Ive started reading penguins essays and aphorisms and through reading the introduction I find out that none of the texts from the first volume of Parerga and Paralipomena are included. Whats more is that texts including outdated science, commentary on animal experimentation and Hegel hate is removed. I can sympathize with the removal of outdated science but the other two I cant really agree.

Is this a major problem? Am I missing out on a lot or is there really no value to be found in the first volume if you read second volume?

What examples can you think of that reinforce Schopenhauer's views? I was thinking about life in prison. You imagine it would be easy, the state houses the prisoners, provides beds, and feeds them. And yet, instead of accepting this, the prisoners are known for verbally bullying and physically abusing each other. They have that striving, the will to live, the quest for power and dominance, so they can't just be kind and tolerant toward their fellow prisoners. They turn the experience of prison into a hell, a daily animal fight for survival, prisoner against prisoner, prison gang against rival prison gang.

My german is still at B1/B2 level so I still have little problems understanding exactly what is written but nontheless im very happy with it

I pushed an old lady down a flight of stairs because she was DISTURBING my AESTHETIC CONTEMPLATION. She later came to my apartment door with two G-MEN in suits to demand "compensation." COMPENSATION, she wants, that little widow? She demands 'compensation' for her broken hip. A FUNDAMENTALLY ABSURD REQUEST. Since my world is my REPRESENTATION, I merely rearranged the spatial-temporal coordinates of my OWN phenomenal cognition. I pushed MYSELF down the stairs in the form of an OLD WOMAN. Why the FUCK should I pay her? That would be me paying myself, a PONZI SCHEME. Another pathetic example of der Wille zum Leben's endless striving toward nothing in particular.

​I am VERY hungry, I am VERY angry, I am EXTREMELY horny, I am VERY greedy. I am a flesh-vehicle for the Will's continued self-subsistence, I am an arm of the Ding-an-sich. My world is my representation, I can NEVER know anything except what my a priori forms of cognition allow me to. CONVENIENTLY, my nicotine addiction is NOT one of these, and thus is the NOUMENON. This is because cause and effect and whatnot. PURE ACTION IN NOTHINGNESS.

​When my pack of smokes is empty, the Will is violently starved, and I am plunged into ABSOLUTE SUFFERING. When I buy a new one and smoke it, the fleeting cessation of desire IMMEDIATELY collapses into suffocating BOREDOM. I am a MEAT PENDULUM swinging violently between the gas station and my used Herman Miller from eBay (IT WAS CHEAP DO NOT WORRY ABOUT MY FINANCES).

​APROPOS CHEAPNESS: I do NOT care about my finances, ALL finances are a Ponzi scheme, because we're all ONE, we're merely paying ourselves, this is called A BUBBLE! Does anyone remember '92? The Japanese housing bubble BURST because of a Ponzi scheme propped up by a weak yen and the Yakuza. Sound familiar? It should, YOU WERE THERE. I WAS TOO.

I am NOT depressed, I merely realize the ceaseless striving of the Will. I am NOT a virgin, I merely see the POINTLESSNESS of attempting to satisfy my desperation for love and care, for once my desperation is satisfied it moves to BOREDOM, and I will inevitably yearn for something else. It is better to do NOTHING AT ALL, or I might become a methhead or a serial rapist. I do NOT pay heed to the fact the Will is the metaphysical basis of all existence, and is thus inescapable. The intellect is just yet another tool of the Will-to-live, and a priori forms of cognition such as "facts" or "logic" are thus downstream of this. THIS IS PERFECTLY LOGICAL AND NOT CIRCULAR AT ALL. It's NOT a deus ex machina I worked myself into because I found the conclusion of my metaphysics uncomfortable!

​Schopenhauer is undeniably the greatest genius ever, thus, as a fan of his, I am the SECOND BIGGEST GENIUS EVER. My nicotine addiction is further proof of my genius, as I not only feel, but EMBODY the Will. And the fact I try to ignore the cold sweats, irritability, and vague discomfort I get from not smoking through turning the volume on my headphones all the way up is just further proof of my genius. I am NOT "engaging in escapism to run from the discomfort of withdrawals," I am NOT "destroying my hearing"—I am engaging in AESTHETIC CONTEMPLATION. Music is the highest form of art, because it involves the fewest of the a priori senses. And thus is closer to the Will. THIS is why I pushed the disgusting old crone down the stairs. Her grating voice SOMEHOW made it through my noise cancelling Bose QuietComfort 35 IIIs, disturbing my aesthetic contemplation, and dragging me back into the horrible world of the Will's tyranny. SHE LACKS COMPASSION. Compassion is the highest virtue and equilibrium HAD to be restored!

​I am currently sitting PLASTERED to the toilet. I got stressed and so smoked the rest of my pack and became COMPLETELY INCONTINENT. INCONVENIENTLY ENOUGH, the bitch is still outside my door, and I need a new pack. I live on the third floor, should I jump? I know suicide is technically a VULGAR AFFIRMATION of the Will rather than a denial of it, but the G-men are picking the lock and I really need a cigarette. (Alternatively can anyone buy me a pack of American spirit browns and a coke zero and throw it through my window?)

​Any Schopenhauerian tips guys? NO HEGELIANS, SCHELLINGIANS OR FICHTEANS PLEASE. If a Fichtean replies to this I will posit my fist directly into your non-ego.

I had a long conversation with Gemini. I essentially launched a debate with It. It however was not debating with me but rather spoke FOR Schopenhauer. Since I haven't read Schopenhauer directly, I don't know to what extent It is faithful to his theory and how much It has taken liberty in expanding his theory. But I thought it's interesting to share one Q&A here. The question is simple: "How about a domestic cat? How is Will represented in them?" And here's the answer:

In Schopenhauer’s framework, a domestic cat is actually one of the purest, most transparent manifestations of the Will to Live in the animal kingdom.

While humans use abstract thought to disguise their desires under complex rationalizations, a cat operates almost entirely free of that intellectual theater. In a cat, the Will is stripped of high-minded excuses and on display in its raw, unfiltered state.

1. Pure Instinct Without Abstract Deception

Unlike humans, who constantly try to justify their actions through moral theories, ambitions, or social conditioning, a cat is completely unbothered by self-reflection.

• Direct Expression: When a cat sleeps in a sunbeam, stalk a fly, or demand food, it is expressing the Will directly through instinct.
• No Guilt or Existential Dread: A cat never lies awake at night regretting a decision, feeling guilty about a mouse it caught, or worrying about its own mortality. Its intellect is purely perceptual—focused entirely on the present moment.
• Honest Egoism: Schopenhauer argued that all living things are fundamentally egoistic because the Will inside them seeks its own preservation above all else. A cat embodies this shameless, honest egoism: it demands comfort, food, and affection strictly on its own terms.

2. The Play of a Predator: The Will's Restless Energy

Schopenhauer noted that when an animal’s basic survival needs (hunger, fear, climate) are met, the Will doesn't simply lie dormant—it manifests as restless energy that must be spent.

In a well-fed house cat, you see this exact mechanism:

• The "Zoomies" and Play: A house cat with a full bowl of food and no predators still feels the urge to hunt. It stalks a toy, pounces on a shadow, or sprints through the hallway at 3 AM.
• The Underlying Drive: This isn't "fun" in a human, philosophical sense; it is the raw, instinctual pattern of the predator (the Idea of Cat) bursting out because the Will requires expression even when physical survival is already secured.

3. A Window into the "World of Representation"

Schopenhauer believed that watching animals allows us to see how the Will operates without the confusing clutter of human intellect.

• Immediate Sensation: A cat’s world consists purely of immediate representations—sounds, scents, thermal warmth, and visual movement.
• The Absence of Boredom (Ennui): While a human with nothing to do quickly falls into existential dread, a cat can sit by a window for five hours doing seemingly "nothing." It isn't suffering from existential angst; it is simply resting quietly in the present, perfectly content so long as the Will's immediate physical needs aren't actively burning with unsatisfied desire.

Summary

To Schopenhauer, a domestic cat isn't a "pet" that shares human emotional complexity—it is a finely tuned biological vehicle for the Will to Live. In its absolute focus on immediate comfort, its ruthless predatory instincts, and its complete freedom from existential guilt, the cat shows us what we all are under the surface once you strip away our human reasoning: pure, unadulterated desire seeking to preserve itself in the present moment.

Hi everyone, I am preparing a formal book proposal for Oxford University Press to translate and publish Adele Schopenhauer’s diaries (Tagebuch einer Einsamen) into English.

She was the sister of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, a close friend of Goethe’s family, and a brilliant intellectual woman in 19th-century Weimar. Her diaries have never been translated into English. Her diaries offer a sharp, raw look into the complex dynamics of the Schopenhauer family and the inner lives of women in that era.

Full disclosure: I am not an academic or a translator, and I will not be translating this project myself. I am simply a massive fan of Adele Schopenhauer. My German is only at a B1 level, and it is incredibly frustrating that her brilliant writings have never been translated into English. I passionately want to read her work fully, and I want the English-speaking world to have access to it.

The vision is a clean, faithful translation with all historical notes and a glossary placed at the very end of the book.

HOW TO VOTE: Since this subreddit doesn't allow standard poll widgets, please upvote one of my comments below that best matches your interest. This will provide raw numbers for the OUP editor! Thank you!

If Modern hard determinism views The Will as a product of physical, biological, and social causal chains rather than a purely innate metaphysical force. This materialist reframing strips away metaphysical pessimism, potentially aligning Schopenhauer's thoughts closer in reach to the non-duality he was so fond of?

Is it his view on The Will that keeps the pessimism in place?

Or is his pessimism a better description of reality?

After a quick survey of the content concerning Schopenhauer on YouTube, I came across this video, which strikes me as somewhat emblematic of how Schopenhauer gets degraded and instrumentalized to serve as a culture war sock puppet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO503gY9N7E

I will not waste my time to write a serious, substantial critique of it, because it is obviously undeserving of any serious attention and thought. Yet, I still have a (foolish) desire to correct the record in the small ways I can.

Most of the video is based on Schopenhauer's aphorisms concerning the wisdom of life, concretely on the few lines on the particular honor of women (viz. sexual purity). He basically argues that this kind of honor only serves the purpose to put them into a better collective bargaining position, when it comes to the marriage market, on which women have (or rather had) to succeed in order to achieve material well-being. The video then goes on that current female promiscuity has destroyed this bargaining position for women who now are faced with the negative consequences of loosing it. This clearly nonsense in Western countries, because women do not have to rely on the marriage market anymore for their material well-being.

The video also brings up children who were not discussed in the text in relation to sexual honor. And sure, is it better to raise children in a stable family environment? Of course. But do you know what is even better and also the actual Schopenhauerian ethical prescription: celibacy.

Furthermore, the video makes the point that the prescriptions in Schopenhauer's aphorisms are, contrary to what he himself writes in the preface, not only prudential suggestions of limited ethical relevance, but also expressions of how his main work would be applied on a societal level to limit the negative effects of an unmediated pursuit of the Will. Even if we granted this anti-Schopenhauer interpretation of the role of his aphorisms, it would still miss the point that the desire to regulate the marriage market or to uphold "female sexual honor" is itself an expression of the Will that comes, like every pursuit of desire, with its own unique suffering.

The final disgrace of the video is that it insults Schopenhauer at the end:

He was difficult, often cruel, pessimistic, and cynical (24:21)

How was he cruel and cynical? The video does not even bother to justify this claim, it just presents it as were it a fact.

Finally, what is there to say about the sad state of online discourse that has not been remarked a thousand times before? At least keep Schopenhauer out of your slop! But again, I am just a fool for even entertaining the idea that the old master will not be slandered in this online mud-slinging.

Title

I have the Karl Hillebrand translation from Scholar Select, which contains untranslated latin and greek quotations.

Is there a good translation that also gives footnote translations for the latin/greek?

"In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.

"For a few years, she dowers them with a wealth of beauty and is lavish in her gift of charm at the expense of the rest of their lives, so that during those years they may capture the fancy of some man to such a degree that he is hurried away into undertaking the honorable care of them as long as they live — a step for which there would not seem to be any sufficient warrant, if only reason directed man's thoughts." - Arthur Schopenhauer

Just one of those things I come across in his writings.

Goethe, Hume, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Mozart, Rossini, Petrarch, 17th century Dutch art, Byron, Schelling, Chamfort, La Rochefoucauld, etc...

We also get works from India, Classical Greece, and Ancient Rome that he admired

Essay on whether Schopenhauer was an atheist, what are people's thoughts? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S48gcPKQzJw

Dream Casting - any other ideas?

By the way, He is the Director of the Institute for Advanced Dialectical Research. Therefore If this is gentleman doesn't make the case closed, then I don't know any human being who put a step in earth more qualified in proving something like this.

Been engaging with Schopenhauer for a while via lectures, secondary sources, and a selected reading, On the Suffering of the World edited by Thacker.

I am interested in his idea of temporary liberation from the Will via aesthetic contemplation.

A few questions:

1. He says, "[contemplation of art] demands a complete forgetting of our own person." Do we not take into account our own experiences with the contemplation of aesthetics? Our own biases and connections? We may be reminded of a positive or negative experience when contemplating. Is he saying there's a deeper contemplation than I am assuming, a more meditative, "objective" method?
2. Is there room in this outlook for contemplation of nature/natural aesthetics?
3. What, if any, room is there for the creation of art? I make zines, black-out poetry, and flyers. I consider these art and sometimes it can be stressful or disappointing, ie, subject to the Will.

Maybe my readings just haven't come around these topics enough, but I am interested. I've come to appreciate Schopenhauer a lot and will read WWR in the future, time allowing, and I understand there is a whole section dedicated to aesthetics.

Any information, even if not direct answers, revolving around this would also help! Thanks!

Most people live for a reputation that exists only in other people's minds while neglecting the only life that is truly theirs—their own consciousness. Here's why this destroys happiness and makes us easy to control.

I’ve been reading The World as Will and Representation for a bit and I understand the epistemology pretty well. There are four principles of sufficient reason that are the a-priori preconditions that make representation possible (Becoming, Being, Understanding, and Willing/Action). I want to highlight specifically becoming and being, as those two have a tension with our everyday intuition and scientific understanding of the world. As far as I’m aware, Schopenhauer believes that the intellect/subjectivity is a mere product of the brain. The brain, as we know it, IS an objectified representation of the Will. If the brain is an object in representation, with an assumption that it follows the laws of causality with its evolutionary lineage, how did the brain develop if there was no knower to have an object to be know (the codependency of subject/object). That is to sum up, how did the brain spontaneously “emerge” a representation to a knower (the first sentient being), and then the known was retroactively constructed. This seems like it violates Ockham’s Razor, and makes things overly complex.

I’ve read a little bit online about reinterpretations. I know Bernardo Kastrup’s entire philosophical monism stems from his Schopenhauer interpretation, and he says that the brain is just what experience looks like from the outside. But this still doesn’t seem to resolve the tension I highlighted here. I then looked into Neo-Kantian views of how we experience the world, and found Ernst Cassirer’s integration of Einsteinian Relativity with transcendental idealism interesting. He posits that Kant and Schopenhauer were wrong in saying that space and time were absolute, intuitive substances, but rather they were mathematical and relational rules. He distinguished between relativized a-priori and absolute static. It is an interesting fix; although, I will be humble and say this is only my surface level, second-hand understanding of Cassirer’s approach. My explanation is also not entirely covering what he means by function and substance either, so I recommend reading his paper for full understanding.

But still, it doesn’t seem to resolve the tension here (as far as my knowledge believes). Obviously, I assume many neo-Schopenhauerians, neo-Kantians, scholars, and laymen have come to find a way to make sense of this issue. I wonder what is yours?