Notes on Works of Arthur Schopenhauer

2020-08-13 0 views

Inspired by Kant and Plato, who regarded the world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer’s philosophy emphasized that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires for the sake of achieving a more tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence.

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

The World as Will and Representation

Vol1

Vol2

This is a supplement to the first book and looks a bit boring, skipped. Although the last few chapters are interesting, e.g. On the Vanity and Suffering of Life, On Ethics, On the Doctrine of the Denial of the Will-to-Live, The Road to Salvation and Epiphilosophy. Epiphilosophy gives a great high level summary of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

On the Will in Nature

The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics

Later (After Kant’s Moral theories)

Essays of Schopenhauer

Each essay looks like a collection of thoughts from Schopenhauer in each topic. These are the ones that I found interesting:

  • On the Emptiness of Life: The essence of life is misery, and the state of painlessness after the satisfaction of desire is the proof that existence in itself has no value, since boredom is merely the feeling of the emptiness of life.
  • Metaphysics of Love: Love springs from the instinct of sex and determines nothing less than the establishment of the next generation. Love has to secure the existence and special nature of the human race in future times; hence the will of the individual appears in a higher aspect as the will of the species; and this it is that gives a pathetic and sublime import to love-affairs, and makes their raptures and troubles transcendent, emotions which poets for centuries have not tired of depicting in a variety of ways. What is manifested in individual consciousness as instinct of sex in general is the will-to-live. It is the will to live presenting itself in the whole species, which so forcibly and exclusively attracts two individuals of different sex towards each other. This will anticipates in the being, of which they shall become the parents, an objectification of its nature corresponding to its aims. This individual will inherit the father’s will and character, the mother’s intellect, and the constitution of both (I found this is true from the genetics point of view).
  • On Suicide: The only valid moral reason against suicide has been explained in my chief work. It is this: that suicide prevents the attainment of the highest moral aim, since it substitutes a real release from this world of misery for one that is merely apparent. But there is a very great difference between a mistake and a crime, and it is as a crime that the Christian clergy wish to stamp it. Christianity’s inmost truth is that suffering (the Cross) is the real purpose of life; hence it condemns suicide as thwarting this end. The extraordinarily active zeal with which the clergy of monotheistic religions attack suicide is not supported either by the Bible or by any valid reasons. Suicide may also be looked upon as an experiment, as a question which man puts to Nature and compels her to answer. It asks, what change a man’s existence and knowledge of things experience through death? It is an awkward experiment to make; for it destroys the very consciousness that awaits the answer.

Wisdom of Life

Other References