Essays and Aphorisms

"Exactly. I picked this for a reason. It’s a book I know very well, without owning it. The real book is Parerga and Paralipomena . Essays and Aphorisms are some selections from that. They are the most user-friendly writings of Schopenhauer and they were recognized as that in his day. R.G. Hollingdale. That’s it. The title helps. ‘ Parerga and Paralipomena’ is Greek for ‘additions and omissions’ or ‘offshoots and offcuts’. It’s the stuff that is either tangential to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but just wasn’t covered in the main works, or that is not really a tangent and just isn’t covered by his systematic philosophy at all. Roughly speaking, volume one is the ‘ parerga ’—the offshoots; and volume two is the ‘ paralipomena ’—the offcuts. Volume two has this potted history of philosophy with a lot of Schopenhauer’s views on the history of philosophy, everything from Greek philosophy to the modern era, and the place of his contemporaries and himself in the history of philosophy. Well, there’s another thing Nietzsche got from Schopenhauer. There’s a famous essay “On University Philosophy”, which is very damning of academic philosophy and uses ‘philosophy professor’ as a term of abuse. And in Untimely Meditations Nietzsche’s essay, “Schopenhauer as Educator” is very anti the academy in many of the points it makes and seems to borrow from Schopenhauer. Yes. Schopenhauer had a brush with university. He taught at the University of Berlin for a term. He deliberately scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel, as an act of spite, and about five people showed up. The courses were listed for a few years afterwards, but he never taught them. So, he had a really bad taste of academia and he cultivated an outsider persona. Actually, it’s with Parerga and Paralipomena that Schopenhauer is really accepted as a philosopher and starts to achieve some sort of renown and recognition. He just wasn’t really known. His mother, Johanna, was more famous than him as a writer and as a saloniste . She hosted Goethe and that’s how Schopenhauer got to know Goethe a little bit. There was always an element of professional jealousy between Schopenhauer and his mother. Parerga and Paralipomena came out in 1851, the last decade of Schopenhauer’s life. Among the essays in the second volume are “On Suicide”, “On Noise”, “Similes, Parables and Fables”, “On Women”, which is the locus classicus of the misogyny that he’s so well-known for. He’s almost like Montaigne in the range of different philosophical and cultural phenomena that he’s interested in. And there are really accessible numbered sections, a bit like Nietzsche would later write, offering clear pearls of wisdom on all these different topics. Yes, absolutely. The title of the book itself suggests that these are not big philosophical thoughts. These are errant thoughts that he was having and writing at the time. But he deliberately said, when he sent it off to the publisher, ‘This is the last thing I’m going to write, I don’t want to bring any more weakling children into the world.’ A bit. His mother mocked him by bringing to his attention the fact that the first editions of his works still hadn’t been selling… Parerga is interesting because, in its day, it was the one that people found easiest to get into. That it was compiled into Essays and Aphorisms for Penguin Classics suggests that it’s still the one that people go in for. But there’s one other thing I should say about it. Within the first volume of Parerga , there’s a book within a book called On the Wisdom of Life or Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life . That’s one that you sometimes find published separately as a book. He does something really unusual there, but helpful for winning him a popular audience, which is that he puts aside all that Buddhistic ethics of self-denial, which he says is unachievable for most people, and practises what he calls a ‘eudaimonology’, a science of the good life. “He has this famous line that life swings to and fro like a pendulum, between boredom and pain” His official view is that the good life is a contradiction in terms. He doesn’t think there’s such a thing as a good life. But he puts that aside and says, ‘Imagine there was a good life. What would it look like, given that it’s too late not to exist now?’ And, so, he offers some advice about how to live. His advice is self-serving, though, in that what you should really be is a self-sufficient intellect, who’s very solitary and independent. In other words: you should be like Schopenhauer. Even though he denied pushing her down the stair, he does admit to grabbing her to move her away, and that’s how it’s reported in the biographies: some people were talking outside his rooms too loudly. He came out and most of them were happy to go away, but there was this one seamstress who was living in the building, who he had a scuffle with and she ended up falling down the stairs. He was taken to court and had to pay her a stipend until she died some years later. There aren’t many ways to tidy that up. It’s a really horrible incident. I don’t know whether I’d want to speculate on that. I don’t know. We can’t know. One of the things he writes in Parerga and Paralipomena is the essay “On Noise”. He was acutely sensitive to noise: he hated it. That seems to have been the initial motivation. But I wonder, if he’d encountered a man making noise, whether it would have ended in the man being pushed down the stairs. I doubt it. But that’s speculative. I could say more about his terrible views on women. His view was that women weren’t capable of the kind of intellectual life that he prized, that they were born for a life of being, as Beauvoir put, the second sex, in a supportive role to men. It doesn’t have any sound reasoning behind it. And I think it’s better to approach this through the lens of psychoanalysis, in terms of his relationship with his mother and his sister. There’s no basis for it, he just thought that women were incapable of philosophical thought. It’s appalling. He had some forward-facing views about other things, though. In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation he writes a chapter called “On the Metaphysics of Sexual Love”. The appendix is about homosexuality and he takes a stance that he knows he will be ridiculed for: that it’s not unnatural to be gay. He says it’s so prevalent in human society, both in history and in cultures of the day, that it can’t be treated as aberrant. He then goes into a really weird explanation of why nature has made things that way, but he knows that even that is enough for him to be ridiculed by his contemporaries. Some people have speculated. Bryan Magee speculates that Schopenhauer had some gay experiences. He definitely had a boyhood friend he was extremely close to. He takes the Greek model of partnerships between young men and older men and he thinks that the reason why nature makes it that way—and this is the part that doesn’t sound very contemporary, it sounds awful—is so that those people don’t procreate when either they are before the point of maturity or past the point of being able to get a woman pregnant. “I don’t think there’s much optimism in Schopenhauer. He’s a pessimist through and through” Bryan Magee reads into that that maybe Schopenhauer had some gay experiences or gay feelings when he was young, and then again when he was older. I’ve heard people argue that his essay, “On Women”, illustrates an obverse ideal. So, if you read between the lines, the things that he hates in women, if you made them into their opposite, he would be describing the physical form of a man. I’m not so convinced by that because, much as it would be interesting, there’s no evidence of an actual gay relationship and plenty of evidence of straight relationships. That’s true. But I think it’s a bit speculative. To take a stance as Schopenhauer did is itself quite something."