NIIETZSCHE - THE CHALLENGE OF EVERY GREAT
PHILOSOPHY - FROM SCHOPENHAUER AS TEACHER
- ATHENAEUM LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY
One of the Largest and Most Visited Sources
of Philosophical Texts on the Internet.
THE CHALLENGE OF EVERY GREAT PHILOSOPHY
FROM SCHOPENHAUER AS TEACHER
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
(1844-1900)
THE CHALLENGE OF EVERY GREAT PHILOSOPHY
FROM SCHOPENHAUER AS TEACHER
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
(1844-1900)
Human beings who do not want to belong to
the mass need only to stop, and not be comfortable;
follow their conscience, which cries out:
"Be yourself! All you are now doing,
thinking, desiring, is not you yourself."...your
educators can be only your liberators...
—Schopenhauer as Educator - From Untimely Meditationsm
The Challenge of Every Great Philosophy
from Schopenhauer as Teacher
Friedrich Nietzsche
Human beings who do not want to belong to
the mass need only to stop, and not be comfortable;
follow their conscience, which cries out:
"Be yourself! All you are now doing,
thinking, desiring, is not you yourself."...
your educators can be only your liberators...
-Schopenhauer as Educator, §1 - From Untimely
Meditations .
A traveller who had seen many countries and
peoples and several continents was asked
what human traits he had found everywhere;
and he answered: men are inclined to laziness.
Some will feel that he might have said with
greater justice: they are all timorous. They
hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom,
every human being knows very well that he
is in this world just once, as something
unique, and that no accident, however strange,
will throw together a second time into a
unity such a curious and diffuse plurality:
he knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience
why? From fear of his neighbour who insists
on convention and veils himself with it.
But what is it that compels the individual
human being to fear his neighbour, to think
and act herd-fashion, and not to be glad
of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in
a few rare cases. In the vast majority it
is the desire for comfort, inertia - in short,
that inclination to laziness of which the
traveller spoke. He is right: men are even
lazier than they are timorous, and fear most
is the troubles with which any unconditional
honesty and nudity would burden them. Only
artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed
manners and loosely fitting opinions and
unveil the secret, everybody's bad conscience,
the principle that every human being is a
unique wonder; they dare to show us the human
being as he is, down to the last muscle,
himself and himself alone even more, that
in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness
he is beautiful and worth contemplating,
as novel and incredible as every work of
nature, and by no means dull. When a great
thinker despises men, it is their laziness
that he despises: for it is un account of
this that they have the appearance of factory
products and seem indifferent and unworthy
of companionship or instruction. The human
being who does not wish to belong to the
mass must merely cease being comfortable
with himself; let him follow his conscience
which shouts at him: "Be yourself! What
you are at present doing, opining, and desiring,
that is not really you."...
I care for a philosopher only to the extent
that he is able to be an example.... Kant
clung to the university, subjected himself
to governments, remained within the appearance
of religious faith, and endured colleagues
and students: it is small wonder that his
example produced in the main university professors
and professors' philosophy. Schopenhauer
has no consideration for the scholars' caste,
stands apart, strives for independence of
.state and society - this is his example,
his model, to begin with the most external
features.... He was an out and out solitary;
there was not one really congenial friend
to comfort him - and between one and none
there gapes, as always between something
and nothing, an infinity. No one who has
true friends can know what true solitude
means, even if the whole world surrounding
him should consist of adversaries. Alas,
I can see that you do not know what it means
to be alone. Wherever there have been powerful
societies, governments, religions, or public
opinions - in short, wherever there was any
kind of tyranny, it has hated the lonely
philosopher; for philosophy opens up a refuge
for man where no tyranny can reach: the cave
of inwardness, the labyrinth of the breast;
and that annoys all tyrants. That is where
the lonely hide; but there too they encounter
their greatest danger. . . .
This was the first danger that overshadowed
Schopenhauer's development: isolation. The
second danger is to despair of truth. This
danger confronts every thinker who begins
from Kant's philosophy, assuming that he
is a vigorous and whole human being in his
suffering and aspiration and not merely a
clacking thinking- or calculating-machine....
As soon as Kant would begin to exert a popular
influence, we should find it reflected in
the form of a gnawing and crumbling scepticism
and relativism; and only among the most active
and noble spirits, who have never been able
to endure doubt, you would find in its place
that upheaval and despair of all truth which
Heinrich von Kleist, for example, experienced
as an effect of Kant's philosophy. "Not
long ago," he once writes in his moving
manner, "I became acquainted with Kant's
philosophy; and now I must tell you of a
thought in it, inasmuch as I cannot fear
that it will upset you as profoundly and
painfully as me. We cannot decide whether
that which we call truth is really truth
or whether it merely appears that way to
us. If the latter is right, then the truth
we gather here comes to nothing after our
death; and every aspiration to acquire a
possession which will follow us even into
the grave is futile. If the point of this
idea does not penetrate your heart, do not
smile at another human being who feels wounded
by it in his holiest depths. My only, my
highest aim has sunk, and I have none left."
When will human beings again have the natural
feelings of a Kleist? When will they learn
again to measure the meaning of a philosophy
by their "holiest depths"?
This, however, is necessary to estimate what,
after Kant, Schopenhauer might mean to us.
He can be the guide to lead us out of the
cave of sceptical irritation or critical
resignation up to the height of a tragic
view, with the starry nocturnal sky stretching
endlessly over us; and he was the first to
lead himself this way. His greatness was
that he confronted the image of life as a
whole in order to interpret it as a whole,
while the subtlest minds cannot be freed
from the error that one can come closer to
such an interpretation if ono examines painstakingly
the colours with which this image has been
painted and the material underneath. . .
.
The whole future of all the sciences is staked
on an attempt to understand this canvas and
these colours, but not the image. It could
be said that only a man who has a firm grasp
of the over-all picture of life and existence
can use the individual science without harming
himself; for without such a regulative total
image they are strings that reach no end
anywhere and merely make our lives still
more confused and labyrinthine. In this,
as I have said, lies Schopenhauer's greatness:
that he pursues this image as Hamlet pursues
the ghost, without permitting himself to
be distracted, as the scholars do, and without
letting himself be caught in the webs of
a conceptual scholasticism, as happens to
the unrestrained dialectician. The study
of all quarter-philosophers is attractive
only insofar as we see how they immediately
make for those spots in the edifice of a
great philosophy where the scholarly pro
and con, and reflection, doubt, and contradiction
are permitted; and thus they avoid the challenge
of every great philosophy which, when taken
as a whole, always says only: this is the
image of all life, and from this learn the
meaning of your life! And conversely: Read
only your own life, and from this understand
the hieroglyphs of universal life!
This is how Schopenhauer's philosophy, too,
should always be interpreted first of all:
individually, by the single human being alone
for himself, to gain some insight into his
own misery and need, into his own limitation.
. . He teaches us to distinguish between
real and apparent promotions of human happiness:
how neither riches, nor honours, nor scholarship
can raise the individual out of his discouragement
over the worthlessness of his existence,
and how the striving for these goals can
receive meaning only from a high and transfiguring
over-all aim: to gain power to help nature
and to correct a little its follies and blunders.
To begin with, for oneself; but eventually
through oneself for all. That is, to be sure,
an aspiration which leads us profoundly and
heartily to resignation: for what, and how
much, can after all be improved in the individual
or in general? . . .
Schopenhauer as Teacher, from Existentialism
from Dostoyevsky to Sartre edited by Walter
Kaufman. short excerpt.