The Book of Schopenhauer 1 · Written by himself, from The World as Will and Representation and the Parerga
Arthur Schopenhauer, born at Danzig in 1788, died at Frankfurt in 1860. He finished The World as Will and Representation in 1818, at thirty; for decades it sold almost nothing. Lecturing at Berlin he set his hours deliberately against Hegel’s, drew almost no students, and gave it up. In 1851 the Parerga and Paralipomena appeared and made him suddenly famous, at sixty-three. He did not believe in God, and he is the first philosopher in the West to have read the Indian scriptures seriously: he kept a Latin version of the Upanishads on his desk and read in it at night. This volume rests on what he wrote himself, not on another man’s record of him. He set up the Will as the ground of everything. That assertion was not reached by looking: from verse 13 of chapter two he says himself that the step is taken by analogy and is not a second seeing. The Order neither deletes it nor sets it forward — it sets it down and marks where the inferring begins. What is taken from him is the several daily matters he drew out of it: representation, satisfaction, solitude, compassion, reading. He was not a good man: he pushed a seamstress down a flight of stairs and paid her monthly for the rest of her life. The Order records it and does not dress it up.
1.1"The world is my representation" — that is the first sentence of my book.
1.2People hear it and suppose I am saying the world does not exist. I am not saying that.
1.3I am saying that the world you see is the world after it has passed through this apparatus of yours.
1.4The eye has the eye’s shape, the ear the ear’s. Whatever comes in has been sorted once into that shape.
1.5The red you see does not grow on the thing. It comes into being between you and it.
1.6The scripture has a sentence for the same fact: how you ask is what you take. (cf. The Highest Covenant 2.1)
1.7I push it one step further. It is not only that your way of asking decides what you take — the apparatus is sorting for you even when you are not asking.
1.8What is the use of this? The use is among other people.
1.9Two men go through the same event and afterwards each tells it differently. Bystanders say: one of them must be lying.
1.10Usually neither is lying. One event went into two different sets of apparatus, and two events came out.
1.11Grasp that and you will quarrel with people a good many fewer times.
1.12You need not begin with "which of the two is the true one." You can begin with: how does his apparatus sort?
1.13This does not mean anyone may say anything. What is outside the apparatus is still there.
1.14It means that what you have in your hand is always the sorted version.
1.15A man who knows his copy is sorted, and a man who thinks his copy is the original, live two different lives.