German philosophy

Three big names in German philosophy are Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The only one of the three that I’ve explored with any depth is Nietzsche, but after finishing the best book on him I’ve ever read, I think I can give you all a taste of what German philosophy is like by rehashing the section on morality.

With some odd reasoning, Kant concludes that there is one supreme principle of morality that goes like this: “Act according to that maxim which can at the same time make itself universal law.” This is similar to the Golden Rule, except that he claims that all rational people ought to abide by it and that they will draw the same conclusions from it. Thus, you ought to follow the maxim “be kind to others” because you would wish everyone else to follow this as a universal law.

Schopenhauer thought this was stupid for a number of reasons. The most clever is that, despite what Kant says, different people could come to different conclusions from it. While most of us would like others to be kind to us, some people, if they are strong enough, might decide that they would do better than most in a world where the universal law was “help no one.” Thus, by Kant’s formula, they ought to not help others.

Instead, Schopenhauer thinks “our moral beliefs and practices are driven not by the idea that the fundamental evil is, as Kant believed, to make an exception of oneself in the manner in which one acts, but rather by the idea that suffering is evil” (p. 168).

What does Nietzsche say? He thinks they’re both wrong. According to him, suffering is the highest good. It sounds odd, but he means that struggle and the overcoming of obstacles are what life is about and what make us better. You are mistaken if you think true happiness comes with repose, satiety, contentment, and the absence of struggle.

Along those lines, here’s a typically inflammatory quotation from his Die fröhliche Wissenschaft:

If you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of compassion you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of compassion: the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together.

I can’t find my favorite passage in the book at the moment, but it basically formulates Nietzsche like this. If the choice is between (1) a perfectly egalitarian world free of all suffering where no one feels pain and there are no great achievements and (2) a world filled with suffering but with great human achievements, then Nietzsche would choose (2). Comfort, relaxation, ease, repose are all overrated if not downright bad.