Book: Parerga and Paralipomena

Overview
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) gathers Arthur Schopenhauer’s most accessible and variegated writings into two volumes that flank and illuminate his principal system. The title means “Appendices and Omissions”: pieces that stand beside his metaphysics while filling gaps, simplifying, or extending it. Its success finally brought him a broad readership and fixed his reputation as a master stylist of German prose and a relentless critic of academic philosophy.

Structure and scope
The Parerga present longer essays and small treatises on metaphysics, aesthetics, religion, and practical wisdom. The Paralipomena are shorter topical reflections arranged in chapters, compact observations on logic and dialectic, psychology, the comic, authorship and style, and everyday life. Together they range from severe metaphysical claims to aphoristic counsel, from polemical broadsides to delicate appreciations of art.

Metaphysics and epistemology
Schopenhauer restates the core of his system: the world appears to us as representation, structured by the forms of space, time, and causality, yet its inner nature is will, blind, ceaseless striving that objectifies itself through grades of nature and consciousness. He stresses the primacy of will over intellect: reason rationalizes purposes whose roots lie in affect and impulse, making human life a circuit between desire, brief satisfaction, and boredom. Kant remains the crucial starting point, but Schopenhauer insists he has uncovered the “thing in itself” as will. He also treats error, self-deception, and the limits of syllogistic reason, sketching a practical art of controversy that unmasks rhetorical stratagems.

Ethics and the art of living
Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, the book’s most widely read segment, collects hard-headed advice on happiness. He distinguishes what one is (character, health, temperament), what one has (property), and what one represents (reputation, status), ranking the first highest and warning that social glitter cannot compensate for inner poverty. Quiet pleasures, solitude, measured work, and intellectual cultivation sustain a tolerable existence in a world organized by suffering. Moral worth springs from compassion, the rare capacity to pierce the principium individuationis and recognize oneself in others’ pain. The ethical ideal culminates in asceticism, the denial of the will’s demands, which he treats with respect, seeing in saints and sages a possible, if extreme, deliverance.

Aesthetics and art
On the Metaphysics of the Beautiful deepens his earlier claim that aesthetic contemplation suspends willing. In beholding Platonic Ideas through art, the subject becomes “pure will-less subject of knowing” and gains respite from striving. Genius is the capacity for such objectifying intuition; it has little to do with practical intelligence. Music occupies a unique rank as a direct copy of the will itself, expressing the inner essence of the world more immediately than the visual arts.

Religion, death, and denial of the will
Essays on religion interpret dogmas allegorically, valuing traditions that acknowledge suffering, compassion, and renunciation. On Death argues that individual consciousness perishes, yet the inner essence, will as the world’s kernel, is indestructible; personal immortality is rejected, while a deeper continuity of being is affirmed. Eastern sources, especially the Upanishads and Buddhism, stand as convergent witnesses to pessimism, compassion, and the path of negation.

Style, polemic, and miscellany
Schopenhauer writes with clarity, wit, and venom. He ridicules hollow verbosity in the universities and singles out Hegel as emblematic of obscurantism. Pieces such as On Reading and Books, On Noise, and On Writers and Style mix urbane guidance with tart satire. Other pages, like On Women, display prejudices that have drawn strong criticism, illustrating both the brilliance and the blind spots of the collection.

Legacy
The volumes provided an inviting portal to a severe philosophy, coupling a stark account of suffering with practical maxims, aesthetic solace, and ethical seriousness. Their blend of system and aphorism helped shape later thinkers and artists while securing Schopenhauer a durable place outside the lecture hall he scorned.