"Schneider's glasses"

The doomsayer

Arthur Schopenhauer: Not exactly the cheerful optimist among philosophers.

(Bild: stock.adobe.com)

Author Robert Schneider rediscovers a philosopher who may not be the most popular today, but who still has a lot to tell us. 

He may not be the most popular philosopher today, but his view of the world and people could not be more contemporary. He defined happiness as the absence of pain. He called his contemporaries "nefarious optimists" who, in the face of a threatening situation, unabashedly walked on a "cooled sphere at the edge of the universe". He found what was happening on earth so miserable that it could not be worse. He found the present, in which he lived, horrible and constantly indulged in new horror fantasies of the approaching end of the world. He didn't really care what he was afraid of. Sooner or later, mankind would sink into self-created chaos anyway. Everything would be too late long before he was born. It was only a matter of time.

However, he didn't want to die so quickly himself, which is why he moved to Mannheim before the cholera raged in Berlin, after making detailed lists of the pros and cons of both cities. At the age of thirty, he had already thought his entire philosophy through to the end and hardly changed a thing. What remained were polished aphorisms and sentences that - sometimes unintentionally funny - are among the most beautiful things ever written in German.

His contemporaries did not have it easy with him, who took his poodle "Atman" for a daily walk along the Main, although it was not always clear who was walking whom. The big poodle led the small, grumpy male or vice versa. You weren't allowed to talk to him because he was always thinking to himself. Certainly not to criticize him. He allowed praise when he was in a good mood. There was only one name needed to provoke excessive outbursts of anger: Hegel. He hated him beyond all measure.

He really would have been a child of the present, this Arthur Schopenhauer. A present that no longer knows any shades of gray, that is constantly talking up the eternally bad and doomed, whether it's the climate, wars or the economy. He would have had a field day with today's media. If a shot is fired in Ukraine, it will have the most dismal effects on NATO and the EU. If it rains continuously for four weeks, it is an unmistakable sign that the planet can no longer be saved. It doesn't really need a reason to be hopelessly unhappy.