Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer’s triplet on essays

1. WHAT WE HAVE. Material goods are a will-o’-the-wisp. Schopenhauer argues elegantly that the accumulation of wealth and goods is endless and unsatisfying: the more we possess, the more our claims multiply. Wealth is like seawater; the more you drink, the thirstier we become. In the end, we don’t have our goods – they have us.

2. WHAT WE REPRESENT IN THE EYES OF OTHERS. Reputation is as evanescent as material wealth. Schopenhauer writes, “Half our worries and anxieties have arisen from our concern about the opinions of others…we must extract this thorn from our flesh. So powerful is the urge to create a good appearance that some prisoners have gone to their execution with their clothing and final gestures foremost in their thoughts. The opinion of others is a phantasm that may alter at any moment, opinions hang by a thread and make us slaves to what others think or, worse, to what they appear to think – for we can never know what they actually think.

3. WHAT WE ARE. It is only what we are that truly matters. A good conscience, Schopenhauer says, means more than a good reputation. Our greatest goal should be good health and intellectual wealth, which lead to an inexhaustible supply of ideas, independence, and moral life. Inner equanimity stems from knowing that it is not things that disturb us, but our interpretations of things.

~ Page 112-113 “Staring at the Sun” ~ Author Irvin D. Yalom

When someone ‘wills’ something they have an aim in mind; they’re trying to do something. But that is not at all what Schopenhauer means when he declares reality at the level of the World as Will. The Will is aimless, or, as he sometimes puts it, ‘blind’ It isn’t attempting to bring about any particular result. It doesn’t have any point or goal. It is just this great surge of energy that is in every natural phenomenon as well as in our conscious acts of willing things. For Schopenhauer there is no God to give it direction. Nor is the Will itself God. The human situation is that we, like all reality are part of this meaningless force. ~ Page 135 "A Little History of Philosophy" Author: Nigel Warburton

Schopenhauer's concept of 'Will' should not be understood in the common sense as simply wanting something for oneself, but is much more than that. It is essence of what it means to be human. Previous to Schopenhauer, much of the philosophical tradition places mankind as the thinking animal, as a rational, conscious being, but Schopenhauer saw consciousness as the mere surface of our minds. Under the conscious intellect is the unconscious will which is a striving, persistent force. .... ~ Page 18 (Except: Nitsche -- Essential understanding - Author Roy Jackson)

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schop0enhauer embodied the deepest melancholy, projecting his dark perspective to encompass all of humankind in near-cosmic gloom. In “On the Vanity and Suffering of Life,” oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/texts/schopenhauer/vanity.pdf he declared that “Everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is designed to be frustrated, or recognized as an illusion.” True Schopenhauer admitted, in a late essay on the wisdom of life, he had once written that “to secure and promote a feeling of cheerfulness should be the supreme aim of all our endeavors after happiness.” Now he knew the “sublime melancholy which leads us to cherish a lively conviction of the worthlessness of everything, of all pleasure and of all mankind, and therefore to long for nothing but to feel that life is a burden that must be borne to an end that cannot be very distant.” Like so many others, he pointed, as if for reassurance, to Aristotle, interpreting him as holding “that genius is allied to melancholy and people of very cheerful disposition are only intelligent on the surface.” Persons of genius should cherish solitude, avoiding the snares and pitfalls of friendship and above all marriage. ~ Page 111