Schopenhauer on Nationalism, Politics, and Rising Above the Times
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 16 August 2026.
Although he thought of existence as a sorry mistake, the philosopher of pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer retained a strong ‘will to life’. One of his reasons for settling in Frankfurt was the reputation of that city’s doctors.
In Frankfurt, he took many precautions, bordering on the paranoid, to preserve his life and comfortable lifestyle. For example, he kept loaded pistols at his bedside, carried a leathern flask to avoid drinking infected water, and forbade barbers from shaving his neck. To prevent robbers, servants, and others from reading them, he wrote his business records and personal thoughts in English, Latin, or Greek, or in a shorthand code.
In the final year of his life, he moved to a ground-floor apartment not because he could no longer manage the stairs but from fear of being caught in a house fire. ‘A man of genius,’ he wrote in typical style, ‘is like a person who lives in a house where there are no other people but only dogs and cats; he is the only one who has any intelligence, but he is constantly in danger of being bitten or scratched.’
The 1848 Riots
In September 1848, there were violent riots in Frankfurt following the murder of two conservative politicians, a prince and a general.
Schopenhauer, who was then sixty years old, became worried about his safety and property. He welcomed the arrival of Austrian troops, and even allowed some twenty soldiers into his elegant apartment to shoot at revolutionaries from the window. In a parody of his social class, when the soldiers moved next door for a better vantage point, he lent one of the officers his large, double opera glasses.
Shaken by these events, he altered his will to leave the bulk of his estate to a fund for Prussian soldiers who had been maimed while quashing the 1848 revolutions—a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions across the German Confederation aimed at establishing a unified nation state, constitutional governance, and civil rights.
Really, Schopenhauer just wanted to be left alone, to enjoy his afternoon meanderings and deploy his opera glasses for the purpose that God had intended. He would rather have stood outside the torrent of politics and history. So when they rudely arrived at his door, he naturally sided with the forces of order.
Is Nationalism the Cheapest Form of Pride?
Schopenhauer had no truck with either nationalism or rabble utopias. National pride, he held, is the cheapest form of pride, because it requires no individual effort or character. In Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), he wrote:
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resort pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
The insult conceals an interesting argument. Pride in something that I myself have achieved—mastering an instrument, raising a family, growing a garden—is at least pride in something to which I have contributed. But what exactly have I done to deserve credit for Shakespeare, Goethe, or the US military? National pride enables us to appropriate the achievements of others simply because we happen to have been born into the same nation or culture. For Schopenhauer, the less a person has to be proud of individually, the more tempting this borrowed pride becomes. The nation supplies the power or the greatness that the individual cannot find in himself.
As for the Germans, Schopenhauer wrote in The World as Will and Representation that they benefited from having such long words in their mouths, because they ‘think slowly’ and need ‘time to reflect’. When the Nazis co-opted him to their cause, they disregarded this passage and others like it. But in his private papers, Schopenhauer went even further: ‘I hereby declare, in the event of my death, that I despise the German nation for its excessive stupidity and am ashamed to belong to it.’ In fact, Schopenhauer was an Anglophile who wrote a lot more like the limpid Hume than the convoluted Kant. For this reason, ironically, he is regarded as one of the greatest German prose stylists.
Rising Into Timelessness
While the Young Hegelians (most famously, Karl Marx) were agitating for political and social reform, Schopenhauer claimed that misery is the natural, inevitable state for human beings, regardless of external conditions, and would not be alleviated by ‘progress’. He made a point of stepping outside the torrent of history and ‘minding not the times but the eternities’—and considered this ability to ‘rise into timelessness’ to be the true mark of a genius.
This is the larger idea behind his disdain for nationalism. Nationalism roots us all the more firmly in a particular place and time; Schopenhauer wanted to do the opposite and escape all contingency. To rise into timelessness is to stand outside the assumptions, passions, and controversies of one’s own age and try to see what remains when they have passed away. It is one reason I often retreat into antiquity—for perspective over my own times, and all times. For instance, if the ancients did not have a concept of one of our modern mental disorders, that tells me something about it—something which many other people don’t see.
Whereas for Hegel, the state was the aim of human existence, for Schopenhauer it was simply its guarantor. The role of the state, in his Hobbesian view, was strictly to limit ‘the war of all against all’ and afford him the conditions to philosophise and enjoy the arts without having to lend his opera glasses.
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