What Hegel excelled at was what Schopenhauer was not good at. Hegel's social and political philosophy is of great importance to us today, and Schopenhauer did not say anything about it that interests us in these areas. But there is one area in which Schopenhauer is definitely more advanced than his old enemy Hegel, and that is science, which is somewhat surprising.

As an idealist influenced by Indian philosophy, he held the view that the world we live in is fundamentally an illusion. It's hard to reconcile this idea with the scientific attitudes we usually understand. The opening and closing lines of his famous book are "The world is my appearance" and "To those who have already denied themselves by will, this world of ours, which is so real, is nothing, even though there is a sun and a galaxy."

In this sense, are we moving away from the worldview of today's science? However, Schopenhauer's central concept of the nature of the intention can be said to be prescient, although few contemporary critics (Christopher?). Janaway) acknowledges this.

Schopenhauer's comments on Hegel can be regarded as a personal attack on "people and not things", and there is no mention of Hegel's specific writings. So some people began to wonder how much Hegel Schopenhauer had read. However, in his later work, On the Will of Nature (1836), he mentions a passage from Hegel that is already marginal for us. This section is the least read and least studied Hegelian philosophy we have now, not only because most of the scientific ideas in it are outdated, but also because it belongs to a traditional German philosophy that requires a special sophistry to understand (the eternal natural law theory proposed by Schelling et al.).

Schopenhauer's quip that it is absurd and illogical, and sometimes for good reason, and that the Hegelian formulation that "in life, light completely dominates gravity" and his resonance with the observation that magnetic phenomena are evidence of natural thought, are not worth mentioning. We (or most of us) no longer believe that there is a purposeful motive in nature. Since Schopenhauer considered intention to be "blind" (as in natural selection), he certainly did not believe in this either. Unlike Hegel, we do not believe that nature is the product of some kind of Absolute Spirit, or that its purpose is to allow the Absolute Spirit to perceive itself as **, nor did Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's blunt remark that "it is not intellect that creates nature, but nature that creates intellect" may have been regarded as heresy in the time of Hegel and Schelling, but in the post-Darwinian era it was common knowledge among women and children.

Further, Schopenhauer argues that nature contains contradictions and conflicts: "The objectification of every level of desire (i.e., every phenomenon) struggles with matter, space, time, and others", and unlike most philosophers, he does not consider man to be a higher rational animal, but, as Nietzsche said after him, he emphasizes how superficial our consciousness is: "only our superficial thoughts".

Similar to Freud's view, he emphasized the motivation of behavior that is not controlled by the conscious: "We often mistakenly believe that we know the real motive of choosing or choosing not to do something, until some fortuitous event occurs and the real motive is revealed." We are not high-class rational animals, but unwittingly servants in the service of the "universal will" acting on us, and often deluding ourselves into believing that "the true self is actually the will to survive - to blindly strive for survival and reproduction." In this sense, he was not only a pioneer of Darwin and Freud, but more precisely, a pioneer of Dawkins. Schopenhauer's "blind will" tells a similar story to Dawkins's "selfish gene". It's the same for morality: what is good for desire or genes is not necessarily good for the individual. Schopenhauer tells us that the intention is "to perpetuate the race by perishing the individual at any time."

For Schopenhauer (Dawkins), the best way out is not to reconcile with nature, but to fight against it until we can escape from the laws of biology. A man named Johann, who lived at the same time as Schopenhauer? Hurlbut's man points out what he sees as the central contradiction of Schopenhauer's philosophy: if we are determined by intention, how can we deny it as Schopenhauer suggests us? If we are indeed able to resist and deny the will, then the will certainly not be as omnipotent as Schopenhauer told us. This is not an academic issue, as it concerns the future of humanity. The question can be rephrased in contemporary terms: Can the surname Li, as a wanderer who appears by chance in the process of evolution, overcome instinct, which is also a product of evolution?

Although there were some biographies of Schopenhauer before, and David? The latest version of Cartwright's book is arguably the most well-researched and irreplaceable (although some of the sentences are inconsequential, and there are some weird idioms like "shot by a contradictory rifle"). In Chapter 7 of the book, Cartwright provides a clear and concise summary of The World as Intention and Appearance, which can be a good introduction to Schopenhauer. For those who are already getting a glimpse of the way, they will find it instructive to understand Schopenhauer's temper, stubbornness, and the comical interspersed with it.

As Schopenhauer himself called the "expression of a single thought", it may sometimes be doubted how well Schopenhauer's philosophy, which he called the "first source of wisdom and knowledge"—a marvellous combination of Plato, Kant, and the Upanishads—unites it. Others deplored his contempt for women, whom he considered to be an ungifted inferior surname, and self-righteously defended polygamy on the basis of the fact that men would not be satisfied with a woman. Given that there is little mystery, holiness, or asceticism in Schopenhauer's own life and behavior, we can see that there is a certain discrepancy between his way of life and his ethical compassion. This mercy praises the act of "pushing oneself toward others" as well as mystery, holiness, and abstinence.

Schopenhauer also meditated: "People often lament the brevity of life, but this is perhaps the greatest virtue of life", but he did not complain about the longevity of life. Because after all, it was at that time that he ushered in the beginning of his twilight fame, and the end of the hegemony of his sworn enemy Hegel. Even if his wish to make Hegel forever forgotten was not realized, he would at least be happy to see his work begin to be taken seriously. In this day and age, there is little reason to continue to maintain historical optimism, and a soft pessimism is more like the habit of people today.

If Leibniz, the great German philosopher of the Enlightenment, believed that we live in a world that is too good to be better. Well Arthur. Schopenhauer's point is that we live in a world that is terrible, full of pain and death. He became an atheist as a teenager and was convinced that such a world could not have been created by the best God. As he said, "Life is a tragic thing, and I decided to spend my life thinking about it".

It is not surprising that Schopenhauer had no respect for Leibniz, calling him "a pitiful candlelight". Optimism, he argues, "is not only ridiculous, but also a very unethical way of thinking, and a caustic mockery of the names of people who have suffered unspeakable suffering" (The World as Intention and Appearance (1819)). We can further say that this is true not only for human surnames, but also for animals. If Kant limited the scope of ethics to biological beings, Schopenhauer emphasized the ability of human beings to tolerate suffering, because he regarded the human surname as a layer of vanity on the surface of the human animal surname. In his system of mercy ethics, he gives what he thinks animals deserve (attention, status, etc.).

As you believe, Schopenhauer, as a leading figure among pessimistic philosophers, has never been forgotten. But we can also say that his main influence was actually outside of philosophy - to composers such as Richard? Wagner, and the influence of countless writers and poets. On the one hand, he felt that art could temporarily relieve the "painful pressure" in his life, so he attached great importance to art. On the other hand, he offers a philosophy of life for life, not just a professional treatise, because one of the tasks of philosophy is to provide comfort in the face of death, which does not include what he calls "the lies of the Holy See". In addition, he is one of the most readable philosophers, which also adds a lot of points to him. His style is beautiful, refined, clear and fluent—even at a time when his fellow German philosophers were awash in difficult and obscure prose (e.g., Hegel).

Schopenhauer is the number one figure who would rather avoid factional struggles. He lived in the age of German idealism (idealism held that everything existed in the mind), but although he was indeed an idealist, his own terminology and ideas were in many ways and to a large extent more "empiricist" than those of his philosophers of his time. While he offered a "philosophy of life," he was not seen as a pioneer of existentialism, if only because of his brutal deterministic rule: we have no choice about the future. He tells us that we are "inherently good and evil" and that we discover "what we are" through "what we do". Like any other living being, we are actually dominated by a multitude of unconscious expressions of desire. The ** of the human will is an illusion that emerges from self-consciousness. So we can't make a choice, as Sartre demanded: we are already us. In fact, for Schopenhauer, Sartre's psychology was as misunderstood as that of Immanuel Kant. (To be continued.) )