The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Literature
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~34,900 words · 166 passages
Cite this work
- APAArthur Schopenhauer. (n.d.). The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Literature. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-essays-of-arthur-schopenhauer-the-art-of-literature
- MLAArthur Schopenhauer. "The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Literature." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-essays-of-arthur-schopenhauer-the-art-of-literature.
- ChicagoArthur Schopenhauer. The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Literature. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-essays-of-arthur-schopenhauer-the-art-of-literature.
What it is about
On writing and on reading: style, authors, criticism, and why reading too much does harm.
Context and history
'When we read, another person thinks for us.' The essay on style remains one of the best ever written in any language, and the tirade against university philosophers still stings. 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.
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. While the one have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, the others want money; and so they write, for money. Their thinking is part of the business of writing. They may be recognized by the way in which they spin out their thoughts to the greatest possible length; then, too, by the very nature of their thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced, vacillating; again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything straight out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper. This sometimes happens with the best authors; now and then, for example, with Lessing in his _Dramaturgie_, and even in many of Jean Paul's romances. As soon as the reader perceives this, let him throw the book away; for time is precious. The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say. Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not t