شوبنهاور: مقدمة موجزة

Very Short Introductions #062

by Christopher Janaway, كريستوفر جاناواي, سعيد توفيق (Translator)

يعد شوبنهاور أكثر الفلاسفة المقروئين من بين الفلاسفة الألمان و يقدم هذا الكتاب شرحا بليغ الإيجاز لمذهبه الميتافيزيقي، مركزا على الجوانب الأصيلة من فكره، التي ألهمت كثيرا من الفنانين و المفكرين بمن فيهم نيتشه و فاجنر و فرويد و فتجنشتاين

و يواجه كريستوفر جاناواي رؤية شوبنهاور العنيدة التي تذهب الى أن اللاوجود سيكون مفضلا عن الوجود لدى الفرد البشري، و دعواه بأن إنكار الذات الورع، أي الفرار من الإرادة ، هو وحده ما يمكن أن يجعل للحياة قيمة

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biography, History, Audiobook, Germany, German Literature

167 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Christopher Janaway (BA, DPhil Oxford) is a philosopher and author. Before moving to Southampton in 2005, Janaway taught at the University of Sydney and Birkbeck, University of London. His recent research has been on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and aesthetics. Janaway currently lectures at the University of Southampton, including a module focusing on Nietzsche.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christopher Janaway’s little book on the life and philosophy of 19th century German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer makes for a most engaging and thought-provoking read. Indeed, if you are interested in literature and the arts or would like have a deeper understanding of the challenges in life we all face yet are generally put off by philosophers and philosophy, this book is for you. By way of example, here are some Janaway and Schopenhauer quotes along with my comments.

“Humanity is poised between the life of an organism driven to survival and reproduction, and that of a pure intellect that can rebel against its nature and aspire to a timeless contemplation of a ‘higher’ reality." ---------- Schopenhauer is an atheist as opposed to a traditional theist within the monotheistic Western tradition (he very much appreciated the wisdom of both the Upanishads and Buddhism). He viewed life as not created or guided by some all-knowing God but propelled by an irrational force he calls ‘the will’. This being the case, ordinary existence is an alternating between frustration and boredom. But do not despair! There is the possibility of escape: literature, music, the arts and aesthetic experience.

“Although thoroughly conservative himself, Schopenhauer regarded the political state merely as a convenient means for protecting property and curbing the excesses of egoism; he could not stomach Hegel’s representation of the state as ‘the whole aim of human existence’. Hegel was also an appalling stylist, who seemed to build abstraction upon abstraction without the breath of fresh air provided by common-sense experience, and Schopenhauer – not alone in this – found his writing pompous and obscurantist, even dishonest.” ---------- Here is one of the keys to the appeal of Schopenhauer’s writing. He is clear and approachable, a great literary stylist and essayist, at the opposite end of the literary spectrum from the vast majority of academic philosophers with their dense, obscure, technical language and convoluted syntax, forever quoting and referring to other equally dense, obscure, dry thinkers.

“Nevertheless, in talking so bluntly about sexuality, and in making it such a cornerstone of his philosophy, he is again unusually forward-looking for his day, Sex is ever-present in our minds, according to Schopenhauer, ‘the public secret which must never be distinctly mentioned anywhere, but is always and everywhere understood to be the main thing. . . . It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort; it has an unfavorable influence on the most important affairs, interrupts every hour the most serious occupations.” ---------- Going back to Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy, humans are defined as the ‘rational animal’. Schopenhauer didn’t buy it. He could see that having reason doesn’t free us from our constant preoccupation with sex; in fact, with our capacity for imagination, we humans are, in a way, even more bound to sex than other animals. With this thinking, Schopenhauer anticipates Sigmund Freud and the development of psychoanalysis.

“Schopenhauer belongs to a tradition which equates aesthetic experience with a ‘disinterested’ attitude towards its object, and is often cited as one of the chief proponents of such a view. The idea is that to experience something aesthetically, one must suspend or disengage all one’s desires toward it, attending not to any consideration of what ends, needs, or interests it may fulfill, but only to the way it presents itself in perception. In Schopenhauer’s case, aesthetic experience must always be an extraordinary episode in any human being’s life.” ---------- This is the prime reason generations of artists, writers and musicians have been moved and influenced by Schopenhauer. His emphasis on artistic transformation, creative imagination and the truth and dignity of aesthetic experience made a powerful imprint on Guy de Maupassant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner and Thomas Mann, to name several.

Sidebar: When once asked what philosopher I would recommend on the topic of aesthetics, I suggested Schopenhauer. I also suggested to start an aesthetics journal where you can make daily entries of your own aesthetic experiences of art, music, performance, reading, nature, and everyday encounters with the world: faces of people, driving a car, drinking coffee, etc.. The idea is to continually open yourself to experiencing the world aesthetically - a powerful path to self-transformation.

Janaway also writes on Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, epistemology ( theory of knowledge) , ethics and ideas on topics like the body, character and the self as well as how the great German thinker envisions a certain kind of mystical detachment as a way to salvation. I restricted my review to Schopenhauer's philosophy of art since this is the area of his thinking that was most influential, particularly among writers, artists and musicians. A philosopher deserving our attention, to be sure, and Janaway’s book is a great place to start.

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read primarily to get a better fix on Mann. But Schopie is so fascinating. I am hooked now. Can't see how I am going to avoid reading W&R.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Jackson Cyril · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very detailed look at Schopenhauer's philosophy. The author's admirable quality to let Schopenhauer himself make his case and only insert commentary when needed is to be greatly lauded. This is not to imply that the book is an easy read; the chapters on metaphysics are especially difficult to trudge through, but worth it I think, as the reader begins to understand one of the most unique voices in philosophy.

[Daniel Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapter 1: Schopenhauer's life and works
Chapter 2: Within and beyond appearance
Chapter 3: The world as will and representation
Chapter 4: Will, body, and the self
Chapter 5: Character, sex, and the unconscious
Chapter 6: Art and ideas
Chapter 7: Ethics: seeing the world aright
Chapter 8: Existence and pessimism
Chapter 9: Schopenhauer's influence

[John Reis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author states in his preface that his aim is: “to give a sympathetic but critical account of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.” Janaway summarizes Schopenhauer’s philosophy of life as follows:

“Existence for Schopenhauer’s is a purposeless, painful striving, driven by an unconscious force that we cannot control. Release from this existence comes from losing one’s individuality, in aesthetic experience, in compassion for the world, and in self-denial.”

This seems to be a rather complete description of Schopenhauer’s thought.

Janaway points out that Schopenhauer’s notion of ‘will’ is not easy to define.

“Humanity is poised between the life of an organism driven to survival and reproduction and that of a pure intellect that can rebel against its nature and aspire to a timeless contemplation of a ‘higher’ reality.”

This is actually very familiar. It is found in Plato and Book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Schopenhauer was very much influenced by the works of Plato and Kant and later the Upanishads.

He believed that empirical consciousness, limited as it was to the phenomena of time, space and causality, was something inferior which we should aspire to escape from, if possible. Only if there was a” better consciousness’ could human beings find anything that was of true value.”

“Schopenhauer thinks that the world of material things which we experience and can investigate in science must be cast aside as of no genuine worth by comparison with the timeless vision open to artists and saints.”

Schopenhauer is a metaphysical idealist, following Kant’s idealism:

“If we wish to preserve our entitlement to knowledge concerning the world of things that occupy space and time and follow causal laws the solution is to accept that they do not lie outside our consciousness.

Schopenhauer is offering his own kind of secular religion. He does not offer us the equivalent of guilt as found in Christianity. But he does offer us a position similar to salvation, as it were. We can never be satisfied in any of our strivings, except through aesthetic experience and self-abnegation. My actions are of no value and do nothing to improve my life. This strikes me as similar to the notion that we can only be saved by God’s grace.

Janaway’s little book is a very good introduction to its subject. He spends no time on Schopenhauer’s later thought on women, or noise. He is focused on the ideas in his “The World as Will and Representation,” its insights and some of its flaws.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kudos to Janaway for writing a solid introduction to one of the most influential and stupid philosophers of the nineteenth century; it makes me wonder who'll get that honor for the twentieth. Heidegger? Wittgenstein? Probably Whitehead. The lesson seems to be that if your thought is meager enough to be taken up by a large number of novelists and poets, you'll end up looking like a bit of a fool. Everything of value in Schopenhauer can be found in the Buddhist tradition. His bizarre decision to combine Plato with Kant shows only that Schopenhauer didn't understand either of them. One very valuable thing that I learned from this book is to take Nietzsche more seriously than I already did; falling for this claptrap so hard, but then seeing so clearly the dullness of it all took tremendous strength of mind.

Of course, I can understand why one might be a pessimist. I'm just not sure you need so much bullshit metaphysics to justify it; walking down the street generally does it for me.

Janaway does a wonderful job, as I said, and I do recommend this as a solid work in the history of philosophy. But good lord, he makes it easy to see why everyone went to Hegel's supposedly incomprehensible lectures instead of Schopenhauer's surely beautiful one: Hegel wasn't a complete nutter.

[Clif · Rating 4 out of 5]

I continue my wonderful readings of the "Very Short Introduction to..." books with this illuminating little book on Arthur Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer was born in 1788, two hundred years after Thomas Hobbes. If you read my review of "A Very Short Introduction to Free Will" you will know that Hobbes was a pioneer in breaking free of the theological view of man. He insisted that human beings are just another form of animal life and Schopenhauer follows the same path.

For Schopenhauer, we are driven by our will and our will is only the pressure of life present in any living creature that drives it to reproduce and fulfill other less necessary drives. Whatever we may think about why we act, beneath it all we are completely physical beings different from other animals only in our ability to imagine reasons for our actions that allow us to claim individual motivation. To Schopenhauer, we live under a delusion that makes us blind to the unity of all life.

Schopenhauer believes, in accord with Buddhism, that the only way to escape the misery of endless desire without satisfaction is to calm the restless, craving mind through meditation. His pessimistic view of life will not admit that there can be real happiness, at best there can only be calm endurance until death brings eternal peace.

His pessimism extends so far as to deny that existence is better than non-existence and I disagree. There can be joys in life, equally true back in the first half of the 19th century when he lived, so the idea that nothing at all is better than life astounds me. Perhaps the prison inmate, wrongfully convicted and sentenced to a life of incarceration, or a slave destined for nothing but hard labor could sympathize with Schopenhauer's view. For the rest of us, isn't being able to love and be loved, or to take pleasure in one's children more than adequate to offset the loss of everything in death?

Nevertheless, Schopenhauer's cold, clear view of reality that has not a word to say about God is refreshing for the time in which it was expressed. Though he was born several decades after Jefferson and Adams, I believe they would have found much of what he wrote congenial to their Deist thoughts of God setting the world in motion and then letting things take care of themselves from then on.

Schopenhauer was precocious in his view of the unconscious, writing of how much lies below and contradicts the reasons we consciously give for our behavior. His thinking aligns with that of Darwin far before Darwin and with Freud far before Freud at a time when early science was mapping out the physical world and new ideas were tumbling from minds that questioned what had been handed down from history.

Yet even Schopenhauer was blind to the equality of women, dismissing them as obviously inferior to men. Nobody can completely escape their times...or their ego!

Christopher Janaway has done a fine job writing this book. The editors of the "Very Short..." series must also be commended for insuring the readability of all the works that compose it. Philosophy in particular has a reputation for being difficult to penetrate (though Schopenhauer is a notable exception) yet I have had no trouble following the ideas in all of the series books I have read to date.

[شفيق · Rating 3 out of 5]

لمده شهر حتي الآن أمكث في كل مكان أفكرُ في فلسفة ذاك الألماني العظيم ومازال يلزمني وقت فوق الوقت وتحليل صادق بعد القراءة لهذا العقل الفذ

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I now stand weary at the end of the road; The jaded brow can hardly bear the laurel. And yet I gladly see what I have done, Ever undaunted by what others say.


Always loved Schopenhauer. The most readable of all those unreadable 19th century German philosophers. This book was helpful in digesting his actual philosophy, which I've tried to skirt as much as possible, preferring his essays and aphorisms and shorter writings. In fact, I often think of him alongside Strindberg and Lovecraft, writers whose biographies I generally enjoy more than their written work. And while I've finally tracked down a copy of David Cartwright's biography of Schopenhauer, I will say that I do like his actual writing, it's just that a lot of it flies over my head.

I was finally able to grab a better sense of what Schopenhauer means by Will, in particular how it's something everything in nature possesses, without, like, anthropomorphizing rocks or whatever:

Whenever we undergo feelings of fear or desire, attraction or repulsion, whenever the body itself behaves according to the various unconscious functions of nourishment, reproduction, or survival, Schopenhauer discerns will manifesting itself - but in a new and extended sense. What he wants to show is that ordinary conscious willing is no different in its basic nature from the many other processes which set the body, or parts of it, in motion. Admittedly, willing to act involves conscious thinking - it involves the body's being caused to move by motives in the intellect - but it is, for Schopenhauer, not different in principle from the beating of the heart, the activation of the saliva glands, or the arousal of the sexual organs. All can be seen as an individual organism manifesting will, in Schopenhauer's sense. The body itself is will: more specifically, it is a manifestation of will to life (Wille zum Leben), a kind of blind striving, at a level beneath that of conscious thought and action, which is directed towards the preservation of life, and towards engendering life anew.

This interesting idea is wrapped up in the much wider claim that the whole world in itself is will. Just as my body's movements have an inner aspect not revealed in objective experience, so does the rest of the world. Schopenhauer seeks an account which makes all fundamental forces in nature homogeneous, and thinks that science is inherently unsatisfying because it always tails off without explaining the essence or hidden inner character of the phenomena whose behaviour it accounts for. His unifying account of nature is that all natural processes are a manifestation of will. This is likely at first sight to be dismissed as fanciful - but we should heed Schopenhauer's warning that he is vastly extending the concept 'will':
hitherto the identity of the inner essence of any striving and operating force in nature with the will has not been recognized, and therefore the many kinds of phenomena that are only different species of the same genus were not regarded as such ... Consequently, no word could exist to denote the concept of this genus. I therefore name the genus after its most important species, the direct knowledge of which lies nearest to us, and leads to the indirect knowledge of all the others. But anyone who is incapable of carrying out the required extension of the concept will remain involved in a permanent misunderstanding. (Wi, 111)

...

So we must not transfer'will' simple-mindedly from human actions to the whole of nature. It serves only as the most convenient term where none yet exists.

...

An alternative interpretation is that Schopenhauer is keeping the sense of 'will' fixed, and simply widening the range of phenomena that it refers to. He does say that in mechanics 'seeking shows itself as gravitation.... fleeing as reception of motion' and similar things (W2, 298); he is prepared to speak in remarkable terms of 'the powerful, irresistible impulse with which masses of water rush downwards, the persistence and determination with which the magnet always turns back to the North Pole, the keen desire with which iron flies to the magnet' (Wi, 117-18). How are we to take this? If meant literally, it is merely embarrassing. But perhaps he is doing something more subtle here, and attempting to teach us our own kinship with nature by rhetorical means: the behaviour of the inorganic world is to an extent 'like the vehemence of human desires' and so 'it will not cost us a great effort of the imagination to recognize once more our own inner nature, even at so great a distance'. This is not to say that iron really desires anything, or that water rushes because it wants to.

What we usually call willing is supposed to be a clear guide to the way the world is. So 'will' must still be understood in terms of its application to human actions; however, we must enlarge its sense at least far enough to avoid the barbarity of thinking that every process in the world has a mind, a consciousness, or a purpose behind it. For the most part, Schopenhauer assures us, the world operates blindly and 'in a dull, one-sided, and unalterable manner' - and the same is even true of many manifestations of the will within each human individual. The following passage states Schopenhauer's view as clearly as any:
only the will is thing in itself ... It is that of which all representation, all object, is the phenomenon, the visibility, the objectivity. It is the innermost essence, the kernel, of every particular thing and also of the whole. It appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of man, and the great difference between the two concerns only the degree of the manifestation, not the inner nature of what is manifested. (Wi, no)





Sick burn on Hegelian though: 'a cuttle-fish creating a cloud of obscurity around itself so that no one sees what it is, with the legend, mea caligine tutus (fortified by my own obscurity)'

He wins gold in the first part of a Danish essay contest, but LOL at the second part: The second essay, part of which is a thorough criticism of Kant's ethics, suffered a different fate in Denmark: despite its being the only entry, the Royal Society refused to award it a prize. It had not, they judged, successfully answered the question set - and they took exception to the 'unseemly' manner in which a number of recent philosophers of distinction had been referred to. Who did they mean? asked Schopenhauer in his Preface to the essays: Fichte and Hegel! Are these men the summi philosophi one is not allowed to insult? It is true that Schopenhauer had not been playing the conventional game of academic politeness, but now he seizes the chance to let rip with all the means at his command. He produces an escalating series of allegations about the emptiness and confusion of Hegel's philosophy, throwing in a picturesque quote from Homer about the chimera, which is a compound of many beasts, and ending:
Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus of the Danish Academy scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right. (B, 16)

The will exists outside of space-time: Two more peculiarities of this doctrine should be noted. First, if the will is the thing in itself, it is not something occupying space and time. Space and time are merely the subject-imposed structure of the world as representation, and the thing in itself is what remains when the world as representation is thought away. Given Schopenhauer's idea that space and time are the principle of individuation, the thing in itself cannot be split up into separate individuals. Beyond representation, space, and time, it is simply the world as a whole that is to be conceived as will. Secondly, there can be no causal interaction between the will, as thing in itself, and events in the ordinary empirical world. Causality too is something which operates only at the level of empirical changes occurring to individual material things, not at the level of the thing in itself. Kant seemed to require that the thing in itself could impinge upon us causally, rather like some empirical object, and Schopenhauer was well aware that this claim was the stumbling-block of Kantianism for many of his contemporaries. Schopenhauer himself avoids the problem, and never claims that the will as thing in itself is a cause. But then what is the relationship between the world in itself and the things and events that lie within our empirical knowledge? Schopenhauer talks sometimes of the will's 'manifestation' in empirical reality, but his preferred term is 'objectification'. This means just that the world shows to us the side of it which we can experience. We have to think of the single will and its objectification in a multitude of phenomena as two sides of a coin, two aspects of the same world.


His idea about the individuals desire and pursuit of sex was really interesting, I think maybe there's something interesting here that could be used to pushback on the atomization of society: Thus Schopenhauer sees the individual's sexual behaviour as at the beck and call of an impersonal force. His most striking way of putting this is to say that it is the will to life of the as yet unconceived offspring which draws a male and female partner together. Their view that they are acting wholly in their own interests out of individual desires towards another individual is a 'delusion' (W2, 538), and this delusion itself is a means by which 'nature can attain her end'. The 'longing of love' celebrated in poetry of all ages is on this account truly something external to the lover, and hence so powerful that the individual can scarcely contain it:

this longing that closely associates the notion of an endless bliss with the possession of a definite woman, and an unutterable pain with the thought that this possession is not attainable: this longing and this pain of love cannot draw their material from the needs of an ephemeral individual. On the contrary, they are the sighs of the spirit of the species ... The species alone has infinite life, and is therefore capable of infinite desire, infinite satisfaction, and infinite sufferings. But these are here imprisoned in the narrow breast of a mortal; no wonder, therefore, when such a breast seems ready to burst, and can find no expression for the infinite rapture or infinite pain with which it is filled. (W2, 551)



Platonism: Schopenhauer follows Plato in claiming that Ideas exist in reality, independently of the subject. They are not concepts. Concepts are the mental constructs we make in order to grasp reality in general terms; but Ideas are parts of nature awaiting discovery. For Schopenhauer, they are not even discovered by conceptual thinking, but by perception and imagination.
What would consciousness of Ideas themselves be like? Schopenhauer has a dramatic answer. Once we abandon the guidance of the principle of sufficient reason,
we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither of things, but simply and solely the what. ... [Wei let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else ... and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception.... What is thus known is no longer the individual thing as such, but the Idea ... at the same time, the person who is involved in this perception is no longer an individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself: he is pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge. P1, 178-9)


Schopenhauer on art's need for genius (his aphorism about genius and targets is good too and I always LOL when I see it on inspirational posters): Although Schopenhauer clearly thinks that natural beauty often gives rise to aesthetic experience (witness the examples of tree, rock, and crag), it is to art that he gives most attention. He is fairly orthodox for his day in believing that the production of art requires something called genius, which must be distinguished from mere talent. But he does give his own account of what genius is. It consists, he writes, 'in the knowing faculty having received a considerably more powerful development than is required by the service of the will' (W2, 377). The person of genius has two-thirds intellect and one-third will, the 'normal person' is the other way round. It is not that the genius is lacking in will - such people usually have strong emotions, for example - but rather that their intellect is capable of detaching itself from the will to a much greater extent, and has the power to function autonomously:

the gift of genius is nothing but the most complete objectivity ... the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to lose oneself in perception, to remove from the service of the will the knowledge which originally existed only for this service. In other words, genius is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world; and this not merely for moments, but with the necessary continuity and conscious thought to enable us to repeat by deliberate art what has been apprehended. (Wi, 185-6)


His stuff on art was always the most accessible to me, although this book helped me with that too: He has claimed that whenever we have an aesthetic experience there occurs both a subjective cessation of willing and an objective insight into the realm of ideas. ... A popular prejudice is that music expresses the emotion of the composer or performer. But this is decidedly not Schopenhauer's view. Music, for him, has the peculiarity of expressing what might be called impersonal emotions:
music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives for them. I always think of music as being the highest art for Schopenhauer because with others (narrative) arts, you're subordinating your will to an artist's will, but with music you're escaping the will altogether. I think his argument is more complicated than that, though.

Hmm The basic idea is quite simple: if I cannot escape from causal necessity as part of empirical reality, then an aspect of me that is beyond empirical reality may do so. Schopenhauer points out that when we hold someone accountable we blame the person for his or her character, or for what he or she is, using actions merely as evidence for this. He suggests that I must be responsible for what I am - my intelligible character behind appearances, from which issue all my actions. Freedom is not eliminated, but moved out of the empirical realm.


Salvation: The will to life must be denied - if salvation is to be attained from an existence like ours' (Wi, 405). Salvation is a religious doctrine, and Schopenhauer is keen to link his philosophical discussion with Christianity, Brahmanism, and Buddhism, claiming that the core of all these religions, leaving aside mythical trappings and recent doctrinal accretions, is really the same. Even God is not to the point: the philosophical import is available to an atheist quite as much as to a theist (W1, 385), and is that we must renounce, or say No to, our nature as human beings, if we are to find true value in existing. The real self is the will to life (W2, 606), and since this is also what must be denied, salvation lies in self-denial or self-renunciation. In fact', he says, 'nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist' (W2, 605).
In 'denial of the will to life', one turns against the particular manifestation of will to life found in oneself, which means turning against the body, and against one's own individuality. Thus one ceases, as much as possible, to strive for one's own egoistic ends, ceases to avoid suffering or to seek pleasure, ceases to desire propagation of the species, or any sexual gratification - in short, one looks down on that willing part of nature which one is, and withdraws from one's identification with it. Such an apparently unpalatable state is made to seem worthy of attainment by Schopenhauer's elevated prose:

we can infer how blessed must be the life of a man whose will is silenced not for a few moments, as in the enjoyment of the beautiful, but for ever, indeed completely extinguished, except for the last glimmering spark that maintains the body and is extinguished with it. Such a man who, after many bitter struggles with his own nature, has at last completely conquered, is then left only as pure knowing being, as the undimmed mirror of the world. Nothing can distress or alarm him any more; nothing can any longer move him: for he has cut all the thousand threads of willing which hold us bound to the world, and which as craving, fear, envy, and anger drag us here and there in constant pain. (Wi, 390)

Then, instead of the restless pressure and effort; instead of the constant transition from desire to apprehension and from joy to sorrow; instead of the never-satisfied and never-dying hope that constitutes the life-dream of the man who wills, we see that peace that is higher than all reason, that ocean-like calmness of the spirit, that deep tranquillity, that unshakable confidence and serenity, whose mere reflection in the countenance, as depicted by Raphael and Correggio, is a complete and certain gospel. Only knowledge remains; the will has vanished. (Wi, 411)

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

For being a short introduction, the author sure repeated himself a lot. It was a pretty quick read, though, and now I know something more about Schopenhauer than that he was a pessimist. The funny thing is, I enjoyed his negativity before I was familiar with the metaphysical system upon which he supported it, but now it's hard for me to separate his pessimistic conclusions from his metaphysics, and I'm just not buying it. I've never thought too much of Plato's eternal forms or Ideas (except as poetically reimagined by William Blake), I'm no believer in Kant's noumenal vs. phenomenal worlds (which, incidentally, Janaway talks about in this book without explicitly naming them - strange), so naturally Schopenhauer's fusion of the two doesn't do much for me. I'm kinda disappointed, because I wanted to like him better.

[Nick121235 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a feeling that the author didn't actually like Schopenhauer, and so I don't feel I got the best reading of him. But at least I was introduced to some of his main concepts. That's somehow how these Very Short Introduction books work; they don't always give the best or fairest interpretation of a thinker but they allow you a foot in the door so that you can then learn how to correct the mistakes. In the words of Hegel, "In order to proceed rightly you must proceed wrongly" . Or something along those lines.

[Seth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Schopenhauer wrote that "The art of not reading is an important one", and I quite agree. I doubt, however, that Schopes and I would be in full agreement on what, exactly, it is important not to read. In particular, I tend to think that in the field of philosophy, there is far too much focus on the history of philosophy - endlessly studying and rehashing the thoughts of a handful of dudes who died long before anyone currently living was born and thus lacked the benefits of a recent education - and too little on developments within the past few decades. Even the best introduction to Schopenhauer (which this may well be) would still have as its subject matter a jackass of a philosopher whose main work (The World as Will and Representation) was first published over two centuries ago. Janaway frequently confirms my biases, pointing out inconsistencies in and objections to Schopenhauer's claims, which Schopenhauer isn't around to address. He also points out ways in which Schopenhauer's ideas were novel at the time and influenced later thinkers, but however important that may make Schopenhauer in the history of philosophy, it doesn't provide strong reason to pay attention to Schopenhauer today. Where Schopenhauer was on to something, relatively recent thinkers have done better, and I'd recommend just reading them instead. For example, Azathoth* has much in common with what Schopenhauer called 'will', but the former concept is scientifically grounded, and we now know far more about it than we did in Schopenhauer's time - see, e.g., The Selfish Gene. Derek Parfit has written more convincingly on the metaphysics of personal identity and its relation to ethics in Reasons and Persons.

Since people do, unfortunately, continue to discuss Schopenhauer today regardless of how much sense it makes to do so, it can help to have some context for such discussion, and this book at least seems a much better way to get it than reading Schopenhauer directly.

*I flatly refuse to call it 'evolution', since that term has accumulated too much positive connotation. Azathoth is The Enemy, and I will not give it good PR. I think Schopes would approve of my stance on this issue.

[Scott Bielinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very accessible—and often critical—introduction to a very interesting philosopher. Janaway does a great job balancing detailed exposition of the more opaque philosophical bits in Schopenhauer's work and introducing the reader to Schopenhauer in his own words. Fascinating discussion on the metaphysics of compassion (99-102).

Janaway rightly points out that Schopenhauer's arguments for pessimism fail. I wonder how damning this is for his whole project, though, given how these arguments emerge as his final reflections in "The World as Will and Representation." Janaway points out we can adopt a more moderate pessimism from Schopenhauer ("life itself has no purpose, that suffering is always part of it, and that its end may sometimes be welcome" (117)). But this is a far cry from Schopenhauer's very extreme pessimism. The wisdom of Ecclesiastes reflects this moderate form of pessimism, though it, of course, refracts us above mere life under the sun.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction (1994) by Christopher Janaway is a very solid introduction to the life and work of Schopenhauer. Janaway is a lecturer of Philosophy.

The book starts with Schopenhauer’s early life and his path to philosophy. The book then explores Schopenhauer’s thought. In particular his reading of Kant and his reaction to that. Schopenhauer’s exploration of human thought and how will and desire is the master of reason in some way echo Hume’s thought. Schopenhauer’s major work ‘The World as Will and Representation’ is thoroughly described. Finally the book discusses the impact of Schopenhauer on Nietzsche, Wagner, Wittgenstein and others.

Schopenhauer : A Very Short Introduction does a good job of describing the ideas and importance of Schopenhauer.

[Arjen · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the Laughing Buddha is all mirth and bellyfuls of bliss, Schopenhauer might well be his gloomy cousin from the west—the Frowning Buddha.

I bring this up because Schopenhauer’s philosophy carries a thread of Buddhist influence, alongside elements drawn from Hinduism, Plato, and Kant. This short introduction's commentary seems to criticise this syncreticism, but I immensely respect Schopenhauer's conviction to assimilate philosophies of such different kinds. Surely Schopenhauer was on the right track.

On the right track, yes, yet often missing the mark. The abstract Schopenhauer-blueprint (including the will, object/subject, Representation as illusion) is great, but when "Schopie" begins to connect and categorize these ideas, they lose their strength. His attempts at psychology are easily overshadowed. Not to mention the obvious criticisms around extreme pessimism and sexism.

[Arthur Jaray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schopenhauer is a strange dude.

[Alex]

estes alemães vão avariar-me o cérebro

[Kendall Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good introduction. Helped me understand Schopenhauer’s thought as well as how he has been received by others.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best VSIs I've read. The only VSI that has come close to this was Peter Singer on.. Hegel and Marx, which will make Schopenhauer very sad indeed. There is a comprehensiveness of philosophical occupation, lucidity of ideas, and connective matrix of context, that often seems like asking for too much from a VSI making me feel guilty about whiny complainy 2-3 star reviews but then somehow get served up like in this book here, without any seeming correlation with the complexity and vastness of the topic at hand. That Schopenhauer was a 'seminal' thinker comes across so clearly in this overview, bringing into the European zeitgeist strikingly original ideas and the language needed to communicate difficult phenomenological paradoxes that make for the most interesting and compelling philosophy of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud and Jung.

It's interesting to me that this famously miserable, gloomy and pessimistic man came across as none of these things. It is possible the VSI has distilled a idea-centric version of the man that is therefore unfettered by his negativity, but I find the more interesting possibility the fact that cultural relativism of the industrialized developed West added a layer of pessimism atop ideas that an Oriental like myself fails to find. Raised on a diet of karma, nirvana, maya, atman, undesirable reincarnation and final release from existence, the 2 big symptoms of his pessimism (life is suffering, non-existence is preferable, this is the worst possible world) seem eminently a matter of fact to me, worthy of neither optimism nor pessimism labels. With the benefit of evolutionary psychology, genetics, and neuroscience, we have the luxury of validating Schopenhauer's ideas of objectified will and putting to rest the perception that these ideas are pessimistic gateway drugs to nihilism. If anything, Schopenhauer's anti-romantic philosophy of consciousness is so much easier to reconcile with modern anthropology than the optimism of Hegel/Marx putting the human species on a special pedestal destined for divine ends, that it is surprising he and Nietzsche are more closely associated with the Nazi cultural phenomenon than Hegel and Marx are.

Notes
Quite amazing how recent blogposts are prescient of concepts from this book: Existence must contain suffering, better not to have existed at all. Meseeks.

Would be cool to have a genealogy of philosophy, showing Mendelian recessive and dominant genes that combine to form various philosophies. Schopenhauer + ? = Nietzsche. Hegel + ? = Marx. ? -> Hegel + Schopenhauer.

Kant: difference between empirical world and thing in itself. Part of world that follows cause effect etc, is known to us as empirical (appearance)

Schopenhauer accepted former (representation) and clarified latter (will).

Conflated ding an sich with platonic form

Leibniz: there are no self standing things. All have reason.

Four sufficient reasons: physical (causal). Logical. Math properties. Motive/moral.

We don't perceive space or time, only matter and change in matter.

Whole world as wille zum Leben, blind striving. To preserve and propagate

He says will is not force. But is it inertia?

Judgment reason perception are all representation. Will is bodily motive, drive, striving.

Body is just objectified will. Teeth and intestine are objectified hunger. Hebitald are objectified sexual impulse.

Subject knows. Object is known. So nject not part of the world. Kant's apperception. Know that alone to be Brahman and not what they here worship

Intellect, sighted old man, on strong shoulders of the will. Who's in charge?

Repression: Will has certain desires. Intellect doesn't want to accept because ashamed, dissonance.

Madness: Intellect wants to process knowledge. Will doesn't allow. gaps are arbitrarily filled.

Kant on sublime tragedy: watch danger from a safe place. Schop: no true satisfaction in life, so not worth attachment.

Emotions tend to be about something. But in music we can grasp emotion directly, without any representation.

Will leads to striving. Lack. Suffering. Pain which is positive, leads to satisfaction a neutral negative proportional to the pain and suffering endured. No will without lack.

Worst possible world. Arranged to be capable of continuing. Worse world would not continue to exist, hence we're the worst.

Since all desire is mediated by the will, we oscillate between suffering (lack) and temporary satisfaction. Can there be pleasure if we dissociate desire from will such that there is no lack?

Aesthetic experience as separating intellect from the will and approaching objective pleasure

All of us are objectified will. But there is possibility of true knowledge, disconnected from will: Mobius strip of duality. We are behavior-machines. Then our subjective mind became smart enough to observe patterns from this behavior, thus mind body duality was born. Then superego, as many minds working together creates patterns we call society and sociology, but these are still only patterns of the will. Then we extracted patterns of behavior where will has the lowest hold, like art and aesthetic experience. We then extracted patterns out of art and other will-free actions, and found to our dismay, that they followed natural principles that underpinned the will. The last turtle on the back of the first.

The true province of genius is perceptive imagination not conceptual thinking. Art structured around a proposition or by rational plan is dead, thus David Lynch vs MCU or any preachy art.

3 ethical incentives: egoism, malice, and compassion, present in varying degrees to give motives and action

'materialism is the philosophy of the subject that forgets to take account of itself'.

I do not consciously decide what I wish to happen in a particular situation, but at a certain outcome I feel 'a jubilant, irresistible gladness, diffused over my whole being ... to my own astonishment

this longing and this pain of love cannot draw their material from the needs of an ephemeral individual. On the contrary, they are the sighs of the spirit of the species ... The species alone has infinite life, and is therefore capable of infinite desire, infinite satisfaction, and infinite sufferings. But these are here imprisoned in the narrow breast of a mortal; no wonder, therefore, when such a breast seems ready to burst, and can find no expression for the infinite rapture or infinite pain with which it is filled.

When Kant later tries to show how ethics requires an idea of God, Schopenhauer is reminded of a conjuror who, to our great surprise, pulls out of the hat something which he had planted there all along

The language in which Kant speaks here has biblical overtones, and, to the atheist Schopenhauer, the very idea of an absolute command either trades surreptitiously on the assumption of an absolute being who may issue it, or it is unfounded.

individuation to be 'mere phenomenon' rather than ultimately part of reality.

the conception of the world as composed of separate individuals is Maya - 'i.e. illusion, deception, phantasm, mirage' (B, 209), while knowledge of the deeper, more correct, non-individuating view is expressed in the Sanskrit tat tvam asi: this art thou

they will, they know what they will, and they strive after this with enough success to protect them from despair, and enough failure to preserve them from boredom and its consequences.

The first, the affirmation of the will to life, is the outlook of someone who would, as it were, stand on the earth with 'firm, strong bones':

At the end of The World as Will and Representation he writes not of 'those who have denied the will', but of 'those in whom the will has turned and denied itself'

Aesthetic contemplation, artistic genius, a life of philanthropy and justice, asceticism, and renunciation of the will, all are supreme values awaiting some human individuals, at least. The individual who escapes from the will achieves nothing less than 'salvation', which seems to be a state whose value is unassailable. All of this is true; but it conflicts with 'pessimism' only if you think pessimism is the view that nothing is of any value at all. It does not conflict with Schopenhauer's views that non-existence would have been preferable and that the world is the worst possible world.

To read Nietzsche without a knowledge of Schopenhauer is to lose a recurring subtext and one of the key points of orientation in his often bewildering progress.

[Imaginarium · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, a decent book. The author presents a nice progression of Schopenhauer's thought, starting from his doctoral dissertation (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason), which is fundamental to understanding his entire system, then going through papers on ethics and freedom of the will, before delving into The World as Will and Representation. The arguments are laid out fairly clearly.

However, as other reviewers noticed, Janaway is way too harsh in his opinions towards Schopenhauer, going as far as to say that his system is "untenable"! It's fine to make known the points with which philosophers struggle with and don't accept, or some which are considered to be errors by today's scholars, but surely there are better ways than this. I think it would be better to inspire the reader to go deeper into Schopenhauer's philosophy to discover what other great figures mentioned at the very end of the book saw in it, without frequently claiming that the system "doesn't work".

The concept of "Will" is not explained to my satisfaction, as there is a debate whether it should be understood as a physicalist force or something like energy from physics or as a minimally conscious drive. The former view seems to be taken by Bryan Magee and Christopher Janaway, the latter by Julian Young and Frederick C. Beiser, as far as I understand at least. This is a very subtle point, but it's very important.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Operari sequitur esse.

What gives to everything tragic the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them.

Every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its craving, set a final goal to its demands, and fill the bottomless pit of its heart.

Everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated, or recognized as an illusion.

Nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schopenhauer covered quite a lot of ground. Some, I find hard to assess, perhaps because I lack access to his predecessors in Indian philosophy. The parts which strike me as most original and persuasive is his aesthetics. His insights into psychology must have seemed quite shocking in their time, but they make little impression today for the simple reason that they have become conventional.

For all of Schopenhauer's professed commitment to rationalism, he does at times indulge in a kind of mysticism. He'd be a stronger philosopher if he were to consider his subject in the context of man's natural endowments.

[Reeham Soliimann · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب موجز عن الفيلسوف الألماني آرتور شوبنهاور، يعرض لحياته ولأهم ما قدمه من أفكار فلسفية كان لمؤلَفَه العالم إرادةً وتمثلًا النصيب الأكبر منها، إذ يضعنا إزاء فكرتين: التمثل وهو ظاهر الوجود، والإرادة التي هي جوهر كل الأشياء والمتحكم الأساس الذي يعمل وفقًا لطبيعته دون هدف، فهي بالنسبة له إرادة عمياء، تتجلى في أفعالنا كما في تتجلى في طبيعة العالم. ويشاركنا كريستوفر مختلف آراء شوبانهاور حول الفن والأخلاق والشخصية الإنسانية، كذلك أفكار الوجود والعدم والموت والخلاص، وغيرها بما في ذلك موقفه ��لمتشائم..
كتاب متميز صادر عن المركز القومي للترجمة تأليف كريستوفر جاناواي وترجمة سعيد توفيق. 🤍

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janaway's introduction to Schopenhauer is a great outline of an extremely influential but difficult 19th century philosopher. Like the other Very Short Introductions, Janaway gives a brief biography and outline of Schopenhauer's work. He also illustrates the enormous influence that Schopenhauer had on late 19th century though, especially on Nietzsche and Freud (the latter concealing his intellectual debt to old Arthur, according to Janaway.)

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please give my review a helpful vote on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/review/R1OGZFO...


I came to this book with a particular interest and a set of expectations.

My interest was in attempting to determine what, if any, effect Schopenhauer had on forming the philosophy of Adolf Hitler. Numerous books attest to Hitler's early interest in Schopenhauer. Hitler carried a volume of Schopenhauer with him through World War I and would quote long passages of Schopenhauer throughout his life. Ernst Hanfstaengl affirms that Hitler turned to Nietzsche only during the 1920s. Yet, I've never seen anything indicated how Schopenhauer played a role in Hitler's thinking. (Hanfstaengl does note that Schopenhauer actually had an ameliorating effect on Hitler, compared to Nietzsche, because of Schopenhauer's Buddhist tendencies.

The prejudices I had were that Schopenhauer was a pessimistic philosopher of minor importance compared to Nietzsche.

This book offers a good overview of Schopenhauer's life and philosophy. The discussion of Schopenhauer's philosophy is hard to follow (I listened to this as an audiobook), but that has more to do with Schopenhauer's philosophy, which the author acknowledges as being muddled and incoherent at times. Schopenhauer's most famous work divided reality between "will," the universe of subjectivity, and "representation," everything known in the outside world. "Will" is a difficult concept at best in that Schopenhauer seems to make the immaterial material:

"This account of acts of will is a decisive step for Schopenhauer, since it places the human subject firmly within the material world. If striving towards ends is setting the body in motion, then, while we will, we are rooted in the world of objects. Schopenhauer thus cannot conceive of a subject of will as being anything other than bodily. He also makes the converse claim that our bodily existence is nothing other than willing. Whenever we undergo feelings of fear or desire, attraction or repulsion, whenever the body itself behaves according to the various unconscious functions of nourishment, reproduction, or survival, Schopenhauer discerns will manifesting itself – but in a new and extended sense. What he wants to show is that ordinary conscious willing is no different in its basic nature from the many other processes which set the body, or parts of it, in motion. Admittedly, willing to act involves conscious thinking – it involves the body’s being caused to move by motives in the intellect – but it is, for Schopenhauer, not different in principle from the beating of the heart, the activation of the saliva glands, or the arousal of the sexual organs. All can be seen as an individual organism manifesting will, in Schopenhauer’s sense. The body itself is will; more specifically, it is a manifestation of will to life (Wille zum Leben), a kind of blind striving, at a level beneath that of conscious thought and action, which is directed towards the preservation of life, and towards engendering life anew."

Will then becomes the "thing in itself," and a single thing. Human life is a mere representation; the Will is everything real and death simply ends the individual life but the Will continues.

This is abstruse stuff.

Schopenhauer's pessimism was a consequence of his belief that suffering was the dispositive feature of human existence. Humans suffered in having unfulfilled wants and desires. However, fulfilling these desires and wants did no more than provide a momentary relief from suffering before some new unfulfilled desire emerged.

Schopenhauer developed a theory of aesthetics because aesthetic suspended the will of the subject. I think it may be this aspect of Schopenhauer that may have interested Hitler. Apparently, Hitler liked to talk about art. This seems like a natural fit.

For me, the most interesting part of the book was the last chapter on Schopenhauer's influences. Schopenhauer did not start a school, like Kant or Hegel, but he was extremely popular wth Germans and Austrians until about the 1920s. Wittgenstein read Schopenhauer and incorporated some of Schopenhauer's views into his philosophy. Likewise, Wagner incorporated Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook into Tristan and Ysolde. Freud claimed that he didn't read Schopenhauer, who had anticipated his views on sublimation and sexuality, but Schopenhauer's philosophical concepts were simply "in the air." For Austrians of Wittgenstein's age - and Hitler went to school with Wittgenstein - reading Schopenhauer counted as part of what it meant to be a literate Austrian, which probably explains Hitler's interest.

This is a book with narrow appeal to those with a particular interest. It is well-written and does everything it promises by providing a "very short introduction" to the subject.

[Montgomery I. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's always worthwhile to read the man with the 🐩 even if just for enjoyment. Still, this introduction is hard to digest, at least the first half of it. Make sure you read about Kant first or you lose the most important insights.

The author is both very sympathetic and very critical. I liked this very much. Nice touch, good balance. As I mentioned before, the first half is harder to digest. This is not only because it introduces the more abstract foundations but also because it could be written more clearly.

If you want to go a step further, read The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee, too.

German idealism usually gives me a hard time but Schopenhauer is special. He has a very original take on ethics (also with respect to animals) and, for me personally, he serves *indirectly* as *the* interpreter of and link to Indian philosophy, opening the door to cryptic texts a westerner can barely grasp (e.g. all vedic texts but also buddhist ones). Naturally therefore, I think both have not given enough space in the book.

I think it is undeniable that Schopenhauers connection to Indian philosophy is strong but only mentioned very briefly at some occasions, without giving it much consideration. This is unfortunate, as it might make sense of quite a few non-obvious or puzzling conclusions at which Schopenhauer arrived. I was particularly surprised that at the end of ch5, where the author discusses Schopenhauers take on the self and the world as one. The author missed the obvious resemblence to the vedic concept of Atman (loosely the universal self) and Brahman (the universal principle, the one that is). Both are one and the same in the advaita vedanta. Why is this important? Because we know Schopenhauer read the Baghavad Gita and the Upanishads before he wrote The World as Will and Representation. If you know that (and the reasons for this non-dualist view), you will be less puzzled than Janaway (even if you disagree). Moreover, Janaway mentions Maya and the illusion of duality, but dharma and moksha are not really discussed. These concepts are crucial, however, as they make sense Schopenhauers ethics in the light of Buddhist (suffering/dissatisfaction due to never ending/unfulfilled desire) and hindu thought alike. This is important because it also makes sense of Schopenhauers denial to the Will (to reach moksha). In fact, to me, Schopenhauer sometimes only makes sense with the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita in mind. At the same time, both these texts also only make sense to me thanks to Schopenhauer. They complement each other. This is most striking, as Schopenhauer still arrived at his conclusions in a train of thought that is in the tradition of European philosophy - mainly Kant, Berkeley, and Plato. And still he found his view mirrored in the ancient south Asian scriptures.

[Charles Remington · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had come across various snippets in articles and books about the philosopher Schopenhauer and was intrigued but did not want to become involved in reading through weighty tomes on the subject. Christopher Janaway’s book is a perfect introduction and covers Schopenhauer’s life and works to the sort of depth that a layman like me can understand. That is not to say that the book is simplistic - far from it. Some of the passages and extracts from the philosopher’s published works are challenging, thought provoking, sometimes counterintuitive, often taking some time to absorb or even understand.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy is decidedly downbeat. When he talks about the balance between suffering and contentment he states: This is the life of almost all men, they will, they know that they will, and they strive after this with enough success to protect them from despair, and enough failure to preserve them from boredom and its consequences. As Schopenhauer sees it constant suffering is essential to all life.
This having been said I found this philosopher’s view of the world strangely comforting. But in conclusion, I can do no better than finish with Mr Janaway’s excellent words on the subject: Schopenhauer’s arguments for these extreme pessimistic doctrines fail to convince. However, his pessimism succeeds in advancing something less extreme and wholly believable which is to think that we are meant to suffer. That we somehow deserve happiness or that the world owes us the fulfilment of our purposes is a mistake – as is also the belief that being alive is simply a good thing, whatever it brings. His protracted, moving discussions on the vanity or worthlessness (Nichtigkeit) of life enable us to escape from these optimistic delusions into a view which is harder, but arguably more humane: that life itself has no purpose, that suffering is always part of it, and that its end may sometimes be welcome.
Schopenhauer - A Very Short Introduction is a lucid, intelligent view of the works of a philosopher who influenced many who followed him including Nietzsche, Freud and Jung. I considered it a worthwhile and rewarding read and do not hesitate to recommend it.

[David Allen Hines · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading the philosophy of Nietzsche and others for many years and even took some courses in college on him, but I had never read Schopenhauer, and I can't even recall college courses on him being offered. Having read this short introduction, I am very sorry I had not read Schopenhauer before I got into Nietzsche and others. Shopenhauer was once well-read and known but has fallen into obscurity in recent decades, and that is a shame. This book makes it clear that while his overall philosophy has some gaping concerns and was not really developed into a school then or now, his style of writing and some fundamental issues he posed, such as atheism, and that the sexual motivation was a key of human behavior, influenced many to come. And unlike Nietzsche, or Kant, who can be very hard to read, Schopenhauer is very readable and interesting. His World as Will and Representation as quoted in this overview, was very interesting and I now want to read it! I was sorry to see I had some difficulty in actually finding the two volumes and even in paperback, were $20 each, but I am looking forward to the read. Nietzsche famously disavowed Schopenhauer, saying he was wrong in everything, but in his Untimely Meditations actually wrote an entire essay on Schopenhauer that was more about how his philosophy than Schopenhauer's but clearly showing the huge influence. Schopenhauer also criticized Kant, and influenced Wagner, Wittgenstein and even Freud. If you want a better insight into where Nietzsche and others came from, read Shopenhaurer. This small guidebook is very illuminating and even if you don't want to read The World as Will and Representation, this guide will give you great understanding of Shopenhauer and how he influenced many others who followed him. After reading this and some of Will, I am sorry he is not more read and commonly available today and I wish I had read him years ago.

[Niall O'Leary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as a bit of a refresher. I don't accept Schopenhauer's philosophy uncritically, but I do like it. My natural antipathy to Plato and his Forms notwithstanding, I find his pugnacious development of Kant stimulating and thought-provoking. And I have a lot of sympathy for a lot of his conclusions. Which is more than can be said for Christopher Janaway, the author of this 'very short introduction'.

Janaway's constant refrain, stated explicitly and implicitly throughout, that 'Schopenhauer's metaphysics is not credible as a system', undercuts his whole discussion. It's hard to take anything seriously when the author obviously doesn't. Indeed it's clear to me that he'd much rather be discussing Nietzsche (whom he repeatedly references). Given that this is necessarily a short introduction, there shouldn't be space here for too much of a critique. Yet the author constantly feels obliged to dismiss before he's even adequately explained.

What makes this so egregious though, is that I don't think Janaway fully grasps the concept of the Will as articulated by Schopenhauer, or perhaps he just wilfully refuses to. This may be because he doesn't seem to actually like Schopenhauer. Rather than engage on the philosopher's own terms, Janaway seems to reject out of hand some of the central tenets ('he can't mean that', etc.). There are obviously problems with Schopenhauer's philosophy, but they are not necessarily those Janaway notes.

All that being said and given its brevity, I suppose this is a good overview in so far as it goes. However, Janaway's distaste may put off anyone who doesn't know Schopenhauer's work to begin with. Just read one of the many abridged translations of 'The World as Will and Representation' instead. Schopenhauer is not only a good writer, but a clear one. Janaway wants to be somewhere else. Irksome, very irksome.