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Lessons from the teenage Schopenhauer’s European tour.

Schopenhauer at the age of fourteen.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on in 22 February 1788 at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). His father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg. At nine years old, Arthur was sent to Le Havre in France to live with the family of his father’s business associated, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age. The two years that Arthur spent in le Havre were, he claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learn to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean-Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

When Arthur was in his mid-teens, the principal of his private school, Dr Runge, who recognised his exceptional potential, attempted to persuade Heinrich Floris to redirect him onto an academic path. Arthur too exerted considerable pressure on his father. To settle the matter in his favour, the wily Heinrich Floris offered Arthur a Hobson’s choice between remaining in Hamburg to learn Latin and prepare for university, or accompany his parents on a luxurious two-year pleasure tour through Europe—on condition that he commit to a merchant apprenticeship upon their return.

Arthur’s European tour: The Wimbledon academy

Thus, in 1803, the fifteen-year-old Arthur set off on a tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austra, and Prussia. In England, he spent twelve weeks at Reverend Thomas Lancaster’s academy in Wimbledon, while his parents toured the North. Teachers thought of him as a “seething, belligerent pupil.” He developed a lifelong antipathy towards Anglicanism and later described the experience as a form of “incarceration.” But he became fluent in English, and, later, would write German in a more limpid English style.

Schopenhauer is still regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the German language. In On Language and Words, he would argue that language, though essential for human reasoning, shapes and limits our thoughts. It often serves as a substitute for true thinking, and distances us from intuitive perception and action. 

However, learning another language can increase our range and flexibility of thought by obliging us to separate the concept from the word and to break down and reconstruct thoughts according to a different organisational scheme. This is all the more true of the classical languages (Latin and Greek), which call for a non-literal translation that forces a melting down and recasting of thought.

Arthur’s European tour: Three hangings and a hard-labour penitentiary

Tourism in those days could take in the ugly as well as the beautiful. On June 8, 1803, Arthur witnessed three hangings from the window of a pub opposite Newgate prison in London. He noted in his travel diary that the men, right before the drop, took to praying: “One of them, who moved his hands up and down as he prayed, made the same movement a couple more times after he had fallen.”

On April 8, 1804, he visited the Bagne de Toulon, to be made famous by Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. “Can one think of a more terrible feeling than that of one of these unfortunates as he is chained to the bench in the dark galley and from which nothing but death can separate him?”

Later, he would compare the whole world to a penitentiary, and this period of his life to the Buddha’s awakening, when Prince Siddharta (later, the Buddha) ventured out of the palace only to be confronted everywhere by the “Four Sights” of age, sickness, death, and an ascetic monk.

Why Arthur warned against book knowledge

There can be no doubt that Arthur gained a lot more from his travels than he would have done from sitting in a Hamburg classroom. His worldliness, he would argue, gave him an advantage over “mere scholars” or “book philosophers”, for true thought must be rooted in direct observation and firsthand experience of the world.

Reliance on books is like “thinking with somebody else’s head” and produces only superficial knowledge, which, “like an artificial limb, false, tooth, or waxen nose,” is not organically woven into our being. Children, he thought (like Jean-Jacques Rousseau), should not be exposed to “theories and doctrines” until the age of sixteen.

In On Reading and Books, Schopenhauer wrote: “For the person who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, since they are carrying what ought to have carried them.

Nietzsche, in the autobiographical Ecce Homo:

[Sickness] bestowed on me the compulsion to lie still, to be idle, to wait and be patient … But to do that means to think! … My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain terms … I was redeemed from the “book,” for years at a time I read nothing—the greatest favour I ever did myself! 

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

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Whereas Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel could count as optimists, Schopenhauer is the first (and last) thinker in all Western philosophy to have constructed a complete and systematic pessimism.

But he is interesting for other reasons too. For his Great Philosophers series (1987), Bryan Magee, who wrote a thick book on Schopenhauer, introduced him as “the only major Western philosopher to draw serious and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought.” 

Magee continues: “He was the first major Western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and more to say about them than any other important philosopher … He was himself among the supreme writers of German prose. Many of his sentences are so brilliantly aphoristic that they’ve been torn out of context and published separately in little books of epigrams.”

Schopenhauer’s humorous epigrams

To give you a flavour, here are a few of his many epigrams:

  • Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
  • Life is a business that does not cover its costs.
  • The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain… If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
  • What everyone most aims at in ordinary contact with his fellows is to prove them inferior to himself.
  • Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
  • It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

Here’s why you laughed, according to Schopenhauer himself

Probably, you chuckled while reading these aphorisms. But why did you chuckle? Schopenhauer has his own theory of laughter, which is a version of the incongruence theory, according to which laughter arises from a contradiction between a concept (what people think is happening) and its reality (what is in fact happening)—highlighting a failure of reason over perception. Thus, when people laugh at us (rather than along with us) they are filling the gap between our idea of ourself, or people’s general idea of us, and the sad reality.

Many people who read Schopenhauer’s aphorisms laugh only half-heartedly, because they feel threatened by them. But the few who laugh full-throatedly feel liberated by their truth. In this moment of pure perception, while they laugh, they escape, if only for a few seconds, from the tyranny of the Will—the blind, irrational force that, in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, underlies all reality, and forces us to exist and strive without purpose.

Schopenhauer’s theory of weeping

Schopenhauer also had a theory of weeping. Weeping, which is a physical expression of mental misery, is a form of self-compassion. As such, it requires an outside perspective on the self, which is why animals don’t cry, and children don’t cry if no one is watching. Schopenhauer cites the example of a person who did not think to weep over their misery until their case was summarised to them in court and they were brought to reflect upon their suffering—when they suddenly broke into a stream of tears.

When we weep, we become “both the sufferer and the compassionate onlooker.” Because weeping originates from self-compassion, it suggests to others that the crier is capable of compassion, and thus worthy of compassion. Psychopaths don’t cry, or only crocodile tears.

A final reason why Schopenhauer is funny

To me, Schopenhauer is important also because he is the first since antiquity to offer a comprehensive solution to the problem of living and suffering. As well as a great philosopher, he was a fine psychologist, so that we often find ourself laughing along with him. But almost as often, we find ourself laughing at him, owing, I think, to the incongruence between his lofty philosophy of temperance and compassion and his own bad boy ways.

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

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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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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.