Schopenhauer’s Lifelong Quest for Safety and Detachment From National Fervor

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer spent much of his 72 years maneuvering to preserve his health, property and intellectual independence. Although famous for portraying existence as a “sorry mistake,” he remained keenly attached to life and took elaborate steps to shield it. His personal precautions, his reaction to the 1848 revolutions in Frankfurt, and his outspoken contempt for nationalism later drew the attention and selective admiration of the Nazi regime, despite the sharp contrast between his ideas and theirs.

Pursuit of Security in Frankfurt

Schopenhauer settled permanently in Frankfurt in 1833, attracted in part by the city’s medical reputation. Once installed, he developed routines that bordered on the obsessive. He kept loaded pistols within reach at night, refused to let barbers shave his neck for fear of razor attacks, and drank only from a personal leather flask to avoid contaminated water. Written records were composed in English, Latin, Greek, or a private shorthand so that servants and visitors could not decipher his finances or opinions.

In 1860, the final year of his life, he relocated to a ground-floor apartment. Mobility was not the issue; he worried that a fire might trap him on an upper floor. The philosopher likened his solitude to that of an intelligent tenant living among animals—endowed with insight yet constantly at risk of harm.

Frankfurt’s 1848 Unrest

The European revolutionary wave reached Frankfurt in September 1848, when a prince and a general aligned with conservative interests were killed, sparking riots. Schopenhauer, then 60, feared for his belongings as well as his personal safety. He welcomed Austrian troops dispatched to restore order and even invited roughly twenty soldiers into his refined apartment so they could fire on demonstrators from his windows. When the soldiers shifted to a neighboring flat for a better vantage point, he lent an officer his large double opera glasses, a gesture that mocked the cultivated habits of his own class.

Disturbed by the violence, Schopenhauer rewrote his will. Most of his estate was redirected to a fund for Prussian soldiers injured while suppressing the uprisings—protests that had aimed to unify the German states under a constitutional framework and broader civil rights. For Schopenhauer, the priority was stability; he wanted the state to prevent turmoil, not to embody any grand moral or historical mission.

View of the State and National Identity

Schopenhauer diverged sharply from contemporaries who celebrated nation-building ideals. Unlike G.W.F. Hegel, who described the state as the culmination of human endeavor, Schopenhauer assigned it a single task: curbing the “war of all against all” so individuals could pursue intellectual and aesthetic interests. National pride, he argued, demanded no personal merit and was therefore “the cheapest form of pride.” In his 1851 collection Parerga and Paralipomena, he wrote that those lacking individual achievements often cling to patriotic fervor, defending national flaws to compensate for their own shortcomings. He even joked that Germany’s famously long words allowed its citizens extra time to think, implying sluggishness of thought.

During the same period, the Young Hegelians, including Karl Marx, promoted social and political reform. Schopenhauer rejected their optimism. Suffering, he asserted, was inherent to human existence and would persist regardless of external improvements. A true philosopher, in his view, steps outside the current of history and contemplates the “eternities,” rising into a timeless realm untouched by political cycles.

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Nazi Appropriation and Misinterpretation

Decades after Schopenhauer’s death in 1860, the Nazi movement searched Germany’s philosophical canon for ideas that could reinforce its ideology. Adolf Hitler dismissed Hegel’s emphasis on rational law, remarking that Hegel’s legacy ended the day the National Socialists seized power. Instead, party thinkers highlighted the concept of “will” found in Schopenhauer and later amplified by Friedrich Nietzsche as “will to power.” This elevation of irrational force over reason served the regime’s social-Darwinist narrative, which prized action and strength above legal norms and intellectual debate.

The appropriation was selective. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche condemned nationalism—Nietzsche even called himself a “good European” rather than a loyal German. Nonetheless, Nazi propagandists quoted their critiques of reason to justify policies that subordinated legal structures to leadership decrees. Schopenhauer’s insistence that the state should merely ensure security was ignored; the regime aimed to mobilize the state for expansive, ideological goals that he would have rejected.

Legacy and Continuing Debate

Schopenhauer’s pessimism, rigorous individualism and aversion to collective identity remain pivotal topics in contemporary philosophy courses. His portrait of life as intrinsically painful challenges narratives of continuous progress, while his extreme measures for personal safety illustrate the practical consequences of such a worldview. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, his work has influenced fields ranging from psychology to literature, underscoring the reach of ideas rooted in pessimism and aesthetic contemplation.

Today, scholars note the irony that a thinker who distrusted mass movements became a reference point for one of the twentieth century’s most aggressive nationalist regimes. The episode highlights how philosophical concepts can be reinterpreted—sometimes against their author’s explicit positions—when politics seeks intellectual endorsement. Yet Schopenhauer’s own writings leave little doubt about his stance: individual insight and tranquility ranked above allegiance to nation or progress, and the state’s worth lay only in its capacity to keep the peace so that private contemplation could flourish.