ABSTRACT
Parerga and Paralipomena 2 is Schopenhauer's swan song in the key of Goethe, i.e., the content, arrangement, and tone of this final book are designed to evoke Goethe and inscribe Schopenhauer as Goethe's intellectual heir. The presentation of PP2 demonstrates how Schopenhauer wanted to be remembered at this high point of his productivity; we can expect that the book included, to some extent, everything that mattered to him—and if his earlier books were carefully and thoughtfully prepared, this is especially the case for his final book. This chapter submits that Schopenhauer not only knew his star was rising in 1850, he also knew what was at stake in emerging as a German luminary at this time in history. Goethe died in 1832, but his memory was still fresh and there was no heir apparent. In the 1870s Nietzsche would tell us how Goethe transcended German nationhood. Later, when Thomas Mann, in his indignation and anguish, wrote Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man during WW I, he defended Wilhelminian Germany, and likewise the authoritarian state, while invoking Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner as his intellectual “triple star.” Goethe would be reclaimed by Thomas Mann after WW II, but Mann could not navigate by Goethe's star during his pre-democratic phase—he needed to call upon more conservative “German” mentors, as he saw them. Schopenhauer's positioning of himself relative to Goethe in 1850 is merely the prehistory of Mann positioning himself during WW I and immediately following WW II: German intellectuals after Goethe simply could not afford to ignore his star, for in terms of intellectual and cultural history, Goethe is the lodestar across space and time. Schopenhauer was masterful in dealing with Goethe personally, in what could be called an agon, and more importantly, he was masterful in using his experience with Goethe, Goethe's works, and Goethe's image to fashion himself as the successor to Goethe in the German imagination. The many quotations and allusions to Goethe in PP2 are not mere window dressing or stylistic flourishes; Schopenhauer had been in personal agon with Goethe over color theory, and he became the leading authority on art and genius, certainly in philosophical circles, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer in agon with Goethe is staged as a contest between philosophy and poetry.
