Rising Into Timelessness |
National pride, said Schopenhauer, is the cheapest form of pride.
For him, the role of the state is merely to maintain the peace.
And the goal of human life is to rise into timelessness.
Although he thought of existence as a sorry mistake, the philosopher of pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer retained a strong “will to life”. One of his reasons for settling in Frankfurt was the reputation of that city’s doctors.
In Frankfurt, he took many precautions, bordering on the paranoid, to preserve his life and comfortable lifestyle. For example, he kept loaded pistols at his bedside, carried a leathern flask to avoid drinking infected water, and forbade barbers from shaving his neck. To prevent robbers, servants, and others from reading them, he wrote his business records and personal thoughts in English, Latin, or Greek, or in a shorthand code.
In the final year of his life, he moved to a ground-floor apartment not because he could no longer manage the stairs but from fear of being caught in a house fire. “A man of genius” he wrote in typical style, “is like a person who lived in a house where there are no other people but only dogs and cats; he is the only one who has any intelligence, but he is constantly in danger of being bitten or scratched.”
In September 1848, there were violent riots in Frankfurt........