The Educator’s Mark

Schopenhauer's Omnipresence in Nietzsche's Philosophy II

The Educator’s Mark

Schopenhauer's Omnipresence in Nietzsche's Philosophy II

3.2.25

Tom Bildstein

After explaining in the first part of this article (link) how Nietzsche transformed from an admirer of Schopenhauer to a critic in the course of the 1870s, Tom Bildstein now examines in more detail how the mature Nietzsche sought to overcome Schopenhauer‘s pessimism and counter it with a “life-affirming” philosophy. Schopenhauer‘s “will to life,” which the misanthrope would like to see ascetically denied, is to give way to the “will to power” as the fundamental principle of all life, which cannot be denied without contradiction.

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Part II: Nietzsche's Critique of Schopenhauer

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V. The Fight Against Nihilistic Pessimism

For Schopenhauer, the will represents the monistic principle of the world to which all worldly phenomena can be traced back. It is the metaphysical essence that underlies Kant’s thing-in-itself, that which “constitutes the inner essence of things.”¹⁵ Nietzsche deals intensively with Schopenhauer’s concept of will and regards it as a metaphysical hypothesis that must be refuted in order to be able to develop a philosophy that consistently affirms life. For Nietzsche, the struggle against Schopenhauer’s thesis of will turns into a struggle against nihilistic pessimism.

For Nietzsche, pessimism itself is not actually the main problem: “It is not pessimism (a form of hedonism) that is the great danger [...] [but] the meaninglessness of all events!”¹⁶. Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to life, which brings the various manifestations of the eternal will in the graded scale of nature under a single expression of a “blind urge” that tirelessly drives all living beings to satisfy their selfish instinct for survival, thus making the world a “playground of tormented and frightened beings,”¹⁷, results in what Nietzsche considers a life-threatening devaluation of existence. In The Antichrist (1888), he makes it clear: “Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why compassion became a virtue for him.”¹⁸

Nietzsche is alluding to the ethics of compassion presented in the fourth and final section of The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to life already contains within itself the moment of its negation. This nihilistic morality of the self-abolition of the will leads to nothingness, which, significantly, corresponds to the concluding words of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus. Schopenhauer himself understood this morality of the negation of the will as asceticism, which he presented as “the self-chosen penitential way of life and self-mortification for the purpose of the lasting mortification of the will.”¹⁹ By making this lifestyle and its destructive treatment of the will the negative philosophical starting point of his own mammoth project, the “revaluation of all values,” Nietzsche progressively turned into an anti-Schopenhauerian.

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VI. Will to Life or Will to Power?

Nietzsche conceives his concept of the will to power as a double antithesis to Schopenhauer’s will to life. This anti-model is twofold in that it arises from a twofold, “ethical” and “metaphysical” – two terms that, strictly speaking, no longer fit Nietzsche’s understanding of philosophy – opposition to Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In Nietzsche’s eyes, the concept of the will to life does not adequately reflect the multiple physio-psychological struggles that structure reality from within. In 1882, he made the statement: "Will to life? Instead of it, I only ever found the will to power“²⁰.

The will to power is a complex concept: the meaning and the central role Nietzsche assigns to it are difficult to decipher. It is not entirely clear whether, as with Schopenhauer, it is a concept with a metaphysical claim or rather a regulative principle of a new way of life. For there are passages in Nietzsche’s writings that confirm both the one and the other hypothesis. In an posthumous fragment from 1885, for example, he makes a statement that is strongly reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics: “This world is the will to power – and nothing more! And you, too, are this will to power – and nothing more!“²¹. Later, however, in a fragment entitled “Will to Power as Knowledge” – an idea that Martin Heidegger would make the main subject of his lecture in the summer semester of 1939 at the University of Freiburg²² – he states that his concept of the will to power is less concerned with revealing the true knowledge of the nature of the world than with “imposing as much regularity and form on chaos as is sufficient for our practical needs”²³.

One thing is certain: Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power is an attempt at an alternative interpretation and evaluation of life, which is intended to pave the way for a new way of life that goes against Schopenhauer. In other words, the aim is to oppose the basic nihilistic idea that man’s main drive corresponds to a “blind urge” to live, which leads him to cling to the preservation of his existence without reason - and in turn to prove that man does not in fact strive for his (survival) life, but for power.

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VII. Yes or No?

The two thinkers’ contrasting interpretations of life and the world – as a reflection of the will to power or the will to life – go hand in hand with opposing ideas of the meaning of life. Schopenhauer’s view of existence as a manifestation of the blind, insatiable will to life inevitably leads to its complete self-negation. In the fourth book of the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer makes it clear “that suffering is essential to life and therefore does not flow into us from outside, but that everyone carries the inexhaustible source of it around within himself.”²⁴ Schopenhauer's answer to the “meaning of life question” is therefore based on a twofold thesis: firstly, that life and suffering essentially belong together, and secondly, that suffering is pointless and should therefore be avoided. The avoidance of suffering as a task in life, which Schopenhauer does not understand in the hedonistic sense of striving for sensual pleasure – because all happiness is of a negative nature and consists only in a brief interruption of the only “positive” lack – can only occur through an ascetic negation of that from which eternal suffering receives its nourishment, from the will to life. Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which with Rudolf Malter²⁵ can certainly be understood as a soteriology²⁶, therefore reacts with a decisive “No!” to the egoistic will to life in order to put an end not only to individual suffering, but also to suffering in the world in general.

Nietzsche reacts quite differently to the problem of the suffering character of life. The new life that he seeks to conceive with the idea of the will to power presupposes a certain willingness to suffer on the part of man, a certain will to suffer. “The will to suffer is there immediately if the power is great enough,”²⁷ Nietzsche wrote in his notebook in 1883. His “true” pessimism comes to the fore with this concept of the will to suffer. Nietzsche directs his alternative concept of pessimism, which he also calls a “pessimism of strength” or a “classical pessimism”, against the “romantic” pessimism, which in his eyes was represented not only by Schopenhauer, but also by Alfred De Vigny, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Giacomo Leopardi, Pascal and all world religions.

Against these representatives of romantic pessimism, but above all against Schopenhauer’s negation of the will to life, “a supreme state of affirmation of existence is to be conceived, in which even pain, every kind of pain, is eternally included as a means of enhancement: the tragic-Dionysian state”²⁸. With his tragic-Dionysian pessimism, Nietzsche thus answers the question of accepting suffering for life in the exact opposite sense to Schopenhauer’s “No!” with a convinced, thoroughly combative and new “Yes!”.

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VIII. Atheism and Amoralism

Since Schopenhauer, philosophy has had to do without one of its oldest and strongest arguments to explain what holds the world together at its core: God. Reality now demanded an atheistic interpretation of itself; it wanted to be perceived as such, i.e. no longer as a mere creature of an unattainable Creator. Nietzsche was impressed by Schopenhauer’s claim to philosophy, which consisted of interpreting the nature of the world without the support of an ultimate God thesis. In his eyes, Schopenhauer was “as a philosopher the first admitted and unbending atheist we Germans have ever had”²⁹.

Nietzsche’s philosophy was directly linked to Schopenhauer’s atheism, which pointed the way for a new, anti-transcendental method. “Atheism was what led me to Schopenhauer”³⁰, he explains in Ecce Homo (1889). In this context, too, Nietzsche would value Schopenhauer’s diagnosis of the state of metaphysics more than the therapeutic he proposed. For Schopenhauer, unlike Nietzsche, the death of God does not simultaneously lead to the downfall of moral values. For Schopenhauer, atheism and amoralism do not go hand in hand. Although he does not follow the Christian doctrine of God, he nevertheless remains faithful to the philanthropic morality of Christianity. Schopenhauer recognizes love of mankind (caritas), which Christianity was the first to “bring up theoretically and formally establish as a virtue, the greatest of all”³¹, as the most important principle of morality, which is closely connected to his metaphysics. He thus remains a Christian at heart, even though he rejects the Christian doctrine of God with his reason.

In this respect, Nietzsche goes a significant step further than his educator. In his eyes, the latter was still far too much of a moralist to recognize the necessity of the arrival of a new, powerful, life-affirming man. “Schopenhauer was not strong enough for a new yes,”³² he wrote in a posthumous fragment from 1887. This new “yes”, to which he wanted to educate his readers against his educator, presupposed an overcoming of morality. In order to overcome morality, man must vehemently fight the inclination to pity his fellow human beings, which Nietzsche, in contrast to Schopenhauer, does not regard as “natural” but as culturally created. “I count the overcoming of pity among the noble virtues”³³, Nietzsche will thus write in Ecce Homo. But who is this conqueror of morality, who ultimately stands before Nietzsche’s eyes as the ideal of human self-education?

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IX. The “Buddha of Frankfurt” versus the “Inverted” Zarathustra Ideal

Schopenhauer’s philosophy was strongly influenced by his antagonistic youthful experiences of the overwhelming beauty of nature and the devastating misery of the human and animal kingdom. Looking back on his youth, the private scholar, who was already in his mid-forties at the time, wrote: “In my 17th year, without any scholarly education, I was as seized by the misery of life as Buddha was in his youth, when he saw illness, aging, pain and death.”³⁴ The Buddha figure, who played a central role not only in his own philosophy but also in his self-perception as a human being, would accompany Schopenhauer even after his death. To this day, some of his attentive readers give him the nickname “the Buddha of Frankfurt”.

Nietzsche too names Schopenhauer and Buddha in one breath. However, the aim of his philosophy is to transcend the Schopenhauerian-Buddhist view of life in order to provide a stage for a new prophet. He wants humanity to receive a new “glad tidings” by means of a new “clairvoyant”, according to which life “must no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, be viewed under the spell and delusion of morality”³⁵. Nietzsche wants us to open our eyes to an “inverted ideal”, namely “the ideal of the most exuberant, liveliest and most world-affirming human being” (ibid.).

The prophet of this radical affirmation of the world and of life is called Zarathustra. However, unlike the Buddha reference in Schopenhauer’s thinking, the figure found in Nietzsche’s works has little to do with the historically transmitted teachings of the founder of Zoroastrianism. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra conveys a teaching to his disciples that had never been expressed before: that of the Übermensch, with which he “gave humanity the greatest gift it has ever been given.”³⁶ In Nietzsche’s eyes, this gift consists of having liberated humanity from the traditionally handed-down vices of bad conscience, flagging self-pity and convinced self-mortification.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, like Schopenhauer’s Buddha, recognizes the perpetual cycle of being, but he draws a different conclusion from this insight; the aim of life is not to break this eternal cycle, as in Buddhism, but to want “the eternal return of the same”:

Zarathustra is a dancer – like the one who has the hardest, the most terrible insight into reality, who has thought the “most abysmal thought”, yet finds in it no objection to existence, not even to its eternal return, – rather a reason to be the eternal yes to all things themselves, “the immense unlimited saying yes and amen.”³⁷

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X. Conclusion: War of the Roses and Patricide

From our overview of Nietzsche’s works and posthumous fragments, we can undoubtedly conclude that the themes, motifs and arguments of Schopenhauer’s philosophy play a central, omnipresent role in his thinking. The will to life and the will to power, pessimism, atheism, the eternal return, nihilism, compassion, music as metaphysics, genius: each of these main motifs of Nietzsche’s philosophy finds a model in Schopenhauer’s thinking.

The educator who offered him a deeper, will-philosophical and pessimistic view of the world in his younger years remained an intellectual challenge for Nietzsche until the end: the model of a philosopher for whom he himself wanted to be the alternative. The history of the Nietzsche-Schopenhauer relationship thus corresponds to a one-sided love story that turned into a war of the roses. Not to stop at the world view of his beloved educator, but to offer an opposing, larger view of things based on it: That was what really mattered to Nietzsche. Whether he understood Schopenhauer correctly on all points was ultimately of no great importance to him. In the end, one thing counts for him above all: the patricide he accomplished in the service of the Übermensch:

I am far from believing that I have understood Schopenhauer correctly; I have only learned to understand myself a little better through Schopenhauer; that is why I owe him the greatest gratitude.³⁸

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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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