He is a philosopher, although he considers existence to be a sad mistake pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer retained a strong “will to live.” One of the reasons he settled in Frankfurt was the reputation of the city’s doctors.
In Frankfurt, he took many precautions bordering on the paranoid to preserve his life and comfortable lifestyle. For example, he kept pistols by his bed, carried a leather flask to avoid drinking infected water, and forbade barbers to shave his neck. He wrote his business notes and personal thoughts in English, Latin, or Greek, or in a shorthand code to prevent robbers, servants, and others from reading them.
In the last year of his life, he moved to a first-floor apartment, not because he could not manage the stairs. fear about a house fire. “A man of genius,” he wrote in typical style, “is like a man who lives in a house where there are no other people, only dogs and cats; there is only him. intelligencebut he is always in danger of being bitten or scratched.
The riots of 1848
In September 1848, there were violent riots in Frankfurt following the assassination of two conservative politicians, a prince and a general.
Schopenhauer, then sixty years old, was concerned about his property and security. He welcomed the arrival of the Austrian troops and even allowed twenty soldiers to fire at the revolutionaries from the window of his elegant apartment. In a parody of his social class, when the soldiers moved in next door, he gave one of the officers a pair of large, double opera glasses.
Shaken by these events, he changed his will to leave the bulk of his estate to a fund for Prussian soldiers maimed during the 1848 Revolutions—a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions aimed at establishing a unified nation-state, constitutional government, and civil rights throughout the German Confederation.
Schopenhauer on nationalism
Schopenhauer had no truck with either nationalism or cruel utopias. National pride, he believes, is the cheapest form of pride because it requires no personal effort or character. In Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), he wrote: “Every poor fool, who has nothing to be proud of, takes pride in the nation to which he belongs as a last resort; he is ready and glad to defend it tooth and nail, and pay for his inferiority.” He believes that Germans benefited from having such long words in their mouths because they “think slowly” and need “time to think”.
While the Young Hegelians (most famously Karl Marx) campaigned for political and social reform, Schopenhauer argued that poverty was a natural, inevitable condition of humanity, regardless of external conditions, and could not be alleviated by “progress”. He aimed to go beyond the flow of history and “think eternity, not time,” and considered this ability to “rise to timelessness” a true sign of genius.
For Hegel, the state was the goal of human existence, but for him it was just a guarantee. The role of the state, in his Hobbesian opinion, was to strictly limit the “war of all against all” and to create conditions for him to philosophize and enjoy art without giving up his opera glasses. States with any lofty ideals have compromised their real goal of simple security.
How the Nazis interpreted Schopenhauer
The Nazis viewed Schopenhauer’s old contemporary GWF Hegel with hostility. They resented his emphasis on reason: history as the march of reason and the state as a collection of rational laws and institutions. In 1933, Karl Schmitt, the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich, famously declared that “Hegel died the day Hitler came to power.”
In it Table talkHitler who didn’t have much philosophyRejected the “boring” and “Jewish” rationalism of Hegel in favor of the “irrationalism” of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – although Schopenhauer and Nietzsche strongly rejected nationalism. Nietzsche saw nationalism and democracy as the successors of the slave ethics Christianity. Instead, he defended the ideal of the “good European”. In 1886, he wrote to his mother: “Even if I have to be a bad German, I am a very good European.”
Basic readings of philosophy
Hitler and the Nazis appreciated Schopenhauer’s ideas about the “will to life” which became the “will to power” along with Nietzsche. They glorified this “irrational will” with reason to support their “social Darwinism,” according to which brute force and action are superior to intellectuality, justice, and the rule of law.
Neel Burton is the author of a newly published book German Greeks: German Philosophy and German Philosophers.
