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Schopenhauer on the psychology of nationalism.

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 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.”

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.

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Arthur Schopenhauer on ageing and isolation

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland).

Arthur’s father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg, where Arthur’s sister, Adèle, was born.

Arthur’s French brother, Jean Anthime

1797, the nine-year-old Arthur was sent from Hamburg to Le Havre, in France, to live with the family of his father’s business associate, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age.

The two years that Arthur spent in Le Havre were, Schopenhauer claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learned to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

From these common beginnings, the lives of Arthur and Jean Anthime would diverge, with Jean Anthime becoming a successful merchant and family man and Arthur growing into a philosopher (“the Sage of Frankfurt”) and celibate recluse.

When Arthur and Jean Anthime met for the last time

In 1845, a lifetime later, Jean Anthime travelled to Frankfurt and met his “German brother” for the last time.

In Frankfurt, Arthur took all his meals at the Englischer Hof. He sat alone, dressed in white tie, at a large common table. At every meal, he would place a gold coin on the table. When a waiter enquired into this practice, he replied that he had vowed to himself to give the coin to charity on the first occasion that the other diners discussed something more substantial than “horses, women, or dogs.” In thirty years, he never lost his coin.

When Arthur received news of Jean Anthime’s visit, he booked two rooms at the Englisher Hof, one for Jean Anthime and another for Jean Anthime’s daughter by his second marriage.

But Arthur arrived late and in a foul mood to their dinner meeting. In his travel diary, Jean Anthime wrote: “He is of such disagreeable character that we quarrelled quite seriously. He professes, he says, the religion of the Hindu. It’s an eccentricity to add to all the others. He is considered mad, and indeed he must be.”

The Hedgehog Dilemma

A few years later, in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Schopenhauer would reflect upon the increasing isolation that accompanies old age, positing that the older we become, the more we diverge from others, and the less we need, or think we need, from them.

This is most true of the genius or man of intellect, who finds his own thoughts a lot more interesting and fulfilling than “the fuss created by fools.” If we must mingle with fools, we should carry our solitude inside us so as to be “not quite in their company, though in their midst.” “To be alone” he wrote, “is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.”

He famously compared humans to hedgehogs who huddle for warmth, but in so doing prick one another with their quills. Thus, the hedgehogs need to find just the right degree of closeness between feeling warm and being injured. But in old age, aided by a waning of the Will (the primitive life force in Schopenhauer’s philosophy), we finally have a coat thick enough to keep us warm:

Profound peace of heart and perfect peace of mind, these highest earthly goods after health, are to be found in solitude alone, and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion. And if our own self is great and rich, we enjoys the happiest state that can be found on this miserable earth.

When Freud read Parerga and Paralipomena, he picked up on the Hedgehog dilemma and quoted the parable in a footnote to his own 1921 work, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. He used the metaphor to explain the ambivalence of human emotions and the necessity of “good manners” or a “proper distance” in social interactions.

Schopenhauer originally wrote about porcupines, which have longer, more dangerous quills, rather than hedgehogs. Freud was so fond of the analogy that, for the rest of his life, he kept a bronze model of a porcupine on his desk.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Lessons from the teenage Schopenhauer’s European tour.

Schopenhauer at the age of fourteen.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on in 22 February 1788 at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). His father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg. At nine years old, Arthur was sent to Le Havre in France to live with the family of his father’s business associated, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age. The two years that Arthur spent in le Havre were, he claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learn to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean-Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

When Arthur was in his mid-teens, the principal of his private school, Dr Runge, who recognised his exceptional potential, attempted to persuade Heinrich Floris to redirect him onto an academic path. Arthur too exerted considerable pressure on his father. To settle the matter in his favour, the wily Heinrich Floris offered Arthur a Hobson’s choice between remaining in Hamburg to learn Latin and prepare for university, or accompany his parents on a luxurious two-year pleasure tour through Europe—on condition that he commit to a merchant apprenticeship upon their return.

Arthur’s European tour: The Wimbledon academy

Thus, in 1803, the fifteen-year-old Arthur set off on a tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austra, and Prussia. In England, he spent twelve weeks at Reverend Thomas Lancaster’s academy in Wimbledon, while his parents toured the North. Teachers thought of him as a “seething, belligerent pupil.” He developed a lifelong antipathy towards Anglicanism and later described the experience as a form of “incarceration.” But he became fluent in English, and, later, would write German in a more limpid English style.

Schopenhauer is still regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the German language. In On Language and Words, he would argue that language, though essential for human reasoning, shapes and limits our thoughts. It often serves as a substitute for true thinking, and distances us from intuitive perception and action. 

However, learning another language can increase our range and flexibility of thought by obliging us to separate the concept from the word and to break down and reconstruct thoughts according to a different organisational scheme. This is all the more true of the classical languages (Latin and Greek), which call for a non-literal translation that forces a melting down and recasting of thought.

Arthur’s European tour: Three hangings and a hard-labour penitentiary

Tourism in those days could take in the ugly as well as the beautiful. On June 8, 1803, Arthur witnessed three hangings from the window of a pub opposite Newgate prison in London. He noted in his travel diary that the men, right before the drop, took to praying: “One of them, who moved his hands up and down as he prayed, made the same movement a couple more times after he had fallen.”

On April 8, 1804, he visited the Bagne de Toulon, to be made famous by Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. “Can one think of a more terrible feeling than that of one of these unfortunates as he is chained to the bench in the dark galley and from which nothing but death can separate him?”

Later, he would compare the whole world to a penitentiary, and this period of his life to the Buddha’s awakening, when Prince Siddharta (later, the Buddha) ventured out of the palace only to be confronted everywhere by the “Four Sights” of age, sickness, death, and an ascetic monk.

Why Arthur warned against book knowledge

There can be no doubt that Arthur gained a lot more from his travels than he would have done from sitting in a Hamburg classroom. His worldliness, he would argue, gave him an advantage over “mere scholars” or “book philosophers”, for true thought must be rooted in direct observation and firsthand experience of the world.

Reliance on books is like “thinking with somebody else’s head” and produces only superficial knowledge, which, “like an artificial limb, false, tooth, or waxen nose,” is not organically woven into our being. Children, he thought (like Jean-Jacques Rousseau), should not be exposed to “theories and doctrines” until the age of sixteen.

In On Reading and Books, Schopenhauer wrote: “For the person who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, since they are carrying what ought to have carried them.

Nietzsche, in the autobiographical Ecce Homo:

[Sickness] bestowed on me the compulsion to lie still, to be idle, to wait and be patient … But to do that means to think! … My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain terms … I was redeemed from the “book,” for years at a time I read nothing—the greatest favour I ever did myself! 

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Whereas Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel could count as optimists, Schopenhauer is the first (and last) thinker in all Western philosophy to have constructed a complete and systematic pessimism.

But he is interesting for other reasons too. For his Great Philosophers series (1987), Bryan Magee, who wrote a thick book on Schopenhauer, introduced him as “the only major Western philosopher to draw serious and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought.” 

Magee continues: “He was the first major Western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and more to say about them than any other important philosopher … He was himself among the supreme writers of German prose. Many of his sentences are so brilliantly aphoristic that they’ve been torn out of context and published separately in little books of epigrams.”

Schopenhauer’s humorous epigrams

To give you a flavour, here are a few of his many epigrams:

  • Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
  • Life is a business that does not cover its costs.
  • The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain… If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
  • What everyone most aims at in ordinary contact with his fellows is to prove them inferior to himself.
  • Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
  • It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

Here’s why you laughed, according to Schopenhauer himself

Probably, you chuckled while reading these aphorisms. But why did you chuckle? Schopenhauer has his own theory of laughter, which is a version of the incongruence theory, according to which laughter arises from a contradiction between a concept (what people think is happening) and its reality (what is in fact happening)—highlighting a failure of reason over perception. Thus, when people laugh at us (rather than along with us) they are filling the gap between our idea of ourself, or people’s general idea of us, and the sad reality.

Many people who read Schopenhauer’s aphorisms laugh only half-heartedly, because they feel threatened by them. But the few who laugh full-throatedly feel liberated by their truth. In this moment of pure perception, while they laugh, they escape, if only for a few seconds, from the tyranny of the Will—the blind, irrational force that, in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, underlies all reality, and forces us to exist and strive without purpose.

Schopenhauer’s theory of weeping

Schopenhauer also had a theory of weeping. Weeping, which is a physical expression of mental misery, is a form of self-compassion. As such, it requires an outside perspective on the self, which is why animals don’t cry, and children don’t cry if no one is watching. Schopenhauer cites the example of a person who did not think to weep over their misery until their case was summarised to them in court and they were brought to reflect upon their suffering—when they suddenly broke into a stream of tears.

When we weep, we become “both the sufferer and the compassionate onlooker.” Because weeping originates from self-compassion, it suggests to others that the crier is capable of compassion, and thus worthy of compassion. Psychopaths don’t cry, or only crocodile tears.

A final reason why Schopenhauer is funny

To me, Schopenhauer is important also because he is the first since antiquity to offer a comprehensive solution to the problem of living and suffering. As well as a great philosopher, he was a fine psychologist, so that we often find ourself laughing along with him. But almost as often, we find ourself laughing at him, owing, I think, to the incongruence between his lofty philosophy of temperance and compassion and his own bad boy ways.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.