Part I: From Disciple to Critic

Nietzsche has the reputation of being a free spirit. The image that posterity has painted of him resembles that of an unbound, self-thinking philosopher with an independent judgment of reality. However, this image can be deceptive, as Nietzsche was by no means completely free from traditional world views and values. His free spirit first had to be educated to freedom. Nietzsche owes his philosophical education to one person in particular: the pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). It was to the author of The World as Will and Representation (1818) that Nietzsche dedicated his third Untimely Meditation, which he published under the title Schopenhauer as Educator (1874). However, Nietzsche’s dialog with his educator is not limited to this Untimely Meditation: it runs through almost all of his published works and can also be traced in numerous letters and posthumous fragments. To what extent was Nietzsche’s philosophy influenced by Schopenhauer and what are the central points of divergence between these two thinkers?

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I. Nietzsche’s first Acquaintance with Schopenhauer or the Leipzig “Schopenhauer-Erlebnis”

Some books are read by pure accident. If a book captivates us, the unexpected reading experience suddenly takes on a mystical glow. It seems as if the reading of this one book was in fact not determined by chance, but by fate. The first, rather accidental reading of Schopenhauer had a similarly magical effect on the young Nietzsche. Between October 1865 and August 1867 – the exact date is not known – when he was standing in an antiquarian bookshop in Leipzig, holding Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (1818) in his hands, a “demonic” voice whispered to him, in his own words: “Take this book home with you”¹. Once home, Nietzsche allowed himself to be captivated by this monumental work: “For a fortnight in a row, I forced myself to go to bed at two o’clock in the morning and leave it again at exactly six o’clock. A nervous excitement took possession of me” (ibid.).

The Leipzig reading experience immediately turned Nietzsche into a Schopenhauerian. The young student of classical philology found himself in Schopenhauer’s texts at this stage of his life, i.e. in his mid-20s. “[H]ere I saw a mirror in which I beheld the world, life and my own mind in appalling magnificence” (ibid.), he writes in his Review of my two Years in Leipzig (1867/68). In his first creative period, until the mid-1870s, Nietzsche allowed himself to be guided by Schopenhauer’s philosophy, above all by its central element, the metaphysics of will, in terms of his worldview and understanding of life. “[S]ince Schopenhauer removed the blindfold of optimism from our eyes,” Nietzsche wrote in a letter to his friend Hermann Mushacke in 1866, “one sees more clearly. Life is more interesting, even if uglier“².

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II. The Birth of Birth out of the Spirit of Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics

In his early years, Schopenhauer’s authority would define Nietzsche not only as a person, but also as a philosopher. His first philosophical work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), was deeply influenced both terminologically and ideologically by Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The Birth, which was given the subtitle Hellenism and Pessimism in its second edition of 1886, can be understood as Nietzsche’s attempt to dialectically unite and play off against each other his Graecophilia on the one hand and his enthusiasm for Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will and music as well as its compositional realization by Wagner on the other. The “tremendous contrast”³ between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which Nietzsche makes the central theme of this work, is prefigured in Schopenhauer’s main work in the opposition of will and representation. In this respect, Nietzsche will understand music “according to Schopenhauer’s teaching”, as he himself writes in the Birth, as the “language of the will”⁴.

However, Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for his metaphysics and aesthetics never turned into an apologetic of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as the American philosopher Paul Swift correctly notes in Becoming Nietzsche (2005) – an older, but still very readable and compact study on Nietzsche’s early sources of inspiration⁵. Nietzsche himself later regrets that in his first philosophical writing he “laboriously sought to express strange and new appreciations with Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas, which fundamentally went against the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as their taste!“⁶ The fact that at that time he was only able to think of the aesthetic and epistemological approach to the world by means of the concepts inherited from Kant and Schopenhauer prevented him from recognizing the novelty of his own observations. In order to develop his thinking freely and help it to achieve a new dimension, Nietzsche first had to critically examine this basic framework.

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III. From Educator to Philosophical Opponent

Under the title Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Nietzsche published the third part of his Untimely Meditations in 1874. This is the only text that he dedicates directly to his “first philosophical teacher”⁷. In this text, as in almost all of his writings up to that point, Schopenhauer is still predominantly presented in the positive light of a “role model”. However, this is the last time that Nietzsche will have an all-round gentle treatment of his “educator”. In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche still presents himself as a loyal reader of his master: “I am one of those readers of Schopenhauer who, after reading the first page of his work, know with certainty that they will read all the pages and listen to every word he has ever said”⁸. He explains this particular fascination for Schopenhauer in this writing by its “impression mixed from three elements”: “his[] honesty, his[] cheerfulness and his[] consistency” (ibid.).

Schopenhauer as Educator thus marks a turning point in the Nietzsche-Schopenhauer relationship. His interest, which until then had been directed more towards his philosophy, now focused more on Schopenhauer as a philosopher and a human being. On December 19, 1876, Nietzsche claims in a letter to Cosima Wagner that he “is not on his [Schopenhauer’s; TB] side in almost all general statements; already when I wrote about Sch., I realized that I had gone beyond everything dogmatic about it; I cared all about the person”⁹. At this time, Nietzsche is particularly taken with Schopenhauer’s non-academic career and his contempt for unfree and inauthentic academic philosophy. He saw the role of the new philosopher, educated by Schopenhauer against his time, as “becoming the judge of the so-called culture surrounding him”¹⁰. In order to follow this maxim to the letter, Nietzsche therefore endeavoured to prove his own integrity as a philosopher. However, this also means that, as the unbending judge of the ambient culture, he had to denounce Schopenhauer’s “dangerous” influence on it.

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IV. Nietzsche versus Schopenhauer

The fact that Nietzsche not only had the ability to be enthusiastic about individual ideas and thinkers but was also capable of intensely criticizing formerly highly respected authors and thoughts, can be deduced from his polemical writings¹¹ against his second educator¹², the Schopenhauerian Richard Wagner. With regard to his two masters, Nietzsche hoped, as can be read in his posthumous fragments from 1884, that the people of the future, superior to their time and culture, “will finally have so much self-overcoming to cast off the bad taste for attitudes and the sentimental darkness, and will be as much against Richard Wagner as against Schopenhauer“¹³.

Nietzsche’s change of attitude towards his educators may seem surprising at first glance: Is he now completely rejecting the roots of his own thought? However, Nietzsche does not take such a radical approach. Schopenhauer and Wagner are not simply erased from his mind: instead of thinking with them, Nietzsche now thinks against them. He would, so to speak, appoint his two educators as the ideal opponents – he called them his “antagonistic masters”¹⁴ in a letter to the Danish essayist Georg Brandes (1842-1927) in 1888 – of his own cultural and philosophical thinking. Schopenhauer would also play an important role in Nietzsche’s terminological considerations, insofar as the basic concepts of his mentor’s philosophy will form the starting point for defining the central terms of his own thinking.

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Link to part 2.

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Tom Bildstein (born in 1999) lives in Brussels and is a PhD student in philosophy at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) since 2023. He is currently writing a dissertation in French on the “Paths of the Will” in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. He is also a member of the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft and is working intensively on the problem of the thing-in-itself in Kant and Schopenhauer, which was also the topic of his master’s thesis and a conversation with Raphael Gebrecht (Bonn) published on the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft blog (Das Problem des Dinges an sich, 2023; link). He is also the author of a scientific paper: Nietzsche et “la grande erreur fondamentale de Schopenhauer” (published in the journal Voluntas: Revista Internacional de Filosofia, 2024). In 2024, he won the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft essay prize with his submission Der Mut zum Idealismus. Schopenhauer’s kompendiarischer Kantianismus.

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Sources

Nietzsche, Friedrich: Rückblick auf meine Leipziger Jahre. In:  Werke in drei Bänden. Autobiographisches aus den Jahren 1856–1869. München 1954. Link.

Swift, Paul A.: Becoming Nietzsche. Early Reflections on Democritus, Schopenhauer and Kant. Lanham 2005.

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Source for the Article Image

Photograph by Schopenhauer dated 3/9/1852, link

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Footnotes

1: Rückblick auf meine zwei Leipziger Jahre.

2: Brief v. 11.07.1866; Nr. 511.

3: Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1.

4: Die Geburt der Tragödie, 16.

5: Cf. esp. its second chapter, „Nietzsche on Schopenhauer in 1867“.

6: Die Geburt der Tragödie, Versuch einer Selbstkritik, 6.

7: Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 4.

8: Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 2.

9: Bf. Nr. 581 (my emphasis).

10: Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 8.

11: Der Fall Wagner (1888) und Nietzsche contra Wagner (1889)

12: In a letter from 12/13/1875 to his lifetime friend Carl von Gersdorff, Nietzsche characterizes both Schopenhauer and Wagner together as his educators (cf. Bf. Nr. 495).

13: Fragment Nr. 26[462].

14: Bf. v. 19.02.1888; Nr. 997.