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mattinthebooks's review
2.0
This book would be so good if Schopenhauer had ever had one healthy relationship with a woman
the_weirdling's review
5.0
A collection of essays with Schopenhauer at his misanthropic best. Always insightful, even if you don’t always agree with him. Every essay is worth reading over and over, with the possible exception of “On Women”. Smart fellow though he was, Schopenhauer missed that every thing he described as negative attributes of women is just as likely because they were oppressed by a patriarchal system leaving women no other avenues of being and existence. And not because that’s “just the way women are”. You can tell he’s never been married or had daughters, and that his mother was a constant source of strife in his life.
ropey's review
It should be said that this was written when cracks and whips were still used and human rights were held in contention, so I won't exert too much censure on specific essays, especially On Women and On Noise. At least now I understand how he influenced Nietzsche so much.
maevefly's review
It should be said that this was written when cracks and whips were still used and human rights were held in contention, so I won't exert too much censure on specific essays, especially On Women and On Noise. At least now I understand how he influenced Nietzsche so much.
mattlikesbooks's review
2.0
This book would be so good if Schopenhauer had ever had one healthy relationship with a woman
thekeziamartins's review
2.0
Very shallow. I'm pretty much a pessimistic person and I was looking for a philosophical and deep look in this subject, I just found a bunch of complaining about things the author doesn't seem to know a lot about.
cimy's review
1.0
Holy crap never again.
For the first essays, I felt that this just wasn't for me, that I didn't have enough experience or training, time and patience to understand the thoughts and ideas.
But then I got to the essay on education, and I got it, and I could follow it. Not perfectly, bit good enough and it gave some interesting ideas.
But thennnn, I got to the essay on woman. I knew this essay was going to exist, before reading this. But holy crap, give "facts" with no backing and as statements that obviously true.
I understood every word and idea, so the problem with the essays were not my lack of knowledge or what have you, is just the author couldn't explain ideas and elaborate arguments in an understandable way, but rant he did very well.
Getting upset about the use of whips is understandable. When the upset comes from the noise the dumb people make not realising it affects the intellectuals a great deal... Hmm, great.
For the first essays, I felt that this just wasn't for me, that I didn't have enough experience or training, time and patience to understand the thoughts and ideas.
But then I got to the essay on education, and I got it, and I could follow it. Not perfectly, bit good enough and it gave some interesting ideas.
But thennnn, I got to the essay on woman. I knew this essay was going to exist, before reading this. But holy crap, give "facts" with no backing and as statements that obviously true.
I understood every word and idea, so the problem with the essays were not my lack of knowledge or what have you, is just the author couldn't explain ideas and elaborate arguments in an understandable way, but rant he did very well.
Getting upset about the use of whips is understandable. When the upset comes from the noise the dumb people make not realising it affects the intellectuals a great deal... Hmm, great.
banlishu24's review
funny
reflective
tense
medium-paced
4.5
I skipped On Women because it was too much for me. It was really awful. However overall this book was so interesting and I’m really glad to have read it. I’ll look at other books by Schopenhauer for sure.
schmidtmark56's review
3.0
Oh Schopie, you're more hit or miss than Nietzsche at his worst, you're more boringly chauvinistic... what are we gonna do with you? You sophomore, you wise-fool....
This small collection started off very strongly. The first few essays were gut punches to be sure. The first essay was deeply pessimistic about the present and how no matter how feeble it may be, it always conquers even the most profound past and clouds even the most planned future. With this in mind, is hedonism the only way to go? But that's also the greatest folly, since the present is ever passing away. We are stuck in a continual becoming and never being (plato). We're never happy, but ever striving after goals, and never happy when reaching goals. "Human life must be some kind of mistake: a compound of needs to satisfy"
We then briskly move to suicide and how Schopie doesn't see anything wrong with it and doesn't see any scriptural justification for being against it.... even though he later points out how one of the main points of Christianity is embracing suffering:
"The inmost kernel of Christianity is the truth that suffering—the Cross—is the real end and object of life. Hence Christianity condemns suicide as thwarting this end; whilst the ancient world, taking a lower point of view, held it in approval, nay, in honor."
There is a strange idea in that it's often been criminalized in the west, but since you can't imprison a dead body, it is kinda just a reputation destroyer (not getting a proper burial, not passing down money or property, etc.) I've also wondered about the legitimacy of this, and really don't know what to think about it. I find it interesting that S. claims the only valid secular argument against suicide is that it thwarts the attainment of the highest moral aims... but this artificially treats humans as if they live in bubbles and wouldn't devastate a whole host of people if they suddenly die. This I think is why it's often traditionally thought of as a selfish or cowardly thing to do, since it takes your pain and indiscriminately shoots it outward, nay, it is very discriminating, primarily hurting most those who care most or who are most dependent upon said suicide victim. Schopenhauer feels like an overeducated teenager at many times in these essays, and here especially. The other main place is his little tirade against "noise", especially people who crack whips (remember that this was the early 1800s). The only interesting point he made about noise (other than the obvious point that it has interrupted a good many philosophical or otherwise creative activities which ended up never coming to fruition as a result (or were dalayed)) was that it only negatively impacts those who are actually trying to achieve something. If you're just fooling around or otherwise non-intellectual, then you don't mind... frankly you'd be thankful for the distraction from your own boredom. He rips and tears into this in the longest section of the collection:
"Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within. Contrarily, if they are active within, they do not care to be dragged out of themselves; it disturbs and impedes their thoughts in a way that is often most ruinous to them"
"I am not surprised that some people are bored when they find themselves alone; for they cannot laugh if they are quite by themselves. The very idea of it seems folly to them."
I love that Schopie also understood this: only boring people can be bored. If you don't brim with creativity or thoughts or dreams or somesuch other constant mental activity, I find it hard to relate to you.
It's also in this largest section that we get some cool, loosly-related pessimistic/elitist/edgy observations like the following:
"For if a man shows that he despises you, he signifies at least this much regard for you, that he wants to let you know how little he appreciates you"
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
"There is no doubt that many a man owes his good fortune in life solely to the circumstance that he has a pleasant way of smiling, and so wins the heart in his favor."
"For a man may have the most excellent judgment in all other matters, and yet go wrong in those which concern himself; because here the will comes in and deranges the intellect at once. Therefore let a man take counsel of a friend. A doctor can cure everyone but himself; if he falls ill, he sends for a colleague. "
"Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection"
"Hence, if a man suddenly finds himself in an unusually happy position, it will in most cases result in his being sympathetic and kind. But if he has never been in any other than a happy position, or this becomes his permanent state, the effect of it is often just the contrary"
On this last point, there's a decent amount of exposition, but it boils down to the fact that the less-refined one is (more brutish), the more easily satiated that person is, and the more likely to be happy. The more refined one is, the fuller experience of reality you have, the less you can subsume to illusions and take easy answers as correct. The base of pessimism is a childish "suffering = bad" ethic, and from this false start, it's assumed that anti-natalism (which is expounded most explicitly in the last section) follows logically. The interesting thing however, is that the pessimist (even with their unjustifiable suffering-ethic) is faced with a wonderful catch 22: we know for a fact that poorer simpler people are happier, and we also know that richer people suffer less….. so what even is the argument from suffering? The pessimistic point is self defeating. If suffering is the ultimate evil, but the unthinking masses don't have a bad time of it, what's the problem? That's actually an argument against education more than an argument against existence.
This is not to mention how the pessimistic argument is inherently incoherent. "Future generations" and "the unborn" literally do not exist yet and cannot feel, thus it philosophically makes no sense to talk about them being "thankful" or "being better off" for not being born. The only coherent thing to discuss is those who are living. And the facts are thus: it is empirically the best time in history to live, and a great way to make the world a better place is to raise your own children with your own values.
Speaking of children, the second largest essay in this collection was "On Women." Although it's uncomfortable for anyone but thoroughbred sexists to read this one, it actually was a sort of lesser "Antichrist," one where Christianity's supra-rational nature is exposed for what it is: something no humans could have invented. Really the only original/interesting point made in the entire section was the rise of emotional politics (along with relativism and other new endeavors) which coincided with the enfranchisement and more-widespread education of women. The rest of his statements prove my point: that Christianity is the true feminism, and modern feminism is largely a hedonistic quagmire.
Schopie recoils at the "over-valuing of women" in Christianity and in western nations:
"This is just the view which the ancients took of woman, and the view which people in the East take now; and their judgment as to her proper position is much more correct than ours, with our old French notions of gallantry and our preposterous system of reverence—that highest product of Teutonico-Christian stupidity. These notions have served only to make women more arrogant and overbearing"
"But in the West, the woman, and especially the lady, finds herself in a false position; for woman, rightly called by the ancients, sexus sequior, is by no means fit to be the object of our honor and veneration, or to hold her head higher than man and be on equal terms with him"
"The laws of marriage prevailing in Europe consider the woman as the equivalent of the man—start, that is to say, from a wrong position. In our part of the world where monogamy is the rule, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties. Now, when the laws gave women equal rights with man, they ought to have also endowed her with a masculine intellect."
There's a repeated claim that women are inferior intellectually, and he even goes so far as to wonder why there aren't any great works of art by women... but then he forgets the obvious fact that many women either never had access to education or to publishing/patrons. The more I think about it, Schopie is basically a smelly 4chan user. He even goes so far as to completely miss the point of marriage:
"And so, since every man needs many women, there is nothing fairer than to allow him, nay, to make it incumbent upon him, to provide for many women. This will reduce woman to her true and natural position as a subordinate being; and the lady—that monster of European civilization and Teutonico-Christian stupidity—will disappear from the world"
"amongst all nations and in all ages, down to the Lutheran Reformation, concubinage was permitted; nay, that it was an institution which was to a certain extent actually recognized by law, and attended with no dishonor. It was only the Lutheran Reformation that degraded it from this position. "
And like the true fedora-tipping loser that he is, he claims he's actually the "reasonable one" who is supporting some sort of "middle ground":
"In India, no woman is ever independent, but in accordance with the law of Mamu, she stands under the control of her father, her husband, her brother or her son. It is, to be sure, a revolting thing that a widow should immolate herself upon her husband's funeral pyre; but it is also revolting that she should spend her husband's money with her paramours"
He makes pragmatic complaints that we should have polygamy so that there aren't so many unemployed and poor women.... which somehow makes more sense than, you know, educating women and making them self-sufficient when single.... Oh well. It seems that Christianity is just too equal for the chauvinists and too traditional and bifurcated for the feminists. People want to have their gods and eat them too.
There's honestly not too much more to say. I remembered the parable of the two chinamen from ancient years:
Two Chinamen traveling in Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them did nothing but study the machinery, and he succeeded in finding out how it was worked. The other tried to get at the meaning of the piece in spite of his ignorance of the language. Here you have the Astronomer and the Philosopher.
Which is a little too pessimistic for me but yeah.... I also discovered a wonderful allegory shortly after that one:
The Cathedral in Mayence is so shut in by the houses that are built round about it, that there is no one spot from which you can see it as a whole. This is symbolic of everything great or beautiful in the world. It ought to exist for its own sake alone, but before very long it is misused to serve alien ends.
And besides making a similar claim to Nietzsche's Antichrist (Christianity is the denial of the will to life, the denial of this world), the book ends on a great note:
"when these faults appear in others, it is our follies and vices that we behold. They are the shortcomings of humanity, to which we belong; whose faults, one and all, we share; yes, even those very faults at which we now wax so indignant, merely because they have not yet appeared in ourselves. "
"we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr, but my fellow-sufferer, Socî malorum, compagnon de miseres! This may perhaps sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others in a right light; and it reminds us of that which is after all the most necessary thing in life—the tolerance, patience, regard, and love of neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every man owes to his fellow. "
This small collection started off very strongly. The first few essays were gut punches to be sure. The first essay was deeply pessimistic about the present and how no matter how feeble it may be, it always conquers even the most profound past and clouds even the most planned future. With this in mind, is hedonism the only way to go? But that's also the greatest folly, since the present is ever passing away. We are stuck in a continual becoming and never being (plato). We're never happy, but ever striving after goals, and never happy when reaching goals. "Human life must be some kind of mistake: a compound of needs to satisfy"
We then briskly move to suicide and how Schopie doesn't see anything wrong with it and doesn't see any scriptural justification for being against it.... even though he later points out how one of the main points of Christianity is embracing suffering:
"The inmost kernel of Christianity is the truth that suffering—the Cross—is the real end and object of life. Hence Christianity condemns suicide as thwarting this end; whilst the ancient world, taking a lower point of view, held it in approval, nay, in honor."
There is a strange idea in that it's often been criminalized in the west, but since you can't imprison a dead body, it is kinda just a reputation destroyer (not getting a proper burial, not passing down money or property, etc.) I've also wondered about the legitimacy of this, and really don't know what to think about it. I find it interesting that S. claims the only valid secular argument against suicide is that it thwarts the attainment of the highest moral aims... but this artificially treats humans as if they live in bubbles and wouldn't devastate a whole host of people if they suddenly die. This I think is why it's often traditionally thought of as a selfish or cowardly thing to do, since it takes your pain and indiscriminately shoots it outward, nay, it is very discriminating, primarily hurting most those who care most or who are most dependent upon said suicide victim. Schopenhauer feels like an overeducated teenager at many times in these essays, and here especially. The other main place is his little tirade against "noise", especially people who crack whips (remember that this was the early 1800s). The only interesting point he made about noise (other than the obvious point that it has interrupted a good many philosophical or otherwise creative activities which ended up never coming to fruition as a result (or were dalayed)) was that it only negatively impacts those who are actually trying to achieve something. If you're just fooling around or otherwise non-intellectual, then you don't mind... frankly you'd be thankful for the distraction from your own boredom. He rips and tears into this in the longest section of the collection:
"Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within. Contrarily, if they are active within, they do not care to be dragged out of themselves; it disturbs and impedes their thoughts in a way that is often most ruinous to them"
"I am not surprised that some people are bored when they find themselves alone; for they cannot laugh if they are quite by themselves. The very idea of it seems folly to them."
I love that Schopie also understood this: only boring people can be bored. If you don't brim with creativity or thoughts or dreams or somesuch other constant mental activity, I find it hard to relate to you.
It's also in this largest section that we get some cool, loosly-related pessimistic/elitist/edgy observations like the following:
"For if a man shows that he despises you, he signifies at least this much regard for you, that he wants to let you know how little he appreciates you"
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
"There is no doubt that many a man owes his good fortune in life solely to the circumstance that he has a pleasant way of smiling, and so wins the heart in his favor."
"For a man may have the most excellent judgment in all other matters, and yet go wrong in those which concern himself; because here the will comes in and deranges the intellect at once. Therefore let a man take counsel of a friend. A doctor can cure everyone but himself; if he falls ill, he sends for a colleague. "
"Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection"
"Hence, if a man suddenly finds himself in an unusually happy position, it will in most cases result in his being sympathetic and kind. But if he has never been in any other than a happy position, or this becomes his permanent state, the effect of it is often just the contrary"
On this last point, there's a decent amount of exposition, but it boils down to the fact that the less-refined one is (more brutish), the more easily satiated that person is, and the more likely to be happy. The more refined one is, the fuller experience of reality you have, the less you can subsume to illusions and take easy answers as correct. The base of pessimism is a childish "suffering = bad" ethic, and from this false start, it's assumed that anti-natalism (which is expounded most explicitly in the last section) follows logically. The interesting thing however, is that the pessimist (even with their unjustifiable suffering-ethic) is faced with a wonderful catch 22: we know for a fact that poorer simpler people are happier, and we also know that richer people suffer less….. so what even is the argument from suffering? The pessimistic point is self defeating. If suffering is the ultimate evil, but the unthinking masses don't have a bad time of it, what's the problem? That's actually an argument against education more than an argument against existence.
This is not to mention how the pessimistic argument is inherently incoherent. "Future generations" and "the unborn" literally do not exist yet and cannot feel, thus it philosophically makes no sense to talk about them being "thankful" or "being better off" for not being born. The only coherent thing to discuss is those who are living. And the facts are thus: it is empirically the best time in history to live, and a great way to make the world a better place is to raise your own children with your own values.
Speaking of children, the second largest essay in this collection was "On Women." Although it's uncomfortable for anyone but thoroughbred sexists to read this one, it actually was a sort of lesser "Antichrist," one where Christianity's supra-rational nature is exposed for what it is: something no humans could have invented. Really the only original/interesting point made in the entire section was the rise of emotional politics (along with relativism and other new endeavors) which coincided with the enfranchisement and more-widespread education of women. The rest of his statements prove my point: that Christianity is the true feminism, and modern feminism is largely a hedonistic quagmire.
Schopie recoils at the "over-valuing of women" in Christianity and in western nations:
"This is just the view which the ancients took of woman, and the view which people in the East take now; and their judgment as to her proper position is much more correct than ours, with our old French notions of gallantry and our preposterous system of reverence—that highest product of Teutonico-Christian stupidity. These notions have served only to make women more arrogant and overbearing"
"But in the West, the woman, and especially the lady, finds herself in a false position; for woman, rightly called by the ancients, sexus sequior, is by no means fit to be the object of our honor and veneration, or to hold her head higher than man and be on equal terms with him"
"The laws of marriage prevailing in Europe consider the woman as the equivalent of the man—start, that is to say, from a wrong position. In our part of the world where monogamy is the rule, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties. Now, when the laws gave women equal rights with man, they ought to have also endowed her with a masculine intellect."
There's a repeated claim that women are inferior intellectually, and he even goes so far as to wonder why there aren't any great works of art by women... but then he forgets the obvious fact that many women either never had access to education or to publishing/patrons. The more I think about it, Schopie is basically a smelly 4chan user. He even goes so far as to completely miss the point of marriage:
"And so, since every man needs many women, there is nothing fairer than to allow him, nay, to make it incumbent upon him, to provide for many women. This will reduce woman to her true and natural position as a subordinate being; and the lady—that monster of European civilization and Teutonico-Christian stupidity—will disappear from the world"
"amongst all nations and in all ages, down to the Lutheran Reformation, concubinage was permitted; nay, that it was an institution which was to a certain extent actually recognized by law, and attended with no dishonor. It was only the Lutheran Reformation that degraded it from this position. "
And like the true fedora-tipping loser that he is, he claims he's actually the "reasonable one" who is supporting some sort of "middle ground":
"In India, no woman is ever independent, but in accordance with the law of Mamu, she stands under the control of her father, her husband, her brother or her son. It is, to be sure, a revolting thing that a widow should immolate herself upon her husband's funeral pyre; but it is also revolting that she should spend her husband's money with her paramours"
He makes pragmatic complaints that we should have polygamy so that there aren't so many unemployed and poor women.... which somehow makes more sense than, you know, educating women and making them self-sufficient when single.... Oh well. It seems that Christianity is just too equal for the chauvinists and too traditional and bifurcated for the feminists. People want to have their gods and eat them too.
There's honestly not too much more to say. I remembered the parable of the two chinamen from ancient years:
Two Chinamen traveling in Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them did nothing but study the machinery, and he succeeded in finding out how it was worked. The other tried to get at the meaning of the piece in spite of his ignorance of the language. Here you have the Astronomer and the Philosopher.
Which is a little too pessimistic for me but yeah.... I also discovered a wonderful allegory shortly after that one:
The Cathedral in Mayence is so shut in by the houses that are built round about it, that there is no one spot from which you can see it as a whole. This is symbolic of everything great or beautiful in the world. It ought to exist for its own sake alone, but before very long it is misused to serve alien ends.
And besides making a similar claim to Nietzsche's Antichrist (Christianity is the denial of the will to life, the denial of this world), the book ends on a great note:
"when these faults appear in others, it is our follies and vices that we behold. They are the shortcomings of humanity, to which we belong; whose faults, one and all, we share; yes, even those very faults at which we now wax so indignant, merely because they have not yet appeared in ourselves. "
"we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr, but my fellow-sufferer, Socî malorum, compagnon de miseres! This may perhaps sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others in a right light; and it reminds us of that which is after all the most necessary thing in life—the tolerance, patience, regard, and love of neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every man owes to his fellow. "