The Logos Scripture · The Book of Schopenhauer
The Book of Schopenhauer 5 · 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.