“A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.”
by Arthur Schopenhauer
Re-framed: Schopenhauer not as a pessimist system to be studied but as a teacher Nietzsche thanked. Twelve lessons drawn from his life and remarks, plus a practicum of fifteen exercises the pupil performs. The 413-remark digest, the pendulum, the hedgehogs, the Frankfurt bachelor's day, the Upanishads by his bed, the poodle Atma - now numbered as lessons in a curriculum.
tags: philosophy, pessimism, will, schopenhauer, nietzsche, educator, erzieher, untimely, pendulum, atma, frankfurt, parerga, upanishads, hedgehogs
UNZEITGEMÄSSE BETRACHTUNGEN · III
Schopenhauer as Educator
Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you the original sense and basic stuff of your being - something fundamentally uneducable and in any case difficult of access, bound up and lamed. Your educators can be only your liberators.- § 1
The page that follows treats Schopenhauer not as a system to be understood but as a teacher to be apprenticed to. The twelve panels are lessons; the final section is the pupil’s exercises. Take heart again. This was a man.
Twelve lessons, drawn from the master’s life and remarks. One practicum, in fifteen exercises, drawn from what Nietzsche said the lessons were good for. Read in any order. Practise in your own.
413 remarks across The World as Will and Representation, Parerga und Paralipomena, and the miscellaneous essays. Sourced from Project Gutenberg, filterable by theme & by work.
“A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.”
- ARTHUR -
DANZIG · 1788 - 1860 · FRANKFURT
Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
The world is my representation.
DIE WELT ALS WILLE UND VORSTELLUNG · PARERGA UND PARALIPOMENA
Danzig, 1788. Frankfurt, 1860. The will is a blind pressure in everything that is; the intellect is a small lamp the will carries for its own use. The world is your representation, and the world is what is left when representation is withdrawn. He worked at this argument for forty-two years and very few people were paying attention until the last decade. He was right anyway.
14 facts about the bachelor of Frankfurt - the merchant’s son who refused, the lecturer Hegel ignored, the man with the poodle by the Main.
Danzig to Frankfurt by way of a carriage, a canal, a salon, and an empty lecture room. Click any scene to open the longer passage.
"Life swings like a pendulum, back and forth, between pain and boredom."
Wanting hurts. Getting bores. The pendulum never stops - only, very rarely, in the moments of disinterested aesthetic contemplation (the painting, the sonata, the river), the will lets go of you for long enough that you forget which side it was on.
From Parerga, II, §396. A herd huddles for warmth; the quills do their work; they back away; they freeze. The distance that eventually settles between them - close enough to share warmth, far enough to spare blood - is, for humans, called good manners.
A herd of hedgehogs all crouched together for warmth on a cold winter day; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to spread out again - only to suffer the cold. So they shifted back and forth until at last they discovered a tolerable distance, where they could best put up with one another.
Twelve from the chapter Psychologische Bemerkungen in Parerga und Paralipomena, vol. II (1851) - among the most-quoted single chapters in the German philosophical canon. Click any paragraph to open it.
Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds; the larger part - the depths - we know nothing of. Most of what passes between a man and a man, between a man and his work, between a man and his choice, is decided below this surface. The intellect, that small lamp the will carries for its purposes, is too dim to light the underwater part of the room.
- Parerga und Paralipomena, II, §315
The five names that recur in his prefaces and notebooks. Three he revered, two he held in open contempt; he wrote them all into the shape of his system whether they liked it or not.
der unvermeidliche Lehrer
The indispensable master. Without the Critique of Pure Reason there is no World as Will and Representation; the doctrine of phenomena and the thing-in-itself is the soil in which his entire system grows. The deepest debt I owe to any philosopher is to him; the deepest mistake is the one he forbade himself from naming, which I claim to have named - the will.
Five short notes - Hegel, Maya, Music, Pity, Reading. The other themes (Suicide; the indefensible essay On Women) are mentioned in the Particulars and left to be read in context.
Twenty-eight years in Frankfurt. One schedule. He resented anything that interrupted it - coachmen cracking whips above all.
Rises.
Cold sponge-bath, shave, coffee in his rooms.
Writes.
Three to four hours at the standing desk. The day’s philosophical work ends here.
Plays the flute.
Half an hour, mostly Rossini arias, badly. He was the first to admit it.
Dines at the Englischer Hof.
A long midday meal, alone or with one acquaintance. He could not bear small talk.
Reads the Times of London.
At a cafe, for an hour. He held that the world ought to be observed in a foreign language.
Walks along the Main with Atma.
From the Schöne Aussicht as far as the Untermainbrücke and back. In all weather.
Light supper, alone.
Bread, butter, fruit. He held that the digestion of the evening should not interfere with the digestion of the day.
The opera or the theatre.
Mostly the Frankfurt opera; mostly Rossini. He attended the same productions year after year.
Reads the Upanishads.
In the Latin of the Oupnek’hat (1801). Daily, for forty years.
Sleeps.
A single bed, no curtains, no companion. The poodle outside the door.
From 1814 onward he read Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin Oupnek’hat daily. Five passages he came back to; his marginal note for each is on the left-hand page.
A short ledger. The left column is what he read; the right column is who read him. The second column is, by some distance, the more consequential line of literary influence in modern thought.
at four o’clock, every afternoon, for nearly thirty years.
The schedule, for the last twenty-eight years of his life, did not change. Write till twelve. Dine alone at the Englischer Hof. Read the Times of London for an hour at the cafe. At four, he and the dog left the rooms by the Schöne Aussicht and walked along the Main as far as the Untermainbrücke and back. When a Hindu visitor mistook the dog’s name and asked him about it, he said: “She is the soul of the world. She is also a poodle.”
He died on the morning of 21 September 1860, sitting in his armchair by the open window, alone. The very last Atma outlived him. The will left his money to the surviving veterans of 1848. The pendulum, presumably, kept on.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI