Tag Archives: German Philosophy

Happiness, Schmappiness

Posted on by

What follows is 42% of an article about Schopenhauer written by a philosophy professor for Aeon:

On 13 December 1807, in fashionable Weimar, Johanna Schopenhauer picked up her pen and wrote to her 19-year-old son Arthur: ‘It is necessary for my happiness to know that you are happy, but not to be a witness to it.’

Two years earlier, in Hamburg, Johanna’s husband Heinrich Floris had been discovered dead in the canal behind their family compound. It is possible that he slipped and fell, but Arthur suspected that his father jumped out of the warehouse loft into the icy waters below. Johanna did not disagree. Four months after the suicide, she had sold the house, soon to leave for Weimar where a successful career as a writer and saloniste awaited her. Arthur stayed behind with the intention of completing the merchant apprenticeship his father had arranged shortly before his death. It wasn’t long, however, before Arthur wanted out too.

In an exchange of letters throughout 1807, mother and son entered tense negotiations over the terms of Arthur’s release. Johanna would be supportive of Arthur’s decision to leave Hamburg in search of an intellectually fulfilling life – how could she not? – including using her connections to help pave the way for his university education. But on one condition: he must leave her alone. Certainly, he must not move to be near her in Weimar, and under no circumstances would she let him stay with her.

What her line of 13 December doesn’t reveal is that Johanna simply couldn’t tolerate Arthur: ‘All your good qualities,’ she wrote on 6 November, ‘become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others … If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.’ He was, in short, a boorish and tiresome know-it-all.

If people found Arthur Schopenhauer’s company intolerable, the feeling was mutual. He spent long depressive periods in self-imposed isolation, including the first two months of 1832 in his new rooms in Frankfurt, the city that became his adoptive home after a stint in Berlin. He defended himself against loneliness with the belief that solitude is the only fitting condition for a philosopher: ‘Were I a King,’ he said, ‘my prime command would be – Leave me alone.’ The subject of happiness, then, is not normally associated with Schopenhauer, neither as a person nor as a philosopher. Quite the opposite: he is normally associated with the deepest pessimism in the history of European philosophy.

Schopenhauer’s pessimism is based on two kinds of observation. The first is an inward-looking observation that we aren’t simply rational beings who seek to know and understand the world, but also desiring beings who strive to obtain things from the world. Behind every striving is a painful lack of something, Schopenhauer claims, yet obtaining this thing rarely makes us happy. For, even if we do manage to satisfy one desire, there are always several more unsatisfied ones ready to take its place. Or else we become bored, aware that a life with nothing to desire is dull and empty. If we are lucky enough to satisfy our basic needs, such as hunger and thirst, then in order to escape boredom we develop new needs for luxury items, such as alcohol, tobacco or fashionable clothing. At no point, Schopenhauer says, do we arrive at final and lasting satisfaction. Hence one of his well-known lines: ‘life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom’.

Schopenhauer knew from his extensive studies of classical Indian philosophy that he wasn’t the first to observe that suffering is essential to life. The Buddhists have a word for this suffering, dukkha, which is acknowledged in the first of its Four Noble Truths. The fourth and final of these truths, magga, or the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to the cessation of dukkha, would also inspire large parts of his moral philosophy.

The second kind of observation is outward-looking. According to Schopenhauer, a glance at the world around us disproves the defining thesis of Gottfried Leibniz’s optimism that ours is the best of all possible worlds. On the contrary, Schopenhauer claims, if our world is ordered in any way, it is ordered to maximise pain and suffering. He gives the example of predatory animals that cannot but devour other animals in order to survive and so become ‘the living grave of thousands of others’. Nature as a whole is ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson later put it, pitting one creature against another, either as the devourer or the devoured, in a deadly fight for survival.

Civilisation doesn’t help much either. It adds so many sites of human suffering. In The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer wrote:

if you led the most unrepentant optimist through the hospitals, military wards, and surgical theatres, through the prisons, torture chambers and slave stalls, through battlefields and places of judgment, and then open for him all the dark dwellings of misery that hide from cold curiosity, then he too would surely come to see the nature of this best of all possible worlds.

If you had to guess the world’s purpose just by looking at the results it achieves, you could only think it was a place of punishment.

These observations, the first on human nature and the second on nature itself, support Schopenhauer’s pessimistic claims that life is not worth living and the world should not exist. We are never given in advance the choice whether to exist or not but, if we were, it would be irrational to choose to exist in a world where we can’t profit from life but only lose. Or as Schopenhauer puts it in another key line: ‘life is a business that does not cover its costs’. . . .

Schopenhauer doesn’t deny that happiness exists. He does, however, think that we are generally mistaken about what happiness is. According to him, happiness is no more than the absence of pain and suffering; the moment of relief occasionally felt between the fulfilment of one desire and the pursuit of the next. For example, imagine the satisfaction of buying your first home. What makes us happy here, Schopenhauer would say, is not the positive state of being a homeowner, but the negative state of relief from the worries that come with not owning your own home (as well as relief from the notoriously stressful process of buying property itself). This happiness, Schopenhauer would be quick to point out, is likely to be short-lived, as a host of new worries and stresses emerge, such as paying down the mortgage, or doing up the bathroom. . . .

Instead, Schopenhauer gives us a different picture of a happy life, one that is not total happiness. While suffering can’t be excluded from life altogether, it can be reduced by making sure no kind of suffering goes on for too long. Going back to Schopenhauer’s image of the pendulum, a happy life would include enough success in fulfilling our desires that we are never in too much pain, but also enough failure to ensure that we are never too bored. It would be a ‘game of constantly passing from desire to satisfaction and from this to a new desire, a game whose rapid course is called happiness and slow course is called suffering.’ A well-paced oscillation between wish and fulfillment, which is at most a semi-satisfied life, is the best we can hope for as far as happiness is concerned.

If a good life, conceived as a happy life, is a futile aim for ethics, this raises the question of what the real aim of ethics should be. The background of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is never far away from this question. It’s not obvious to Schopenhauer that the semi-satisfied life presented above is better than nonexistence. Such a life would still contain a preponderance of suffering, even if no kind of suffering would go on for too long.

Rather than trying to make the world into a happy home, then, Schopenhauer opts for an ethics that might save us from the world altogether. He endorses asceticism, the practice of severe self-denial exemplified in the saints and mystics of many world religions . . .

Note that Schopenhauer’s otherworldly ascetics are not happy. They have entirely given up the game of a semi-satisfied life. Instead, they accept, and come to symbolise, the universality and inevitability of suffering, in order to transcend it. In relation to the ascetic, Schopenhauer is more likely to use words such as composure and peace than happiness and pleasure.

To say that Schopenhauer endorsed asceticism might appear to suggest that he practised it himself. Far from it. The most ascetic part of his daily routine in Frankfurt was the cold sponge bath he took between seven and eight every morning. After that, he made his own coffee and settled down to write for a few hours before receiving selected visitors, until his housekeeper appeared at noon, cuing them to leave. He played flute for half an hour each day – an activity that, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, belied the sincerity of his pessimism – and then made his way to his favourite spot to eat, the Hôtel d’Angleterre, for a hearty afternoon meal. After this he might make himself another coffee, take an hour’s nap, then read a little light literature before walking his dog, a white poodle called Atma, while smoking a cigar, all before settling in for his typical nine-hour sleep. The life of the Buddha it was not.

Unquote. 

Happy or not, we can still vote for every Democrat in November and damage that other party for years, possibly decades, to come. Arthur and Atma would agree.

Nietzsche: Genius of the Heart by Charlie Huenemann

Posted on by

6572902

Charlie Huenemann, a philosophy professor at Utah State, self-published this book in 2009. I don’t know why, because it’s an excellent introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche’s life and thought. Did Prof. Huenemann have trouble finding a publisher? Did he see it as a money-making opportunity? He has a sense of humor (that’s him in the picture when he was younger). Maybe he thought it would be an interesting thing to do.

Huenemann’s thesis is that Nietzsche’s philosophy was an attempt to make his miserable life livable:

I said it two times . . . and now this will make three: Nietzsche’s philosophy was the means by which he reconciled himself to his life. It was an  unfortunate life, beginning in tragedy [two deaths in the family], enduring through sickness and loneliness, ending in insanity [possibly due to a brain tumor, not syphilis], and then being twisted [by his anti-Semitic but apparently well-meaning sister] into abetting humanity’s worst atrocities.

Nietzsche’s task, as he saw it, was  to develop in himself the right attitude, so that no matter how unfortunate this life turned out to be . . . he would be able to surmount it, accept it, and embrace it. All of the magnificent monsters he pressed into his service — the Apollonian and Dionysian forces, his thoroughly skeptical neo-Kantian naturalism, Zarathustra, the eternal return, the will to power, the revaluation of all values — were, in the final analysis, devices, heuristics, visions and touchstones he needed in to order to accomplish this most extraordinary feat. If readers turn to his books in search of arguments for believing in these monsters, or reasons for taking them to be real, they have missed the entire point. The point was not truth. The point was triumph [204-5].

Academic philosophers tend to shy away from analyzing the personal reasons other philosophers have for adopting certain views. The ideas and arguments are what matter. Nietzsche didn’t agree. He believed philosophical positions (and religious beliefs) are explainable by individual psychology — which is partly what Huenemann is doing in this book. Huenemann considers whether Nietzsche would apply that same formula to his own views and decides he wouldn’t.

[Nietzsche] has a lot to say — indeed, many volumes! — about what is good and noble for human beings, and what is sick, weak and despicable. There are indeed facts about these values. His claim is only that the traditional assignment of values — particularly over what is “good or “evil” — is a huge mistake, grounded in a hopelessly inadequate understanding of reality.

This immediately raises a question about Nietzsche’s own consistency with the gospel he preaches. . . . Consider this comic tirade from a later work, Twilight of the Idols: “Finally, let’s consider how naive it is in general to say, ‘Human beings should be such and such!’ Reality shows us a captivating treasury of types . . . and some pathetic bystander of a moralist says to all this, “No! Human beings should be different‘? . . . He even knows how human beings should be, this sanctimonious sniveler”.

Nietzsche grants himself exemption . . . He thinks what what he is doing is significantly different from what other moralists do. . . .Whereas other moralists act as if they have just been handed the tablets of moral commandments from the sky, Nietzsche believes he is digging up his “commandments” from the earth — indeed, from the forces of life itself. His values are not dreamed up or invented, but wrested through bitter experience from genuine confrontations with a hard and unforgiving world [162-3].

Huenemann says “the supreme Nietzschean value is living power. What leads to the flourishing of living power . . . is good; what stifles or diminishes it is bad [167]“. Nietzsche: Genius of the Heart certainly has living power. It’s a lively, informative, sometimes critical account of one of philosophy’s most distinctive thinkers (and not expensive at all).

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale

Posted on by

After reading Sue Prideaux’s biography of Nietzsche, I Am Dynamite!, I wanted to read something from the philosopher himself. I hadn’t read anything of his since On the Genealogy of Morality — or Morals — seven years ago. I wanted to understand better what was bothering the poor man. And how he thought people should live.

Beyond Good and Evil has nine parts. Each part is composed of aphorisms or sections, sometimes a page or two, sometimes a single paragraph. Overall, it was rough going. I often had no idea what he was complaining about (he mostly complains). There were also passages like this, the meaning of which seems clear at first:

Today, … when the herd animal alone obtains and bestows honours in Europe, when “equality of rights” could all too easily change into equality of wrongdoing: I mean into a general war on everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, creative fullness of power and mastery — today, being noble, wanting to be by oneself, the ability to be different, independence and the need for self-responsibility pertains to the concept “greatness”; and the philosopher will betray something of his ideal when he asserts: “He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, the superabundant of will; this shall be called greatness…. [sec. 212].

Nietzsche’s fundamental idea is that the most important fact about human beings is their will to power — their desire to control and create. He was convinced that Christian morality, the morality of “the herd”, with its ideas like “turning the other cheek” and “the meek shall inherit the Earth”, interferes with humanity’s will to power. In particular, it interferes with the will to power of those blessed with genius, the greatest among us. He was well aware of Goethe, Beethoven, Napoleon and Wagner, all towering figures in his opinion, but he apparently believed there would be more such tremendously accomplished figures if only everyday morality didn’t hold them back. In order to achieve greatness, a person must go beyond the standard ideas of good and evil. If one is to achieve greatness, the transvaluation (or reconsideration) of all values is necessary.

But what values should a genius live by? Is it necessary to ignore the Golden Rule? Sacrifice everything else to one’s art or projects? Ignore common courtesy? Trample other people however and whenever it feels right? After reading Nietzsche’s biography, two of his books and several summaries of his ideas, I still don’t know. I also don’t understand why he was so bothered by everyday morality. He seems to have taken the existence of common beliefs about good and evil as a personal affront.

He offers a clue when discussing what “a born, unavoidable psychologist and reader of souls” is confronted by:

The corruption, the ruination of higher human beings, of more strangely constituted souls is the rule: it is dreadful to always have such a rule before one’s eyes [sec. 269].

If anyone has ever been one, Nietzsche was a born psychologist. Perhaps he was speaking for himself in this passage. He must have viewed himself as “strangely constituted”. After he lost his mind, he suffered from extraordinary delusions of grandeur, describing his frequent contacts with the leading statesmen of Europe and sometimes referring to himself as God.

Scholars have determined that Nietzsche was not a German nationalist or an anti-semite. Some say the notion of the Ãœbermensch was not central to his philosophy. So it was surprising to read some of his strongly-worded views. For example:

… that what is right for one cannot … by any means be right for another, that the demand for one morality for all is detrimental to precisely the higher men, in short that there exists an order of rank between man and man, consequently also between morality and morality [sec. 228].

Every elevation of the type man has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society — and so it will always be: a society which believes in … orders of rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other [257].

The noble caste was always in the beginning the barbarian caste: … they were more complete human beings (which, on every level, also means … “more complete beasts”) [257].

The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is [that it] accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sake have to be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental faith must be that society should not exist for the sake of society but only as a foundation and scaffolding upon which a select species of being is able to raise itself .. to a higher existence [258].

One has to … resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation… Exploitation … pertains to the essence of the living thing … it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power [259].

There is master morality and slave morality … The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges “what harms me is harmful in itself”, he knows himself to be that which … accords honour to things, he creates values [260].

A morality of the rulers [says] that one has duties only toward one’s equals; that towards beings of a lower rank, towards everything alien, one may act as one wishes or “as the heart dictates” and in any case “beyond good and evil” [260].

The grander, more manifold, more comprehensive life lives beyond the old morality; the “individual” stands there, reduced to his own law-giving, to his own arts and stratagems for self-preservation, self-enhancement, self-redemption [262].

Egoism pertains to the essence of the noble soul, I mean the immovable faith that to a being such as “we are” other beings have to be subordinate by their nature, and sacrifice themselves to us … “it is justice itself” [265].

Nietzsche’s ethical theory might be called “aristocratic egoism” — self-centered behavior for the natural aristocrats among us (not the aristocrats with hereditary titles); a reasonable amount of respect for other aristocrats; and everybody else knowing their place. Who knows how many impressionable readers have taken these ideas seriously enough to have acted on them? The man wasn’t joking when he wrote: “I am dynamite!”

In conclusion, the best thing I can say about Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is that I no longer feel the need to understand its author.

I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux

Posted on by

I’m more interested in Nietzsche’s philosophy than his life, but I visited a famous bookstore this summer and wanted to buy a book. I’m glad I bought this one.

It’s an understatement to say that Nietzsche was quite a character. He was an accomplished scholar who left the academy when he was 35, citing his poor health. He had enough income (partly from his academic pension) to travel about Europe, develop various friendships, propose marriage a couple times, spend lots of time with Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima, do a great deal of hiking, compose music nobody cared for and write philosophy books hardly anyone bought when they were published. He suffered terribly from unspecified ailments and wrote short bursts of text in order to protect his eyesight.

Although Nietzsche was a fairly normal, although brilliant, young man, he became more eccentric as the years passed, until he totally lost his mind at the age of 55. He lived another eleven years, being watched over by his horrible sister, Elisabeth, one of the nastiest people I’ve ever read about. Being a great admirer of Hitler (who admired her in return), Elisabeth used her control of Nietzsche’s writings to give him a reputation as a proto-Nazi, when in fact he wasn’t a German nationalist or anti-Semitic at all. He was a cultured, mild-mannered European with interesting, vividly-expressed ideas about how to live in a world without using religion as a crutch. (This is the positive, revisionist view of Nietzsche that’s become widely accepted among scholars in the last 70 years.)

I Am Dynamite! won a prize in Britain as the best book of 2019. From the prize’s announcement:

… this magnificent biography of a very strange and difficult subject is wonderfully well-written, lucid and clear-headed. It is full of sharp and stylish turns of phrase, it gallops along at an energetic pace, and it is often extremely and surprisingly funny, with a great gift for characterisation….

Friedrich Nietzsche’s work rocked the foundation of Western thinking, and continues to permeate our culture, high and low – yet he is one of history’s most misunderstood philosophers. Sue Prideaux’s myth-shattering book brings readers into the world of a brilliant, eccentric and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand Nietzsche: the philosopher who foresaw – and sought solutions to – our own troubled times.

Not everyone has been so enthusiastic. Brian Leiter, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, wrote a review in the Times Literary Supplement (which is mostly behind a paywall):

Prideaux is an especially vivid and engaging writer, who covers the facts of Nietzsche’s life well, although sometimes in soap-operatic detail….If Hollywood were to produce a movie of Nietzsche’s life, this book could provide the blueprint. Hollywood ought, however, to consult some philosophers if the movie is to do better than the book in conveying Nietzsche’s ideas.

Leiter argues briefly that Nietzsche wasn’t skeptical about science — he merely doubted science could teach us how to live. He says Prideaux gives too much importance to Nietzsche’s concept of the Ãœbermensch and too little to his opinion that “human excellence, and the aesthetic pleasure it provided (think Beethoven or Goethe), made life worth living”. Leiter criticizes Prideaux for implying Nietzsche believed the universe has purpose, when he clearly didn’t, and that he was in pursuit of a “universal morality”, which is more debatable. The professor concludes:

Prideaux has the correct sense that Nietzsche is profound; but it is not clear she has much idea why.

I very much enjoyed this biography, but it is not for those wanting to learn something about the philosophy. Prideaux’s discussions of his ideas are at best superficial, at worst wrong.

I think the professor is a bit harsh in his assessment (as professors often are when a non-specialist writes about one of their particular specialties). I Am Dynamite! explains what it was like to be Friedrich Nietzsche and provides an introduction to his distinctive philosophy. If you want to understand more of what he thought, there are plenty of other books and articles to read, many of which feature opinions from experts who don’t always agree with Professor Leiter. As Nietzsche himself would say, his philosophy, as with most everything else in the world, is open to interpretation.

Hegel: A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer

Posted on by

Peter Singer is a famous philosopher (as famous as philosophers can be these days) known for his very strong utilitarian views:

He is known especially for his work on the ethics of our treatment of animals, for his controversial critique of the sanctity of life doctrine in bioethics, and for his writings on the obligations of the affluent to aid those living in extreme poverty.  

But he has also written on German philosophy. In 1983, he published Hegel, a brief introduction to the highly influential 19th century philosopher. Hegel is now part of Oxford University Press’s colorful series of “Very Short Introductions”.

Hegel (the philosopher, not the book) wrote a lot and is notoriously hard to understand. That’s one reason so many academics have written about him. Singer does an excellent job. He devotes chapters to four of Hegel’s works (Lectures on the Philosophy of History; Philosophy of Right; The Phenomenology of Mind; and Science of Logic), the principal topics of which are history, freedom, mind and rationality. But since Hegel is what is known as a “systematic” thinker, none of the topics stand alone.

I came away from Hegel with what feels like a better understanding of his thought, although not good enough to explain it to anyone. All I’ll say is that Hegel seems to have viewed Geist (translated as either “mind” or “spirit”) as a real but abstract entity that has progressed through history, advancing toward more and more freedom, culminating in total rationality (the “Absolute”). Singer concludes that Hegel may have been a panentheist:

The term comes from Greek words meaning “all in God”; it describes the view that everything in the universe is part of God, but – and here it differs from pantheism – God is more than the universe, because he is the whole, and the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts. Just as a person is more than all the cells that make up his or her body – although the person is nothing separate from the body – so on this view God is more than all the parts of the universe, but not separate from it. Equally, just as no single cells amount to a person, so no individual parts of the universe amount to God. 

[This] interpretation is plausible, not only because it is consistent with what Hegel says specifically about God, but also because it makes sense of the dominant theme of his philosophy. If God is the absolute idea, the ultimate reality of the universe, the whole of its parts, we can understand why the absolute idea must manifest itself in the world, and there progress to self-comprehension. God needs the universe in the same way a person needs a body.

… Hegel sees God not as eternal and immutable, but as an essence that needs to manifest itself in the world, and, having made itself manifest, to perfect the world in order to be perfect itself…. It is a vision that places immense weight on the necessity of progress: for the onward movement of history is the path God must take to achieve perfection. Therein may lie the secret of the immense influence that Hegel, for all his outward conservatism, has had on radical and revolutionary thinkers [note: Karl Marx being the most obvious instance].