This is a short collection of some of Schopenhauer’s lesser known works and sayings. A lot of its themes retread ground from his greatest treatise, “The World as Will and Representation.” Some view Schopenhauer as a pessimist. “If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world…. Misfortune in general is the rule….Work, worry, toil and trouble are indeed the lot of almost all men their whole life long. And yet if every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time?”
Schopenhauer spent much of his time reconciling the freedom of the will with the grounding of the causal chain of history and how both relate to ethics. “For will itself and in itself—even when it appears as an individual and thus constitutes the individual’s original and fundamental volition—is independent of all knowledge, because it precedes all knowledge…. Will itself, since it lies outside of time, is unchangeable for as long as it exists at all…. Consequently the entire empirical course of a man’s life is, in great things and in small, as necessarily predetermined as clockwork…. The outcome however is a moral one, namely this, that by what we do we know what we are, just as by what we suffer we know what we deserve.” He also discusses justice, the law, as well as natural and prescribed rights in society, “The concept of justice is, like that of freedom, a negative concept: its content is a pure negation…. It is accordingly easy to define human rights: everyone has the right to do anything that does not injure another…. Although men possess unequal powers, they nonetheless possess equal rights. Rights are not based on powers: because of the moral nature of justice, they are based on the fact that in each man the same will to live appears at the same stage of its objectivization. Yet this is valid only in respect of original and abstract rights, which men possess as men.”
Often, Schopenhauer compares eastern with the desert religions. “If this Augustinian dogma of the tiny number of the elect and the great number of the eternally damned is understood merely sensu allegorico and interpreted in the sense of our own philosophy, then it agrees with the fact that only very few achieve denial of the will and thereby redemption from this world (as in Buddhism only very few achieve Nirvana). What, on the other hand, this dogma hypostatizes as eternal damnation is nothing other than this world of ours…. Buddha’s Sansara and Nirvana are identical with Augustine’s two civitates into which the world is divided, the civitas terrena and coelestis (The City of this world and the City of God).”
Finally, Schopenhauer urges every philosopher to think for themselves. “The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time…. He who writes for fools always finds a large public…. As a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents…. Students and learned men of every kind and every age go as a rule in search of information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything: it does not occur to them that information is merely a means towards insight and possesses little or no value in itself…. Oh, how little such a one must have had to think about, since he had so much time for reading!”
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