SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR

In his third installment of Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: Schopenhauer als Erzieher (1874), Nietzsche continues his pet theme of the philistinization of German [read: Western!] culture, with ugly hypocritical pretenses and artificial social conventionalities concealing and destroying the absolute uniqueness of a once-given human individuality. Germany needs a good teacher to help her “find herself,” and she has found one in Schopenhauer. [There is nothing wrong with Schopenhauer, of course, and with Nietzsche, for that matter, but have they stopped the process of philistinization of Western culture? What would Nietzsche say today? Which teachers would he recommend?..]

Nietzsche commends Schopenhauer for his intellectual honesty: the sine qua non in a good teacher. But he has also found something else, something highly unexpected in this alleged epitome of philosophical pessimism. Here is an extended key passage from Nietzsche’s essay:

Schopenhauer has a second characteristic in common with Montaigne, besides honesty--- a joy that really makes others joyful. “Aliis laetus, sibi sapiens.” There are two very different kinds of joyfulness. The true thinker always communicates joy and life, whether he is showing his serious or comic side, his human insight or his godlike forbearance: without surly looks, or trembling hands, or watery eyes; but simply and truly, with fearlessness and strength, a little cavalierly perhaps, and sternly, but always as a conqueror: and it is this that brings the deepest and intensest joy to see the conquering god with all the monsters that he has fought. But the joyfulness one finds here and there in the mediocre writers and limited thinkers makes some of us miserable; I felt this, for example, with the “joyfulness” of David Strauss. We are generally ashamed of such a quality in our contemporaries, because they show the nakedness of our time, and of the men in it, to posterity. Such fils de joie do not see the sufferings and the monsters, that they pretend, as philosophers, to see and fight; and so their joy deceives us, and we hate it; it tempts us to the false belief that they have gained some victory. At bottom there is only joy where there is victory: and this applies to true philosophy as much as to any work of art. The contents may be forbidding and serious as the problem of existence always is; the work will only prove tiresome and oppressive, if the slipshod thinker and the dilettante have spread the mist of their insufficiency over it: while nothing happier or better can come to man's lot than to be near one of those conquering spirits whose profound thought has made them love what is most vital, and whose wisdom has found its goal in beauty. They really speak: they are no stammerers, or babblers. They live and move, and have no part in the danse macabre of the rest of humanity. And so in their company one feels a natural man again, and could cry out with Goethe—“What a wondrous and priceless thing is a living creature! How fitted to his surroundings, how true, and real!”

I have been describing nothing but the first, almost physiological, impression made upon me by Schopenhauer, the magical emanation of inner force from one plant of Nature to another, that follows the slightest contact. Analyzing it, I find that this influence of Schopenhauer has three elements--- his honesty, his joy, and his consistency. He is honest, as speaking and writing for himself alone; joyful, because his thought has conquered the greatest difficulties; consistent because he can’t help being so. His strength rises like a flame in the calm air, straight up, without a tremor or deviation. He finds his way, without our noticing that he has been seeking it: so surely, and cleverly, and inevitably does he run his course: as if by some law of gravitation. If anyone have felt what it means to find --- in our present world of Centaurs and Chimaeras --- a single-hearted and unaffected child of nature, who moves unconstrained on his own road, he will understand my joy and surprise in discovering Schopenhauer: I knew in him the educator and philosopher whom I had so long desired. Only, however, in his writings: which was a great loss. All the more did I exert myself to see behind the book the living man whose testament it was, and who promised his inheritance to such as could, and would, be more than his readers—his pupils and his sons.

This Nietzschean assessment of the intellectual legacy of Arthur Schopenhauer is a brilliant vindication of the latter’s place in history. Petty commercial philosophers of modern times notwithstanding, Schopenhauer’s place is not in the second rank, but in the foremost first rank of the greatest philosophers of history. My great pleasure is thus to share my own personal opinion with Nietzsche.

Now, if there is anyone who might remember the title of this entry, and thus the title of Nietzsche’s essay, and raise this objection: “Wait a minute, Nietzsche is talking about Schopenhauer as an educator, and you seem to be confusing the issue talking about Schopenhauer as a philosopher!”--- to him I will say this:

But who else is a philosopher if not an educator of his contemporaries and of the posterity? Unless one is a teacher of humanity, one cannot pretend to be a good philosopher! Being a successful teacher is another story… But then, even the greatest genius of all time cannot win the battle for the soul of humanity.