Chapter 73 Chapter 24 Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer (Schopenhauer, 1788-1860) was different among philosophers in many ways.Almost all other philosophers are in some sense optimists, but he is a pessimist.He is not quite academic like Kant and Hegel, but he is not completely outside the academic tradition. He hates Christianity and likes Indian religions, both Hinduism and Buddhism.He was a man of wide cultivation, as interested in art as in ethics.He was remarkably unnationalistic; he was as familiar with English and French writers as he was with his own.His appeal has always been less with specialized philosophers than with artists and men of letters who seek a philosophy they can trust.The emphasis on "will" that characterizes much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy began with him; but for him "will," though fundamental in metaphysics, is ethically evil. —This is an opposition that is only possible with the pessimist.He admits three sources for his philosophy, Kant, Plato, and the Upanishads; but I do not think he has as much from Plato as he thinks.His outlook has a certain temperamental kinship with that of the Hellenistic age; it is a languid outlook, one that despises victory in favor of peace, and despises efforts in reformation in favor of inaction, which he regards as Inevitability always comes to nothing.

Schopenhauer was born in Danzig to parents who came from local business families.His father was a Voltairean who saw England as the land of liberty and reason.Like most of the famous citizens of Danzig, he resented Prussia's invasion of the independence of this free city. When Danzig was annexed to Prussia in 1793, he was so indignant that he moved to Hamburg at a considerable financial loss.Schopenhauer lived with his father in Hamburg from 1793 to 1797; then he spent two years in Paris, at the end of which his father was pleased to see that the boy had almost forgotten German. In 1803 he was sent to a boarding school in England, where he hated the posturing and hypocrisy.

Two years later, in order to please his father, he became a clerk in a firm in Hamburg, but he hated the prospect of a business career and longed for the life of a scholar.The death of his father (presumably by suicide) made it possible for him to get what he wanted; his mother was determined to send him out of business and into school and college.We might have expected him to like his mother more than his father for this reason; but the opposite happened: he loathed his mother, but kept fond memories of his father. Schopenhauer's mother, a woman with literary interests, had settled in Weimar two weeks before the Battle of Jena.In Weimar, she hosted a literary salon, wrote her own books, and made friends with cultural people.She has no kindness for her son, but she has a keen eye for his faults.She reprimanded him against rhetoric and empty sentimentality; he, for his part, was angry at her flirting with others.When he reached manhood, he inherited a considerable estate; thereafter, he and his mother gradually found each other less and less intolerable.His contempt for women was, of course, at least partly caused by his quarrel with his mother.

Already in Hamburg Schopenhauer had come under the influence of the Romantics, especially Tieck, Novalis and Hofmann, with whom he had learned to appreciate Greece, thinks that the Hebrew elements in Christianity are not good.Another Romantic, Friedrich Schlegel, made his admiration for Indian philosophy firmer.He entered the University of Göttingen in his adult year (1809) and learned to admire Kant.Two years later he entered the University of Berlin, where he studied mainly science; he had heard Fichte lecture, but despised him.He remained indifferent throughout the stirring war of liberation. In 1819 he became a Privatdozent (unpaid lecturer) at the University of Berlin, so conceited that he put his lectures at the same hour as Hegel's; since he failed to attract Hegel's students, he stopped soon. lecture.In the end he settled down to the life of an old bachelor in Dresden.He kept a poodle named Atma (the spirit of the universe), took two-hour daily walks, smoked a long pipe, read The Times of London, and hired correspondents to search for evidence of his reputation.He was anti-democratic and hated the Revolution of 1848; he believed in seances and magic;

In his study, there is a bust of Kant and a bronze Buddha.Apart from this point about getting up early, he tried to imitate Kant in his way of life. His main work "The World as Will and Idea" (The World as Will and Idea) was published at the end of 1818.He considered the book so important that he went so far as to say that some passages in it were dictated to him by the Holy Spirit.To his great humiliation, the book went completely unnoticed. In 1844 he prompted a second edition; but it was not until some years later that he began to receive some of the recognition he craved. Schopenhauer's system is a modification of Kant's, but a modification in which points in the Critique are emphasized that are quite different from those emphasized by Fichte or Hegel.They eliminated the thing-in-itself, thus making knowledge metaphysically fundamental.Schopenhauer retained the thing-in-itself, but identified it with the will.He contends that what perception perceives as my body is really my will.There are reasons why this view is a product of the development of Kantian thought, although most Kantians are unwilling to fully admit these reasons.Kant once argued that the study of the moral law can bring us behind the phenomenon and give us knowledge that sensory perception cannot give us; he also believed that the moral law is basically about the will.In Kant's view, the difference between a good person and a bad person is a difference in the world of things in themselves, and it is also a difference in desire.It can be seen that in Kant's view, desire must not belong to the world of appearance but the world of reality.The phenomenon corresponding to a will is a certain movement of the body; this is why, according to Schopenhauer, the body is a phenomenon and the will its reality.

But the will behind phenomena is not composed of many different wills.According to Kant, both time and space belong only to phenomena, and Schopenhauer agrees with him on this point; the thing-in-itself does not exist in space or time.Therefore, in the sense that my will is real, my will cannot be timed, nor can it be composed of separate acts of will, because the "plurality"— The source of the "principle of individuation," in Schopenhauer's favorite scholastic parlance, is precisely space and time.So my will is one and timeless. No, not only that, but it should be identified with the will of the universe; my separateness is an illusion produced by my subjective organ of space and time perception.The Real is one vast will, present in all natural processes, animate and inanimate.

So far, we might expect Schopenhauer to identify his cosmic will and God as one, to advocate a pantheism not dissimilar to Spinoza's, in which the so-called virtue It is in obedience to the will of God.But here his pessimism leads to another development.The will of the universe is evil; the will is all evil, and is anyway the source of all our never-ending misery.Suffering is essential to all life, and it increases with every increase in knowledge.The will has no fixed purpose which, if attained, would bring satisfaction.Although death always triumphs in the end, we still pursue our futile ends, "like we blow up a soap bubble as long and as big as we can, knowing full well that it will burst in the end." This thing called happiness is Not at all, because unfulfilled desires cause pain, and fulfillment brings only satiety.Instinct drives man to reproduce, which in turn begets new opportunities for misery and death; this is why sex and shame are linked.Suicide is useless; the theory of reincarnation, even if it is not true in its original sense, conveys the truth in the form of myth.

It's all very tragic, but there is a way out, and that way out was discovered in India. The best of all myths is the myth of Nirvana (Schopenhauer interprets Nirvana as death).He admits that the myth is un-Christian, but "the ancient wisdom of mankind will not be replaced by what happened in Galilee." Suffering is caused by a strong will; the less we exercise our will, the less we suffer.So the so-called knowledge, as long as it is a certain kind of knowledge, is proved to be useful after all.The difference between one person and another is part of the phenomenal world, and seeing the world as it is, the difference disappears.To the good man, the veil of Maya (illusion) has become transparent; the good man understands that all things are one, and that the difference between himself and others is only a superficial difference.He came to this insight through love, which is always compassion and a connection to the suffering of others. As soon as the veil of "Maya" is removed, people will bear the suffering of the whole world.In the good man, knowledge of the whole quiets all wills; his will is divorced from life, and denies his own nature. "In his heart, there is a kind of disgust for the nature of his own phenomenal existence as an expression, that is, the core inner nature that has recognized the world full of misery."

Schopenhauer thus came into complete agreement with ascetic mysticism, at least as far as practice is concerned.Eckhart and Angelus Ziracius are better than the New Testament.There are some good things in orthodox Christianity, notably the doctrine of original sin preached by St. Augustine and Luther against the "vulgar doctrine of Pelagius";He said that Buddhism is the highest religion; the ethics of the Buddha are traditionally recognized throughout Asia, except where the "hateful Islamic doctrine" prevails. A good person will practice complete chastity, voluntary purity, fasting and asceticism.In all things he will single-mindedly restrain his personal will.But the good man does not do this in order to achieve harmony with God, as the mystics of the West do; it is not in pursuit of this positive goodness.The good sought after is negative through and through:

"We must dispel the shadowy impression of 'nothingness' which we recognize behind all virtue and holiness as the ultimate object of virtue and holiness, that 'nothingness' which we fear as children fear the dark; we must not even be like the Hindus , evading it with myths and nonsense, such as reincarnation into Brahma or Buddhist nirvana. We rather frankly admit that what remains after the total abolition of the will is indeed emptiness for all who are still full of will Nothing; but conversely, to those whose will has been transformed and has denied itself, our world, so real, despite its suns and galaxies, is nothingness."

There is a faint implication here that the sage sees something positive that others don't, but what that is is nowhere implied, so I think the insinuation is merely rhetorical.Schopenhauer said that the world and all its phenomena are nothing but the objectification of will.With the surrender of the will, "all those phenomena are also abolished; the endless tension and effort, on all stages of objectivity, of which the world is constituted; The multiplicity of forms; the total expression of the will; and, finally, the universal forms of this expression—time and space, and their last fundamental forms—subject and object; are all abolished. No will: no representation, no The world. There is nothing but nothingness before us." We cannot explain the meaning of this passage other than to mean that the purpose of the holy beings is to approach non-existence as closely as possible; and that non-existence cannot be achieved by the holy ones by suicide, for some reason that has never been clearly stated. .Why a saint is preferable to a perpetually inebriated man is not easy to understand; perhaps Schopenhauer thought that the moments of sobriety must be extremely frequent. Schopenhauer's obedience to fate is not very consistent and not very sincere.The mystics he cites were contemplative; in the "Believable Intuition" the most profound kind of realization is attained, and this knowledge is the supreme good.Since Parmenides, false knowledge of phenomena has been contrasted with another kind of knowledge, not with something quite different.Christianity advocates that our eternal life lies in knowing God.But Schopenhauer doesn't talk about that at all.He agrees that what is commonly taken as knowledge belongs to the realm of Maya, but when we pierce the veil we see not God but Satan—the evil being forever busy weaving a web of misery to torment his own creation. Almighty will.The sage was frightened by the "devil's intuition", shouted "Go!", and hid in the realm of non-existence.It would be an insult to say that mystics are people who believe in such myths.As for the fact that a sage can still live a somewhat valuable life without achieving complete non-existence, such a formulation cannot be reconciled with Schopenhauer's pessimistic theory.As long as the wise man exists, he exists because of the evil of retaining the will.He can reduce the amount of evil by weakening the will, but he can never acquire any positive good. If we can judge by Schopenhauer's life, we can see that his arguments are not sincere.He used to eat well in good restaurants; he had many petty love affairs that were sensual and unenthusiastic; he was exceptionally quarrelsome and extremely greedy.Once an elderly seamstress spoke to a friend outside his room door, and he so offended him that he threw her downstairs, maiming her for life.She won a court judgment ordering Schopenhauer to pay her a certain amount (fifteen taras) every quarter for as long as she lived.When she finally died twenty years later, he wrote in the ledger: "Obitanus, abitonus." It is difficult to find any trace of virtue in his life, except his kindness to animals, which went as far as his opposition to vivisection for the sake of science.In all other respects he was utterly selfish.It is hard to believe that a man who believes deeply in the virtues of asceticism and obedience never intends to embody his beliefs in practice. Historically, two things are important about Schopenhauer, his pessimism and his will over knowledge.With his pessimism, one does not need to believe that all evil can be explained away and committed to philosophy, so his pessimism is useful as an antidote.From a scientific point of view, both optimism and pessimism are equally undesirable: optimism posits, or attempts to prove, that the universe exists to please us, pessimism says that it displeases us. Scientifically speaking, there is no evidence that the universe has the former relationship with us or the latter relationship.Faith in pessimism or faith in optimism is not a matter of reason but of temperament, though optimism has always been much more common among Western philosophers.So it may be beneficial to have a representative of the opposite faction raise issues that would otherwise be ignored. Even more important than pessimism is the doctrine of the primacy of the will.Obviously, this theory has no necessary logical connection with pessimism, and people who advocated this theory after Schopenhauer often get the basis of optimism from it.There are many modern philosophers, notably Nietzsche, Bergson, James, and Dewey, who have argued in one form or another for the supremacy of the will.Moreover, the doctrine has gained popularity even outside the circle of professional philosophers.Thus, as the rank of the will rises, so does the rank of knowledge descend.This, I think, is the most striking change in the philosophical temperament of our time.This change was prepared by Rousseau and Kant, but first announced in pure form by Schopenhauer.For this reason his philosophy, despite its inconsistencies and certain shallowness, is of considerable importance as a stage in historical development.