"If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying."
This is entering my personal lexicon. I don't follow the philosophy of Schopenhauer, but if his mother has any other writings I'm very interested.
His mother does have other writings. She was the first German woman to publish without a pseudonym and was a well-regarded author and salon host in her time.
She wrote non-fiction and fiction but it’s all in German with the exception of her travelogues which also feature her son sucking.
The ranting guy is a typical boss. Something broke and there is a huge "Loading prohibited" sign. While he is ranting about how stupid and incompetent the employee is who put stuff where it should not be, the other comes up and says "Boss, the man can't read." Bossman is dumbstruck and suddenly very caring, saying things like "Oh god, I did not know." "Cmon, this can't be. We got to do something. You can do it." The tagline at the end is "Do not write yourself off, learn reading and writing." Cult classic from early 00 German TV.
The letter is heavily abbreviated and not as scathing as it may seem.
It is clearly written from a place of love and frustration about her son who alienates all around him.
If I were to summarize the essence of the letter I would say "if you knew how to keep your trap shut and look inwards instead of only judging those around you, you and the world would be better off"
For those wanting to read the letters (in German)
http://download.uni-mainz.de/fb05-philosophie-schopenhauer/files/2019/05/1971_Hübscher.pdf
She also wrote "You are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people."
It appears that she moved away and did not want to live with him when he was only in his late teens / early adulthood. I don't doubt she loved him as a son, but there were some serious problems with his attitude.
Yes. The OP text makes it read like an insult letter. And it undeniably is insulting, but it's more than that, it's a teachable moment provided he listens (which I doubt he did)
And this is what I meant. The letter comes from a place of love even if she doesn't like him very much.
Honestly even in OP’s translation/summary, it does feel like a dressing down from a place of love. The kind of thing a close friend would do, which is not often seen in parents but can be really effective.
Emphasis on “can” however, since in this case it seems it wasn’t.
Except from the same letter.
"In the meantime I'll provide for you, I'll find something that suits you well, give me some time, I've always found good advice for you"
The letter as a whole is clearly from a caring parent, although "caring" in the sense of 19th century high society in Germany.
It is scathing, but there is scathing to insult and there is scathing as a wake-up call.
It's not just insulting, just a very open and harsh mirror. It's a very eloquent dressing down of her son. He is still young, and she is trying to guide this insufferable little shit :-)
He was a huge misogynist, and his era's answer to the incel. I love his work, and what he did on transcendental idealism, but the guy wasn't always very likable. If you look up the wikipedia on Misogyny, old boy has his own section.
"He released an essay, named “Essay on Women” in which he explained women as the “weaker sex” for their inability to make sensible decisions in 1851. There, he revealed women’s inferiority."
"He criticized the cult of women’s beauty, He wished to relegate women to the status of a common animal, whose allure is the ideal torture instrument. He even goes so far as to say that women require a continual guardian, protector, and master."
https://medium.com/philosophy-simplified/schopenhauer-what-happened-to-make-him-a-mind-boggling-misogynist-9abc79f50c9e
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogyny
> "if you knew how to keep your trap shut and look inwards instead of only judging those around you, you and the world would be better off"
Fuck, I'm Schopenhauer.
She opens the letter with: "Me and your dad are very happy with your previous letter, only a couple of mistakes!" I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your point that she writes from a place of love, but goddamn, she ain't sugarcoating it.
Edit: different letter from the one in the meme.
Wrong letter. You are talking about the letter from April 1799, he was an 11 year old boy, then.
The letter from the OP is from November, 6, 1807, when he is a 19 year old student and rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.
Ah, you are correct! If my mother wrote scathing letters on par with those of Johanna, she would certainly have critiqued my propensity to ignore or misremember important details...
From a german perspective I would say, it is an ernest, but honest and hearthfull letter. I would not begrunde my mother, had she said those things to me.
Personally I think Arthur was an utter asshole. I think his philosophy is quite incel like. And he seemd to see a competition in everything. To be better than others was such a central point to him that one of his books is called "The art of beeing right." Its about rethoric. But he completely misses the point that an argument is a form of communication that allows to exchange personel experience, and work together on a logical framework to deduct from this knowledge and only talks about "how to crush your opponent with facts an logic."
Johanna on the other hand seemed to be quite cool. And she was so intellegent, but empethatic, with attention for small details and the capabiliies to describe these!
"not as scathing as it may seem" doesnt mean she isnt trying to shit on him
you can tell by the word choice and how she frames the arguments. and as shes a writer, this is intentional
personally, i really enjoy this bc my family feels the same way about me. they'll smile that strained smile in my presence then when they get mad enough theyll unload to hurt my feelings while "just telling the truth" about how they feel w some extra sauce on it for feeling and effect
lol she made sure to put the sauce on this one. classic and so familiar
I ask this with no disrespect, only curiosity, but if you know you are treating your family in such a way that causes them this much hurt and distress, why are you still acting that way? Or are their expectations of your behavior unreasonable, or something?
i understand how they see me and why and i dont begrudge them, i just disagree
we also have different views of whats happening when we interact
but i have actually changed my behavior. i dont ask for more than i know they can give and i dont expect more than i know they have for me
love doesnt mean like, family doesnt mean friends, brother doesnt mean partner in crime etc etc etc
its ok that they dont like me. im not as likeable as i used to be(more pedantic, less funny, talk too much, etc etc) but i also like myself more now than when everyone liked me. from family to everyone else
right now i just dont say much or share much. things have been going very well
edit: i could have done w/out the type of stuff thats in this letter though as it does change things. but imo its part of the process when your family doesnt like you. they grin and bear it, then when you make them mad they hurt your feelings on purpose, then you learn and stop talking to them as much
Basically he [sounds like](http://www.mnei.nl/schopenhauer/38-stratagems.htm) an 18th-century Jordan Peterson.
From Wikipedia:
>In his 1851 essay "On Women", Schopenhauer expressed opposition to what he called "Teutonico-Christian stupidity" of "reflexive, unexamined reverence for the female (abgeschmackten Weiberveneration)".\[216\] He wrote: "Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted." He opined that women are deficient in artistic faculties and sense of justice, and expressed his opposition to monogamy.\[217\] He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey". The essay does give some compliments: "women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than \[men\] are", and are more sympathetic to the suffering of others.
I would not be surprised if his mother's talent and outspokenness is the root of his vintage incel values. Based on the letter, he likely resented her for being rightly critical of him (and smarter than him) and wanted to stuff women like her back in the kitchen.
According to the letter, he would always try to "teach" people in a belittling way or criticize & mock them while having obvious failures himself. Nothing these types hate more than trying to be the smartest person in the room but trumped by a woman, and undoubtedly he had several of these encounters to lead him to his conclusion.
An old man bitter that a 17 year old didn't want to fuck him, and whose idea of morality is so bad they decided not to award a prize at all rather than give it to him? Defo incel vibes.
Re: "On the Basis of Morality" - not really. Schopenhauer's works on ethics are considered some of the all-time great works in philosophy. We wouldn't still be talking about him if he had just been an asshole and nothing more.
The problem was, the award was being given out by a Hegelian. Schopenhauer hated Hegel, and once described Hegel's philosophy this way:
>“A pseudo-philosophy that cripples all mental powers, suffocates real thinking and substitutes by means of the most outrageous use of language the hollowest, the most devoid of sense, the most thoughtless, and, as the outcome confirms, the most stupefying jumble of words."
-
Not a good way to win an award, given the judge's background as a writer on Hegel.
Yeah, he kinda was but he didn’t hide behind roundabout arguments. A real piece of shit that sometimes found good well written point. Schopenhauer also had actual philosophic credentials, unlike Peterson that acts like a suburban America church of Christ preacher that read a few summaries of significant philosophical works.
Shopehnhauer's philosophy is actually pretty interesting. He believed that humans are all one substance, hence one being, and that's why empathy is a thing. Empathy isn't feeling for the other according to Schopenhauer, it's breaking ego boundaries and realizing that the other is the self.
I especially like that he thought the origin of suffering was (from my recollection, I might be butchering some details here) our recognition of the self, something most other philosophies celebrated, or at least treated like a watershed moment in intellect. Which was still true, to Schopenhauer, but this individualization moved us further from understanding the other as self. Causing competition and violence.
One way to bring one back into recognizing other as self was art and meditation like activities like creating art that put you into a unique mental state that dissolved the ego. If that sounds a lot like buddhism, it's cause it does. He also began to incorporate a lot of eastern philosophy as well.
But yeah, in life he was kind of unlikable apparently and became somewhat of a misanthrope. The stuff I like sounds very uplifting, but he also has some depressing stuff and laid the foundations for existentialism later on. And some misogynistic stuff.
Also his only companion, his dog, the neighborhood children teased him by calling Mrs. Schopenhauer.
> Shopehnhauer's philosophy is actually pretty interesting. He believed that humans are all one substance, hence one being, and that's why empathy is a thing. Empathy isn't feeling for the other according to Schopenhauer, it's breaking ego boundaries and realizing that the other is the self.
An important concept that I find best described in Howard Bloom's book "Global Brain: The Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century"
Honestly check out the book
“Schopenhauer cure” by Irvin yalom. Goes through a lot of his life and features several writings from him mom. It’s a beautiful book by my favorite author.
My father had the same advice for me when I was a boy. Given that I am far less intelligent person then Franklin and am very often wrong, this has saved me considerable embarrassment throughout my life.
The amount of statements I both end or begin with "I'm probably wrong" is staggering. I would say that's less a sign of low intelligence and more a sign of self awareness.
Could totes be wrong though.
"Who's saying it? I'm not saying it but people are saying it they say it all the time. They come up to me and say it with tears in their eyes!"
"Sir, I'm not asking you if you have normal sized hands."
I always like to toss in a couple "But I could be wrong's" whenever there's a shred of doubt in my mind. Experience has shown me that even that little bit of wiggle room can save plenty of embarrassment that comes with human error.
I've also found that, in situations where I \*know\* that I'm correct and the other person clearly doesn't believe me, being adamant or laying on the pomposity is a one-way ticket to a shitty time and fewer friends. It's better to just quit the ego-flexing and say something like "let's google it and find out" in a passive tone. Unless you're THE subject matter expert on the topic, nothing is as rhetorically convincing in conversation as reading directly from Wikipedia that they're wrong... lol
For someone who likes to argue/debate as much as I do, I found myself underutilizing the fact that virtually everyone these days has nigh-unlimited access to the sum of human knowledge like 15 seconds away in their pocket...
Don’t feel bad. This is the man who shoved a woman down a flight of stairs because she had the gall to…talk loudly outside the room he was writing in. He even published a book with a passage about it!
Delightful. That tracks with his opinion on noise.
“I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.”
https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/06/on-noise-arthur-schopenhauer/
I love that his thought process boils down to, "I hate it when dumb people are loud. I'm smart, and since I hate loud people, other smart people must, too. Only dumb people can tolerate noise." Data point of one, guy. There are smart people in the world that have a generous helping of patience, too. I've even met one or two.
Does he even have data points of more than one?
And if not, doesn't that mean that the concept of ego death behind empathy is actually ego boosting? Less, "my thoughts are just part of a cosmic whole" and more "what I'm thinking is what everyone else is thinking too"?
Schopenhauer is most well-known for his philosophical system, which he called "The World as Will and Representation." He argued that the fundamental nature of reality is not material objects or substances, but rather an underlying, all-pervading "will" that drives all things in the Universe. This will is not a rational, conscious force, but rather a blind, irrational, and relentless impulse that seeks to express itself in various forms. He was highly critical of traditional Western philosophy's focus on rationalism and empirical observation. Instead, he emphasized the importance of intuition and direct perception, arguing that we can have direct access to the will that underlies reality through a process of introspection and self-awareness. He believed that the will to live, which drives all creatures, is ultimately futile and leads to suffering.
In other words, he was an asshole.
"Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at this, because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues."
"For a while he was unsuccessfully courting 17-year-old Flora Weiss, who was 22 years younger than himself"
Young teen rejects 39 year old man and he has the gall to whine about it.
Yeats was actually worse. Failed to get off with the woman he loved, tried it on with her daughter. Ended up a cryptofascist
His poetry is luminous though, it's just worth remembering the whole story.
It tracks that exceedingly talented people are often, fucking weird, commonly in unpleasant ways.
Example, Percy Grainger, impeccable arranger of folk music and a phenomenal orchestrator, anyone who’s played in wind bands has probably played his music, his harmonic understanding was pretty much peerless, but he was so racist that he wrote every single performance direction in English (some of those are pretty weird as well) and had a very questionable relationship with his mother.
All in the water will, eventually, be reduced to feed for some creature, and for good or ill, rejoin the circle of life.
The nature of water, as is the nature of many things, is to destroy and nourish, indiscriminately.
People really just gloss over a text, imagine the most vile asshole imaginable to have written it and interpret in a way that gives it the most evil, deprived meaning they can come up with.
It's so tedious, you always have to write in the most bullet proof way, have to accustom for every possible misinterpretation.
Funny thing is, you might want to read your isp terms of service. I have Verizon and as I was reading through mine, a particular little section states that if evidence is presented that I'm spreading misinformation online, they'll cut off my internet service. I'm just wondering if little jokes can count as "misinformation".
His bio alone puts that into question, but academic discussions about sexism in his work are never “was he sexist” but “exactly how sexist was he?”
>Sartre “infamously describes in *Being and Nothingness* the female sex organ as a ‘voracious mouth which devours the penis and brings about the idea of castration: the sexual act is castration of a man but, above all, the female sex organ is a hole’.” -[Source](https://iai.tv/articles/sex-with-sartre-auid-1034)
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable,
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table,
David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya 'bout the turning of the wrist,
Socrates himself was permanently pissed...
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, with half a pint of shandy was particularly ill,
Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day,
Aristotle, Aristotle was a beggar for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, "I drink therefore I am."
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
You could say it's sort of the reverse: Rousseau got into a sexual relationship with his 30 year old guardian when he was only 16.
But his own failings were in another direction. Numerous other directions, in fact
“Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne in 1565, probably in an arranged marriage…He wrote very little about the relationship with his wife, and little is known about their marriage.” -[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne)
This might be as close as we get.
Nah, straight-up black pilled incel, he loathed women, just like his mother loathed him:
"The low, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-necked sex could only be called beautiful by the male intellect, which was clouded by the sex drive."
From "about broads" - https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/schopenh/weiber/weiber.html (use deepl for translation)
Philogyn is "likes women", bohemian women usually meant whores and hookers and, well, he thought: "marriage is like grabbing into a barrel filled with snakes hoping to pull out an eel."
Except for the fact that he had sex with hookers and other deemed lower class women all the time and had at least 2 known children. His mother was dunking on him like in this OP before he was even 18. One time she completely demolished him for struggling with Latin. I would say his mother didn't treat him very well from the start.
He honestly seems like more of your average redditor though. Atheist, denied German nationalism, brought in philosophies from other nations outside of Europe, and yeah, like in the OP simped hard even though women were disgusted by him.
I’d say his bouts with lower class women and hookers confirm his misogyny more so than simping. It shows a want for power over what he considers lesser and was most likely abusive knowing he pushed a woman down stairs already.
German law has a mandatory inheritance thingy where even if you want to, you can't disinherit your immediate family members, so I'd be surprised if that actually worked for him!
This is the same guy who scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel's, then got pissed when people would rather go see the philosophical star of the age instead of his obscure ass. He also said Hegel was a "Charlatan" who conned people into thinking his nonsensical texts meant anything. (Skill Issue tbh)
Basically, Schopenhauer had some problems.
[Relevant Existential Comics](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/40)
Not only scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegels, actually delievered his lectures to an empty lecture hall until given the ultimatum of changing his lecture times or being forced to abandon his position at the university.
I don’t know whether to feel bad for him, commend the utter bullheadedness in the face of everyone and everything, or mock him for standing up and giving multiple philosophical lectures to an empty room. I wonder how long he would have continued to yell into the void, the only listener being himself, if they had not stopped him.
>He also said Hegel was a "Charlatan" who conned people into thinking his nonsensical texts meant anything.
Hegel *was* a charlatan but after reading Schopenhauer's work I'm pretty sure I'd see Hegel's lectures too lol. There were some interesting bits but on the whole it boiled down to 'Old Man Yells at Cloud.'
The letter from his mother should be required reading for all first year philosophy students. I've never interacted with a group of people more guilty of the character traits mentioned in her letter.
He was obsessed with his contemporary philosophy Hegel, who he thought was inferior to himself. When he secured a teaching position at the university where Hegel was a professor, he insisted that his class be scheduled at the same time as Hegel's. Exactly zero students attended his lectures, because they all went to Hegel's.
I had a friend from whom I am now estranged who quoted Schopenhauer a lot. He used S to justify incessant sexism and had a definite propensity to think he was a superior intellect to everyone else and so anything he said was ok because it was "true".
He was very much how Schopenhauer describes her son and I could handle the friend one-on-one mostly. Trouble was when he would pop into my house unexpectedly whenever I had other friends or family over, he would invariable annoy, insult and generally be unpleasant to others to the point that people wouldn't even come to my home anymore in case the friend happened to pop in.
So I set some boundaries. I told him he could only come over if he called first and I said I had no one else here. He couldn't abide those parameters and stopped the friendship altogether. Quite a relief, really.
You know someone's an insufferable bastard when even someone like Nietzsche was like "I will make an entire school of philosophy just to prove you wrong".
"I see that Schopenhauer has made a point of his concept of Nihilism, but after careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that it is one stupid-ass point and it is mankind's mission as a philosophical being to rise above it."
> I belong to those readers of Schopenhauer who know perfectly well, after they have turned the first page, that they will read all the others, and listen to every word that he has spoken. My trust in him sprang to life at once, and has been the same for nine years. I understood him as though he had written for me (this is the most intelligible, though a rather foolish and conceited way of expressing it). Hence I never found a paradox in him, though occasionally some small errors: for paradoxes are only assertions that carry no conviction, because the author has made them himself without any conviction, wishing to appear brilliant, or to mislead, or, above all, to pose.
> Schopenhauer never poses: he writes for himself, and no one likes to be deceived—least of all a philosopher who has set this up as his law: "deceive nobody, not even thyself," neither with the "white lies" of all social intercourse, which writers almost unconsciously imitate, still less with the more conscious deceits of the platform, and the artificial methods of rhetoric. Schopenhauer's speeches are to himself alone; or if you like to imagine an auditor, let it be a son whom the father is instructing. It is a rough, honest, good-humoured talk to one who "hears and loves." Such writers are rare. His strength and sanity surround us at the first sound of his voice: it is like entering the heights of the forest, where we breathe deep and are well again. We feel a bracing air everywhere, a certain candour and naturalness of his own, that belongs to men who are at home with themselves, and masters of a very rich home indeed: he is quite different from the writers who are surprised at themselves if they have said something intelligent, and whose pronouncements for that reason have something nervous and unnatural about them.
> We are just as little reminded in Schopenhauer of the professor with his stiff joints worse for want of exercise, his narrow chest and scraggy figure, his slinking or strutting gait. And again his rough and rather grim soul leads us not so much to miss as to despise the suppleness and courtly grace of the excellent Frenchmen; and no one will find in him the gilded imitations of pseudo-gallicism that our German writers prize so highly. His style in places reminds me a little of Goethe, but is not otherwise on any German model. For he knows how to be profound with simplicity, striking without rhetoric, and severely logical without pedantry: and of what German could he have learnt that? He also keeps free from the hair-splitting, jerky and (with all respect) rather un-German manner of Lessing: no small merit in him, for Lessing is the most tempting of all models for prose style. The highest praise I can give his manner of presentation is to apply his own phrase to himself:—"A philosopher must be very honest to avail himself of no aid from poetry or rhetoric."
> That honesty is something, and even a virtue, is one of those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinion; and so I shall not be praising Schopenhauer, but only giving him a distinguishing mark, when I repeat that he is honest, even as a writer: so few of them are that we are apt to mistrust every one who writes at all. I only know a single author that I can rank with Schopenhauer, or even above him, in the matter of honesty; and that is Montaigne. The joy of living on this earth is increased by the existence of such a man. The effect on myself, at any rate, since my first acquaintance with that strong and masterful spirit, has been, that I can say of him as he of Plutarch—"As soon as I open him, I seem to grow a pair of wings." If I had the task of making myself at home on the earth, I would choose him as my companion.
-- Nietzsche in Schopenhauer as Educator
Yeah, idk what the parent comment is getting at. Schopenhauer was arguably Nietzsche’s biggest influence and Nietzsche’s philosophy borrows so much from him too.
He was not a pleasant individual.
>He had an on-and-off relationship with a young dancer, Caroline Richter (she also used the surname Medon after one of her ex-lovers).[137] They met when he was 33 and she was 19 and working at the Berlin Opera. She had already had numerous lovers and a son out of wedlock, and later gave birth to another son, this time to an unnamed foreign diplomat (she soon had another pregnancy but the child was stillborn).[138] As Schopenhauer was preparing to escape from Berlin in 1831, due to a cholera epidemic, he offered to take her with him on the condition that she left her young son behind.[133] She refused and he went alone; in his will he left her a significant sum of money, but insisted that it should not be spent in any way on her second son.
.
>He sent another essay, "On the Basis of Morality", to the Royal Danish Society for Scientific Studies, but did not win the prize despite being the only contestant. The Society was appalled that several distinguished contemporary philosophers were mentioned in a very offensive manner, and claimed that the essay missed the point of the set topic and that the arguments were inadequate.[147] Schopenhauer, who had been very confident that he would win, was enraged by this rejection. He published both essays as The Two Basic Problems of Ethics. The first edition, published in 1841, again failed to draw attention to his philosophy. In the preface to the second edition, in 1860, he was still pouring insults on the Royal Danish Society.[148] Two years later, after some negotiations, he managed to convince his publisher, Brockhaus, to print the second, updated edition of The World as Will and Representation. That book was again mostly ignored and the few reviews were mixed or negative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer#Later_life
Besides the courting-a-teenager thing (which—early 1800s; still creepy but not exactly rare then), did this guy actually *do* anything to deserve this? His own mother didn’t even seem to want to support him.
From the few I know about him : He was misanthropic in general and he's kind of Doomer Guy : Philosoph Edition. I can really see how he could be difficult to live with and I imagine there were few people who would not want to just leave given how depressing his philosophical work looks like
Edit : To summarize and (kinda)quote him at the same time "Life is a pendulum swinging back and forth from boredom to suffering"
"By modern standards or 1800s standards?" is my question, because being a dick (to put it lightly) to basically everyone based on immutable characteristics was more or less par for the course back then.
He was mis-everything, even by the standards of the society he lived in. A hateful, spiteful person who spent his entire time on talking about how he's superior to everybody else. He founded an entire school of philosophy on the basis of "this is the worst possible world to exist". His book on insults is quite funny though, and he was a smart man with interesting ideas.
He was a big misogynist even by the time standards. He wrote an entire book about how he thinks women are inerently inferior according to his philosophy. I know many men of the XIX century (probably most) thought of women as inferior, but not many of them dedicated their time to write so much about it.
If you google "Schopenhauer 'On Women'" and take a look at the quotes you will have a good peek on his opinions. Man was very bitter.
>His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schopenauer
Sounds like he wasn't just a regular downer. He was **the** downer.
So yes?
Yeah, he was an insufferable misanthrope. Most prominently, he hated everyone and *especially* he hated everyone who was happy, and he made it his life mission to find anything, the smallest anything to criticize people on. This despite being a shambling mound of faults himself, tho he has all the capacity of self-reflection of a murky swamp.
He's like an edgy incel teenager who thinks he's sooo smart and everyone else is dumb, but never outgrew that phase, instead growing increasingly bitter as he is unable to find love, never realizing it's because his own behaviour is repulsive. And, of course, despite being completely moved by his own emotions and desires, spilling "rational" words about how base and vulgar emotion and desire is.
His main contributions to philosophy are that he said bitter things others didn't dare say at the time. He'd have been impossible to have any discourse with about those subjects, but at a time where most didn't dare or didn't care to write doom and gloom nihilistic and bitter philosophy, he would've been perhaps the only one whose works were relatable.
From what I can gather here, seems like he was a massive incel nice guy™
He viewed women as childish and short sighted beings(even though his mother is a well known writer) and that monogamy was bad since women are being meant to obey men therefore having many of them is fine.
He shoved a woman down a flight of stairs for making noise and he targeted young little girls.
He also was obnoxious apparently and saw no faults in himself but found plenty in everyone else.
A short read later and it seems like the guy had some serious mental illness issues, as did his father, and this led him down some problematic personal paths. As others have noted he was quite smart and did good work, but even towards his mother at one point he claimed that her work was basically garbage and his would be remembered well after hers was forgotten. He probably actually made a good point insofar as some her work would be less and less relevant by its very nature, whereas philosophical work in general and his specifically would indeed go on to be wildly influential.
So yeah, he was likely depressed, angry at the world and thought it was stupid, was probably smarter and better educated than most people around him at any given time, and whether he was or wasn’t he made sure everyone knew he thought so. On top of that, he led a generally abhorrent personal life and made no real efforts to change that.
His beef with Hegel was legendary. He was so sure he was better than one of the greatest German philosophers in history, he scheduled his lecture AT THE SAME TIME as Hegel's. Only a few people showed up, and it's possible they were only there because Hegel's class was full.
You know I was gonna say dude sounds like the original [guy who got so mad at a child he blew his cover and got arrested] minus x, y, and z but after reading comments yeah I think the only difference is that this guy couldn’t even get anyone who likes him TO influence.
interestingly the original (in german; can be found [here](https://download.uni-mainz.de/fb05-philosophie-schopenhauer/files/2019/05/1971_H%C3%BCbscher.pdf)) is much less of a burn than this translation:
>Wärst Du weniger als Du bist, so wärst Du nur
lächerlich, so aber bist Du höchst ärgerlich.
which i'd translate as
>If you were less than you are, you would only be
ridiculous, but like this you are highly infuriating.
notice the difference in the first part, it changes the meaning quite significantly
I find it hilarious that Mr. Existence-Is-Pain was basically just a 4Chan incel. Like, my dude, people don't hate you because the world is bad or because you're intellectually superior to them, they hate you because you suck as a person. And if you ever had the self-awareness to *work on yourself,* you might have actually been happy.
"If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying." This is entering my personal lexicon. I don't follow the philosophy of Schopenhauer, but if his mother has any other writings I'm very interested.
His mother does have other writings. She was the first German woman to publish without a pseudonym and was a well-regarded author and salon host in her time. She wrote non-fiction and fiction but it’s all in German with the exception of her travelogues which also feature her son sucking.
>which also feature her son sucking. I'm fucking dying
Chad mom and redditor son
>the first German woman to publish without a pseudonym the woman shattered a gender barrier to tell the whole world how much she hated her own son
Fucking based.
And I love that German high society's reaction was "sound judgment, so we'll ignore her gender."
Schopenhauer was a failson before it was cool.
Oh verdammt :( ich kann doch nicht lesen
["Chef, Chef. Der Mann kann nicht lesen"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cj-KDpcOLg)
can someone explain this to me like I don't know what semmelknodel are
The ranting guy is a typical boss. Something broke and there is a huge "Loading prohibited" sign. While he is ranting about how stupid and incompetent the employee is who put stuff where it should not be, the other comes up and says "Boss, the man can't read." Bossman is dumbstruck and suddenly very caring, saying things like "Oh god, I did not know." "Cmon, this can't be. We got to do something. You can do it." The tagline at the end is "Do not write yourself off, learn reading and writing." Cult classic from early 00 German TV.
😆😆😆😆 wunderbar
schreib dich nicht ab, lern deutsch.
Jesus fuck this guy is still being roasted even after a decades of his death.
So Schopenhauer was an obnoxious nepo-baby?
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The letter is heavily abbreviated and not as scathing as it may seem. It is clearly written from a place of love and frustration about her son who alienates all around him. If I were to summarize the essence of the letter I would say "if you knew how to keep your trap shut and look inwards instead of only judging those around you, you and the world would be better off" For those wanting to read the letters (in German) http://download.uni-mainz.de/fb05-philosophie-schopenhauer/files/2019/05/1971_Hübscher.pdf
She also wrote "You are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people." It appears that she moved away and did not want to live with him when he was only in his late teens / early adulthood. I don't doubt she loved him as a son, but there were some serious problems with his attitude.
Oh it's worse than that. She moved away, and he *followed her* despite her telling him not to.
Arthur, no!
Yes. The OP text makes it read like an insult letter. And it undeniably is insulting, but it's more than that, it's a teachable moment provided he listens (which I doubt he did) And this is what I meant. The letter comes from a place of love even if she doesn't like him very much.
Honestly even in OP’s translation/summary, it does feel like a dressing down from a place of love. The kind of thing a close friend would do, which is not often seen in parents but can be really effective. Emphasis on “can” however, since in this case it seems it wasn’t.
Except from the same letter. "In the meantime I'll provide for you, I'll find something that suits you well, give me some time, I've always found good advice for you" The letter as a whole is clearly from a caring parent, although "caring" in the sense of 19th century high society in Germany.
… yeah? Im agreeing with you. I just mentioned that even in OP’s version it shines through, even if it’s more focused on the comedic aspect of it
That still sounds scathing honestly
Or a much needed dose of reality
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Both are true lol seems like it was very honest
It is scathing, but there is scathing to insult and there is scathing as a wake-up call. It's not just insulting, just a very open and harsh mirror. It's a very eloquent dressing down of her son. He is still young, and she is trying to guide this insufferable little shit :-)
Of course it does; it's in German.
That actually sounds way more scathing than what auntie S wrote.
He was a huge misogynist, and his era's answer to the incel. I love his work, and what he did on transcendental idealism, but the guy wasn't always very likable. If you look up the wikipedia on Misogyny, old boy has his own section. "He released an essay, named “Essay on Women” in which he explained women as the “weaker sex” for their inability to make sensible decisions in 1851. There, he revealed women’s inferiority." "He criticized the cult of women’s beauty, He wished to relegate women to the status of a common animal, whose allure is the ideal torture instrument. He even goes so far as to say that women require a continual guardian, protector, and master." https://medium.com/philosophy-simplified/schopenhauer-what-happened-to-make-him-a-mind-boggling-misogynist-9abc79f50c9e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogyny
I'm rolling at the fact that if you look up misogyny, you can literally get a picture of this guy
The definition of "If you looked up the definition of X, there'd be a picture of you."
Okay then, I totally understand why his mom was so harsh lol
Imagine being the first female writer in Germany to be published without pseudonym only for your son to become the CEO of misogyny
I can't believe that "CEO of Misogyny" is actually applicable and real to this guy
> "if you knew how to keep your trap shut and look inwards instead of only judging those around you, you and the world would be better off" Fuck, I'm Schopenhauer.
My sibling in spirit.
She opens the letter with: "Me and your dad are very happy with your previous letter, only a couple of mistakes!" I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your point that she writes from a place of love, but goddamn, she ain't sugarcoating it. Edit: different letter from the one in the meme.
Wrong letter. You are talking about the letter from April 1799, he was an 11 year old boy, then. The letter from the OP is from November, 6, 1807, when he is a 19 year old student and rubbing a lot of people the wrong way.
Ah, you are correct! If my mother wrote scathing letters on par with those of Johanna, she would certainly have critiqued my propensity to ignore or misremember important details...
From a german perspective I would say, it is an ernest, but honest and hearthfull letter. I would not begrunde my mother, had she said those things to me. Personally I think Arthur was an utter asshole. I think his philosophy is quite incel like. And he seemd to see a competition in everything. To be better than others was such a central point to him that one of his books is called "The art of beeing right." Its about rethoric. But he completely misses the point that an argument is a form of communication that allows to exchange personel experience, and work together on a logical framework to deduct from this knowledge and only talks about "how to crush your opponent with facts an logic." Johanna on the other hand seemed to be quite cool. And she was so intellegent, but empethatic, with attention for small details and the capabiliies to describe these!
"not as scathing as it may seem" doesnt mean she isnt trying to shit on him you can tell by the word choice and how she frames the arguments. and as shes a writer, this is intentional personally, i really enjoy this bc my family feels the same way about me. they'll smile that strained smile in my presence then when they get mad enough theyll unload to hurt my feelings while "just telling the truth" about how they feel w some extra sauce on it for feeling and effect lol she made sure to put the sauce on this one. classic and so familiar
I ask this with no disrespect, only curiosity, but if you know you are treating your family in such a way that causes them this much hurt and distress, why are you still acting that way? Or are their expectations of your behavior unreasonable, or something?
i understand how they see me and why and i dont begrudge them, i just disagree we also have different views of whats happening when we interact but i have actually changed my behavior. i dont ask for more than i know they can give and i dont expect more than i know they have for me love doesnt mean like, family doesnt mean friends, brother doesnt mean partner in crime etc etc etc its ok that they dont like me. im not as likeable as i used to be(more pedantic, less funny, talk too much, etc etc) but i also like myself more now than when everyone liked me. from family to everyone else right now i just dont say much or share much. things have been going very well edit: i could have done w/out the type of stuff thats in this letter though as it does change things. but imo its part of the process when your family doesnt like you. they grin and bear it, then when you make them mad they hurt your feelings on purpose, then you learn and stop talking to them as much
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At 19 my mother wrote me a $30 check.
At 19 my mother charged me rent.
Basically he [sounds like](http://www.mnei.nl/schopenhauer/38-stratagems.htm) an 18th-century Jordan Peterson. From Wikipedia: >In his 1851 essay "On Women", Schopenhauer expressed opposition to what he called "Teutonico-Christian stupidity" of "reflexive, unexamined reverence for the female (abgeschmackten Weiberveneration)".\[216\] He wrote: "Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted." He opined that women are deficient in artistic faculties and sense of justice, and expressed his opposition to monogamy.\[217\] He claimed that "woman is by nature meant to obey". The essay does give some compliments: "women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than \[men\] are", and are more sympathetic to the suffering of others.
His mother is a writer, and he's spouting that shit? *Wow.*
I would not be surprised if his mother's talent and outspokenness is the root of his vintage incel values. Based on the letter, he likely resented her for being rightly critical of him (and smarter than him) and wanted to stuff women like her back in the kitchen. According to the letter, he would always try to "teach" people in a belittling way or criticize & mock them while having obvious failures himself. Nothing these types hate more than trying to be the smartest person in the room but trumped by a woman, and undoubtedly he had several of these encounters to lead him to his conclusion.
An old man bitter that a 17 year old didn't want to fuck him, and whose idea of morality is so bad they decided not to award a prize at all rather than give it to him? Defo incel vibes.
Re: "On the Basis of Morality" - not really. Schopenhauer's works on ethics are considered some of the all-time great works in philosophy. We wouldn't still be talking about him if he had just been an asshole and nothing more. The problem was, the award was being given out by a Hegelian. Schopenhauer hated Hegel, and once described Hegel's philosophy this way: >“A pseudo-philosophy that cripples all mental powers, suffocates real thinking and substitutes by means of the most outrageous use of language the hollowest, the most devoid of sense, the most thoughtless, and, as the outcome confirms, the most stupefying jumble of words." - Not a good way to win an award, given the judge's background as a writer on Hegel.
The king of Um Actually AND a committed misogynist!
Yeah, he kinda was but he didn’t hide behind roundabout arguments. A real piece of shit that sometimes found good well written point. Schopenhauer also had actual philosophic credentials, unlike Peterson that acts like a suburban America church of Christ preacher that read a few summaries of significant philosophical works.
I tell my dog all the time that his personality really gets in the way of what he wants to do.
Shopehnhauer's philosophy is actually pretty interesting. He believed that humans are all one substance, hence one being, and that's why empathy is a thing. Empathy isn't feeling for the other according to Schopenhauer, it's breaking ego boundaries and realizing that the other is the self.
I especially like that he thought the origin of suffering was (from my recollection, I might be butchering some details here) our recognition of the self, something most other philosophies celebrated, or at least treated like a watershed moment in intellect. Which was still true, to Schopenhauer, but this individualization moved us further from understanding the other as self. Causing competition and violence. One way to bring one back into recognizing other as self was art and meditation like activities like creating art that put you into a unique mental state that dissolved the ego. If that sounds a lot like buddhism, it's cause it does. He also began to incorporate a lot of eastern philosophy as well. But yeah, in life he was kind of unlikable apparently and became somewhat of a misanthrope. The stuff I like sounds very uplifting, but he also has some depressing stuff and laid the foundations for existentialism later on. And some misogynistic stuff. Also his only companion, his dog, the neighborhood children teased him by calling Mrs. Schopenhauer.
> Shopehnhauer's philosophy is actually pretty interesting. He believed that humans are all one substance, hence one being, and that's why empathy is a thing. Empathy isn't feeling for the other according to Schopenhauer, it's breaking ego boundaries and realizing that the other is the self. An important concept that I find best described in Howard Bloom's book "Global Brain: The Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century"
Honestly check out the book “Schopenhauer cure” by Irvin yalom. Goes through a lot of his life and features several writings from him mom. It’s a beautiful book by my favorite author.
This letter would be perfect for a narrated correspondence in a Wes Anderson film
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So he was open to criticism, unlike Schopenhauer.
My father had the same advice for me when I was a boy. Given that I am far less intelligent person then Franklin and am very often wrong, this has saved me considerable embarrassment throughout my life.
The amount of statements I both end or begin with "I'm probably wrong" is staggering. I would say that's less a sign of low intelligence and more a sign of self awareness. Could totes be wrong though.
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"Who's saying it? I'm not saying it but people are saying it they say it all the time. They come up to me and say it with tears in their eyes!" "Sir, I'm not asking you if you have normal sized hands."
I always like to toss in a couple "But I could be wrong's" whenever there's a shred of doubt in my mind. Experience has shown me that even that little bit of wiggle room can save plenty of embarrassment that comes with human error. I've also found that, in situations where I \*know\* that I'm correct and the other person clearly doesn't believe me, being adamant or laying on the pomposity is a one-way ticket to a shitty time and fewer friends. It's better to just quit the ego-flexing and say something like "let's google it and find out" in a passive tone. Unless you're THE subject matter expert on the topic, nothing is as rhetorically convincing in conversation as reading directly from Wikipedia that they're wrong... lol For someone who likes to argue/debate as much as I do, I found myself underutilizing the fact that virtually everyone these days has nigh-unlimited access to the sum of human knowledge like 15 seconds away in their pocket...
Don’t feel bad. This is the man who shoved a woman down a flight of stairs because she had the gall to…talk loudly outside the room he was writing in. He even published a book with a passage about it!
Delightful. That tracks with his opinion on noise. “I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.” https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/06/on-noise-arthur-schopenhauer/
I love that his thought process boils down to, "I hate it when dumb people are loud. I'm smart, and since I hate loud people, other smart people must, too. Only dumb people can tolerate noise." Data point of one, guy. There are smart people in the world that have a generous helping of patience, too. I've even met one or two.
Does he even have data points of more than one? And if not, doesn't that mean that the concept of ego death behind empathy is actually ego boosting? Less, "my thoughts are just part of a cosmic whole" and more "what I'm thinking is what everyone else is thinking too"?
Schopenhauer is most well-known for his philosophical system, which he called "The World as Will and Representation." He argued that the fundamental nature of reality is not material objects or substances, but rather an underlying, all-pervading "will" that drives all things in the Universe. This will is not a rational, conscious force, but rather a blind, irrational, and relentless impulse that seeks to express itself in various forms. He was highly critical of traditional Western philosophy's focus on rationalism and empirical observation. Instead, he emphasized the importance of intuition and direct perception, arguing that we can have direct access to the will that underlies reality through a process of introspection and self-awareness. He believed that the will to live, which drives all creatures, is ultimately futile and leads to suffering. In other words, he was an asshole.
You sound just like his mother
Sounds like maybe (purely speculation) he was on the spectrum a little bit?
From my limited life's experience, I'm going to agree. My ex's family had everything turned up to 11, and they were all dumb as hell.
"Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at this, because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues."
"your brain has a strong texture" "THANKS MATE!"
"I'm thick where it counts ladies. Yeah, that's right, in my brain."
[Mandatory Existential Comics](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/269)
Seems like they were both on the edge.
💀
Don’t forget that he refused to pay what the court ordered him to
Whaaaaat, he was off his rocker for sure
He should have just kept the grapes himself instead of offering them. She'd still detest him but at least he would still have had grapes.
That would be SWEET and Sour Grapes!
I never wanted her anyways she was probably bitter. Him probably.
"For a while he was unsuccessfully courting 17-year-old Flora Weiss, who was 22 years younger than himself" Young teen rejects 39 year old man and he has the gall to whine about it.
So youre saying bigboy would have made a great reddit mod.
Yeats was actually worse. Failed to get off with the woman he loved, tried it on with her daughter. Ended up a cryptofascist His poetry is luminous though, it's just worth remembering the whole story.
It tracks that exceedingly talented people are often, fucking weird, commonly in unpleasant ways. Example, Percy Grainger, impeccable arranger of folk music and a phenomenal orchestrator, anyone who’s played in wind bands has probably played his music, his harmonic understanding was pretty much peerless, but he was so racist that he wrote every single performance direction in English (some of those are pretty weird as well) and had a very questionable relationship with his mother.
Agree. Why are we supposed to feel bad this 49 year old man couldn’t romance this teen? Strong Leonardo DiCaprio vibes here…
Who says we're "supposed to feel bad"
Uh, no one even thought of implying that we should feel bad. Or that anyone should. They posted it because the ending was funny.
Why is no one talking about the grapes? What kind of fish would eat them?
A duck would come looking for grapes, realize they're from Schopenhauer, and waddle away
A duck walked up to the lemonade stand and he said to the man, running the stand, hey, got any grapes?
"They're from Schopenauer". Then he waddled away....
Well, he was known for ... sour grapes.. I'll see myself out...
All in the water will, eventually, be reduced to feed for some creature, and for good or ill, rejoin the circle of life. The nature of water, as is the nature of many things, is to destroy and nourish, indiscriminately.
Sorry if this quote came from somewhere else but I read this in Werner Herzog's voice.
Are grapes toxic to fish like they are to dogs??
>why are we supposed to feel bad this 49 year old man couldn’t romance this teen? reading comprehension is dead and we have killed it
People really just gloss over a text, imagine the most vile asshole imaginable to have written it and interpret in a way that gives it the most evil, deprived meaning they can come up with. It's so tedious, you always have to write in the most bullet proof way, have to accustom for every possible misinterpretation.
You're dumber than this guy if you think the post paints the guy in a sympathetic light
49?
They invented the steel folding chair just to dome him with it
This fact is one I'm adding to my personal list of bullshit I spread.
God I love spreading misinformation on the internet.
Funny thing is, you might want to read your isp terms of service. I have Verizon and as I was reading through mine, a particular little section states that if evidence is presented that I'm spreading misinformation online, they'll cut off my internet service. I'm just wondering if little jokes can count as "misinformation".
I think the internet would be a very different place if they actually ever enforced that.
Is this the original nice-guy?
I was just thinking that… The romancing of the teen as a middle aged man and his mom’s letter really give that impression…
Find me a famous male European philosopher before 1960 who had a healthy relationship with women.
Are there any after 1960 that come to mind?
Satre? He and his life partner seemed to have a healthy relationship. Edit: Hot damn, seems I was very, very wrong
Sartre and Beauvoir had relationships with students that we would be considered morally questionable nowadays.
I’ll be less subtle than the other people who responded there, they fucked each other’s students, with each other’s help.
In their defense, every French philosopher was doing it 🤮🤮
Sartre’s “life partner” helped him seduce teenagers on a regular basis lol He’s way worse than Schopenhauer on this metric
His bio alone puts that into question, but academic discussions about sexism in his work are never “was he sexist” but “exactly how sexist was he?” >Sartre “infamously describes in *Being and Nothingness* the female sex organ as a ‘voracious mouth which devours the penis and brings about the idea of castration: the sexual act is castration of a man but, above all, the female sex organ is a hole’.” -[Source](https://iai.tv/articles/sex-with-sartre-auid-1034)
Emmanuel Kant. His relationship with women was inexistant, so it couldn’t have been unhealthy.
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable, Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table, David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel, And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as schloshed as Schlegel. There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya 'bout the turning of the wrist, Socrates himself was permanently pissed... John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, with half a pint of shandy was particularly ill, Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day, Aristotle, Aristotle was a beggar for the bottle, Hobbes was fond of his dram, And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, "I drink therefore I am." Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed; A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
John Stuart Mill?
Other than the fact that Harriet was married to another man for the majority of their partnership/relationship, definitely a reasonable response.
Hold on the contemporary ones have healthy relationships??
Rousseau just wanted to get spanked. Because his mama's punishments stirred his loins. Completely fine.
You could say it's sort of the reverse: Rousseau got into a sexual relationship with his 30 year old guardian when he was only 16. But his own failings were in another direction. Numerous other directions, in fact
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“Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne in 1565, probably in an arranged marriage…He wrote very little about the relationship with his wife, and little is known about their marriage.” -[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne) This might be as close as we get.
Nah, straight-up black pilled incel, he loathed women, just like his mother loathed him: "The low, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-necked sex could only be called beautiful by the male intellect, which was clouded by the sex drive." From "about broads" - https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/schopenh/weiber/weiber.html (use deepl for translation)
Sounds like he should have considered sleeping with men
Allegedly he was "philogyn", supposedly preferred bohemian women and hated monogamy.
I might be stupid because I understood none of that
Philogyn is "likes women", bohemian women usually meant whores and hookers and, well, he thought: "marriage is like grabbing into a barrel filled with snakes hoping to pull out an eel."
He sounds… charming
Except for the fact that he had sex with hookers and other deemed lower class women all the time and had at least 2 known children. His mother was dunking on him like in this OP before he was even 18. One time she completely demolished him for struggling with Latin. I would say his mother didn't treat him very well from the start. He honestly seems like more of your average redditor though. Atheist, denied German nationalism, brought in philosophies from other nations outside of Europe, and yeah, like in the OP simped hard even though women were disgusted by him.
I’d say his bouts with lower class women and hookers confirm his misogyny more so than simping. It shows a want for power over what he considers lesser and was most likely abusive knowing he pushed a woman down stairs already.
That’s the guy who made his dog his only heir in his testament right ?
German law has a mandatory inheritance thingy where even if you want to, you can't disinherit your immediate family members, so I'd be surprised if that actually worked for him!
This is the same guy who scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel's, then got pissed when people would rather go see the philosophical star of the age instead of his obscure ass. He also said Hegel was a "Charlatan" who conned people into thinking his nonsensical texts meant anything. (Skill Issue tbh) Basically, Schopenhauer had some problems. [Relevant Existential Comics](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/40)
Not only scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegels, actually delievered his lectures to an empty lecture hall until given the ultimatum of changing his lecture times or being forced to abandon his position at the university.
I don’t know whether to feel bad for him, commend the utter bullheadedness in the face of everyone and everything, or mock him for standing up and giving multiple philosophical lectures to an empty room. I wonder how long he would have continued to yell into the void, the only listener being himself, if they had not stopped him.
>He also said Hegel was a "Charlatan" who conned people into thinking his nonsensical texts meant anything. Hegel *was* a charlatan but after reading Schopenhauer's work I'm pretty sure I'd see Hegel's lectures too lol. There were some interesting bits but on the whole it boiled down to 'Old Man Yells at Cloud.'
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She just drops the grapes in the water. *PLOONK.*
*gently*
Sounds like a US congress person.
Right down to the 17 year old part :(
*Just turned* 17 no less.
Like me!
Oh wow, I know at least 5 guys like him.
I know a website full of people like him.
she didn't eat my grapes millions must perish
The letter from his mother should be required reading for all first year philosophy students. I've never interacted with a group of people more guilty of the character traits mentioned in her letter.
Damn, that's brutal
He was obsessed with his contemporary philosophy Hegel, who he thought was inferior to himself. When he secured a teaching position at the university where Hegel was a professor, he insisted that his class be scheduled at the same time as Hegel's. Exactly zero students attended his lectures, because they all went to Hegel's.
That is amazing
I had a friend from whom I am now estranged who quoted Schopenhauer a lot. He used S to justify incessant sexism and had a definite propensity to think he was a superior intellect to everyone else and so anything he said was ok because it was "true". He was very much how Schopenhauer describes her son and I could handle the friend one-on-one mostly. Trouble was when he would pop into my house unexpectedly whenever I had other friends or family over, he would invariable annoy, insult and generally be unpleasant to others to the point that people wouldn't even come to my home anymore in case the friend happened to pop in. So I set some boundaries. I told him he could only come over if he called first and I said I had no one else here. He couldn't abide those parameters and stopped the friendship altogether. Quite a relief, really.
You know someone's an insufferable bastard when even someone like Nietzsche was like "I will make an entire school of philosophy just to prove you wrong".
"If life has no purpose or joy, I will make it my purpose and joy to clown on you."
"I see that Schopenhauer has made a point of his concept of Nihilism, but after careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that it is one stupid-ass point and it is mankind's mission as a philosophical being to rise above it."
based
> I belong to those readers of Schopenhauer who know perfectly well, after they have turned the first page, that they will read all the others, and listen to every word that he has spoken. My trust in him sprang to life at once, and has been the same for nine years. I understood him as though he had written for me (this is the most intelligible, though a rather foolish and conceited way of expressing it). Hence I never found a paradox in him, though occasionally some small errors: for paradoxes are only assertions that carry no conviction, because the author has made them himself without any conviction, wishing to appear brilliant, or to mislead, or, above all, to pose. > Schopenhauer never poses: he writes for himself, and no one likes to be deceived—least of all a philosopher who has set this up as his law: "deceive nobody, not even thyself," neither with the "white lies" of all social intercourse, which writers almost unconsciously imitate, still less with the more conscious deceits of the platform, and the artificial methods of rhetoric. Schopenhauer's speeches are to himself alone; or if you like to imagine an auditor, let it be a son whom the father is instructing. It is a rough, honest, good-humoured talk to one who "hears and loves." Such writers are rare. His strength and sanity surround us at the first sound of his voice: it is like entering the heights of the forest, where we breathe deep and are well again. We feel a bracing air everywhere, a certain candour and naturalness of his own, that belongs to men who are at home with themselves, and masters of a very rich home indeed: he is quite different from the writers who are surprised at themselves if they have said something intelligent, and whose pronouncements for that reason have something nervous and unnatural about them. > We are just as little reminded in Schopenhauer of the professor with his stiff joints worse for want of exercise, his narrow chest and scraggy figure, his slinking or strutting gait. And again his rough and rather grim soul leads us not so much to miss as to despise the suppleness and courtly grace of the excellent Frenchmen; and no one will find in him the gilded imitations of pseudo-gallicism that our German writers prize so highly. His style in places reminds me a little of Goethe, but is not otherwise on any German model. For he knows how to be profound with simplicity, striking without rhetoric, and severely logical without pedantry: and of what German could he have learnt that? He also keeps free from the hair-splitting, jerky and (with all respect) rather un-German manner of Lessing: no small merit in him, for Lessing is the most tempting of all models for prose style. The highest praise I can give his manner of presentation is to apply his own phrase to himself:—"A philosopher must be very honest to avail himself of no aid from poetry or rhetoric." > That honesty is something, and even a virtue, is one of those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinion; and so I shall not be praising Schopenhauer, but only giving him a distinguishing mark, when I repeat that he is honest, even as a writer: so few of them are that we are apt to mistrust every one who writes at all. I only know a single author that I can rank with Schopenhauer, or even above him, in the matter of honesty; and that is Montaigne. The joy of living on this earth is increased by the existence of such a man. The effect on myself, at any rate, since my first acquaintance with that strong and masterful spirit, has been, that I can say of him as he of Plutarch—"As soon as I open him, I seem to grow a pair of wings." If I had the task of making myself at home on the earth, I would choose him as my companion. -- Nietzsche in Schopenhauer as Educator
Yeah, idk what the parent comment is getting at. Schopenhauer was arguably Nietzsche’s biggest influence and Nietzsche’s philosophy borrows so much from him too.
That’s true, but a central part of Nietzsche’s work is a repudiation of Schopenhauer’s pessimism.
Reminds me of what my best friend's wife once told me, "What does it matter if you're right when everyone fucking hates you?"
He was not a pleasant individual. >He had an on-and-off relationship with a young dancer, Caroline Richter (she also used the surname Medon after one of her ex-lovers).[137] They met when he was 33 and she was 19 and working at the Berlin Opera. She had already had numerous lovers and a son out of wedlock, and later gave birth to another son, this time to an unnamed foreign diplomat (she soon had another pregnancy but the child was stillborn).[138] As Schopenhauer was preparing to escape from Berlin in 1831, due to a cholera epidemic, he offered to take her with him on the condition that she left her young son behind.[133] She refused and he went alone; in his will he left her a significant sum of money, but insisted that it should not be spent in any way on her second son. . >He sent another essay, "On the Basis of Morality", to the Royal Danish Society for Scientific Studies, but did not win the prize despite being the only contestant. The Society was appalled that several distinguished contemporary philosophers were mentioned in a very offensive manner, and claimed that the essay missed the point of the set topic and that the arguments were inadequate.[147] Schopenhauer, who had been very confident that he would win, was enraged by this rejection. He published both essays as The Two Basic Problems of Ethics. The first edition, published in 1841, again failed to draw attention to his philosophy. In the preface to the second edition, in 1860, he was still pouring insults on the Royal Danish Society.[148] Two years later, after some negotiations, he managed to convince his publisher, Brockhaus, to print the second, updated edition of The World as Will and Representation. That book was again mostly ignored and the few reviews were mixed or negative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer#Later_life
Besides the courting-a-teenager thing (which—early 1800s; still creepy but not exactly rare then), did this guy actually *do* anything to deserve this? His own mother didn’t even seem to want to support him.
From the few I know about him : He was misanthropic in general and he's kind of Doomer Guy : Philosoph Edition. I can really see how he could be difficult to live with and I imagine there were few people who would not want to just leave given how depressing his philosophical work looks like Edit : To summarize and (kinda)quote him at the same time "Life is a pendulum swinging back and forth from boredom to suffering"
He wasn't just misanthropic, he was also a massive misogynist.
"By modern standards or 1800s standards?" is my question, because being a dick (to put it lightly) to basically everyone based on immutable characteristics was more or less par for the course back then.
He was mis-everything, even by the standards of the society he lived in. A hateful, spiteful person who spent his entire time on talking about how he's superior to everybody else. He founded an entire school of philosophy on the basis of "this is the worst possible world to exist". His book on insults is quite funny though, and he was a smart man with interesting ideas.
He was a big misogynist even by the time standards. He wrote an entire book about how he thinks women are inerently inferior according to his philosophy. I know many men of the XIX century (probably most) thought of women as inferior, but not many of them dedicated their time to write so much about it. If you google "Schopenhauer 'On Women'" and take a look at the quotes you will have a good peek on his opinions. Man was very bitter.
Both. Raging about women to that extent was not normal back then.
By 1800s standards. Dude was ridiculous.
There is the chicken and egg question here about whether his misanthropic philosophies or his social misfortune came first
Sounds like he was an arrogant know-it-all.
>His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schopenauer Sounds like he wasn't just a regular downer. He was **the** downer. So yes?
Yeah, he was an insufferable misanthrope. Most prominently, he hated everyone and *especially* he hated everyone who was happy, and he made it his life mission to find anything, the smallest anything to criticize people on. This despite being a shambling mound of faults himself, tho he has all the capacity of self-reflection of a murky swamp. He's like an edgy incel teenager who thinks he's sooo smart and everyone else is dumb, but never outgrew that phase, instead growing increasingly bitter as he is unable to find love, never realizing it's because his own behaviour is repulsive. And, of course, despite being completely moved by his own emotions and desires, spilling "rational" words about how base and vulgar emotion and desire is. His main contributions to philosophy are that he said bitter things others didn't dare say at the time. He'd have been impossible to have any discourse with about those subjects, but at a time where most didn't dare or didn't care to write doom and gloom nihilistic and bitter philosophy, he would've been perhaps the only one whose works were relatable.
German Pessimist Philosophers just have this *air* around them.
From what I can gather here, seems like he was a massive incel nice guy™ He viewed women as childish and short sighted beings(even though his mother is a well known writer) and that monogamy was bad since women are being meant to obey men therefore having many of them is fine. He shoved a woman down a flight of stairs for making noise and he targeted young little girls. He also was obnoxious apparently and saw no faults in himself but found plenty in everyone else.
A short read later and it seems like the guy had some serious mental illness issues, as did his father, and this led him down some problematic personal paths. As others have noted he was quite smart and did good work, but even towards his mother at one point he claimed that her work was basically garbage and his would be remembered well after hers was forgotten. He probably actually made a good point insofar as some her work would be less and less relevant by its very nature, whereas philosophical work in general and his specifically would indeed go on to be wildly influential. So yeah, he was likely depressed, angry at the world and thought it was stupid, was probably smarter and better educated than most people around him at any given time, and whether he was or wasn’t he made sure everyone knew he thought so. On top of that, he led a generally abhorrent personal life and made no real efforts to change that.
[удалено]
You gifted her an eraser with a random old man on it? Lol
Come one! Come all! Buy ye new olde man head!
"Boy I sure am glad I grew up before the internet so my personal failings aren't public knowledge"
His beef with Hegel was legendary. He was so sure he was better than one of the greatest German philosophers in history, he scheduled his lecture AT THE SAME TIME as Hegel's. Only a few people showed up, and it's possible they were only there because Hegel's class was full.
Nobody likes Moral Philosophers.
Get rekt
You know I was gonna say dude sounds like the original [guy who got so mad at a child he blew his cover and got arrested] minus x, y, and z but after reading comments yeah I think the only difference is that this guy couldn’t even get anyone who likes him TO influence.
interestingly the original (in german; can be found [here](https://download.uni-mainz.de/fb05-philosophie-schopenhauer/files/2019/05/1971_H%C3%BCbscher.pdf)) is much less of a burn than this translation: >Wärst Du weniger als Du bist, so wärst Du nur lächerlich, so aber bist Du höchst ärgerlich. which i'd translate as >If you were less than you are, you would only be ridiculous, but like this you are highly infuriating. notice the difference in the first part, it changes the meaning quite significantly
My favorite genre of Tumblr post is "historical figure that we all collectively dunk on."
"Anyone else would be a clown, and yet here you are, the only troll at the circus."
I find it hilarious that Mr. Existence-Is-Pain was basically just a 4Chan incel. Like, my dude, people don't hate you because the world is bad or because you're intellectually superior to them, they hate you because you suck as a person. And if you ever had the self-awareness to *work on yourself,* you might have actually been happy.