Book: Essays and Aphorisms

Overview
Essays and Aphorisms presents a distilled map of Arthur Schopenhauer’s mature thought, drawn largely from his 1851 Parerga and Paralipomena. Written in a lucid, polemical style, the pieces range from brisk maxims to compact essays on metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, psychology, religion, and practical living. Together they sharpen the central claim of his system: that beneath the world we know lies a blind, ceaseless striving he calls the Will, and that understanding this fact reorients how we judge happiness, virtue, art, and death.

Metaphysics of the Will and Pessimism
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics pivots on the distinction between the world as representation, appearances structured by our forms of perception, and the world as Will, the inner being of everything, manifest as urge and impulse. From this springs his famous pessimism: life is animated by lack, desire breeds pain, and satisfaction is brief before boredom returns. The human condition is thus an oscillation between suffering and emptiness. Philosophical honesty, he argues, requires acknowledging this structure rather than dressing it in optimistic rationalizations or progress myths.

Ethics, Compassion, and Conduct
Against systems that ground morality in reason, utility, or divine command, he locates its root in compassion, a direct participation in another’s inner being that momentarily loosens the prison of ego. Character is largely innate and unchangeable, so ethics is less a project of remodeling the self than of regulating one’s willing: lessen demands, simplify desires, avoid avoidable pain, and cultivate benignity. Practical counsels stress self-possession, moderation, and independence of mind; fame and honor are unstable currencies compared with inner serenity.

Love, Women, and Social Life
His reflections on sexual love and the sexes are among the most controversial. He interprets amorous passion as the species working through individuals, tricking them into perpetuation; what lovers deem personal destiny is, for him, biological teleology. His remarks on women, often caustic and unfair, reveal his biases as much as his method of demystification. More generally, he is a shrewd observer of social vanity, conversation, and status games, warning that society frequently amplifies envy and distraction rather than wisdom.

Art, Genius, and Knowledge
Aesthetics offers a temporary exit from the tyranny of the Will. In disinterested contemplation, we apprehend Platonic Ideas and forget ourselves; the higher the art, the clearer this relief. Music stands apart as a direct expression of the Will’s rhythms, not a mere copy of appearances. He contrasts mere learning with thinking, urging readers to read sparingly, reflect deeply, and write plainly. Genius is marked by the capacity to sustain intuition beyond practical ends, but it comes with isolation and exposure to the world’s noise, both literal and figurative.

Religion, Death, and the Denial of the Will
He treats religions as symbolic metaphysics that, despite errors, capture ethical truths for ordinary consciousness. The serious path lies in ascetic practices that weaken willing: compassion, chastity, poverty of desire, and quietude. Regarding death, he denies that individual extinction refutes the deeper continuity of being; what ends is the principium individuationis, not the inner essence. Suicide is criticized as a violent assertion of the Will, not its negation; the ethical ideal is a serene loosening of attachment rather than flight.

Style and Legacy
The book’s aphoristic concentration gives Schopenhauer’s system unusual accessibility without sacrificing severity. Its blend of metaphysical boldness, psychological realism, and practical advice influenced writers, psychologists, and later philosophers. What endures is the insistence that clear seeing, of suffering, desire, and illusion, can ground a humane ethics and a modest art of living, extracting dignity from a world inhospitable to facile consolation.