For many years, as we wrote in a recent post, Friedrich Niet­zsche has been mis­un­der­stood as a philo­soph­i­cal nihilist and even a pro­to-Nazi. This is unfor­tu­nate, giv­en all Niet­zsche has to say about liv­ing coura­geous­ly in the face of nihilism and pro­to-Nazism, both of which he feared and hat­ed. But if we’re look­ing for a philoso­pher who espoused few, if any, pos­i­tive val­ues, who saw the entire world as emp­ty and malev­o­lent, and who had lit­tle sym­pa­thy for his fel­low man, we could instead turn to the Ger­man thinker whom Niet­zsche called his “teacher,” Arthur Schopen­hauer.

Schopen­hauer adopt­ed Bud­dhism ear­ly, years before D.T. Suzu­ki arrived in Europe and the U.S. and pop­u­lar­ized East­ern reli­gion and phi­los­o­phy. Per­haps Schopenhauer’s ver­sion of Bud­dhism didn’t quite catch on the same way because in his inter­pre­ta­tion, it resem­bles a dark, pes­simistic inver­sion of Rene Descartes’ propo­si­tions two cen­turies ear­li­er. “In my 17th year,” wrote Schopen­hauer (1788–1860), “I was gripped by the mis­ery of life, as the Bud­dha had been in his youth when he saw sick­ness, old age, pain and death.” So far, text­book intro to Bud­dhism.

But Bud­dhism has lit­tle to say about how the world came into exis­tence. Schopen­hauer goes on to write, “The truth was that this world could not have been the work of an all lov­ing being, but rather that of a dev­il, who had brought crea­tures into exis­tence in order to delight in their suf­fer­ings.” Schopen­hauer fits into the rare com­pa­ny of philo­soph­i­cal Anti­na­tal­ists, those who believe it would be bet­ter for us not to have been born at all. How is it then that Alain de Bot­ton can claim, as he does in his School of Life intro to Schopen­hauer above, that “like the Bud­dha… he deserves dis­ci­ples, schools, art­works, and monas­ter­ies to put his ideas into prac­tice.” What would that even look like?

Schopenhauer’s pes­simism was thor­ough­go­ing, and arrived ful­ly devel­oped in his 1818 mas­ter­piece, The World as Will and Rep­re­sen­ta­tion, pub­lished when he was thir­ty. The Schopen­hauer we tend to know, if we know him at all, is a scowl­ing old man with an incon­gru­ous­ly com­ic ring of white hair sur­round­ing his bald head like a fluffy winged  halo. But until his death at age 72, he stuck to the sys­tem­at­ic think­ing of his youth; “he pub­lished a great deal,” says Bryan Magee above in a dis­cus­sion with philoso­pher Fred­er­ick Cople­ston,” but all of it was to extend, or elab­o­rate, or enrich the philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem he had devel­oped in his twen­ties and from which he nev­er depart­ed.”

In those many lat­er pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing two works on ethics and a revised edi­tion of Will and Rep­re­sen­ta­tion over twice the orig­i­nal length, Schopen­hauer the­o­rized the world as essen­tial­ly irra­tional and the crea­tures in it as gov­erned by the “will-to-life,” which, says de Bot­ton, “makes us thrust our­selves for­ward, cling to exis­tence, and look always to our own advan­tage.” Expressed main­ly through sex, the will-to-life dri­ves us to fall in love again and again, a phe­nom­e­non Schopen­hauer respect­ed, “as one would a tiger or a hur­ri­cane.” But Schopen­hauer resent­ed love, and saw it only as a neces­si­ty for the preser­va­tion of the species.

Aside from serv­ing this essen­tial func­tion, the will-to-life expressed through love only drove us to unhap­pi­ness. Schopen­hauer tends to be much less quotable than his most famous admir­er, Niet­zsche, but in one quote that sums up his idea of love, he wrote, “direct­ly after cop­u­la­tion the devil’s laugh­ter is heard.” It is per­haps need­less to point out that he had a very low view of the busi­ness of pro­cre­ation, not only because he opposed birth, but also because he opposed the con­di­tions that give rise to it. Rather than ele­vat­ing us above the run of oth­er sex­u­al­ly pro­cre­at­ing ani­mals, our con­scious­ness only serves to make us aware of our mis­ery.

“At every stop, in great things and small,” Schopen­hauer wrote, “we are bound to expe­ri­ence that the world and life are cer­tain­ly not arranged for the pur­pose of being hap­py. That’s why the faces of almost all elder­ly peo­ple are deeply etched with such dis­ap­point­ment.” Nonethe­less, we can “rise above the demands of the will-to-life,” he believed, in the man­ner of celi­bate monks and nuns. As Bud­dhist monas­tics have for 2,600 years, and more recent­ly a few scowl­ing Ger­man philoso­phers, we can renounce the plea­sures and the suf­fer­ings of every­day human life.

The oth­er way in which Schopen­hauer rec­om­mend­ed that we face the grim­ness of human life is through a form of art ther­a­py, spend­ing “as long as we can with art and phi­los­o­phy, whose task is to hold up a mir­ror to the fren­zied efforts and unhap­py tur­moil cre­at­ed in us by the will-to-life.” Where Schopenhauer’s first pro­pos­al for deal­ing with life’s suf­fer­ing close­ly resem­bles that of Ther­ava­da Bud­dhism, his sec­ond is a Mahayana for a Ger­man Roman­tic, who finds com­pas­sion for oth­er suf­fer­ing indi­vid­u­als only through the medi­um of art, lit­er­a­ture, and phi­los­o­phy.

In the full embrace of pes­simism, Schopen­hauer may sound to us a lit­tle like anoth­er Ger­man artist, Wern­er Her­zog, who also stares into the abyss of human mis­ery and finds val­ue only in its rela­tion to art: “To mar­ry means to do every­thing pos­si­ble to become an object of dis­gust to each oth­er,” Schopen­hauer writes, “Every life his­to­ry is the his­to­ry of suf­fer­ing,” “Life has no intrin­sic worth, but is kept in motion mere­ly by desire and illu­sion.” Should you find such state­ments com­fort­ing because they sound true to your expe­ri­ence, then per­haps Schopen­hauer holds for you a key to under­stand­ing and accept­ing the tragedy of exis­tence. But maybe he was wrong in assum­ing every­one was as mis­er­able as him­self.

See de Bot­ton expand on Schopenhauer’s view of love in the video above from his A Guide to Hap­pi­ness series.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

How Did Niet­zsche Become the Most Mis­un­der­stood & Bas­tardized Philoso­pher?: A Video from Slate Explains

A Guide to Hap­pi­ness: Alain de Botton’s Doc­u­men­tary Shows How Niet­zsche, Socrates & 4 Oth­er Philoso­phers Can Change Your Life

See the Homes and Stud­ies of Wittgen­stein, Schopen­hauer, Niet­zsche & Oth­er Philoso­phers

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Is there a more mis­un­der­stood philoso­pher than Friedrich Niet­zsche? Grant­ed, the ques­tion makes two assump­tions: 1) That peo­ple read phi­los­o­phy 2) That peo­ple read Friedrich Niet­zsche. Per­haps nei­ther of these things is wide­ly true. Many peo­ple get their phi­los­o­phy from film and tele­vi­sion: Good Will Hunt­ing, True Detec­tive, Com­ing to Amer­i­ca.… There’s noth­ing inher­ent­ly wrong with that. I don’t read med­ical books. Most of my knowl­edge of med­i­cine comes from hos­pi­tal dra­mas. (If you ever hear me make unsourced med­ical claims, please remind me of this.)

But back to Niet­zsche…. If few peo­ple read phi­los­o­phy in gen­er­al and Niet­zsche in par­tic­u­lar, why is his name so well-known, why are his ideas so bad­ly man­gled? Because some of the peo­ple who read a lit­tle Niet­zsche write films and tele­vi­sion shows. In many of them, he emerges as a twist­ed nihilist with no scru­ples and lit­tle regard for human life. In the most infa­mous case of Niet­zsche-twist­ing, the philosopher’s sis­ter extract­ed from his books what she want­ed them to say, which sound­ed very much like the ideas of the Nazis who lat­er quot­ed him.

Nietzsche’s mas­tery of the apho­rism and his fierce­ly polem­i­cal nature have made him supreme­ly quotable: “God is dead,” “What does not kill us, makes us stronger.” And so on. Bring the con­text of these state­ments to bear and they sound noth­ing like what we have imag­ined. The video above from Shon Arieh-Lerer and Daniel Hub­bard explains how Niet­zsche became “the most absurd­ly bas­tardized philoso­pher in Hol­ly­wood.” It leads with a telling­ly hilar­i­ous clip from The Sopra­nos in which A.J. calls the philoso­pher “Niche” and Tony tells him, “even if God is dead, you’re still gonna kiss his ass.”

We might half expect Tony to embrace the Ger­man philoso­pher. The way Nietzsche’s been inter­pret­ed seems to jus­ti­fy the prin­ci­ples of sociopaths. This should not be so. “In real­i­ty,” the video’s pro­duc­ers write at Slate, “Niet­zsche was a very sub­tle thinker.” The two biggest mis­con­cep­tions about Niet­zsche, that he was a nihilist and an anti-Semi­te, get his phi­los­o­phy griev­ous­ly wrong. Niet­zsche “wrote let­ters to his fam­i­ly and friends telling them to stop being anti-Semit­ic” (and call­ing anti-Semi­tes “abort­ed fetus­es.”) He famous­ly broke off his intense friend­ship with Richard Wag­n­er in part because of Wagner’s anti-Semi­tism. His work is not kind to Judaism, but he rages against anti-Semi­tism.

Far from endors­ing nihilist ideas, Niet­zsche feared their rise and con­se­quences. So how did he become “a dar­ling of Nazis and sad teenagers?” The car­i­ca­ture arose in part because read­ers from his day to ours have, like Tony Sopra­no, found his com­plete and total rejec­tion of Judeo-Chris­t­ian moral­i­ty too shock­ing to get beyond, mis­char­ac­ter­iz­ing it as tan­ta­mount to the rejec­tion of all human val­ues. On the con­trary, Niet­zsche argued for the “reval­u­a­tion” of val­ues, “the exact oppo­site of what one might expect,” he wrote,” not at all sad and gloomy, but much more like a new and bare­ly describ­able type of light, hap­pi­ness, relief, amuse­ment, encour­age­ment, dawn.”

Of course, the fact that Nietzsche—or a butchered ver­sion thereof—was co-opt­ed by the Nazis did more to sul­ly his name than any­thing he actu­al­ly wrote. “By the time Niet­zsche made his way into Amer­i­can pop cul­ture,” says Arieh-Lerer, “we were pre­dis­posed to get­ting him wrong.” Niet­zsche may have had some strange qua­si-mys­ti­cal con­cep­tions, and he believed in a def­i­nite hier­ar­chy of cul­tures, but he was not a racist or a psy­chopath. He has been as mis­un­der­stood as many of the sad teenagers who love him. Per­haps you will be moved to read him for your­self after see­ing his reha­bil­i­ta­tion above. If so, we can point you toward online edi­tions of near­ly all of his books here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Did Niet­zsche Real­ly Mean When He Wrote “God is Dead”?

Down­load Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Mod­ern Thought (1960)

The Dig­i­tal Niet­zsche: Down­load Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness