Philosophy of Love by Irving Singer;

Author:Irving Singer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2009-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche

In considering the prospects for the requisite harmonization, I return to the history of ideas about love, and specifically the work of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. They have to be studied together. Nietzsche was enamored of Schopenhauer’s philosophy when he was young. Schopenhauer died in 1860, so Nietzsche couldn’t have known him personally, but having studied his philosophy he considered himself a Schopenhauerian. He glorifies Schopenhauer as the hero of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of Music. Schopenhauer’s ideas then recur in later books that Nietzsche wrote.

As Nietzsche got older, however, he repudiated more and more details of Schopenhauer’s doctrine. He eventually ended up as a critic and not a devotee, which is a healthy development in any philosopher. It is the way that history marches on. Each new generation has to digest the ideas of previous ones, but then progressively eliminate much of what will now seem to them to be excrement. In the case of Nietzsche, his dialectic with Schopenhauer is particularly instructive because it reveals his own weaknesses as well as his unique strength of mind.

For instance, in Nietzsche’s final stage of emancipation, he remarks that Schopenhauer called himself a pessimist, which Nietzsche thought confused and counterproductive in various ways—one of which appears in the fact, according to Nietzsche, that Schopenhauer didn’t live the life of a pessimist. “Do you know how Schopenhauer spent his day?” he says in effect in one of his later books. “He had a good breakfast, did his writing in the morning, and in the afternoon he went for a walk with his poodle.” Incidentally, by the end of his life, Schopenhauer, who lived alone with his dogs, had twenty-four poodles. His lodgings contained photographs of them all on the walls. “After his walk,” Nietzsche continues, “Schopenhauer came home, ate a big meal, and then passed the evening playing on the flute. That’s not what it is to be a pessimist!”

In response, Schopenhauer would have replied that that’s exactly what it is to be a pessimist, since if you are one, you don’t expect too much of the world, you don’t try to live in accordance with very high, remote, wonderful, but unrealistic ideals that nobody can satisfy, and therefore you don’t inflict pain upon yourself because of your imperfections. Once you realize that you have fallen short of such ideals, you simply accept yourself as you are and garner pleasures along the way as best you can. You adapt to the reality of this being a world without a God (both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were atheists), a world without any fundamental meaning and wholly propelled by what later science would call a mere field of energy. There is no prior plan or metaphysical intelligence to be deciphered. Existence is a function of what Schopenhauer called the “Will,” by which he meant the dynamic force in nature itself.

The outlines of this view were accepted by Nietzsche as much as by Schopenhauer. The latter believed that if you’re a pessimist you can adjust to the situation much better than if you’re an optimist.

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