/lit/ - Literature

>>10916195

>>/lit/thread/8627576

He's very good. Beautiful writing, complex metaphysics, very well educated (he understood five languages), exaggerated the misery of existence and sometimes provoked for the sake of provoking (and probably out of a felling of inadequacy) but you can learn much from him, especially about the history of philosophy and about eastern thought.

>>9778587

Reading Schopenhauer is like having a library speak to you - the man offers citation after citation, quote after quote, from a lifetime of having enough inherited wealth to read and write with maximal leisure. He understood five languages.

> Death is the great reservoir of life.

>>9028845

>Self-awareness is the worst possible thing that can happen to a species.

This is an incomplete statement, from a Schopenhauerian perspective; when it comes to the relation between rational self-awareness and suffering, it's true that increased cognition allows for increased suffering - but increased cognition also allows for an increased likelihood of will-denying release from suffering. Without rational self-awareness, our animal selves would be forever trapped in the cycle of affirming the misery of life, without the possibility of recognizing it for the worthless error that it is.

> Self-awareness is the main reason why we're so miserable.

Nah. The main reason we're so miserable, from Schopenhauer's point of view, is due to the nature of being per se, rather than the nature of conscious being more specifically; it's in the nature of being(-in-itself, and being-as-appearance) to want and to strive and to be ultimately disappointed - to be active, restless, subrationally impulsive - and it's this fundamental fact, more than our consciousness of it, that is the deepest intelligible reason for why existence is misery.

>>8575578

>You went all the way, I see. Nice.

Appreciated - but I can't fully agree, since I'm saving these for far into the future:

https://www.amazon.com/Manuscript-Remains-Early-Manuscripts-184-1818/dp/0854965386
https://www.amazon.com/Manuscript-Remains-II-Critical-189-1818/dp/0854965394/ref=pd_bxgy_14_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=ZHEFHFQ64RCK432TJG04
https://www.amazon.com/Manuscript-Remains-III-Manuscripts-1818-1830/dp/0854965408/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=2W47JA5PESCT2HKGC8F8
https://www.amazon.com/Manuscript-Remains-Vol-1830-1852-Manuscripts/dp/0854965416/ref=pd_sim_14_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=4G9QQQ24TFM30FA0036A

> As to 'The art of being always being right': I have always found it silly that it was precisely Schopenhauer that wrote it, given his hate for sophistry.

I think he presents it as a guide for recognizing and avoiding such fallacies, maybe for exposing them too; but it's also largely written in his biting, joking style, and I believe he let it sit in his notebooks for a while before deciding to not even publish it.

> It is also a shame that you don't read German (although the translations are fine).

I would love to be able to - to unpack (hopefully) more of the technicalities and subtleties of the German idealists, and to see for myself how beautiful Schopenhauer's writing is in his native language. He actually could have written an English edition of any of his works, in all likelihood (he thought for a while about translating the Critique of Pure Reason into English) - imagine!

But if I ever put in the effort to learn a language, it will probably be after I read a lot more philosophy and decide which works I'm most desperate to understand in the originals.

Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will.