A Dose of Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher during the halcyon days of German philosophy.
Kant, Fichte, Hegel: those guys.
As you can tell, every day for Art was a bad-hair day.
This may have colored his thinking, but we will save that discussion for another day.
Art tried to compete with Hegel at the same university.
Five students showed up for Art’s classes.
Hegel’s were SRO.
So, Art dropped out of “academic philosophy” to do his own thing.
His rebellion is our gain.
The amazing thing about AS is that he wrote in a manner that anyone can understand.
Ok, well, maybe not ANYONE, but he was much more accessible than his contemporaries.
Compared to Hegel and Kant, he made a big left turn from the “philosophy of obscurity”, which was the zeitgeist at the time.
He wrote a book, which I commend to you, called “The Wisdom of Life”, which is chock full of more goodies than I can share here.
A few excerpts:
[The wisdom of life means the] ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest possible amount of pleasure and success; an art the theory of which may be called Eudaemonology, for it teaches us how to lead a happy existence.
… the wise in all ages have always said the same thing, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way too acted alike, and done just the opposite; and so it will continue. For, as Voltaire says, we shall leave this world as foolish and as wicked as we found it on our arrival.
Compared with genuine personal advantages, such as a great mind or a great heart, all the privileges of rank or birth, even of royal birth, are but as kings on the stage, to kings in real life.
The happiness we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings. The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it. Since everything which exists or happens for a man exists only in his consciousness and happens for it alone, the most essential thing for a man is the constitution of this consciousness, which is in most cases far more important than the circumstances which go to form its contents.
An intellectual man in complete solitude has excellent entertainment in his own thoughts and fancies, while no amount of diversity or social pleasure, theatres, excursions and amusements, can ward off boredom from a dullard.
More?