Chapter 37 Schopenhauer as educator (excerpt)

If a traveler who has seen many countries, peoples, and parts of the world be asked what characteristic he finds everywhere in people in common, he may answer that they have a tendency to be lazy.Some will feel that he is more correct and more truthful if he says that they are all cowards.They hide behind custom and public opinion.Fundamentally speaking, everyone understands in their hearts that as a unique thing, it exists only once in the world, and there will be no such coincidence for the second time that it can bring so many extremely complicated elements together and combine them into An individual like he is now.He knew it, but he hid it like a guilty conscience--why?Because of the fear of the neighbor, the neighbor wants to uphold the custom and wrap himself in it.But what compels a man to fear his neighbor, to think and act with the crowd, instead of happily being himself?For a few it may be ashamed.In most people it is ease, indolence, in a word, the tendency of the traveler to speak of laziness.The traveler had a point: people are more lazy than cowardly, and it is precisely they who most fear the burden that absolute sincerity and frankness may impose upon them.Only artists hate such a hasty cliché, copying what others say, but can reveal everyone's secret and that guilt, and reveal that everyone is a one-time miracle. They dare to point out to us that everyone until his every day The movement of every muscle is himself and himself alone, and, so long as his uniqueness is thus strictly enforced, he is beautiful and impressive, as new and incredible as every work of nature, and never can be tiresome.When a great thinker despises human beings, he despises their laziness: for their own reasons, they appear like factory products, uniform, unworthy of dealings and instruction.There is only one thing for the man who does not want to be reduced to the common people, and that is to stop being lazy with himself; he should heed the call of his conscience: "Be yourself! Everything you do, think, and pursue now is not yourself."

There are two very different kinds of joy.The true thinker is always delightful, whether he expresses his seriousness or his jest, his human insight or his divine indulgence; without gloomy countenance, trembling hands, tearful eyes, It's clear and simple, brave and powerful, maybe with some tough chivalry, but always as a winner.And there is nothing more profoundly and heartfeltly exultant than seeing a victorious god standing beside all the trolls he vanquishes.Conversely, in mediocre writers and rigid thinkers one can sometimes read a kind of joy that only makes us feel sorry for people like me, as I did with David Strauss, for example. joy felt.We are ashamed to have such cheerful contemporaries, who have dishonored us and our time in posterity.Such optimists are completely blind to the miseries and monsters which, as thinkers, they are supposed to see and fight against; so their gaiety is unpleasant because it is deceitful, and it tries to lead people to believe that here the a victory.After all, where there is victory there is joy; and this applies to all works of art as well as to the works of true thinkers.Even though the content may remain dire and serious, as is the truth of life's problems, it is oppressive and tormenting only when half-thinkers and half-artists cast over them a cloud of their own shortcomings; There is no joy, no better enjoyment, than to be near such victors, who, because they have pondered the deepest truths, must love the most living things, and at last, as wise men, take refuge in beauty.They really talk, they don't incoherent, they don't copy what others say; they really move, they live, they don't live like ghosts wearing masks, as others are used to.So, approaching them, we feel really intimate and natural, and we have to exclaim like Goethe: "How glorious and precious is the living thing! How grounded, how real, how real to be with it!"

We know all this, and sometimes we are terribly shocked by all this dizzying anxiety and haste, this whole nightmare state of our lives, which seems to be on the eve of awakening, and the closer the awakening is, the more agitated the dream becomes.But we also felt that we were too weak to bear that moment of deep introspection, that we were not what all nature was looking for in order to save itself.Rather, we only occasionally put our heads out of the water and saw what kind of current we were drowning in.Moreover, even this fleeting rise and awakening, we do not do it by our own strength, we have to be lifted up - who is the power to lift us up?

It is those who are sincere, those who are no longer animals, namely philosophers, artists, and saints; when they appear, and through their presence, nature that never leaps makes its only leap, and is a happy one. Jumping, because for the first time it feels that it has reached its destination, that is, the place where it finds that it no longer has to think about the goal, that it has played the game of life and becoming to perfection.It is deified in this knowledge, and its face is covered with that tender twilight weariness called Beauty.What it expresses now with this apotheosis is the great explanation of existence; and the highest desire a mortal can harbor is to hear it with bated breath.

Here I have approached the answer to the question whether it is possible to connect with the great ideals of the Schopenhauer-type man through constant ego activity.This is certain: the above-mentioned new duty is not that of a single individual, but rather that men belong together to a powerful body, held together not by external forms and laws, but by a basic idea. of.This basic idea is culture, but only in so far as culture sets out to each of us the task of promoting, among us and without us, philosophers, artists, and saints, thereby contributing to the restoration of nature. Finish.For just as nature needs the philosopher, so it needs the artist, for a metaphysical aim, namely, for its true self-deification, whereby it at last establishes itself as the pure, finished formation, a kind of That which has never been clearly seen in the turmoil of its own generation - so also for its self-knowledge.Goethe once meaningfully reminded us that for nature, all her attempts are only as effective as the artist finally guesses its stuttering speech, intercepts it in the middle, and replaces it. expresses the true intent of its attempt.On one occasion he declares: "I have always said, and I will continue to repeat, that the causa finalis (first cause) of world disputes and human disputes is the art of drama and poetry. If it were not so, the raw material would be absolutely useless."  … Only in today's or coming birth, once we have risen to those highest degrees of philosophers, artists, and saints, will new objects of our love and hate also appear to us,—then we have Our mission and our field of duty, our hate and our love.Because we know what culture is.

It sometimes seems to me that modern people are so bored with each other that they feel the need to amuse themselves by means of all the arts.They allow their artists to present themselves as a tempting meal, and they are sprinkled with all the ingredients of the East and the West, so of course!Now they smell very interesting, according to the taste of the whole East and West.They aspire to satisfy every palate; every man deserves to be entertained, whether his whim is sweet or foul, delicacies or simple meals, Greek or Chinese, sentimental or dirty.Modern people want to be fun and interesting at all costs, and their chefs are known to be French at best and German at worst.After all, this is more a consolation to the latter than to the former, and if the French laugh at our lack of charm and grace, or if they see a German who is deliberately elegant and graceful, they can't help thinking of an Indians who get pierced and scream for tattoos, we don't blame them.

Nature always wishes to benefit the world, but she is not good at finding the most flexible and effective means and measures for this purpose: this is her great distress, and she is therefore melancholy.The reason why it produces philosophers and artists is to make human existence reasonable and meaningful, which undoubtedly comes from its own impulse to save; however, the effect he achieves through philosophers and artists is often How vague, how feeble!In general, how little it does productively!Especially in the matter of using philosophers to benefit the world, it is extremely embarrassed; its means seem to be only whimsical, random trials, so that its intentions have suffered countless failures, and most philosophers are useless.The course of nature looks like waste; but the source of waste is not criminal luxury but inexperience; and it is conceivable that, if it were a man, it could not escape anger at itself and its clumsiness.Nature shoots the philosopher at man like an arrow, which she does not aim, but which she hopes will fall somewhere.However, it got it wrong countless times, so it became angry with embarrassment.It acts as profligately in the field of culture as it sows plants.It achieves its purpose in such a general and crude way that it sacrifices too much power.The relationship between an artist and his connoisseurs and lovers is like a cannon to a flock of sparrows.To cause an avalanche in order to throw off a snowflake, to shoot someone dead in order to hit a fly on his nose, is the act of a fool.Artists and philosophers are a counter-evidence to the purposiveness of nature in its means, even though they provide excellent evidence of the intelligence of its ends.It should hit everything, but it always hits very little—and that few don't hit with the intensity with which it launches artists and philosophers.It is sad that art as cause and art as effect have to be judged so differently: how magnificent it is as cause, how feeble it is as effect, like a lingering sound!There is no doubt that the artist follows the will of nature, and he creates for the happiness of others.Even so, he still knows that among these others, there will never be anyone who understands and loves his works as much as himself.Because of the clumsiness of nature, he must have the highest level of love and understanding, so as to call out the lower level of love and understanding; the great and the noble are used as a means to make the relatively small and low.Nature is very poorly run, her expenses are far greater than her income; however rich she may be, sooner or later she will go bankrupt.Its arrangement would be much more rational if its governing principle was a small fee and a hundredfold return, for example, a small number of artists with a small amount of power, and at the same time a sufficient number of recipients and appreciation or, giving them a stronger character than the artist himself.Thus the effect of the work of art will be a hundred times louder echo to the cause.Or, should we not at least expect cause and effect to be equal in intensity, and how far behind this expectation Nature lags behind!Artists, and especially philosophers, seem like accidents of their time, like hermits, or like stragglers.