Essays and Aphorisms

Summary

Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J. Hollingdale from Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, the two volumes of 'appendices and omissions' he published in 1851 to make his system available to general readers. The book that resulted is the opposite of a treatise: short, sardonic, quotable pieces on suffering, death, religion, women, reading, noise, ethics and psychology, all resting on the metaphysics of his early masterpiece. The world, in that metaphysics, is the expression of a single blind, insatiable will to live, which appears in each of us as desire. Because desire springs from lack and satisfaction quickly turns to boredom, life swings between pain and tedium, and happiness is only the temporary absence of suffering. The essays on the suffering of the world and the vanity of existence press this home with images of life as a debt contracted at birth and paid off at death, and with the argument that the pleasure of the eater is far less than the pain of the eaten. The essay on suicide denies that religion or philosophy has any right to condemn it, mocks the clergy's arguments, and yet describes suicide as a mistaken experiment that destroys the individual appearance while leaving the will untouched. The essay on women, notorious for its contempt, has long been read as revealing more about Schopenhauer than about its subject. Essays on reading and on thinking for oneself warn that constant reading lets another person think for us, and a short piece on noise records his torment by the cracking of carters' whips in the street. The public-domain text stored in this library is a different and earlier selection from the same source, T. Bailey Saunders's On Human Nature, drawn from the Parerga chapters on ethics and on law and politics. Its first essay finds in every person a colossal egoism joined to a reservoir of hatred, envy and malice, calls man the only animal that causes pain for its own sake, and names Schadenfreude, delight in another's misfortune, as the worst human trait and pity as its opposite and the true root of justice. Government argues that the state exists to restrain this egoism and is a muzzle for a beast of prey. Free-will and Fatalism and Character argue that a person's individual actions are strictly necessitated by motives while character itself is innate, unalterable and inherited from the father, so that experience can only teach us what we already are. Moral Instinct and Ethical Reflections return to compassion as the one counter-principle to egoism, contrasting the moods in which we feel misery in ourselves and in others. Across both selections, Schopenhauer combines a bleak metaphysics with vivid observation and a moralist's interest in vanity, honour and self-deception.

Plot or Argument

• Parerga and Paralipomena: purpose and reach

  Schopenhauer gathered essays and fragments that did not fit his systematic work, aiming at educated general readers. The volumes include the Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life and shorter chapters on many subjects; anthologies such as this one select from them.

• On the suffering of the world and the vanity of existence

  Suffering is the positive element of life and happiness merely its absence. Time, striving and boredom show the emptiness of existence; the comparison of predator and prey shows that pain outweighs pleasure.

• On suicide

  Schopenhauer rejects religious and legal condemnation of suicide as baseless, but argues from his metaphysics that suicide is a futile act that affirms rather than denies the will to live.

• On women

  A notoriously hostile to women essay attributing to women childishness, deceit and lack of objectivity, and attacking European gallantry; it is now read chiefly as evidence of its author's prejudices.

• On reading, writing and thinking for oneself

  Reading is thinking with another's head; too much of it weakens the mind's own power. Good style comes from having something to say, and most books are written for money.

• Human Nature (stored text)

  Physical truths have external significance only; moral truths reveal the will. Man is a beast of prey with a colossal egoism and a store of malice; Schadenfreude and envy oppose pity, which is the source of justice and charity.

• Government (stored text)

  Right rests on the identity of will in all people, but the state exists because of human egoism and injustice; it is a protective device, best organized as hereditary monarchy, and should not be mistaken for the highest end of life.

• Free-will and Fatalism; Character (stored text)

  Actions follow necessarily from character and motives; freedom lies only in the timeless act of will that is one's character. Character is innate and unalterable, inherited from the father, and a person learns it only through their own deeds.

• Moral Instinct; Ethical Reflections (stored text)

  Honour is a misuse of freedom; the state is a crutch, not a limb. Compassion, born of recognizing oneself in another, is the only genuine counter-principle to egoism, and resignation the end of suffering.

Characters

• The will to live, metaphysical protagonist

  The blind striving that Schopenhauer identifies as the inner nature of the world and of every person, source of desire and suffering.

• The 'animal méchant par excellence', type

  Gobineau's phrase, which Schopenhauer adopts for humanity as the only creature that torments others for its own sake.

• The man of masks, type

  The professional, patriot or philanthropist whose public role, Schopenhauer says, usually disguises a moneymaker.

• T. Bailey Saunders, translator

  Victorian translator who issued Schopenhauer's essays in small topical volumes, abridging and retitling them; his On Human Nature is the stored text.

Lessons

• Pity, not reason, is the root of morality

  Schopenhauer argues that the only genuine moral motive is compassion, the felt recognition of another's suffering as one's own. Justice and charity grow from it, and its opposites are Schadenfreude and envy.

  • Is compassion a reliable enough basis for ethics, given how selective it is?
  • Why does Schopenhauer rank Schadenfreude as worse than envy?
  • How does this ethic shape Schopenhauer's unusual concern for animals?

• Character may be learned but not changed

  In Free-will and Fatalism and Character, a person's deeds follow necessarily from an innate, unalterable character, which they discover only by watching what they do. The view is bleak but raises sharp questions about self-knowledge, responsibility and treatment.

  • If character cannot change, what is the point of moral education or therapy?
  • What evidence would Schopenhauer need to support his claim that character is inherited from the father?

• Happiness is a pause in suffering

  Schopenhauer's pessimism treats pain as positive and pleasure as negative, the cessation of want. Whatever one thinks of the metaphysics, the observation that satisfaction quickly fades into boredom has had a long life in psychology.

  • Is boredom really the other pole of suffering, or a distinct state?
  • Does Schopenhauer's pessimism describe depression, or a philosophical position open to the healthy?

• A brilliant writer's prejudices are part of the evidence

  The essays combine acute psychology with contempt for women, crowds and the noise of other people. Reading them well means separating observation from temperament and noticing how one colours the other.

  • How should a reader handle an author whose insight and bigotry sit side by side?
  • What does the essay on noise reveal about Schopenhauer's own sensitivities?

Context

Parerga appeared just after the failed revolutions of 1848, which Schopenhauer had opposed, at a moment when Hegelian optimism was losing its hold in Germany. His pessimism, his use of Indian and Buddhist ideas, and his biological view of the will fitted a mood of political disillusion and growing interest in physiology and heredity. His late fame shaped Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Freud and many fin-de-siècle writers.

Composition

Schopenhauer worked on the Parerga essays through the 1840s in Frankfurt. After three publishers refused the book, A. W. Hayn of Berlin published it in 1851 in two volumes without paying an honorarium. A posthumous edition (1862) added material from his notes. T. Bailey Saunders published English selections in several volumes in the 1890s, including On Human Nature; R. J. Hollingdale's selection, Essays and Aphorisms, appeared in 1970 and remains in copyright.

Reception

A favourable 1853 article by John Oxenford in the Westminster Review, 'Iconoclasm in German Philosophy', helped launch Schopenhauer's fame in Germany as well as Britain. The Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life became especially popular. The essays reached readers who never opened The World as Will and Representation and fixed his popular image as the philosopher of pessimism; feminist critics have long addressed the essay on women.

Comparisons

• the-world-as-will-and-representation

  The essays popularize and illustrate the system of the main work; the claims about character, compassion and the denial of the will are developed there with the full metaphysics behind them.

• essays-bacon

  Bacon's essays are practical counsel for ambitious men in courts; Schopenhauer borrows the essayist's worldly tone but turns counsel toward resignation and suspicion of all ambition.

• pensees

  Pascal also writes in fragments about human misery, diversion and self-love, but turns them toward Christian hope, which Schopenhauer replaces with Buddhist-tinged renunciation.

• beyond-good-and-evil

  Nietzsche learned aphorism and moral psychology from Schopenhauer, then attacked his ethics of pity as a symptom of life turned against itself.

• letters-from-a-stoic

  Seneca's letters also treat suicide as a door that is always open and philosophy as a training for suffering; Schopenhauer shares the frankness but rejects Stoic confidence that virtue secures happiness.

• the-sickness-unto-death

  Kierkegaard, publishing in 1849, also analyses despair as the deepest human condition but treats it as a spiritual sickness curable by faith, where Schopenhauer offers only quieting of the will.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The catalogue of cruelty near the opening of the essay Human Nature, where Schopenhauer piles up evidence, including slavery in America, before concluding that man is no gentler than the tiger and the hyena.
• The ranking of vices that follows: envy is bad, but Schadenfreude, delight in another's misfortune, is worse, and pity is named as its true opposite and the root of justice and charity.
• The passage on masks, where Schopenhauer claims that the professions and public virtues people wear usually hide the moneymaker underneath.
• The essay Free-will and Fatalism, which argues that every single action is necessitated by character and motive, while the character itself is described as a free act outside time.
• The closing Ethical Reflections, which contrast suffering felt in ourselves, which breeds envy, with suffering seen in others, which breeds sympathy.

Key terms and names

Will to live

Schopenhauer's name for the blind, endless striving that he believes is the inner nature of the world and appears in each person as desire. In these essays it explains both egoism and cruelty.

Egoism

The primary human motive in the essay Human Nature: each person's boundless concern for his own existence and well-being, which breaks through right and justice whenever it can.

Schadenfreude

German for harm-joy, delight in the misfortunes of others. Schopenhauer calls it the worst trait in human nature because it takes pleasure in suffering for its own sake.

Compassion (Mitleid)

The felt recognition of another's suffering as one's own. Schopenhauer makes it the only genuine moral motive and the source of justice and loving-kindness.

Innate character

The fixed, unalterable disposition from which, Schopenhauer claims, all a person's deeds necessarily follow. He holds that it is inherited from the father and learned only by watching one's own conduct.

Parerga and Paralipomena

Greek for appendices and omissions, the title of the two volumes of 1851 from which these essays are taken. The book made Schopenhauer famous after decades of neglect.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What evidence does Schopenhauer give in Human Nature for his claim that man is the cruellest of animals?
2. Comprehension Why does Schopenhauer rank Schadenfreude as worse than envy, and what does he set against both?
3. Comprehension According to Government, why does the state exist, and what does Schopenhauer mean in Ethical Reflections when he calls it a crutch rather than a limb?
4. Interpretation Schopenhauer explains cruelty as the will, embittered by its own suffering, seeking relief by tormenting others. Does this account excuse cruelty, explain it, or condemn it more deeply?
5. Interpretation If every action follows necessarily from an unchangeable character, what is left of praise, blame and moral education in Schopenhauer's view?
6. Interpretation Schopenhauer uses the language of disease throughout, comparing hatred to a chronic illness and the state to a prosthesis. What do these medical images add to his argument?
7. Big Question Schopenhauer grounds morality in pity rather than in reason or divine law. Can compassion alone carry the weight of justice, or does it need something beneath it?

Faith Connections

• Ecclesiastes 1-2 (Scripture)

  The Preacher finds that all striving is vanity and that satisfaction fades as quickly as it comes. Schopenhauer's swing between want and boredom echoes this book closely, but Ecclesiastes ends by commanding fear of God and enjoyment of his gifts rather than the quieting of the will.

• Romans 8:18-25 (Scripture)

  Paul agrees that the whole creation groans in pain and has been subjected to futility, but he adds that it was subjected in hope. Placed beside Schopenhauer's account of suffering, the passage shows where Christian and pessimistic readings of the same evidence part ways.

• Luke 10:25-37 (Scripture)

  The Samaritan is moved with compassion at the sight of a wounded stranger and acts at cost to himself. Schopenhauer's claim that pity is the root of justice finds a vivid example here, though Jesus tells the parable to answer a question about loving God and neighbour.

• Pascal, Pensées (Great Conversation)

  Pascal also writes short fragments on human misery, restlessness and the diversions people use to avoid looking at themselves. Where Schopenhauer offers resignation, Pascal argues that the same wretchedness is the sign of a greatness lost and a remedy in Christ.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The inner nature of every person is a blind will to live. That will expresses itself first as colossal egoism, and when frustrated by suffering it seeks relief by causing suffering in others, as Schadenfreude and cruelty show. Reason cannot restrain this will, and the state only muzzles it from outside. Only compassion, in which one recognises one's own being in another's pain, opposes egoism from within. Therefore compassion is the sole foundation of genuine morality.

Rhetorical device: analogy. In Human Nature Schopenhauer says that hatred stands to anger as a chronic disease to an acute one, borrowing a physician's distinction to show that hatred is anger that has settled in and become a lasting, even pleasurable, condition.

Debate: Resolved: Compassion, not reason, is the true foundation of morality.

Memory Work

man is the only animal which causes pain to others without any further purpose than just to cause it

Compared with the Moral Law the State is a crutch instead of a limb, an automaton instead of a man

Writing Prompts

Essay: Schopenhauer claims in Human Nature that Schadenfreude is the worst human trait and pity its true opposite. Analyse his reasons for this ranking and argue whether compassion, as he describes it, can account for justice toward people we do not pity.

Comparison with Pensees: Pascal and Schopenhauer both write in fragments about human misery, self-love and the restlessness that keeps people from happiness. Compare their diagnoses of the human condition and argue whether Pascal's appeal to grace or Schopenhauer's appeal to compassion and resignation better fits the evidence each presents.

Medical Lens

Schopenhauer is a central figure for the history of pessimism, the psychology of suffering and the debate over suicide. His essay on suicide argued against moral and legal condemnation at a time when suicide was still criminalized in parts of Europe, which makes it a landmark in the history of attitudes toward suicide, while its metaphysical objection is sometimes misread as approval. His account of a blind will beneath consciousness, and of intellect as its servant, anticipated Freud, who acknowledged the parallel. The stored essays add a theory of innate, father-inherited character and a physiological account of intellect that fed nineteenth-century heredity theories. Biographical material often invoked by readers (his father's probable suicide, his anxieties, his flight from cholera in 1831, his sensitivity to noise) is context and should not be turned into a diagnosis.

• Parerga II, 'On Suicide' (in the Hollingdale selection)

  Rejection of religious and legal condemnation of suicide, mockery of clerical arguments, and the metaphysical claim that suicide fails to deny the will.

  SuicidePhilosophy AS Therapy
• Parerga II, 'On the Suffering of the World' and 'On the Vanity of Existence' (in the Hollingdale selection)

  Pain as positive and pleasure as negative; boredom; life as a debt repaid at death.

  Melancholia DepressionPain
• Parerga II, 'On Noise' (in the Hollingdale selection)

  Schopenhauer's complaint that noise, especially the cracking of whips, interrupts and destroys thought.

  Neurosis AnxietyMind Body
• On Human Nature, 'Human Nature' (stored text)

  Egoism, malice and the pleasure of anger and hatred; cruelty as the embittered will's attempt to relieve its own torment; Schadenfreude and envy as opposites of pity.

  Psychology UnconsciousPain
• On Human Nature, 'Government', 'Free-will and Fatalism' and 'Character' (stored text)

  Character inherited from the father, innate and unalterable; intellectual differences grounded in brain and nervous system.

  Heredity DegenerationMind Body
• On Human Nature, 'Ethical Reflections' (stored text)

  Two moods toward misery: suffering felt in oneself, which intensifies the will until resignation, and suffering seen in others, which produces sympathy.

  Melancholia DepressionPhilosophy AS Therapy

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Compare Schopenhauer's essay on suicide with modern suicide-prevention ethics. Where does his argument against condemnation hold up, and where does his metaphysics fail people at risk?

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Schopenhauer and a modern behavioural geneticist about his claim that character comes from the father and intellect from the mother.

• Fiction

  Write a day in 1831 when Schopenhauer decides to flee Berlin's cholera, while Hegel stays.

• Classroom

  Have students collect three examples of Schadenfreude from news or social media and test Schopenhauer's claim that it is the worst human trait.

Further Reading

• The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer

• Counsels and Maxims, Arthur Schopenhauer (trans. T. Bailey Saunders)

  Part of the Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life.

• Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, Rüdiger Safranski

• Schopenhauer, Christopher Janaway

  Very Short Introduction.

• The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Bryan Magee