1. Idealism and optimism
Schopenhauer thinks that life is full of pain, but at the same time, he thinks that pain is the inevitable result of will activities, so it is not a sin, on the contrary, it is a positive aspect of life and a topic. People realize their existence through pain. Body is the carrier and puppet of will, and pain is the content of human existence (including spirit and body). Without pain, it is impossible to show the existence of human beings. Schopenhauer said: "Will is a harpsichord, the obstruction and obstruction to will is the vibration of the string, knowledge is the soundboard, and pain is the sound." In Schopenhauer's view, we should allow the will to rush about and make life full of pain, so that life can be meaningful; On the contrary, acts against one's will, such as loving one's neighbor as oneself and doing good deeds for others, are virtues recognized by Christianity, but they are "extremely disgusting" hypocrisy, a negative aspect of life and an antithesis.
People's existence is painful, but pain affirms and sublimates the meaning of this existence. Therefore, Schopenhauer does not approve of suicide. Under this premise, Schopenhauer raised the question of how people treat their own lives. He has a famous saying: "Suicide is a completely aimless and meaningless behavior", which is a futile and crazy behavior taken by people with sound thinking in the ugliest world before us. (See all Schopenhauer's articles on suicide and death. It not only allows the will to act freely, so as to enjoy life and pain; It also requires denying the will, thus making all motives ineffective and becoming a clear and peaceful person; This is obviously a paradox. But Schopenhauer thinks this paradox is both realistic and unexplained. If you insist on explanation, you will go to mysticism. Schopenhauer blocked all doubts and explanations about it with practical mysticism. )
why? Schopenhauer said, first of all, the stupidity of suicide is not that it leads to death, but that it cannot bear the pain, which is survival. Secondly, suicide can't prove to be seeing through Maya (Sanskrit māhāmāyā, great illusion, Schopenhauer refers to the world of representation. ) is a sober move behind the illusory scenes, but the most arrogant performance of the contradictory will of life, and it is also a masterpiece of Maya. Finally, suicide only stops life, but it does not stop desire; It not only has nothing to do with denying the will to life, but also affirms the latter. In this case, the will to life shows the desire to die, and the desire to die shows suicide. It can be seen that the denial of will is not to get rid of pain at all, not to be dissatisfied with life, but to despise the enjoyment of life and achieve no desire, not to commit suicide. Schopenhauer believes that an ascetic should gladly stand on the opposite side of the phenomenon of will-himself-and take every pain for granted. In this way, he will gladly welcome any new pain imposed on him by accident or other people's malice, accept any loss, humiliation and insult, and regard these as opportunities to no longer affirm his will.
People should not commit suicide, but should abandon the will to life. What is its purpose? Schopenhauer believes that it is to understand the curtain of Maya, realize that everything in the universe is an illusion of will, and get a relief from being in it and being able to find and observe these illusions calmly and clearly, and then feel heartfelt ecstasy. Schopenhauer said: "A person who completely denies the will to survive, from the outside, he is indeed a poor, penniless, joyless and lifeless person, but his heart is clear and full of tranquility and joy." Not only that, Schopenhauer also believes that this realm of clarity, tranquility and joy is "something more outstanding than all achievements" and an ideal realm of life, which can only be entered by the accomplished and the wise.
It is the trilogy of Schopenhauer's theory, and it is also the essence of Schopenhauer's theory to move from affirming pain and opposing suicide to the realm of enlightenment and attainment. This is also the reason why we not only feel pessimistic and disappointed after reading Schopenhauer's original works, but also experience the joy of being "awakened".
If the tracing and restoration mentioned above are basically correct, then it is more accurate to call Schopenhauer's philosophy idealism rather than pessimism.
As a philosophical person, Schopenhauer thinks that he has understood the mysteries of life in the universe, so he is not bound by any dogma and pursues a free and easy life.
Secondly, is Nietzsche pessimistic? Nietzsche is not a pessimist, but an extremely profound optimist.
as an optimist, Nietzsche started from the concept of "tragic spirit", which was born in the soil of Schopenhauer's theory. In fact, where Schopenhauer stopped was Nietzsche's starting point. All his theories are inextricably linked with Schopenhauer. Although Nietzsche later violently attacked Schopenhauer and tried to cut off the umbilical cord, it didn't help, and people with discerning eyes could still see the marks of birth. As Brandeis said, in order to wake up the world and flaunt his genius, Nietzsche deliberately ignored, didn't mention at all, or attacked those thinkers who had influenced him.
2. Tragic spirit and intuitionism
Nietzsche's aesthetic view is concentrated in the book The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche put forward a core concept: tragic spirit, and two secondary concepts: Apollo modality and Dionysus modality.
Nietzsche believes that Greek tragedy is beautiful because it is an organic composition of two components (Apollo modality and Dionysus modality). The former represents the beauty of silence and is the attitude of people to observe the world with calm reason; The latter represents vitality, which is the endless kinetic energy for people to create the world and life. When beauty and strength are combined, the highest form of art (tragedy) can be achieved. In tragedy, the former stimulates life force, while the latter awakens the beauty of dreams, and the two interact. The Greeks used it to purify the world, beautify life and sweep away the gloom of pessimism. However, the appearance of Socrates broke the harmony and balance of the above two components, because he carried forward the modality of Apollo and abandoned the modality of Dionysus. Life in Greek culture disappeared, leaving only a bloodless rational culture. In this sense, Nietzsche called Socrates a decadent, and believed that the task of contemporary people is to raise vitality, revive the glory and inject boiling blood into rational culture.
On the surface, Nietzsche's tragic spirit pays equal attention to reason and vitality, but in fact, what he emphasizes is the latter. Nietzsche saw from the tragedy that the personal destruction relieved all the pain, and eliminated the root of the pain, so as to obtain the ecstasy of being integrated with the universe. At the same time, he realized that the personal destruction did not affect the unstoppable and endless life phenomena, and suddenly gave birth to heartfelt pleasure. This is the fullness of vitality and the highest beauty. Thus, it is the essence of Nietzsche's tragic spirit to gain joy instead of disappointment and affirm life instead of denying it.
Nietzsche draws people's eyes to Greek tragedies, believing that there is the highest beauty in them, with the purpose of affirming people and their existence and value. Nietzsche believes that in order to affirm life, people need tragic spirit, look at the generation and change process of the real world with aesthetic eyes, make the real world artistic, turn the suffering of life into aesthetic happiness, turn personal tragedy into world comedy, abandon Christian pessimism, and experience happiness as life and biology from it. This is the "metaphysical comfort" given by tragedy, and it is also the ultimate meaning for life. Nietzsche said: "Only as an aesthetic phenomenon, existence and the world are always justified."
Schopenhauer believes that what people can grasp with reason is only the appearance of things, and the internal source and motivation of these appearances (that is, will), just like Kant's thing itself, can never be measured by reason. If you want to know the activity of will, you can only rely on intuition. Nietzsche's aesthetic view is based on this. Nietzsche believes that the suffering and destruction of the protagonist in the tragedy is an apparent world that can be understood by reason, and the activity of full vitality (Dionysus modality, that is, Schopenhauer's will) behind it can only be understood by intuition. Not only that, Nietzsche's view on the tragic effect was also taken from Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer believes that Aristotle's fear and pity are not pleasant feelings, so they are not the purpose of watching tragedy, but only the means. So, what is the purpose? As mentioned earlier, it is the indifferent state of mind after getting rid of all the goals and property in life, or the quiet sentiment after getting rid of social temptation, and other noble orientations. In a word, it is the exaltation of the spirit after understanding the mystery of life. From the above point of view, Schopenhauer already has the basic factors for Nietzsche to learn from by advocating the spiritual pleasure and high-spirited aesthetic effect from tragedy in order to confront, see through and eliminate the troubles of life. Nietzsche just separated them, highlighted and strengthened them, and effectively expanded them into the main content of his theory.
Schopenhauer's intuitionism can be summarized in two sentences: the subject becomes the pure perception of the unconscious, and the object becomes the idea of objectifying the will. In this regard, Schopenhauer defines it from two aspects: on the one hand, the subject gets rid of the entanglement of the will to survive, gets lost in the object, completely abandons himself and becomes a pure subject, that is, "losing himself intuitively, and getting rid of this kind of labor for the knowledge that originally served the will, that is to say, completely disregarding his own interests, desires and purposes, thus completely withdrawing his personality for a while, so as to leave him as a pure subject for understanding". In short, it is irrelevant and subjective, and the subject becomes an objective thing, observing things purely and objectively. In this way, it makes no difference whether you watch the sunset from the prison or the palace. On the other hand, because the subject has changed, the object reflected in front of him has also changed. Its individuality has disappeared, leaving only the "eternal form", that is, the concept of direct objectification of will. Schopenhauer summarized these two aspects as follows: the object is not regarded as an individual thing but as a permanent form of all kinds of things, and the subject of cognition is regarded as the self-consciousness of the pure and meaningless subject of cognition. From the above, it can be seen that the key to the establishment of Schopenhauer's intuitive observation point lies in the transformation of the subject: first, abandon all theoretical dogmas that are external to the subject; Secondly, abandon all concepts and categories inherent in thought; Finally, directly penetrate things with an unpolluted and lively mind, treating me as a thing and treating things as me. Schopenhauer believes that only in this way can we discover the folly of the will world and the mystery of cosmic life under the quiet and orderly appearance world.
The connotations and differences of Nietzsche's tragic spirit, Apollo modality and Dionysus modality all depend on the intuitive observation point. It can be said that it is intuitionism that makes Nietzsche, a well-behaved student of theology and classical philology in his early years, become the initiator and advocate of passionate and wild strong will and superman concept.
III. Philosophy of life and cosmology
Since Schopenhauer, the research object of the history of western philosophy has undergone fundamental changes, that is, from the epistemological research before Kant and Hegel (the pursuit of the origin and function of rational knowledge) to the ontological research (the pursuit of the mystery of human noumenon and the relationship between human noumenon and cosmological noumenon), and from the perspective of human rational phenomenon to the perspective of life phenomenon. Because this transformation began with Schopenhauer and was followed by Nietzsche, which influenced the whole 2th century, it is appropriate to call them philosophers of life.
As a philosopher of life, Schopenhauer mainly answers the question of "what is man", while Nietzsche mainly answers the question of "how can people live meaningfully", and both of them are unified in "will".
Schopenhauer inherited from ancient Greece, and in the early 19th century, he reconsidered the question of what human nature really is. Schopenhauer's conclusion is that man is a painful creature, biology is its stipulation, and pain is its content. Therefore, it is an unshirkable duty of living things to suffer and endure it. Why is pain inseparable from living things? The key is will. In Schopenhauer's view, will is an inner creativity, which is blind, accidental and unconscious, and forms biology through the principle of individualization. If the will is never satisfied, the living thing will always be in pain. Schopenhauer gave this definition to people, aiming at revealing the truth of existence to human beings and making them understand it, so as to treat life with indifference and enjoy the joy after exploring the essence of life.
based on Schopenhauer's theory, Nietzsche continued to explore. Nietzsche said, "I was the first person to know the wonderful Dionysus phenomenon." This is not true, it is a statement of greed for one's own merits! As mentioned earlier, this concept is derived from Schopenhauer's "will". The difference is that in Schopenhauer, will is required to be denied; In Nietzsche's view, Dionysus' modality is affirmed. Nietzsche said: "The affirmation of life, even the affirmation of its most wonderful and difficult problems, and the will to life that rejoices in its endless vitality in the process of pursuing the highest form-this is what I call Dionysus modality." Nietzsche's so-called affirmation of Dionysus' modality is an affirmation of pain, sin and all suspicious and unfamiliar things in life, which is consistent with Schopenhauer. Nietzsche's lifelong work is to promote human vitality and affirm Dionysus' modality. Nietzsche's so-called "God is dead" means that traditional rationalism is required to die and be replaced by instinctive vitality; The so-called "revaluation of all values" is to re-evaluate all views on life problems in history from the perspective of vitality; The so-called "strong will" is the condensation of vitality; The so-called "free man" is a person who gets rid of the bondage of reason, returns to Dionysus modality and masters himself; The so-called "egoism" is the behavior mode in which Dionysus' modality dominates himself without being a slave of reason. The so-called "superman" is those who constantly surpass themselves, rebuild the prosperity of life and re-establish Dionysus' modality. Nietzsche believes that since Christianity, human beings have been living in the most miserable and darkest situation because reason suppressed Dionysus' modality. Nietzsche also believes that man is a bridge rather than an end, that is to say, man must sublate himself-in this respect, it is different from Kant. In Nietzsche's view, Superman not only didn't exist before, now, but also won't exist in the future, because people are raw materials, ugly stones that need to be pondered repeatedly, and things that will never mature. Only by maintaining Dionysus modality can human beings have hope.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's philosophy of life is based on their world view.
Schopenhauer believes that everything in the universe is a phenomenon, and its inner ontology is will. The generation of everything in the phenomenon world lies in the activity of will. Will is internal creativity, things are its presentation form, and matter is only a constituent element. Schopenhauer said: "Once this phenomenon is eliminated, other phenomena immediately take its place and grab its material." Schopenhauer never denied matter. He believes that there are only two things in the world that can escape the domination of causality, namely, matter and natural forces (will). He said: "These two are the prerequisites for all changes". Between these two premises, with the different emphasis, Schopenhauer sometimes said that "matter is also the same as natural forces", and sometimes