Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays Volume One
by Arthur Schopenhauer
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This is the only complete English translation of one of the most significant and fascinating works of the great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). The Parerga (Volume 1) are six long essays; the Paralipomena (Volume 2) are shorter writings arranged under thirty-one different subject-headings. These works won widespread attention on their publication in 1851, and helped secure lasting international fame for Schopenhauer. Their intellectual vigour, literary power, and rich diversity show more are still striking today. They are essential to a full understanding of Schopenhauer's thought. show lessTags
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Volume 1 of the work that won Arthur Schopenhauer the worldwide acclaim he had long sought, 1851's Parerga and Paralipomena, contains six essays covering the history of the problem of philosophical idealism and realism, professional philosophy, individual fate, spirit seeing, the wisdom of life. The energy behind his thoughts, his lucid and compelling style, and the wide-ranging scope of his investigation make for a dynamic, stimulating, and unforgettable read.
Arthur Schopenhauer maakt deel uit van wat wel de Grote Traditie in de westerse filosofie wordt genoemd. De genealogie van deze Grote Traditie is: René Descartes, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Popper en Ludwig Wittgenstein. Het magnum opus van Schopenhauer is Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, dat voortbouwt op het werk van Kant. Parerga en Paralipomena (wat zoveel betekent als Strooigoed en Restanten, oftewel Aanvullingen en Weglatingen) bestaat uit twee bundels essays, waarin Schopenhauer zijn ideeën voor een breed publiek toegankelijk probeert te maken. Niet alleen inhoudelijk, maar zeker stilistisch vormen deze essays een absoluut hoogtepunt in de filosofische literatuur. In de show more essays preludeert Schopenhauer op allerlei moderne inzichten – waaronder de kwantumtheorie, de neurowetenschap (met name het werk van Antonio Damasio), NLP, Spiral Dynamics en de Speaking Circles. show less
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Arthur Schopenhauer traveled in childhood throughout Europe and lived for a time in Goethe's Weimar, where his mother had established a salon that attracted many of Europe's leading intellectuals. As a young man, Schopenhauer studied at the University of Gottingen and in Berlin, where he attended the lectures of Fichte and Schleiermacher. show more Schopenhauer's first work was The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), followed by a treatise on the physiology of perception, On Vision and Colors (1816). When Schopenhauer wrote his principal work, The World as Will and Idea (1819), he was confident that it was a work of great importance that would soon win him fame, but in this he was badly disappointed. In 1819 he arranged to hold a series of philosophical lectures at the same time as those of the newly arrived professor Hegel, whom Schopenhauer despised (calling him, among other creative epithets, an "intellectual Caliban"). This move resulted only in further humiliation for Schopenhauer, since no one showed up to hear him. Schopenhauer continued to be frustrated in repeated attempts to achieve recognition. In 1839 and 1840 he submitted essays on freedom of the will and the foundation of morality to competitions sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy but he won no prize, even when his essay was the only entry in the competition. In 1844 he published a second volume of The World as Will and Idea, containing developments and commentaries on the first. Around 1850, toward the end of his life, Schopenhauer's philosophy began to receive belated recognition, and he died in the confidence that his long-awaited and deserved fame had finally come. Schopenhauer's philosophy exercised considerable influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only among academic philosophers but even more among artists and literati. This may be in part because, unlike his German idealist contemporaries, Schopenhauer is a lucid and even witty writer, whose style consciously owes more to Hume than to Kant. Schopenhauer's philosophy is founded on the idea that reality is Will--a single, insatiable, objectless striving that manifests itself in the world of appearance as a vast multiplicity of phenomena, engaged in an endless and painful struggle with one another. He saw the same vision in the texts of Indian religions---Vedanta and Buddhism---which he regarded as vastly superior to Western monotheism. Schopenhauer's theory of the empirical world is an idealism, in which the doctrines of Kant are identified with those of Berkeley. In aesthetic enjoyment Schopenhauer saw a form of knowledge that is higher than ordinary empirical knowledge because it is a disinterested contemplation of the forms or essences of things, rather than a cognition of causal connections between particulars driven by the will's interest in control and domination. True salvation, however, lies in an intuitive insight into the evil of willing, which in its highest manifestations is capable of completely extinguishing the will in a state of nirvana. In his perceptive development of the psychological consequences of his theory, Schopenhauer gives particular emphasis to the way in which our knowledge and behavior are insidiously manipulated by our unconscious volition; this stress, plus the central role he gives to sexuality in his theory of the will, contains much that is found later in Freud (who acknowledged that Schopenhauer had anticipated his theory of repression). Schopenhauer's main influence on twentieth-century philosophy, however, was mediated by Nietzsche, whose theory of the will to power added a poignant twist by committing itself to the affirmation of the will while still conceiving it in essentially the same way---insatiable, painful, predatory, deceptive, and subversive of rational thought---which it had been in Schopenhauer's metaphysical pessimism. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays Volume One
- Original publication date
- Berlin, 1851
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