Customer Reviews

Essays and Aphorisms (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a classic. I love it and cart it around everywhere- so much so that my wife took to calling me `Schopey,' soon after we married. Oh what a kidder... The text in question is basically an abbreviated form of "Parerga and Paralipomena," a collection of, you guessed it, essays and aphorisms that Arthur published towards the end of his life. In fact, he owed much of his early popularity to these little bits of brain, blood and bile- they paved the way for the interest in his earlier, more thorough and more intimidating work- `The World as Will and Representation,' his central text. Intense, brooding, and enthrallingly lucid (a trait much lacking in philosophy in general and German philosophy in particular), these little pensees and barbs will provide you with much enjoyment, quotes, quips and boundless food for thought. If you are at all the kind of person who enjoys reading, or if you are buying books with such a person in mind (and if you weren't I don't see how you would have ended up here) I cannot say enough good things about this tiny volume!

Whether or not you agree with Schopenhauer's central philosophic themes, his high-jacking/hybridization of Kantian metaphysics and Eastern Vedic/Buddhist Scripture, his pessimistic misanthropy, his irrational and intuitive bent, his (huge) influence on psychology and psychoanalysis, his dismissal of Judeo-Christian religion, or his overbearing arrogance- he is not a thinker to be dismissed lightly. I disagree with him on practically everything important (as did Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy notwithstanding), except his scathing misanthropy and his views on opera (page 163- he loathed it by the way, as a philistine piling up of styles, an `unmusical invention for unmusical minds...'), but so what?

His views, maxims and opinions are straightforwardly put with all the deceptive elegance of a minor key Chopin Nocturne. A refreshing break from the tireless jargon-juggling of contemporary, pomo, academic charlatans... And the man was brilliant. The kind of brilliance that engenders humility in readers and makes young, would-be philosophers reconsider their choice of profession. You cannot help but enter into dialogue with this man. And hey- All you young, winsome, despairing, romantically-inclined teenagers- take note! This guy was the real deal, it takes serious cajones to spit in the face of the Enlightenment and proclaim to the progress-minded 19th C. that, "Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of existence, then our existence must have no object whatever," (which is the first sentence in this nice little book) and then back that statement up with serious argumentation. And as a literary influence Schopenhauer is in a league entirely of his own. Thomas Mann is unthinkable without him (well, and Nietzcsche). Borges once opined that the only thinkers he thought accurately depicted the world were Schopenhauer and Berkeley.

Finally, The introduction by Hollingdale is .. superb. It is possibly the best brief introduction to Schopenhauer (by way of Kant and 19th C. trends in German philosophy) that I have come across; it manages to be (simultaneously) anecdotal, psychological, historical, humorous and analytic- all in under 40 pages. No easy achievement, that. It should be noted that Hollingdale is a fine scholar/translator; his work with the late, great Walter Kaufmann on a variety of his Nietzsche translations comes to mind, as does his own fantastic critical biography, `Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy,' which still may be the best work of its kind in terms of its approachability.

My only beef with Hollingdale is minor: he doesn't mention the effects of the `Nachmearz,' (a period in the mid 19th C. Germany, following revolts in 1848, wherein the public became disenchanted with `academic' philosophy and turned to more literary-outsider intellectuals) as influential in producing the kind of cultural climate in which a thinker and writer such as Schopenhauer could find a mass readership. This is odd because in `The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche,' Hollingdale discusses (at length) the far-reaching effects of said cultural phenomenon in producing the legends that permeate the widespread public perception of Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer...

But I digress. Cheap copies of this are abound. Do yourself a massive favor, live a little- take a chance, as Nietzsche did, when he was a college student, nosing about in a bookstore...

Insighful ideas written in lucid language (very rare for a philosopher) with thoughts on existence, suicide, women, religion, politics, ethics, aesthetics, psychology, and other sundry ideas.

Scopenhauer's ideas are a reflection of the post-Kantian era. The Zeitgeist of spiritual nihilism, which is nothing more than greater minds expressing the religious tendency. Scopenhauer seems like one who finds very little value in the world but he doesn't reverberate the nihilist slogan, "Since all is false, everyhing is permitted." He at once preaches to us that the world is inherently meaningless and that all movement is the result of an obscure force he calls "Will," and yet he proscribes compasion and empathy, as can be exemplified by his outrage over slavery and his sensitivity to animals.

While it's easier to tear down walls then to build them up, I nevertheless have a few problems with his ontological presuppositions.

Scopenhauer writes that his "ethics is ... actually in the spirit of the New Testament.." obviously appreciating it's ascetic nature yet in his dialogue on religion, he castigates Christianity and surprisingly exalts the Greeks (who affirmed life and did not practice an official religion ), exemplifying the superiority of their metaphysics to that of Christian metaphysics. He does this by comparing the periods in which these two systems reigned over their respective societies. The result of the Greek outlook was "the fairest unfolding of humanity, a spelndid state structure, wise laws, a carefully balanced legal administration, rationally regulated freedom, all the arts, together with poetry and philosophy, at their peark, creating works which after thousands of years still stand as unequalled models of their kind, almost as the production of higher beings whom we can never hope to emulate.." while when Christianity took over as the reigning religion in Europe there was a "hideous ignorance and darkness of mind, and in consequence intolerance, quarrelling over beliefs, religious wars, crusades, persecution of heretics and inquisitions..." etc. From my perspective, Christianity's dogmatism and its devaluation of life caused the cultural stagnation in the dark ages (Why champion reason and seek insight through philosophical inquiry when the catechism of Christianity has all of the answers?) but the devaluation seems to be what Scopenhauer is attracted to and yet he fails to realize that. Nevertheless, Scopenhauer ends his dialogue on religion with Demopheles declaring to Philalethes, "Let us see, rather that, like Janus - or better, like Yama, the Brahmin god of death - religion has two faces, one very friendly, one very gloom: you have had your eyes fixed on one face, I have had mine fixed on the other."

My second problem is that Scopenhauer proposes that the intellect is a result of the Will and does not exist on its own accord. But in the section "On Philosophy and the Intellect" he says that which inspires the genius is not related to subjective self-interest, and in turn the Will, but to objectivity. But since intellect, in Scopenhauer's view, arose in organisms as a function to serve the Will, how can the intellectual pursuits of the genius evade servicing the Will? The pursuits of the genius might be a result of a surplus of energy from within, causing him to seek knowledge beyond himself and his own self-serving interests, but isn't the very attempt of coping with such a surplus of energy a fulfillment of need and isn't an unquelled need a source of suffering? Need arises from self-interest and therefore from the subjective Will.
One final problem is that Scopenhauer's ontological premise is that everything is Will but then he insists that it be renunciated. Wouldn't the desire to renounce the Will be in vain if the Will is the fundamental drive behind all aims, including intellectual ones? So perhaps what Scopenhauer really intends is not the renunciation of the Will but rather the sublimation of it.

Scopenhauer lived a very participatory lifestyle so in light of that we should not take his pessimism too seriously. Good read.

Taken from the nineteenth-century philosopher's last book, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Essays & Aphorisms is a superb introduction to Schopenhauer's thought, a sampling of his final views on a wide range of subjects. Admittedly, the author's original two-volume work is often tedious and repetitive, but the selections and abridgements by Hollingdale have produced an easily consulted and highly readable result. As explained in the Introduction, Parerga was actually not a collection of essays or of aphorisms, but, in Schopenhauer's own words, one of "single but systematically ordered thoughts on diverse subjects." The "Essays" contained in this volume are really chains of such thoughts on specific subjects. Schopenhauer is famous, or rather infamous, primarily for his pessimistic outlook, and only secondarily so for the adaptation to Kant's metaphysics that he constructed to support it. Pessimism is at least as old as literature - Sophocles wrote: "Not to be born at all is the most to be desired; but having seen the light, the next best is to die as soon as possible" - but Schopenhauer's contribution was to try to show that this is justified. The background for this attempt is the system he had worked out and published by 1818 in his principle work, The World as Will and Representation (or Idea), 1200 pages in its final form, and recommended only to the reader who already possesses a healthy interest in Schopenhauer's complete system as the outcome of German metaphysics. Thankfully, Hollingdale outlines this background, and the background necessary to understand it, in an amazingly concise Introduction, which also includes an illuminating biographical sketch. As Hollingdale notes, there is nothing to prevent the reader completely unacquainted with Kant and with Schopenhauer's life and times from picking up Essays & Aphorisms and enjoying it immensely, but it is the reviewer's opinion that the Introduction will prove invaluable to such a reader, and helpful or at least interesting to most others. After the obscure and awkward writing styles of the two giants of German philosophy, Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer, who revered the former and despised the latter, really comes across as much as an heir to Goethe's legacy as to Kant's. His stylistic strengths, which are both presented and, indirectly, discussed, in the penultimate section "On Books and Writing," partly accounts for his enduring popularity and the enthusiasm with which at least two of his most famous adherents, Richard Wagner and the young Nietzsche, embraced his philosophy. It is of course, though, the substance of his writing which strikes the reader most in such a condensed book as Essays & Aphorisms. The initiation is brutal. The first two essays "On the Suffering of the World" and "On the Vanity of Existence" leave no doubt as to the overriding sentiment in Schopenhauer's world-view and ethics: "the world is Hell, and men are on one hand the tormented souls and the other the devils in it." Like his metaphysics, his pessimism threads its way through every section, but not oppressively so. It receives an even-handed treatment and, again like his metaphysics, is not the end of his philosophy but only the context in which one must read the selections, which display, as often as not, a psychological rather than conventionally philosophical insight. A number of his aphorisms "On Psychology" are included, and many of these, as well as others, suggest that he was indeed, as is often claimed, a precursor to Freud, though his direct influence is probably magnified, even distorted, in such a compact selection. As Schopenhauer was an influential figure in Nietzsche's thought, the reader unfamiliar with the reasons for Nietzsche's abandonment of him might expect, seeing the "Dialogue on Religion" and section "On Religion" in the table of contents, religion to be butchered completely, but the material selected, especially if read with Hollingdale's Introduction, is sufficient for the careful reader to realize how the tenets of Augustinian Christianity, with its "sin of existence," and Buddhism, with its aim of nothingness, are by no means antithetical to his disparagement of life. These systems differ from his primarily in their understanding of the nature rather than the worth of this world. Essays & Aphorisms offers the first-time reader of Schopenhauer a selection of his thought and his thinking, including some of the best and worst of both. From his ludicrous essay "On Women" to his brilliant reflections on genius and intellect, Schopenhauer is present in these pages in all his Romantic splendor and misery, and is to be considered, at the very least, in light of a note about him penned seven years after his death by Nietzsche: ". . . The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men. . ."

arthur schopenhauer is, without a doubt, one of the most important, poetic, talented, brilliant, and also humorously misanthropic thinkers to ever live. his writing is so brilliant that i have trouble understanding that why his greatest admirer friedrich nietzsche is so much more well known and constantly discussed than he is. i would say that they are both on the same par, ingenious equals who are indispensable in terms of philosophical greatness and force of personality. these essays and aphorisms are so vivid and beautifully written that not only is the attentive reader riveted by his thoughts and theories, but even temporarily convinced by his extreme cynicism and pessimism? i am one of those who see schopenhauer's dark view of life and the world as less temperamental and more grounded in reality than many scholars and biographers of the man like to admit. schopenhauer is perhaps, along with nietzsche and other monumental evolutionary thinkers like bergson and stirner, one of the most prophetic and simply gigantic men to ever live. he is, as the back of this particular edition of his aphorisms and essay says, "aware that everything might not be all for best." no false optimism or transcendentalism here, and no sugary coating on the disturbing truths of man's isolation and confusion in a universe that seems to be purposeless, indifferent, and entirely ephemeral. he rails bitterly against the majority of human beings with the hatred and resentment of one who, as a result of his brilliance and intellectual genius, been ostracized and at times actively abused by the more mediocre and less passionate masses all through his life. schopenhauer's greatest and most vital characteristic is his uncompromising intellectual integrity and his refusal to ignore the very real and in fact almost immobilizing fact of horrendous evil and senseless, unjustified human suffering. his philosophy of renunciation and asceticism, which he in no way actually lived or practiced personally, is the only flaw or inconsistency i can find in his work, and like nietzsche i would say that it is the result of weakness and lack of courage rather than logical thinking or supposed 'objectivity'. also unique is schopenhauer's stubborn belief and recognition that only the present actually exists, and that 'the future' is an illusory projection we create to make up for the inevitable and inescapable dissatisfaction and perpetual disillusion with the here and now. he doesn't offer any fictitious solutions or illusions of salvation which cannot be verified empirically, and he exhorts the individual to stand apart from the crowd of people and realize their potential while understanding that he or she will never attain to what the majority of people pursue frantically, perfect happiness. "in this existence, in which no perfect state exists and satisfaction can only be relative and minimal, we must aim less for the delusion of positive pleasure and more for the securing of our safety and the careful avoidance of suffering or impoverishment." truer words have never been spoken. it is, as with all legendary artists and thinkers, as if arthur schopenhauer is sitting in your room and talking to you himself--such is the power of his incredibly accurate and poignant commentary on our existence and it's ultimate meaninglessness and emptiness.

This book grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and forced me to evaluate my priorities in life. This book has had more practical influence on the way I actually live my life day-to-day than any other. Never has pessimism been so beautiful. I'm glad I didn't die before I had the chance to read this book. This is the best-kept secret in the annals of wisdom. Schopenhauer's pessimism is like a solvent that cleans all the nasty sludge off your moving parts, and his wit is like a fresh grease-pack in your bearings. Read it and tell a friend!

The one overriding fault I tend to find in western philosophers of the last couple centuries stems from the strange-but-prevalent affliction coequally termed `diarrhea of the pen.' I suppose verboseness is to be expected, after all: most (if not all) of these famed deep thinkers are attempting to condense/define the human experience within the vast ocean of existence itself; given these parameters and the innumerable tangents available, it is no real surprise then that those of philosophic bent tend to express their concepts in complicated and convoluted form. If nothing else, it keeps the proles away in droves (j/k)--but seriously, it also makes reading these conceptions a tedious task; it off-times seems to me that Kant, Hegel et al would have benefited greatly from the presence of a stern editor.

But here we have an innovation! Penguin Classics has published an abridged version of Arthur Schopenhauer's _Parerga and Paralipomena_ into this nice digestible volume, _Essays and Aphorisms_. R.J. Hollingdale's translation is a clear, lucid read, and with the repetition and grandiloquence removed, the pessimistic outlook of Herr Schopenhauer gains a keen sharpness; his controversial musings cut quick and to the bone.

As for the material itself...well, let's take a look:

"The social structure, the state, will stand quite firm only when it is founded on an universally recognized metaphysical system. Such a system can naturally be only one of folk-metaphysics, that is, religion: ...the social structure could hardly exist at all if religion did not lend weight to the government's authority and the ruler's dignity..." (On Religion: A Dialogue, pg. 109)

"...as the weaker sex, [women] are driven to rely not on force but on cunning: hence their instinctive subtlety and their ineradicable tendency to tell lies: for, as nature has equipped the lion with claws and teeth, the elephant with tusks, the wild boar with fangs (etc), so it has equipped women with the power of dissimulation as her means of attack and defense..." (On Women, pg. 83)

"A constitution embodying nothing but abstract justice would be a wonderful thing, but it would not be suited to beings such as men. Because the great majority of men are in the highest degree egoistic, unjust, inconsiderate, deceitful, sometimes even malicious, and equipped moreover with very mediocre intelligence, there exists a need for a completely unaccountable power..." (On Law and Politics, pg. 152-153)

"States of human happiness and good fortune can as a rule be compared with certain groups of trees: seen from a distance they look beautiful, but if you go up to and into them their beauty disappears and you can no longer discover it. That is why we so often feel envy for other people." (On Psychology, pg.171)

"Few write as an architect builds, drawing up a plan beforehand and thinking it out down to the smallest details. Most write as they play dominoes: their sentences are linked together as dominoes are, one by one, in part deliberate, in part by chance." (On Writing, pg. 207)

This is great stuff, people, whether you agree with Schopenhauer's statements or not. Brilliant & provocative, and an enjoyable read as well. Highly recommended.

R.J.Hollingdale was judicious in his choice of material for this text which makes a good 'primer' for reading Schopenhauer
at length. Hollingdale's introduction provides a useful profile on the German philosopher and his background. As other reviewers have remarked, Schopenhauer presented his ideas very clearly and such is the clarity of his thought, you get the feeling that he is addressing you personally. Considering that he is touching on the mysteries of life as a kind of theatre-cum-battle-ground, in which the will struggles to act out its purposes, accompanied by a kind of continuous ground bass of suffering, you might expect Schopenhauer to be heavy going. But his essays are frequently peppered with wit and lively turns of phrase.

Notorious for his contempt of Hegel, the preacher of philosophical optimism, for whom God mutates into the State and thereafter bestows order and felicity with the precision of a Swiss clock(Schopenhauer said that in Hegel's philosophy, the 'turkeys fly around ready roasted'!)- Schopenhauer railed against such bloodless abstractions. This false optimism prevailed well into the late 19th c and even the early 20th c, promising that science and social engineering - the cult of 'progress' - would eventually remove most of life's ills.
For his own part, Schopenhauer saw that all such ventures were likely to remain impotent in the face of human suffering, in his eyes, the most immediate fact of life. For Schopenhauer, the will-to-live and the struggle for existence were synonymous with suffering, and however you dressed it up, it remained the ground bass to life. For the prophets of 'progress' perhaps, that sounded like cowardice, cosmic stage fright. But after all, Buddhism has taught the truth of suffering for 2,500 years. It is well known that Schopenhauer availed himself of Buddhist and Hindu teachings and therefore, the interface between them is worth exploring. In other respects, Schopenhauer remained very much a European, drawing on classical sources and, of course, Kant's philosophy.
Schopenhauer's views on the arts were interesting, seeing all true art as a blessed space in which the struggle of subjective 'willing' might be silenced, leaving us free to see the world as idea or pure 'objectivity.' Schopenhauer was a keen student of human psychology and the peculiar forces shaping human character. His stress on the primacy of the will, and the fact that he regarded the intellect as secondary to it, anticipated much found in Freud and Jung. Hence, these essays and aphorisms make engaging reading.

This is a brief compendium and collection of Schopenhauer's expository writing, suitable for a quick introduction to many of his ideas and most famous sayings. Few philosophers were as clear and concise in their writing as he was, and this little book contains many of most quotable and trenchant passages. The Schopenhauer neophyte as well as the more experienced reader will find much to reflect on and to entertain here.

Personally, I like Schopenhauer despite his overall downer message, although his philosophy and metaphysics, which is which is called absolute voluntaristic idealism, hasn't faired that well in the last 100 years, although when I was in college 30 years ago he seemed to be popular among the students I knew who were studying philosophy.

There are several reasons why Schopenhauer's thought is still important. An idealist like Kant, he kept Kant's distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, between the mental and external representations of reality. Kant's defense of idealism, that some ideas or at least mental processes are innate, is still relevant in modern brain science and neurobiology and in Chomsky's theories in linguistics, especially in regard to Chomsky's ideas about language learning and acquisition, in which there is support from brain science for a built-in facility in humans for language, and possibly an innate syntactical generator component to language ability.

Although innate ideas probably don't exist in the way that Kant envisioned them, modern brain science has supported his theory that the mind or brain is actively involved in the organizing and structuring of the data from the senses, and that we couldn't make sense of reality if we didn't have inborn aptitudes and capabilities to do that.

Schopenhauer emphasized the importance of Eastern philosophy and the validity of its introspective methods, while maintaining his overall empirical approach. His moral and ethical philosophy is based on compassion rather than on practical and reasonable considerations like Kant's. He was probably the first important western philosopher to give credit to Zen and Buddhist thought, while remaining faithful to the empirical principles of science.

Outside of philosophy his thoughts have had a major impact on psychology and the arts. He was the most important influence on both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and he also had a great influence on Freud and Jung, and on writers and composers from Wagner to Tolstoy. During the 20th century, Schopenhauer's reputation faded and the importance of his work has been to a great extent overlooked, but recent books show that his importance is being rediscovered and reappraised.

I have to include this brief passage on his thought, since it's excellent, which I obtained from the biographies section of Bluepete website.

"Schopenhauer's system of philosophy, as previously mentioned, was based on that of Kant's. Schopenhauer did not believe that people had individual wills but were rather simply part of a vast and single will that pervades the universe: that the feeling of separateness that each of has is but an illusion. So far this sounds much like the Spinozistic view or the Naturalistic School of philosophy. The problem with Schopenhauer, and certainly unlike Spinoza, is that, in his view, "the cosmic will is wicked ... and the source of all endless suffering."

I have a personal anecdote to recount. My college roommates and I used to read Schopenhauer at night to each other over a couple of beers, and we found his acerbic, trenchant style and sharp wit a delight to read, and this book is perhaps the best example of his prose in that regard. One Schopenhauer quote I still remember after 30 years is: "Intellect comes from the mother; character from the father," which might say a lot about his family life and how he grew up.

Schopenhauer is also famous for quotes such as:

"The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom."
(from his Essays, Personality; or What a Man Is).

"I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as pretty fair measure of it."

"To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties."

I have to include my favorite quote on marriage here, although it isn't Schopenhauer's, and I don't know where it came from, although it echoes his sentiments: "Marriage is the institution where the woman loses her the name and the man his solvency."

His dyspeptic view of life might have been fostered by his delicate digestive system. He would spent many minutes poring over the menu before ordering his food in the cafes where he usually dined, because a wrong choice "could send his nerves ringing for days," according to one comment I read about him. Whatever the source of his pessimism, Schopenhauer seemed almost embarrassed and ashamed to be in a human body, because he did not seem to find much good in humans or human society. No doubt he would have preferred to be a higher, more intelligent species than humans, if such exists somewhere else in the universe. But Schopenauer didn't seem to think that intelligent life existed here. :-)

Whatever the current fate of his reputation, Schopenhauer was a uniquely gloomy intellect who contributed much to several areas of philosophy. And not the least of his virtues is that he was a true cynic and pessimist--surely the most accurate view of life, after all. :-)

Schopenhauer's father committed suicide. Son Arthur had been very devoted to his father Heinrich Floris. The high-sensitive son could not deal with the fact, that his mother Johanna had preferred to talk with Goethe in her Weimar Literary Salon instead of helping her husband, getting more and more depressed as a salesman in Hamburg. A typical, later on dialogue between mother (at that time a famous novelist) and son, fresh university lecturer: "One still will read my writings, at a time, when your books are out of stock and only one copy can be found in a lumber-room." Mother thereupon sneering: "The whole, complete edition of your writings, my son, still will be waiting to get an order to be shipped..." (the reviewer fears that his own frizztext-book might have to suffer the same fate). "The World as Will", as too much inconsiderate will-to-live - in such a way Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 - September 21, 1860) experienced the whole human being. With persistance and arrogance, with brain and bile, suffering and bitterly, but with sensitivity and empathy as well he wrote - trying not to get overwhelmed by disgust. He had a deep neurotic aversion against women (surely involved by his mother). Once he pushed in anger his charwoman down the stairs backwards. But this female individual offered resistance very intellectually: She successful called a judge and Schopenhauer was sentenced, to pay a pension to her - all her life long. But exactly this evil bile encouraged him, on the other hand, to fight against mother Johanna and Goethe, against Hegel and diverse money-lenders. However just opposite to his choleric, hot-tempered way of life, his philosophical theory proclaimed to be calm as a Buddha. He adored Eastern Vedic (Buddhist) Scriptures. He adored enjoying art as a way out of the more mediocre and less passionate masses. The summary of his philosophy finally is the reference to the noblesse to demand nothing; this German philosopher's hope is, that "willing" might be silenced. 150 years and some wars later we all should agree. "To be vulgar is nothing else than giving the leading role in our consciousness to the will and not to the cognition." This tiny book is still able to help today's readers to climb not a meditative, but a thoughtful level. And still it is not out of stock in the most nations ...

I wasn't surprised to see all the 5 star ratings of this collection of essays by Schopenauer. It's the kind of book you regret is over once you're finished. It's a very accessible way to discover Schopenhauer, warts and all, without having to get bogged down in some of his more laborious, convoluted pieces. Scopenhauer is one of the world's great philosophers, but is probably under read due to the complexity and pedantic nature of his more extensive works. This casual collection of essays allows the reader to get to know a little about Schopenauer and his philosophy.

Are humans immortal in any way? Well, yes. Schopenauer, who unlike many of his western European counterparts, studied eastern as well as western philosophy, and it shows in the essay "On the Indestructability of our Essential Being by Death." As Eastern philosophers have suggested for some time, matter is conserved rather than 'created or destroyed,' so of course we live on in terms of our physical selves, since our 'physical selves' is what we essentially are. Mentally however, once the atoms of our brains etc. dissolve, we are no more, and as Schopenhauer puts it, such a "question whether we exist [mentally] after death [has no] meaning," like the idea that negative length has no meaning. In a line that couldn't have been said better by any modern, Schopenauer says that indeed "consciousness is extinguished by death...But cheer up! [Schopenhauer a pessimist?]...this consciousness is, in its origin and aim, merely an expedient for helping the animal to get what it needs. The state to which death restores us, on the other hand, is our original state, i.e. is the being's intrinsic state." hmmmmm! I wonder if Freud attributed his own 'death wish' hypothesis to Schopenhauer. If he didn't, he should have. So here we have, no, death doesn't really happen physically, but to the extent it does mentally, its more of a return to an original state, and now worth worrying too much over in the long run.

Although the lion's share of Schopenhauer's philosophy is dedicated to demosntrating the necessary idealism of the human mind, he was a materialist of the most pragmatic sort, as evidenced in lines from "On Various Subjects," where he speaks of the "false antithesis between mind and matter....[declaring that] all ostensible mind can be attributed to matter...[that mental] life is only a semblance, an illusion, and every creature is in reality a mere automaton, i.e. a play of mechanical, physical and chemical forces." Of course we, and other animals, are not just agglomerations of chemicals as are rocks, for we also have a 'will' that directs our life actions. This is for Schopenhauer and emergent property of the physical parts of our bodies and not, as Bergson suggested, some distinct, mysterious substance.

On one more nonpessimistic note, Schopenhauer comments on Hesiod's interpretation of the myth of Pandora's box, saying "it is not all the evil but all the good things of the world which Pandora had in her box (as her name already indicates). When Epimetheus rashly opened it the good things flew out and away: Hope alone was saved and still remains with us." Schopenhauer a pessimist? If you can get past Schopenhauer's misogyny, this is a neat little book of wisdom for the philosophically minded and nonphilosopher alike.