Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 15:56:33 -0500
From: Tristich-AT-aol.com
Subject: N's erstwhile master/followers


In his address, "Freud and the Future," Thomas Mann, by way of Mrs.
Lowe-Porter, refers to an essay by Arthur Schopenhauer called "Transcendent
Speculations on Apparent Design in the Fate of the Individual." According to
Mann, Schopenhauer argues "that precisely as in a dream it is our will that
unconsciously appears as inexorable objective destiny, everything in it
proceeding out of ourselves and each of us being the secret theatre-manager
of our own dreams, so also in reality the great dream which a single essence,
the will itself, dreams with us all, our fate, may be the product of our
inmost selves, of our wills, and we are actually ourselves bringing about
what seems to be happening to us."

Does anyone know where this essay by Schopenhauer is to be found or if it is
known in English by another title? Typically, Thomas Mann does not offer a
complete citation, and I have not found it among purported "Complete"
collections of Schopenhauer's essays. I would like to check out Thomas Mann's
references for myself, and I would appreciate being pointed in the right
direction.

My thought (as an untutored amature) is: Is there not some connection between
this concept of Schopenhauer's (assuming that Mann has correctly
characterized it) and Nietzsche's Eternal Return and also Amor Fati?

Thomas Mann's address, of course, was delivered in honor of Freud, and in it
he traces Freud's thought from roots in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, through
some of Freud's progeny, to an outlook to a future (viewed as of 1936) of the
psychoanalytic movement. I think that Thomas Mann suggests that Freud and the
psychoanalytic movement would have produced, may yet produce, the
Philosophers of the Future prophesied by Nietzsche. According to Mann, it is
Schopenhauer's argument paraphrased above that constitutes the "profound and
mysterious point of contact" between the natural-scientific world (of Freud)
and the philosophical world (of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) and that out of
this contact the "poet's utopia" may yet emerge, brought about by
psychoanalytic philosophers of the future (my combination of terms).

Fred Haines


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