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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.