it was also because the 30-something philosopher decided to offer his course at the same place, day, and time as G. W. F. Hegel, the superstar of German philosophy, had scheduled his class.

What was Schopenhauer thinking?

One of the many merits of David Bather Woods’s new biography is his superb effort to convey exactly what Schopenhauer was thinking in his challenge to Hegel. In a (German) word, it was Selbstdenken: thinking for oneself, and not simply agreeing with what a professor tells you to think. In his portrayal of this famously prickly, private, and pessimistic man, Woods presents a thinker committed to the daunting vocation of pondering the human situation, and he does so with compassion and an appreciation for the comic.

Woods is not alone in this regard. Schopenhauer’s life and thought have made him an inviting target for comedians. In an iconic Monty Python sketch, Schopenhauer plays on the German philosophers’ football club in its epic battle against the Greeks. (Spoiler: Socrates heads the winning goal past Leibniz, who is pacing absent-mindedly in front of the net.) The dour German also makes a cameo in Woody Allen’s short story “My Philosophy,” in which a doctor diagnoses Schopenhauer’s will to live as nothing more than a case of hay fever.

Not surprisingly, humor seems the best response to a thinker who concludes that life—an unrelenting experience of disappointment and despair, which “swings like a pendulum back and forth between pain and boredom”—is a business “that does not cover its costs.” Moreover, Schopenhauer was the rare thinker who insisted on living his philosophy. Inevitably, perhaps, this led to a life of self-imposed solitude. Schopenhauer was a lifelong bachelor who had few friends and many enemies, who preferred the company of dogs to that of his fellow men and women, and whose own mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, broke off ties with him, telling him in a letter, “I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.”

Tellingly, Johanna’s son had yet to turn 20 years old. Teenagers can be difficult, but Schopenhauer was a case apart. Solitary by disposition at an early age, he became even more so as he grew older, driven by the belief that solitude was the price of telling the rest of humankind two unbearable truths. First, that it is better never to have been born; second, for those of us unfortunate enough to exist, to expect nothing but suffering and sorrow. As he wrote in one of his later works, Parerga and Paralipomena, “If suffering is not the first and immediate object of our life, then our existence is the most inexpedient and inappropriate thing in the world.”

As Woods suggests, this assertion is not as dark as we might otherwise conclude. One reason Schopenhauer railed against his arch-foe Hegel was that he believed the older man’s Idealism—the contention that knowledge is based not on the material world but on an “ideal” or thought-dependent one—set us at a remove from concrete, everyday experiences. (Another reason, of course, is that Hegel drew hundreds of students to his classes whereas Schopenhauer could not field a football team with his own.) A self-styled empiricist, Schopenhauer insisted that our reasoning be based on our rootedness in the world. Not only will such rootedness constantly and forcibly remind us that the world is a harsh place, but it also teaches us to think for ourselves: “One can only think through what one knows, which is why we should learn something; but one also knows only what has been thought through.”

This insistence on thinking for oneself—issued in the previous century by Immanuel Kant, the thinker from whom Schopenhauer most struggled to free himself—is central to Schopenhauer’s contention that this practice entails a solitary life. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? The tired slogan “no pain, no gain” takes on fresh meaning when applied to the task of challenging all forms of inherited wisdom. This way of thinking comes most easily to the young, and it is telling that Schopenhauer was himself scarcely 30 when he wrote The World as Will and Representation.

Such independent thinking reveals that the world and everything in that world, including us, are subject to what Schopenhauer calls the “will to live.” This notion, which Friedrich Nietzsche later adapted as the “will to power,” can mean a variety of things—not just for scholars but for Schopenhauer himself. Moreover, Schopenhauer locates this will as the starting point of his metaphysics and ethics. We experience it every moment of our lives as the force that fuels our never-ending struggle for self-preservation and reproduction. (In anticipation of Freud, Schopenhauer described “the sexual organs as the true center of the world”—an assertion he proved by fathering two children out of wedlock, neither of whom he acknowledged as his own.)

But what experience also teaches us is that we feel compassion for the suffering and afflictions of our fellow human beings, enmeshed with us in this unceasing struggle for being. Woods stresses that for Schopenhauer, the existence of compassion is proved not by abstract theorizing but by living. We know compassion because we feel it in ourselves, but also because we know it when we see and feel it in others. From this vast pile of empirical data, Schopenhauer drew a simple maxim: “Do no harm; and help others to the extent you can.”

This conviction led Schopenhauer to be an ardent abolitionist, a keen advocate of prison and asylum reform, and a fierce opponent of animal cruelty. It is curious to think that his beloved standard poodle, Atma, knew what men and women did not know: that his master believed in the care and concern for all living beings. At Schopenhauer’s funeral in 1860, his first biographer, Wilhelm Gwinner, suggested that “ordinary people saw the misanthrope in him,” but Schopenhauer “was full of compassion” for them. This may have been difficult for Schopenhauer’s contemporaries to perceive. Readers today, however, who have ample reason to be pessimistic, might find it a bit easier.

Robert Zaretsky teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston. He is the author most recently of Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague.

Dorian Lynskey

Doublethink & DoubtOrwell: 2+2=5By Raoul Peck (dir)George Orwell: Life and LegacyBy Robert CollsOxford University Press 208pp £14.99

Nobody under the age of seventy-five has heard George Orwell’s voice. The only extant video footage is in a silent movie of the Eton Wall Game. None of his many wartime recordings for the BBC Eastern Service has survived. By all accounts his voice, damaged by a bullet to the throat during the Spanish Civil War, was thin, flat and weak. In fact, the controller of the BBC Overseas Service complained that putting on ‘so wholly unsuitable a voice’ made the BBC appear ‘ignorant of the essential needs of the microphone and of the audience’. Even photographs of Orwell are few and far between, which is why you see the same ones over and over again. For the most part, he exists only on the page, and in our heads.

This poses a challenge to the documentarian, but is an opportunity, too. In the Haitian director Raoul Peck’s film Orwell: 2+2=5, which screened at the London Film Festival and is on general release in March, Orwell’s fellow Old Etonian Damian Lewis gives us the voice we like to imagine: wry, resonant, penetrating, crisply authoritative and quietly furious about the many varieties of bullshit he made it his mission to expose. Peck says that Orwell’s writing is the film’s ‘libretto’, and it is accompanied by scenes from adaptations and docudramas, copious news footage and a witty array of film clips (Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, Oliver Twist, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and the recent horror film M3GAN all make an appearance).

As in I Am Not Your Negro, his 2016 film about James Baldwin, Peck uses Orwell as a kind of seer, commenting simultaneously on his own era and ours. Orwell never set out to be a timeless prophet, but in trying to explain the horrors of the 1930s and 40s he identified enduring truths about the cruelties and hypocrisies of power. Cue references to Edward Snowden, Jamal Khashoggi, AI, Iraq, Putin’s press conferences, cross-Channel refugees and (repeatedly) Trump. The strength of this connective tissue varies. While it’s bracing to cut from Orwell’s imperial service in 1920s Burma to atrocities in 2020s Myanmar, a segue from the Black Lives Matter slogan ‘I can’t breathe’ to Orwell dying from tuberculosis feels strangely offensive to both parties. Like Asif Kapadia’s Orwellian docudrama 2073, Peck’s film risks seeming like a compendium of everything that is wrong with the world. But I enjoyed its ambition nonetheless.

I doubt that Robert Colls, in his short new biography, George Orwell: Life and Legacy, feels the same way. Orwell: 2+2=5 would seem the work of a man too infatuated with what Colls calls Orwell’s ‘intellectual mystique, a “cool” more often bestowed on rock stars than writers’, and too confident about claiming Orwell for the Left. Colls swings in the opposite direction with a pronounced conservative bias. When hunting for current examples of the persecutions of ‘thoughtcrime’, for example, Colls averts his eyes from the Trump administration’s war on free expression and alights on British universities and publishers. His subtler observations – he likens Nineteen Eighty-Four to ‘a dream about being inside the head of a country that is in the process of losing its mind’ – must compete with the din of partisan axe-grinding.

Orwell’s idiosyncratic jumble of liberal, socialist and conservative instincts can accommodate both Peck’s and Colls’s needs. His fabulously wry first wife, Eileen, described his landmark 1941 essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ as ‘a little book explaining how to be a Socialist, though Tory’. Even in his most revolutionary moods, Orwell was very specific about what should stay and what should go. Small wonder that he found fault with every version of socialism except his own. But then he gave nobody an easy ride, least of all himself. With the sole exception of Animal Farm, he described all of his fiction as ‘awful’ or ‘bollox’ and took masochistic pleasure in itemising all the faulty predictions that he made during the war. ‘It seems to me very important to realise that we have been wrong, and say so,’ he wrote in Partisan Review towards the end of 1944.

Peck focuses on what Orwell got brilliantly right – about fascism, communism, imperialism, nationalism, the abuses of new technology and the lies people tell themselves without necessarily realising. But even when Orwell was proved wrong, which was often, he was wrong in a sincere and interesting way. To quote his disclaimer in Homage to Catalonia, ‘I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest.’

Truth-seeking was Orwell’s creed. As Colls writes, ‘all his life Orwell would charge his enemies not so much with evil but with fraud … All swindlers. All a racket. Down with rackets.’ He trusted things he had personally seen, heard or felt while wrinkling his nose at theory and rhetoric. This justifies Milan Kundera’s blunt claim, as seen in Peck’s film, that Orwell ‘hated politics’. He developed his own organic English socialism by pitting the cheerful solidity of the working classes against the dishonest contortions and sterile fads of the intellectuals.

Where Colls’s chronological approach has the edge on Peck’s time-hopping is in clarifying Orwell’s evolution as a political thinker and the immense effort he put into re-examining his priors. In 1938, as Eileen noted, he retained ‘an extraordinary political simplicity in spite of everything’. The Road to Wigan Pier is oblivious to vast swathes of working-class life, while Homage to Catalonia, brilliant though it may be, is a keyhole view of the Spanish Civil War. Contemporaries such as his future friend Malcolm Muggeridge, in his remarkable 1940 book The Thirties, had a stronger grip on the big picture. The Second World War transformed Orwell by purging some bad habits, from his crude, alarmist pacifism to his unthinking anti-Semitism, and sharpening his eye. Colls argues nicely that, through his wartime output for the BBC, Tribune, Partisan Review and others, Orwell ‘composed, in effect, a prose opera of the English people’. He became the man who could write masterpieces.

Anyone who has engaged with Orwell will be cognisant of his flaws: the seductive generalisations, the hyperbolic denunciations, the frequent appeals to ‘common sense’ (really an umbrella term for the opinions of George Orwell). But his weaknesses, like his strengths, flowed from his obsession with moral clarity in a world drowning in humbug. In many ways, his politics were unsophisticated, yet more sophisticated thinkers were more likely to miss the wood for the trees.

For this reason, Orwell’s reputation has comfortably withstood every unflattering revelation, from his carelessness towards women to his unresolved prejudices. Perhaps the real danger now is that he becomes a floating signifier for people who have only read Nineteen Eighty-Four, if that, and understood almost none of it. When the richest man in the world recently addressed a far-right rally in London from a giant TV screen while wearing a ‘WHAT WOULD ORWELL THINK’ T-shirt, the jokes wrote themselves. Both Peck and Colls counteract such clumsy hijacking simply by drawing attention to what Orwell actually wrote. In 2025, it is not his enemies that Orwell needs defending against but his pseudo-admirers.