Here’s my book review of In the Presence of Schopenhauer by French prize-winning novelist Michel Houellebecq. In this novella-length essay, the author describes his fascination with 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
The Frogs is a sculpture by Sergio Bustamante. Can you guess why it reminds me of this book?
Houellebecq asserts that encountering Schopenhauer’s philosophy changed his outlook on life fundamentally. The author was in his mid-twenties. It was as if he’d met a perverse, cranky old man whom he could regard as a father figure – an understanding mentor who could forgive the author for being such a curmudgeon himself.
In her preface to the paperback, critic Agathe Novak-Lechavalier describes the author’s outlook this way:
Schopenhauer opened Houellebecq’s eyes and taught him to contemplate the world as it is in itself – as entirely driven by a blind and endless ‘will to live’ which is the essence of all things, from inert matter to men, via plants and animals. In Schopenhauer, this ‘will’, foreign to the principle of reason, is the basis of the absurd and tragic character of all existence, whose sufferings are at once inevitable (because ‘all willing proceeds from need and thus from deprivation, and thus from suffering’) and devoid of any justification. It also explains the author’s legendary pessimism.
“In other words,” the philosopher might have said to the author, “don’t feel bad about being such a cynic. Michel. Because the only sense you can make of the world is what you perceive through your senses, your opinion is the only one that matters!”
In my posts, I’ve included book reviews of Houllebecq’s novels The Map and the Territory and Submission. I’ve also read Whatever and Serotonin – all before I picked up this little book of admiration for Schopenhauer.
Well, finally, this essay explains a lot. I’ve found Houllebecq’s narrative points of view – whether expressed in the first or the third person – as solipsistic – that is, hopelessly self-centered to the point of self-obsession. His plots often seem pointless. He never explains. It’s as if he has no idea why he wrote the story.
I’d say this point of view agrees not only with Schopenhauer but also with the later French existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as with some contemporary behaviorists. “The universe is empty and meaningless,” they seem to say. “Make of it what you will.”
Some say this is good news, Recently, I heard physicist Brian Cox say he thought the mission of the human race is to make meaning.
I wonder.
