The Book of Schopenhauer 4 · 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.
4.1What a man has divides into three: what he is, what he has, and what he is in the eyes of others.
4.2Of the three the first matters most, and most men attend only to the other two.
4.3What he is — his body, his temper, his head, and whether he can be alone.
4.4These go with him. Wherever he goes, they are there.
4.5What he has — money, a house, land. These have to be watched, have to be kept, and they run off.
4.6What he is in the eyes of others — reputation. This is the least secure of the three, because the whole of it grows inside other people’s heads.
4.7A man spends a frightening amount of himself on reputation. And not one part of it is located in him.
4.8Let me say something practical: health outweighs all other advantages put together.
4.9A healthy beggar is better off than a sick king. The saying sounds old. Fall properly ill once and you find out how hard it is.
4.10And one more, which men do not count as an ability and which is the largest one: being able to be alone.
4.11A man cannot bear solitude because the moment he is alone there is only himself left, and he finds there is not much there.
4.12So he goes to find company. He does not like those people. He is running from himself.
4.13To see how much there is inside a man, see how he does when he is by himself.
4.14I lived by this all my life. People called me unsociable.
4.15I did not argue. Being unsociable has one advantage: you never have to applaud people you do not like.