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Richard Wagner
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his philosophy of pessimism. Schopenhauer argued that life was the product of a blind, cosmic will that human reason was powerless to interpret, as its knowledge of the world is always imperfect and indirect. Because of this, the world cannot be said to objectively exist beyond humans’ subjective perception of it. This doctrine was enormously influential on Nietzsche, who credits Schopenhauer for his “world-denying” thought, but strongly disagrees with the negative value Schopenhauer assigns to life and to the moralistic thinking that, he argues, confuses and warps Schopenhauer’s conception of the will.
Schopenhauer Quotes in Beyond Good and Evil
The Beyond Good and Evil quotes below are all either spoken by Schopenhauer or refer to Schopenhauer. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Preface
Quotes
Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be conceded that the worst, most durable, and most dangerous of all errors so far was a dogmatist’s error—namely, Plato’s invention of the pure spirit and the good as such. But now that it is overcome, now that Europe is breathing freely again after this nightmare and at least can enjoy a healthier sleep, we whose task is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all that strength which has been fostered by the fight against this error. To be sure, it meant standing truth on her head and denying perspective, the basic condition of all life, when one spoke of spirit and the good as Plato did.
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8. Peoples and Fatherlands
Quotes
In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century, the over-all direction of the mysterious workings of their soul was to prepare the way for this new synthesis and to anticipate experimentally the European of the future: only in their foregrounds or in weaker hours, say in old age, did they belong to the “fatherlandish”—they were merely taking a rest from themselves when they became “patriots.” I am thinking of such human beings as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: do not hold it against me when I include Richard Wagner, too, with them, for one should not allow oneself to be led astray about him by his own misunderstandings—geniuses of his type rarely have the right to understand themselves.
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Schopenhauer Character Timeline in Beyond Good and Evil
The timeline below shows where the character Schopenhauer appears in Beyond Good and Evil. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
1. On the Prejudices of Philosophers
...others, he finds past philosophers to have created as much confusion as clarity, singling out Schopenhauer in particular. Nietzsche suggests a more capacious idea of the will: there are a plurality...
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3. What Is Religious
Criticizing Schopenhauer’s version of pessimism as limited by its morality, Nietzsche still sees a grain of truth...
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8. Peoples and Fatherlands
...and relevance there too. Paradoxically, Nietzsche ascribes this French spirit to several notable Germans, including Schopenhauer, Heine, and Hegel. France’s superior culture is due to three factors: their artistic tradition, their...
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