Schopenhauer and ‘Man's Need for Metaphysics’

Abstract

Nietzsche describes Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation (1818), which he discovered in a second-hand book shop in Leipzig in 1869, as a book written especially for him (UM iii 2). The Birth of Tragedy he describes as written ‘in his [Schopenhauer's] spirit and to his honour’ (BT 5). Even after his break with decadent ‘romanticism’ represented, as he saw it, by both Schopenhauer and Wagner, he continued to regard the former, his ‘first and only educator’, as both a ‘great thinker’ and a great human being (HH ii Preface 1). Even in the middle of attacking everything Schopenhauer stands for, in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche still pauses to call him ‘a genuine philosopher … a man and a knight with a brazen countenance who has the courage to be himself, knows how to stand alone and does not wait for the men in front and a nod from on high’ (GM iii 5). In this chapter I shall very briefly sketch Schopenhauer's general philosophy, acquaintance with which is necessary, inter alia , to understanding the development of Nietzsche's metaphysics, before turning to what Schopenhauer has to say specifically about religion. IDEALISM AND PESSIMISM The basis of all Schopenhauer's thinking is, as he understands it, Kantian idealism. The everyday world of space and time, a product of the way in which the human mind processes the raw material it has received from external reality, is, he holds, mere ‘appearance’ or ‘representation’, in the final analysis a ‘dream’.