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If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, Schopenhauer is the grandfather. Here’s why.

In 1809, the twenty-one-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer matriculated at the University of Göttingen, nominally to study medicine and satisfy his interest in the natural sciences. In Göttingen, the skeptic Gottlob Ernst Schulze introduced him to Plato and Kant. Arthur remarked to Schulze, “Life is a tricky business. I’ve decided to spend it trying to understand it.” With that, he left Göttingen to pursue his studies at the newly founded University of Berlin, which had fast risen into Germany’s premier centre of philosophy.

In Berlin, Schopenhauer attended lectures by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of the department, and found him to be abstruse and tedious. He thought of Fichte as a charlatan and second-rate Kant, and, in his notes, referred to his philosophy as a “world-comedy”. He held the dogmatic Friedrich Schleiermacher in equal contempt, and his notes on Schleiermacher’s lectures reveal a budding atheism. He never regretted his beginnings as a medical student. Even at Berlin, he attended more lectures in the sciences and medicine than in philosophy, since, he believed, a philosopher ought to have a strong grounding in the sciences.

The relationship between madness and genius

And not just the sciences, but life itself. In the winter of 1812, Arthur began visiting patients in the “melancholy ward” of Berlin’s Charité hospital to investigate the relationship between madness and genius. In his lectures, Fichte had characterised genius as “divine” and madness as “animal”, but Arthur, who was no stranger to mental illness, suspected the two to be intertwined. “Genius” he would write in The World as Will, “lives only one storey above madness.”

Many of the patients he spoke to were or had been highly accomplished people. They were perfectly capable of rational thought, even of wit, and rarely erred in their knowledge of the immediate present. Madness, he surmised, is not a disturbance of the rational faculty. Instead, it arises when the past is too painful to bear. When this happens, memories are repressed, and may be replaced by new “memories”. “If … certain events or circumstances are wholly suppressed for the intellect, because the will cannot bear the sight of them; and then, if the resultant gaps are arbitrarily filled up for the sake of the necessary connection, we then have madness.” “True mental health” in contrast, “consists in perfect recollection of the past.”

Schopenhauer conceived of genius as an ability to rise into timelessness, to see time merely, in that famous phrase of Plato, “as the moving image of eternity”. Thus, what genius and madness share in common is a disrupted relationship with time. Whereas the madman has lost the thread of the “where” and “when”, the genius can still pick it up, but disentangles himself to better concentrate on the “what”.

What Freud said about it

Freud, who was four years old when Schopenhauer died, denied having been at all influenced by him. But in 1914, he conceded: “What [Schopenhauer] says about the struggle against accepting a distressing piece of reality coincides with my concept of repression so completely that once again I owe the chance of making a discovery to my not being well read.”

Again, in 1925, Freud wrote: “I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper. The large extent to which psychoanalysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer—not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality, but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression—is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life.”

If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, Schopenhauer is the grandfather.

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

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The German Greeks was announced for end of June, because I didn’t want to rush it. But it was so inspiring to write that I finished earlier.

So I’m releasing the ebook early, on the quiet, at the special price of 2.99. When the paperback comes out at the end of June, the ebook will go up to the regular 9.99.

The work has already received a couple of editorial reviews, including from Prof Robert Wicks, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, who called it: ‘A fine, enjoyably readable and historically accurate book that informatively and excitingly portrays the lives of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.’

The lightning book cover (which I designed myself) is inspired by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who preaches:

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

For Schopenhauer, our character is inborn and immutable, and apparent, at every stage of life, in the face and, especially, the eyes, which are the ‘mirror of the mind’. For this reason, when someone surprises or disappoints us, we never say, ‘Oh, his character has changed’ but, ‘Oh, I must have been wrong about him.’

Under the changeable shell of his years, his relationships, even his store of knowledge and opinions, there hides, like a crab under its shell, the identical and real man, quite unchangeable and always the same.

Schopenhauer took this idea very seriously, and when sitting for painters, obsessed over the depiction of his eyes.

That’s why, now, his eyes are still so full of lightning.

You can order the ebook here in the US and here in the UK.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be very receptive to any comments and feedback.

PS. I appreciate that many will prefer to await the paperback or hardback.

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Nietzsche’s thought experiment to determine our own greatness.

Sisyphus, by Titian.

Possibly under the influence of Plato, who was himself influenced by Pythagoras, the Stoics held that the universe undergoes cycles, being periodically destroyed in a great conflagration [Greek, ekpyrosis] and then reborn, ad infinitum.

Because God, being perfectly rational, is bound to make the same choices, each cosmic cycle plays out similarly or even identically, so that the world as we know it, with us in it, existed in the previous cycle and will recur in the next.

In around 200 CE, the philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote: “[Chrysippus and the Stoics] hold that after the conflagration all the same things come to be again in the world numerically, so that even the same peculiarly qualified individual as before exists and comes to be again in the world…”

In his Letters, the Roman Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) tells Lucilius: “Things that vanish from our sight are merely stored away in the natural world: they cease to be, but they do not perish… the day will come again that will return us to the light. It is a day that many would refuse, except that we forget everything before returning.”

This concept of eternal recurrence, or eternal return, is even echoed in the Bible:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after (Ecclesiastes 1:9-11).

In the City of God Against the Pagans (426 CE), St. Augustine seeks to deny that these and other such verses refer to eternal return. If “the wicked walk in a circle,” says Augustine, “this is not because their life is to recur by means of these circles, which these philosophers imagine, but because the path in which their false doctrine now runs is circuitous.”

Enter Nietzsche

In the 19th century, Nietzsche used eternal return as a thought experiment, as perhaps the Stoics had done, to determine the degree to which our individual will is aligned with the will of the world.

How, asks Nietzsche, would we feel if a daemon visited us one night and told us that we will have to live out our life over and over again? Would we feel joy, or desperation?

In the chapter of Ecce Homo (1908) entitled, Why I Am so Clever, Nietzsche says, “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati [love of fate]: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.”

Nietzsche’s Nazi sister had this line deleted from Ecce Homo: “I confess that the deepest objection to the Eternal Return… is always my mother and my sister.”

In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Albert Camus compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, the mythical king of Ephyra who was punished for resisting the gods by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. Camus concludes, “The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognizing and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.

Or, in those wonderful words of Virgil, “The only hope for the doomed is no hope at all.”

Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories.

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Lessons from Aristotle: Protecting democracy from demagogues.

Both Plato and Cicero argued that the best orator is a philosopher, or, at least, a good person or person of virtue. If you were not a philosopher or a good person, you were not an orator but merely a sophist or demagogue.

Against this, we have to contend with the fact that even a wretch like Hitler was able to move crowds—and quite powerfully and world-historically at that. Everything about Hitler was warped, his character (ethos), the arguments he used (logos), and the emotions that he sought to instil (pathos), but, still, people followed him in their droves because they themselves were wretched and warped.

A lesson from Aristotle

Plato’s long-time student Aristotle, who lived some twenty-four centuries ago, was perhaps the first to understand that the bedrock of democracy is an affluent, educated middle class.

In the Politics, Aristotle says that, compared to states with a large middle class, states of the rich and poor tend to strict oligarchy (“rule by a few”) or rampant democracy, and, ultimately, to tyranny.

Unfortunately, few states have a large middle class, so that the middle, balanced form of government is rare. According to Aristotle, a democracy becomes preferable when the quantity of the poor exceeds the quality of the rich. Otherwise, an oligarchy is preferable.

The form of the democracy or oligarchy depends on the precise composition of the state. But in every case, the middle classes ought to be included in government, because only they are able to successfully mediate and arbitrate between the rich and the poor.

What we can do right now to protect against demagogues

If today’s democratically elected governments wish to preserve and perpetuate the system that elected them, and ensured an unprecedented eighty years of peace, they need to introduce better, stronger safeguards and balance an excess of democracy with oligarchy, or, to be more precise, aristocracy (“government by the best”) or repositories thereof—such as tighter rules and more stringent criteria for selecting political party leaders and a more independent or autonomous judiciary.

But for the longer term, they need to look to the economy, social justice, culture, and education. Because rhetoric, or oratory, is not carried out in a vacuum. What is ethos, what is pathos, even what is logos alter according to the dispositions and inclinations of the audience or public—although I do believe that, overall, and over time, with the lessons having been learnt, the good, the true, and the just are naturally more persuasive.

No tyrant lives forever. Now war rages on forever. Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees, and every second or third generation must learn the lessons anew.

Or read.

Neel Burton is author of How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in 1712 in the Republic of Geneva. At the age of 16, he ran away from the city and the abusive engraver to whom he was apprenticed.

In neighbouring Savoie, he found shelter with a priest, who put him onto the attractive Françoise-Louise de Warens, who had separated from her husband, converted to Catholicism, and become a proselytiser in the pay of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy. Completely smitten, Rousseau completed his conversion to Catholicism in the Piedmont-Sardinia capital of Turin, where he supported himself by working as a footman and secretary for an ailing countess.

At the age of 20 or 21, Rousseau returned to Warens in Chambéry, and their relationship turned sexual. Although Warens was also intimate with her household steward, Rousseau considered it the greatest love of his life. He began to call her Maman (“Mummy”), and she him Mon petit (“My little one”).

In those years, Rousseau struggled to establish himself in a career and spent a year travelling. He travelled mostly on foot, meeting people from all walks of life. When he returned to Warens, he pursued his passion for music and read deeply. But Warens could no longer support him, so, at the age of 27, he took up a position as a tutor in Lyon, which gave him the opportunity to reflect on pedagogy.

Paris and Venice

With Warens growing cold on him, in 1742, at the age of 30, Rousseau moved to Paris to present a new system of musical notation to the Académie des Sciences. The Académie praised his mastery but found his system impractical and rejected it.

In 1743, his Enlightenment connections led him to a job as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. He revelled in Italian music but did not get on with the ambassador and, the following year, returned to Paris.

He met a laundry girl called Thérèse Levasseur, who would become his life companion. In 1746, she bore the first of their five illegitimate children. All five were immediately handed to a foundling hospital, where the chances of surviving into adulthood would have been slim. Later, Voltaire would anonymously publish a pamphlet to expose this secret and discredit Rousseau as a moral and educational authority.

Rousseau wrote ballets, with little success. He began to spend a lot of time with Diderot, Condillac, and d’Alembert, and became involved with Diderot’s brainchild, the Encyclopédie, to which he contributed almost four hundred articles on politics and music. The Encyclopédie, which stood at the heart of the Enlightenment, was denounced by both the king and the Church.

Rise to fame

In 1749, Diderot was imprisoned in Vincennes. While walking to Vincennes, Rousseau read an announcement in the Mercure de France for the Dijon Academy’s essay contest, on the question, “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” This led to the radical idea that the arts and sciences had led to the moral degeneration of man, who began as moral and vigorous—or, at least, uncorrupted by vanity, superficiality, inauthenticity, luxury, and inequality. In his Confessions, Rousseau wrote, “Within an instant of reading this [advertisement], I saw another universe and became another man.” With his prize-winning essay, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (the “First Discourse”), he rose into a cause célèbre.

In 1752, he wrote a simple, Italian-inspired one-act opera, Le Devin du village, which premiered at the royal court at Fontainebleau. The king liked it enough to offer him a pension, which he declined—gaining notoriety as “the man who had refused a king’s pension.”

In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva and converted back to Calvinism. He embraced a personal, natural religion, or “religion of the heart,” which, together with his belief in the corrupting influence of civilisation, set him apart from the other Encyclopédistes, who championed reason, progress, and atheism.

In 1755, he completed his second major work, the Discourse on Inequality (the “Second Discourse”), in which he painted a rosy picture of man in the original “state of nature” and argued that private property is the original source and basis of all inequality and misery. When Voltaire received his copy, he wrote back to Rousseau: “No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on all fours.”

Sophie d’Houdetot and La Nouvelle Héloïse

The saloniste Madame d’Epinay, having noticed the second discourse, offered Rousseau a pension together with a cottage on her estate in Montmorency. He refused the pension but moved into the cottage with Thérèse and her mother.

He resented being in the keep of Madame d’Epinay and soured things by falling head over heels for her cousin, Sophie d’Houdetot. He came to believe that there was a plot against him and wrote a series of damaging letters. In 1757, he moved with Thérèse into a villa on the nearby estate of the duc de Luxembourg, who became his patron.

His bestselling novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), is inspired by his liaisons with d’Houdetot and Warens.

The Social Contract and Emile

After Julie, Rousseau turned his pen to his two most acclaimed works, the Social Contract and Emile.

In the Social Contract, he sets out how to create a just state in which we may recover some of our natural freedom and goodness.

In Emile, he lays out a system of education that might preserve the individual’s innate vigour and morality. Having encouraged the child to become active, curious, and critical, it remains, in adolescence, to make him into a loving and feeling being, “to prefect reason by sentiment.”

Emile, however, is aimed exclusively at wealthy orphan boys with a dedicated, live-in tutor (orphan, to remove the corrupting influence of the parents). In the section on Emile’s female counterpart, Sophie, Rousseau states that women should be “passive and weak” and “put up little resistance.”

Book IV contains the controversial “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” in which the vicar’s argument leads only to natural religion, that is, to an unmediated, self-discovered relationship with a creator God.

In a letter, Voltaire deemed Emile “a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known.”

Years of exile

Both the Social Contract and Emile were banned from France and Geneva, with warrants issued for Rousseau’s arrest.

Over the next few years, Rousseau moved from place to place as his reputation caught up with him. His nemesis Voltaire invited him in vain to Ferney on the Geneva border, where renegade writers could border hop to escape the authorities.

In 1766, Rousseau travelled to England with David Hume. Tasked with escorting Thérèse to England, James Boswell seduced her en route, with Thérèse telling him, “Don’t imagine you’re a better lover than Rousseau.”

His paranoia intensified, and he began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. The two men fell out when Hume, seeking to protect his reputation, published an account of the whole affair.

Return to France and death

Rousseau returned to France in 1767 under an assumed name and spent the next three years in relative seclusion. He married Thérèse, practised botany, and wrote his disarmingly candid Confessions.

He died in 1778, at the age of 66, from what was recorded as apoplexy (some said suicide). In 1794, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon and placed next to those of… Voltaire.