Do you know, Anton Pavlovich, why I love children? Children open our eyes. At some point they reach an age when they discover the most exciting question that we humans have invented: The question “Why?”
All other human questions have an end. The question “Who?” is the fastest to be answered, with only one answer needed. Then there is the question “How?” This question may need a few further questions for being answered. But the question “Why?” opens a view into infinity. The question “Why?” can be continued endlessly.
When a young child has reached the age of asking “why?”, then it has discovered the beginning and the end of the world. Every child handles it differently, and yet all children do the same. At some point every child discovers that this question can be asked infinitely. And so I come to speak about Arthur Schopenhauer:
Arthur Schopenhauer was the first and only person who discovered where this question was leading. Every other person in the world before him thought that the question was answered with a knowlegde. For a long time it was thought that this knowledge would end with “God”. Even the Buddha, the founder of the only godless religion, ended with “God”. But while all other people finally answered the question with “Yahweh”, “God” or “Allah”, the Buddha simply stopped answering. And when his son asked further, the Buddha withdrew into the forest and disappeared.
In the European Enlightenment 250 years ago, man began, as Immanuel Kant called it, “to think for himself”. The question “why?” was no longer answered with “Because God wants it”. The question was thrown back on ourselves. The answer of the enlightened adult since then has been: “Think about it for yourself.” Since then we humans have advanced “science” like never before.
Now Immanuel Kant’s generation produced two fundamentally different intellectual children: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to whom his parents had given three very important first names. And Arthur Schopenhauer. Both had received a request from their father Immanuel Kant: “Dare to think for yourself!” But while Hegel believed that this request was about “thinking”, Schopenhauer knew what this request was really about: it was about “daring”. So the Hegel child began to “think”, and with him all of Germany, then all of Europe, and finally the whole world.
The Schopenhauer child, on the other hand, began to “dare”. And it dared to speak out what the Buddha had fled from into the forest. The little Schopenhauer child finally answered the question validly.
“Why?” All religions answer this question from our children with a God on the other side, all sciences answer this question with reason on our side. Only Arthur Schopenhauer was able to bring these two different answers from our two parents together.
“Why?”
Because we want.
Thank you, Anton Pavlovich, for listening to me. I wish you a good night.
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Vienna Calling 