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Although he thought of existence as a sorry mistake, the philosopher of pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer retained a strong “will to life”. One of his reasons for settling in Frankfurt was the reputation of that city’s doctors.
In Frankfurt, he took many precautions, bordering on the paranoid, to preserve his life and comfortable lifestyle. For example, he kept loaded pistols at his bedside, carried a leathern flask to avoid drinking infected water, and forbade barbers from shaving his neck. To prevent robbers, servants, and others from reading them, he wrote his business records and personal thoughts in English, Latin, or Greek, or in a shorthand code.
In the final year of his life, he moved to a ground-floor apartment not because he could no longer manage the stairs but from fear of being caught in a house fire. “A man of genius” he wrote in typical style, “is like a person who lives in a house where there are no other people but only dogs and cats; he is the only one who has any intelligence, but he is constantly in danger of being bitten or scratched.”
The 1848 Riots
In September 1848, there were violent riots in Frankfurt following the murder of two conservative politicians, a prince and a general.
Schopenhauer, who was then sixty years old, became worried about his property and safety. He welcomed the arrival of Austrian troops, and even allowed some twenty soldiers into his elegant apartment to shoot at 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 opera glasses.
Shaken by these events, he altered his will to leave the bulk of his estate to a fund for Prussian soldiers who had been maimed while quashing the 1848 revolutions—a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions across the German Confederation aimed at establishing a unified nation state, constitutional governance, and civil rights.
Schopenhauer on Nationalism
Schopenhauer had no truck with either nationalism or rabble utopias. National pride, he held, is the cheapest form of pride, because it requires no individual effort or character. In Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), he wrote: “Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resort pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.” The Germans, he opined, benefited from having such long words in their mouths, because they “think slowly” and need “time to reflect”.
While the Young Hegelians (most famously, Karl Marx) were agitating for political and social reform, Schopenhauer claimed that misery is the natural, inevitable state for human beings, regardless of external conditions, and would not be alleviated by “progress”. He made a point of stepping outside the torrent of history and “minding not the times but the eternities”—and considered this ability to “rise into timelessness” to be the true mark of a genius.
Whereas for Hegel, the state was the aim of human existence, for him it was simply its guarantor. The role of the state, in his Hobbesian view, was strictly to limit “the war of all against all” and afford him the conditions to philosophise and enjoy the arts without having to forsake his opera glasses. States with any higher ideals jeopardised their true goal of simple security.
How the Nazis Interpreted Schopenhauer
The Nazis viewed Schopenhauer’s older contemporary G.W.F. Hegel with hostility. They abhorred his emphasis on reason: on history as the march of reason and the state as a body of rational laws and institutions. In 1933, Carl Schmitt, the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich, famously declared that “on the day Hitler came to power, Hegel died”.
In his Table Talk, Hitler, who did not have much philosophy, dismissed Hegel’s “tedious” and “Jewish” rationalism in favour of the “irrationalism” of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—even though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both strongly rejected nationalism. Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the slave morality of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the “good European”. In 1886, he wrote to his mother, “Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.”
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Hitler and the Nazis praised Schopenhauer’s ideas on the “will to life”, which, with Nietzsche, became the “will to power”. They glorified this “irrational will” over reason to support their “social Darwinism”, according to which brute force and action are superior to intellectualism, justice, and the rule of law.
Neel Burton is author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.
