The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~32,600 words · 155 passages
Cite this work
- APAArthur Schopenhauer. (n.d.). The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-essays-of-arthur-schopenhauer-on-human-nature
- MLAArthur Schopenhauer. "The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-essays-of-arthur-schopenhauer-on-human-nature.
- ChicagoArthur Schopenhauer. The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-essays-of-arthur-schopenhauer-on-human-nature.
What it is about
On character, freedom, government and the basis of morality, in short form.
Context and history
The underlying thesis is that character is innate and does not change: what changes with the years is knowledge, not will. His whole psychology follows from this, and much of Freud's. A note on the edition: Essays of Schopenhauer is not a book Schopenhauer wrote under that name. It is a selection of chapters from Parerga und Paralipomena (1851) made by the English editor, under a title of the editor's own. The text is Schopenhauer's; the book is not. This is an old English translation, in the public domain. The German original is also in the catalogue, and is what should be cited.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Truths of the physical order may possess much external significance, but internal significance they have none. The latter is the privilege of intellectual and moral truths, which are concerned with the objectivation of the will in its highest stages, whereas physical truths are concerned with it in its lowest. For example, if we could establish the truth of what up till now is only a conjecture, namely, that it is the action of the sun which produces thermoelectricity at the equator; that this produces terrestrial magnetism; and that this magnetism, again, is the cause of the _aurora borealis_, these would be truths externally of great, but internally of little, significance. On the other hand, examples of internal significance are furnished by all great and true philosophical systems; by the catastrophe of every good tragedy; nay, even by the observation of human conduct in the extreme manifestations of its morality and immorality, of its good and its evil character. For all these are expressions of that reality which takes outward shape as the world, and which, in the highest stages of its objectivation, proclaims its innermost nature. To say that the world has only a physical and not a moral significance is the greatest and most pernicious of all errors, the fundamental blunder, the real perversity of mind and temper; and, at bottom, it is doubtless the tendency which faith personifies as Anti-Christ. Nevertheless, in spite of all religions--and they are systems which one and all maintain the opposite, and seek to establish it in their mythical way--this fundamental error never becomes quite extinct, but raises its head from time to time afresh, until universal indignation compels it to hide itself once more. Yet, however certain we may feel of the moral significance of life and the world, to explain and illustrate it, and to resolve the contradiction between this significance and the world as it is, form a task of gre