Although he considered existence to be a regrettable mistake, the philosopher pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer maintained 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 to maintain his comfortable life and lifestyle. For example, he kept loaded pistols by his bedside, carried leather flasks to drink contaminated water, and forbade barbers to shave his neck. He wrote his business records and personal thoughts in English, Latin, or Greek, or in shorthand code so that robbers, servants, and others could not read them.
In the last year of his life, he moved to a first-floor apartment, not because he could no longer manage the stairs, but because fear who fell in the house fire. “A man of genius,” he wrote in a typical style, “is like a man who lives in a house where only dogs and cats are no longer human; he is the only one who intelligencebut he is always in danger of being bitten or scratched.”
Rebellions of 1848
In September 1848, there were violent riots in Frankfurt after the assassination of two conservative politicians, a prince and a general.
Schopenhauer, who was sixty years old at the time, was worried about his property and safety. He welcomed the arrival of the Austrian troops and even allowed some twenty soldiers into his beautiful apartment to shoot at the revolutionaries from the window. In a parody of his social class, when the soldiers moved next door for a better vantage point, he lent one of the officers his large double-edged opera glasses.
Shaken by these events, he changed his will to bequeath a large portion of his estate to a fund for Prussian soldiers who had been maimed during the suppression of the revolutions of 1848—a series of broadly coordinated protests and uprisings throughout the German Confederation aimed at establishing a unified nation-state, constitutional government, and civil rights.
Schopenhauer on nationalism
Schopenhauer had no truck with nationalism or blasphemous utopias. National pride, in his opinion, is the cheapest form of pride, because it does not require individual effort and character. In Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), he wrote: “Every wretched fool, who has nothing of which to be proud, takes pride in the nation to which he belongs as the last opening; he is ready and happy to defend himself against all the faults and teeth and nails, and thus compensate for his inferiority.” According to him, the Germans benefited from having so many long words, because they “think slowly” and need time to think.
While the Young Hegelians (most famously Karl Marx) advocated for political and social reform, Schopenhauer argued that human misery was a natural and inevitable condition regardless of external conditions and could not be alleviated by “progress”. He thought about getting out of the flood of history and “not into the times, but into the eternities” and considered this ability to “go out into the eternal” as a true sign of a genius.
While for Hegel the state was the goal of human existence, for him it was only its guarantor. The role of the state, in his Hobbesian opinion, was to strictly limit the “war of all against all” and to provide him with the conditions for philosophy and the enjoyment of art without leaving the opera glasses. States with high ideals put their real goal – simple security at risk.
How the Nazis interpreted Schopenhauer
The Nazis viewed Schopenhauer’s older contemporary GWF Hegel with hostility. They hated his emphasis on reason: on history as the march of reason and the state as a collection of rational laws and institutions. In 1933, Karl Schmitt, the “crown expert” of the Third Reich, famously announced that “Hegel died the day Hitler came to power.”
In himself Desk talkHitler, who was not much philosophyrejected the “boring” and “Jewish” rationalism of Hegel in favor of the “irrationalism” of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, even though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche strongly rejected nationalism. Nietzsche saw nationalism and democracy as successors to slavery morality of Christianity. Instead, he advocated the ideal of a “good Europe”. In 1886, he wrote to his mother: “If I am a bad German, I am in any case a very good European.”
Important books of philosophy
Hitler and the Nazis appreciated Schopenhauer’s ideas about the “will to life”, which became the “will to power” with Nietzsche. They praised this “irrational will” over reason to support their “social Darwinism,” according to which brute force and brutal action are superior to intelligence, justice, and the rule of law.
Neil Burton is the author of the new post German Greece: German Philosophy and German Philosophers.
