Summary
Georg Simmel: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
Presentation of Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's philosophies is accompanied by opposite doubts. Schopenhauer writes quite clearly: his way of thinking and expression completely excludes some "original understanding" of his teaching that would change the previously valid one - which is still possible with Plato, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. If the presentation seeks to be more than a mere report, then it must go beyond the content of the teaching itself and engage in further and critical consideration of its connections with cultural facts, psychological background, cognitive norms and moral values. If in the case of Schopenhauer a logical interpretation is not necessary, it is not even possible in the case of Nietzsche. If I tried to calm down his poetic or emotion-filled language with a cold scientific style, then it would not only be a change of form, but it would mean raising his statements to a level of abstraction that they themselves did not reach and which could then be directed in some different directions. He himself simply gives too little for a philosophical interpretation that tends to a simple presentation, while Schopenhauer offers too much for the same.
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