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Nietzsche in the Context of Schopenhauer Dr INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056 Nietzsche in the Context of Schopenhauer Dr. S.Sridevi* Abstract Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a German philosopher and cultural critic. He deconstructed the subjective ideologies beneath western religion, morality and philosophy that were supposed to have universal truths. He was deeply influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a German philosopher whose writings influenced existentialism, which has been established by scholars. This paper looks at these negotiations and also looks into a few poems of Nietzsche analyzing their themes. Key words: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche Nietzsche was interested in the enhancement of personage of humanity and cultural health of the human race. Nietzsche’s revitalizing thinking has inspired leading figures in all walks of intellectual life, including dancers, poets, novelists, painters, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and social revolutionaries. In 1865, Nietzsche discovered Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) in a local bookstore. He was then 21 years old. Schopenhauer’s atheistic and turbulent vision of the world, in conjunction with his high praise of music as an art form, captured Nietzsche’s imagination. (Wicks). Reason helps us to set free ourselves from perceptions, says Schopenhauer. It can assist us appreciate things objectively. Judgments are probable only if rationale is applied. In spite of conceptual ideas, illusions do prolong to exist. As man has unreasonable tendencies, the practice of reason is very important. Reason can only prevent error, that is, a judgment on insufficient grounds, by opposing to it a truth; as for example, the abstract knowledge that the cause of the weaker light of the moon and the stars at the horizon is not greater distance, but the denser atmosphere; but in all the cases we have referred to, the illusion remains in spite of every abstract explanation. For the understanding is in itself, even in the case of man, irrational, and is completely and sharply distinguished from the reason, which is a faculty of knowledge that belongs to man alone. The reason can only know; perception remains free from its influence and belongs to the understanding alone. (Schopenhauer 56) The will to power is an essential conception in the thinking of Nietzsche. He views it as an irrational force. It guides the mind, body and spirit of the people. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for All and None (Also Sprach Zarathustra, Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, 1883–85), is one of Nietzsche’s most renowned works, and Nietzsche regarded it as among his most noteworthy. Thirty years after its initial publication, 150,000 copies of the work were printed by the German government and issued as inspirational reading, along with the Bible, to the young soldiers during WWI. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is poetic and uses a prophetic manner of writing. It relies upon many Old and New Testament allusions. Nietzsche fills the work with nature metaphors. He invokes animals, earth, air, fire, water, celestial bodies and plants. He describes the spiritual development of Zarathustra who is portrayed as a solitary, reflective, exceedingly strong-willed, sage-like, laughing and dancing voice of heroic self-mastery. Zarathustra is accompanied by a proud, sharp- eyed eagle and a wise snake. Nietzsche refers to this superior mode of being as superhuman (übermenschlich) (Wicks). Nietzsche absorbed the Schopenhauerian view that non-rational forces exist in the foundation of all creativity. These forces are artistically conveyed in music, Nietzsche felt. He identifies a strongly instinctual, untamed, amoral, Dionysian power within pre-Socratic Greek society as an essentially creative and vigorous energy. He locates its major idiom in the tragic choral group and it is Schopenhauer who similarly argues that man has enormous will power which cannot always be controlled by rational thinking. Schopenhauer believed that this earth is lived with anguish and pain and declared that life is a wretched business. He regarded optimism as absurd and as a bitter mockery of the unspeakable suffering of humanity and thought rational thinking is only a mask to hide irrationalism. He had a rich impact on Richard Wagner, the famous German music composer. Nietzsche was strongly influenced by Wagner and Schopenhauer and his later writings reflect a celebration of human will. But for Schopenhauer who was influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism, it was renunciation or asceticism that helped man to conquer this illusionary world or as discussed earlier it was art that helped man to conquer the sufferings of this world (Blumenau). Approaching life from a Schopenhauerean perspective, that is, considering that the human Will brought miserable pressure and his argument that philosophy brought some solace to humanity in its deterministic viewpoint makes us believe that there are no choices left for people in their lives as our virtue and vices are inborn, and our Will rules us completely directing our day to day behaviour. The World as Will *Associate Professor of English, CTTE College, Chennai 11 Volume 8 Issue 11 2019 2315 http://infokara.com/ INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056 and Idea was published in 1819 and did not receive much acclaim as the public went to listen to Hegel’s lectures and Schopenhauer sometimes lectured to an empty room. Hegel was an optimist who believed in human freedom, understanding and reason, and on the contrary, Schopenhauer believed that man is doomed. As an idealist influenced by Indian philosophy, Schopenhauer holds that the world we live in is ultimately an illusion, and the opening words of his masterpiece are “The world is my representation,” and the closing words are “To those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very world of ours with all its suns and galaxies – is nothing,” as his philosophy is an amalgam of Plato, Kant and the Upanishads (Caldwell). Being influenced by Schopenhauer, in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche posits what he calls a Dionysian impulse as the source of Greek tragedy and draws his argument from Schopenhauer: What then did Schopenhauer think about tragedy? He says, “What gives all tragedies their characteristic drive for elevation is the working out of the recognition that the world and life cannot provide any just satisfactions, and thus our devotion to it is not worthwhile; the tragic spirit lives on in that insight, and it leads from there to resignation” (The World as Will and Idea, II, 495). Oh, how differently Dionysus speaks to me! Oh, how far from me then was just this entire doctrine of resignation! (Nietzsche in Birth of Tragedy 5) The will to power as Nietzsche conceives of it is neither good nor bad as it is a basic drive found in everyone, but one that expresses itself in many different ways; The philosopher and the scientist direct their will to power into a will to truth; Artists channel it into a will to create; Businessmen satisfy it through becoming rich. One particular form of the will to power that Nietzsche devotes much attention to is what he calls “self-overcoming.” Here the will to power is harnessed and directed toward self-mastery and self- transformation, guided by the principle that “your real self lies not deep within you but high above you” (Birth of Tragedy 11). Nietzsche further states: In the Dionysian dithyramb man is aroused to the highest intensity of all his symbolic capabilities. Something never felt before forces itself into expression—the destruction of the veil of Maja, the sense of oneness as the presiding genius of form, of nature itself. Now the essence of nature must express itself symbolically; a new world of symbols is necessary, the entire symbolism of the body, not just the symbolism of mouth, face, and words, but the full gestures of the dance—all the limbs moving to the rhythm. And then the other symbolic powers grow, those of music, rhythm, dynamics, and harmony—all with sudden spontaneity. To grasp this total unleashing of all symbolic powers, man must already have attained that high level of freedom from the self which seeks to express itself symbolically in those forces. Because of this, the dithyrambic servant of Dionysus will understand only someone like himself. (Birth of Tragedy 11) Humanizing morality began in the eighteenth century that released morality from religious codes philosophers began to frame it in non-religious frameworks as it viewed that religion empowered the weak against the strong creating a new order of right and wrong, and became a tool for power. Nietzsche arrived at Kierkegaard's idea that the crowd is untruth: the self-legislating individual has trained himself to docility conforming to standards of morality and the normative behavior pattern has been customized as normal. The self of man has herd mentality, Nietzsche argues, but the individual has the potential to become something else as at any moment the self can accommodate itself to new ideologies and moralities. It is autonomous and can go beyond the conceptions of society which defines the good and the evil and man has the capacity to create new systems of thought using his fundamental drives; he can survive without transcendent support systems. Nietzsche or Kierkegaard has not codified this system of thinking with a scientific and philosophical rigour (Crowell). This search for newer ways of looking at life is a search for truth which goes beyond any existing system of intellectual platform or any living social code, and it means a new interpretation of life, a new way of understanding which might help us live better. And for the consolation of those who in any way and at any time may have devoted strength and life to the noble and hard battle against error, I cannot refrain from adding that, so long as truth is absent, error will have free play, as owls and bats in the night; but sooner would we expect to see the owls and the bats drive back the sun in the eastern heavens, than that any truth which has once been known and distinctly and fully expressed, can ever again be so utterly vanquished and overcome that the old error shall once more reign undisturbed over its wide kingdom.
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