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Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Schopenhauer

Publié le 27/01/2010

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  • Schopenhauer, Arthur

(1788-1860) Philosophe allemand.

A la mort de son père, il suit sa mère, écrivain, à Weimar et fait la connaissance de Goethe, Wieland et des frères Schlegel. Après des études à Göttingen puis à Berlin, où il suit les séminaires de Fichte, il publie en 1819 son ouvrage principal, le Monde comme volonté et comme représentation. 

A l'instar de Kant, il désigne le monde comme étant une "représentation" de ce que le sujet perçoit. Il n'y a donc pas d'objet sans reconnaissance du sujet et inversement. Schopenhauer met l'accent sur la volonté du sujet de connaître les "choses en soi" et en fait le principe "a priori" absolu. Toutes les forces de la nature reposent sur cette force de volonté. Le "vouloir-vivre" en lui-même est une volonté sans raison ni but (volonté primitive), qui représente un principe du monde indépendant de chaque sujet. Dans ses formes individuelles, illusoires et multiples, le vouloir-vivre est une impulsion existentielle (volonté de vivre et de procréer), source de toutes les souffrances, nous menant, dans un cycle sans fin, du désir et de la douleur à l'ennui. Mais l'intelligence, qui lui est originairement liée, peut s'affranchir de cette servitude par l'art, la pitié (qui nous libère de l'illusion de l'égoïsme), et l'ascétisme, négation de tous désirs telle qu'elle est prêchée dans le bouddhisme sous la forme du nirvana.

La philosophie de Shopenhauer, profondément pessimiste, aux accents à la fois nihilistes et vitalistes, influencera largement Wagner et Nietzsche.

  • Ouvrages 

- De la quadruple racine du principe de raison suffisante (1813) ;

- le Monde comme volonté et comme représentation (1818) ;

- Sur la volonté dans la nature (1836) ;

- le Fondement de la morale (1860).

The most interesting German philosopher of the nineteenth century was Arthur Schopenhauer, who was born in Danzig in 1788 and studied philosophy at Göttingen in 1810 after a false start as a medical student. He admired Kant but not Kant's successors. He attended the lectures of Fichte in Berlin in 1811, but was disgusted by both his obscurity and his nationalism. In the writings of Hegel and his disciples he complained of ‘the narcotic effect of long-spun periods without a single idea in them'. His own style, first exhibited in his doctoral dissertation of 1813, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, was energetic and luminous, and won the praise of the great poet Goethe. In Dresden between 1814 and 1818 Schopenhauer composed his philosophical masterpiece, The World as Will and Idea, which he republished in an expanded form in 1844. In 1820 he went to Berlin and offered a series of lectures, but the students, injudiciously, preferred to hear Hegel who was lecturing at the same hour. The boycott of his lectures fuelled his distaste for the Hegelian system, which he regarded as mostly nonsense. In 1839 he won his first public recognition with a Norwegian prize for an Essay on the Freedom of the Will. Schopenhauer was a brilliant essayist, and when his essays were published in 1851 under the title Parerga and Paralipomena he emerged from years of obscurity and neglect to become a famous philosopher. He died in 1860.

schopenhauer

« There are many different grades of will, and only the higher grades are accompanied by knowledge and self-determination.If, therefore, I say, the force which attracts a stone to the earth is according to its nature, in itself and apart fromall idea, will, I shall not be supposed to express in this opinion the insane opinion that the stone moves itself inaccordance with a known motive, merely because this is the way in which will appears in man.Will is the force which lives in the plant, the force by which crystal is formed and by which the magnet turns to theNorth Pole.

Here at last we find what Kant looked for in vain: all ideas are phenomenal existence, the will alone is athing in itself.Schopenhauer's will, which is active even in inanimate objects, appears to be the same as Aristotle's naturalappetite, restated in terms of Newton's laws instead of in terms of the theory of the natural place of the elements.Why does he call it ‘will', then, rather than ‘appetite' or simply ‘force'? If we explain force in terms of will,Schopenhauer replies, we explain the less known by the better known; if, instead, we regard the will as merely aspecies of force, we renounce the only immediate knowledge we have of the inner nature of the world.But there is, Schopenhauer agrees, a great difference between the higher and lower grades of will.

In the highergrades individuality occupies a prominent position: each human has a strong individual personality, and so to alesser extent do the higher species of brute animals.

‘The farther down we go, the more completely is every traceof the individual character lost in the common character of the species.' In the inorganic kingdom of nature allindividuality disappears.Nature should be seen as a field of conflict between different grades of will.

A magnet lifting a piece of iron is avictory of a higher form of will (electricity) over a lower (gravitation).

A human being in health is a triumph of theIdea of the self-conscious organism over the physical and chemical laws which originally governed the humours ofthe body, and against which it is engaged in constant battle.Hence also in general the burden of physical life, the necessity of sleep, and, finally, of death; for at last thesesubdued forces of nature, assisted by circumstances, win back from the organism, wearied even by the constantvictory, the matter it took from them, and attain to an unimpeded expression of their being. The rotation of the planets round the sun, in tension between centripetal and centrifugal force, is no less anexample of the universal essential conflict of the manifestation of will.What, then, is the nature of will, which is so universally present and active? All willing, Schopenhauer says, arisesfrom want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering.

A wish may be granted; but it is succeeded byanother and we have ten times more desires than we can satisfy.

The fleeting gratification of a desire is ‘like thealms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive today, that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow'.

So long asour consciousness is filled by our will, we can never have happiness or peace; we can at best alternate pain withboredom.Is there any escape from the slavery of the will? In the third book of his chief work Schopenhauer expounds a wayof escape through Art.

Always in animals, and for most of the time in humans, knowledge is at the service of thewill, employed in securing the satisfaction of its desires.

But it is possible to rise above the consideration of objectsas mere instruments for the satisfaction of desire, and to adopt an attitude of pure contemplation.

This attitude ismost easily adopted towards beauty, whether in nature or in art.

We must lose ourselves in a natural landscape or apiece of architecture; lose ourselves, literally, by forgetting our will and our individuality.

We must become a simplemirror of the object of our contemplation, so that the perceiver and the perceived become one.

‘In suchcontemplation the particular thing becomes at once the Idea of its species, and the perceiving individual becomespure subject of knowledge.'The Ideas which Schopenhauer is here talking of are not Lockean ideas of perception, but the Platonic Idea of thespecies.

It is through Art, the work of genius, that we make contact with the universal which is independent of, andmore real than, the individual, like the single rainbow quietly resting on the innumerable showering drops of thewaterfall.

Every human has the power of knowing the Ideas in things, but the genius excels ordinary mortals inpossessing this knowledge more intensely and more continuously.

In contemplation free from will, we lose ourconcern with happiness and unhappiness, and we cease to be individual.

‘We are only that one eye of the worldwhich looks out from all knowing creatures, but which can become perfectly free from the service of will in manalone.'The theory of the liberating effect of aesthetic contemplation is developed in a detailed consideration of the variousarts – architecture, painting, poetry, drama, and above all, music, the most powerful of the arts.

Music,Schopenhauer says, is not, like the other arts, a copy of the Ideas, but is the copy of the Will itself, whoseobjectification the Ideas are.

Schopenhauer's notion of music emptying the self was echoed by T.

S.

Eliot, when hewrote in The Dry Salvages of music heard so deeplyThat it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.But the person whose life was most affected by Schopenhauer's writing on music was Richard Wagner, who came tothink of himself as the embodiment of Schopenhauerian genius.The liberation offered by aesthetic contemplation, however, is only a temporary one.

The only way to achievecomplete freedom from the tyranny of the will is by complete renunciation.

What the will wills is always life; so if weare to renounce the will we must renounce the will to live.

This sounds like a recommendation of suicide; but in factSchopenhauer regarded suicide, if sought as an escape from the miseries of the world, as a false step inspired by anover-estimate of the importance of the individual life, and motivated by a concealed will to live.What Schopenhauer meant by renunciation is best understood by following the account he gives, in his fourth book,of different moral characters, starting with wickedness and ending with saintliness or asceticism.

Moral progressconsists in the gradual reduction of egoism: the tendency of the individual to make itself the centre of the worldand to sacrifice everything else to its own existence and well-being.A bad man is an egoist to the highest degree: he asserts his own will to live and denies the presence of that will in. »

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