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Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?7
Let`s be careful not to create gloomy images out of that word "torture." In this case there remains enough to draw a different conclusion, to offset the word - there even remains something to laugh about. For let`s not underestimate the fact that Schopenhauer, who in fact treated sexuality as a personal enemy (including its instrument, woman, this "instrumentum diaboli" [tool of the devil]), needed enemies in order to maintain his good spirits, that he loved grim, caustic, black-green words, that he got angry for the sake of getting passionately angry, that he would have become ill, would have become a pessimist (and he wasn`t a pessimist, no matter how much he wanted to be one) without his enemies, without Hegel, women, sensuousness, and the whole will for existence, for continued life. Had that been the case, Schopenhauer would not have continued, on that we can wager. He would have run off. But his enemies held him securely; his enemies always seduced him back to existence. Like the ancient cynics, his anger was his refreshment, his relaxation, payment, his remedy for disgust, his happiness. So much with respect to the most personal features in Schopenhauer.
On the other hand, with him there is still something typical—and here we finally come up against our problem once more. As long as there have been philosophers on earth and wherever there have been philosophers (from India to England, to name two opposite poles of talent in philosophy) there unquestionably have existed a genuine philosophical irritability with and rancour against sensuousness. Schopenhauer is only the most eloquent eruption of these and, if you have an ear for it, the most captivating and delightful. In addition, there exists a real philosophical bias and affection favouring the whole ascetic ideal. No one should fools themselves about that. As mentioned, both belong to the philosophical type: if both are missing in a philosopher then he is always only a so-called philosopher - that we know for certain.
What does that mean? For we must first interpret this, something which stands there inherently and eternally stupid, like every "thing in itself." Every animal, including also la bête philosophe [the philosophical beast] instinctively strives for the optimal beneficial conditions in which it can let out all its power and attain the strongest feeling of its strength. Every animal in the same instinctual way and with a refined sense of smell that "is loftier than all reason" dislikes any kind of trouble maker or barrier which lies or which could lie in his way to these optimal conditions (I`m not speaking about his path to "happiness" but about his way to power, to action, to his most powerful deeds, and, in most cases, really about his way to unhappiness). Thus, the philosopher dislikes marriage as well as what might persuade him into it—marriage is a barrier and a disaster along his route to the optimal. What great philosopher up to now has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leitniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—none of these got married. What`s more, we cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, that`s my principle. And Socrates, the exception, the malicious Socrates, it appears, got married ironically to demonstrate this very principle.
Every philosopher would speak as once Buddha spoke when someone told him of the birth his son, "Rahula has been born to me. A shackle has been forged for me." (Rahula here means "a little demon"). To every "free spirit" there must come a reflective hour, provided that previously he has had a one without thought, of the sort that came then to Buddha - "Life in a house," he thought to himself, "is narrow and confined, a polluted place. Freedom consists of abandoning houses;" "because he thought this way, he left the house."
Ascetic ideals indicate so many bridges to independence that a philosopher cannot, without an inner rejoicing and applause, listen to the history of all those decisive people who one day said no to all lack of freedom and went off to some desert or other, even given the fact that such people were strong donkeys and entirely different from a powerful spirit.
So what, then, does the ascetic ideal mean as far as a philosopher is concerned? My answer is - you will have guessed it long ago - the philosopher smiles when he sees an optimal set of conditions for the loftiest and boldest spirituality. In so doing, he does not deny "existence"; rather that`s how he affirms his existence and only his existence, and does this perhaps to such a degree that he stays close to the wicked desire perat mundus, fiat philosphia, fiat phiosophus, fiam! [let the world perish, but let philosophy exist, let the philosopher exist, let me exist]
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