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    The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy
    The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy
    The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy
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    The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy

    By Arthur Schopenhauer

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    This early work by Arthur Schopenhauer was originally published in 1830 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. The contents of 'The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy,' are drawn entirely from his posthumous papers, edited and translated by T. Bailey Saunders. Arthur Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788, in Gdansk, a Polish city on the Baltic coast. His parents were both descendants of wealthy German Patrician families, and moved to Hamburg shortly after the Prussians annexed Gdansk in 1793. Schopenhauer enrolled at the University of Göttingen in 1809 and it was here that he first studied metaphysics and psychology, under the well respected and polemical anti-Kantian philosopher, Gottlob Ernst Schulze. Schopenhauer began his most famous work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung ('The World as Will and Representation') in 1814, and published it five years later. This text has become a centre-piece of modern philosophy, in which the author argues that the world is driven by a continually dissatisfied 'will', one which is continually seeking satisfaction. It includes aspects of epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, ethics and a strong criticism of the Kantian approach to knowledge.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWhite Press
    Release dateDec 12, 2014
    ISBN9781473398665
    The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy
    Author

    Arthur Schopenhauer

    Nació en Danzig en 1788. Hijo de un próspero comerciante, la muerte prematura de su padre le liberó de dedicarse a los negocios y le procuró un patrimonio que le permitió vivir de las rentas, pudiéndose consagrar de lleno a la filosofía. Fue un hombre solitario y metódico, de carácter irascible y de una acentuada misoginia. Enemigo personal y filosófico de Hegel, despreció siempre el Idealismo alemán y se consideró a sí mismo como el verdadero continuador de Kant, en cuyo criticismo encontró la clave para su metafísica de la voluntad. Su pensamiento no conoció la fama hasta pocos años después de su muerte, acaecida en Fráncfort en 1860. Schopenhauer ha pasado a la historia como el filósofo pesimista por excelencia. Admirador de Calderón y Gracián, tradujo al alemán el «Oráculo manual» del segundo. Hoy es uno de los clásicos de la filosofía más apreciados y leídos debido a la claridad de su pensamiento. Sus escritos marcaron hitos culturales y continúan influyendo en la actualidad. En esta misma Editorial han sido publicadas sus obras «Metafísica de las costumbres» (2001), «Diarios de viaje. Los Diarios de viaje de los años 1800 y 1803-1804» (2012), «Sobre la visión y los colores seguido de la correspondencia con Johann Wolfgang Goethe» (2013), «Parerga y paralipómena» I (2.ª ed., 2020) y II (2020), «El mundo como voluntad y representación» I (2.ª ed., 2022) y II (3.ª ed., 2022) y «Dialéctica erística o Arte de tener razón en 38 artimañas» (2023).

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      Book preview

      The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy - Arthur Schopenhauer

      THE ESSAYS OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER:

      THE ART OF CONTROVERSY

      by

      ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

      TRANSLATED BY

      T. BAILEY SAUNDERS, M.A.

      Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Contents

      THE ESSAYS OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER: THE ART OF CONTROVERSY

      Arthur Schopenhauer

      TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.

      1. PRELIMINARY: LOGIC AND DIALECTIC.

      2. THE BASIS OF ALL DIALECTIC.

      3. STRATAGEMS.

      I.

      II.

      III.

      IV.

      V.

      VI.

      VII.

      VIII.

      IX.

      X.

      XI.

      XII.

      XIII.

      XIV.

      XV.

      XVI.

      XVII.

      XVIII.

      XIX.

      XX.

      XXI.

      XXII.

      XXIII.

      XXIV.

      XXVI.

      XXVII.

      XXVIII.

      XXIX.[1]

      XXX.

      XXXI.

      XXXII.

      XXXIII.

      XXXIV.

      XXXV.

      XXXVI.

      XXXVII.

      XXXVIII.

      4. ON THE COMPARATIVE PLACE OF INTEREST AND BEAUTY IN WORKS OF ART.

      5. PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS.

      6. ON THE WISDOM OF LIFE: APHORISMS.

      7. GENIUS AND VIRTUE.

      Arthur Schopenhauer

      Arthur Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788, in Gdańsk, a Polish city on the Baltic coast. His parents were both descendants of wealthy German Patrician families, and moved to Hamburg shortly after the Prussians annexed Gdańsk in 1793. It was here that Schopenhauer’s father committed suicide (most likely in 1805), and after this, his mother moved to Weimar in order to pursue her writing career. Schopenhauer joined his mother one year later, although he always had a troubled relationship with her. He found her newly established ‘literary salon’, with its vanity and ceremoniousness, incompatible with his own values, and was also deeply troubled by the ease with which his mother forgot his father’s memory. Consequently, in order to gain a greater degree of independence, Schopenhauer enrolled at the University of Göttingen in 1809. It was here that he first studied metaphysics and psychology, under the well respected and polemical anti-Kantian philosopher, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who advised the young man to concentrate on Plato and Kant. Schopenhauer wrote his thesis on the main aspects of experience in the phenomenal world, entitled On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. He elaborated on the classical principle of ‘sufficient reason’ which states that nothing is without a ground or a reason, giving four main classes of explanation; ‘becoming’, ‘knowing’, ‘being’ and ‘willing’. Whilst his mother informed him that ‘the book was incomprehensible and it was unlikely that anyone would ever buy a copy’, it has remained an important text in phenomenology (the study of experience and consciousness) to this day. By 1812, Schopenhauer had attended lectures in Berlin by seminal thinkers of the day; the post-Kantian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schopenhauer began his most famous work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (‘The World as Will and Representation’) in 1814, and published it five years later. This text has become a centre-piece of modern philosophy, in which the author argues that the world is driven by a continually dissatisfied ‘will’, one which is continually seeking satisfaction. It includes aspects of epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, ethics and a strong criticism of the Kantian approach to knowledge. After the phenomenal success of his book, Schopenhauer was appointed a lecturer at the University of Berlin in 1820, where he famously clashed with his colleague, the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. A notoriously difficult character, Schopenhauer deliberately scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel’s in order to take students away from the ‘clumsy charlatan’ as he described him. Only five students attended Schopenhauer’s lectures however, and he soon dropped out of academia. In a later essay, On University Philosophy, he expressed his deep-felt resentment against the political manoeuvrings of university life.

      In 1821, Schopenhauer fell in love with a beautiful young opera singer, Caroline Richter, with whom he had a relationship for several years. He refused to marry however, stating that ‘marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties’ – later clarifying his position – ‘marrying means to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find an eel amongst an assembly of snakes.’

      In 1831, a cholera epidemic broke out in Berlin and Schopenhauer left the city. He settled permanently in Frankfurt in 1833, where he remained for the next twenty-seven years, living alone except for a succession of pet poodles named Atman and Butz. Schopenhauer enjoyed good health throughout his life, but at the age of seventy began to quickly deteriorate. He died on 21 September 1860, from heart failure, whilst sitting alone at his home in Frankfurt. He is remembered amongst the pantheon of great philosophers and has influenced figures as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Erwin Schrödinger, Carl Jung and Leo Tolstoy.

      TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.

      The volume now before the reader is a tardy addition to a series in which I have endeavoured to present Schopenhauer’s minor writings in an adequate form.

      Its contents are drawn entirely from his posthumous papers. A selection of them was given to the world some three of four years after his death by his friend and literary executor, Julius Frauenstädt, who for this and other offices of piety, has received less recognition than he deserves. The papers then published have recently been issued afresh, with considerable additions and corrections, by Dr. Eduard Grisebach, who is also entitled to gratitude for the care with which he has followed the text of the manuscripts, now in the Royal Library at Berlin, and for having drawn attention—although in terms that are unnecessarily severe—to a number of faults and failings on the part of the previous editor.

      The fact that all Schopenhauer’s works, together with a volume of his correspondence, may now be obtained in a certain cheap collection of the best national and foreign literature displayed in almost every bookshop in Germany, is sufficient evidence that in his own country the writer’s popularity is still very great; nor does the demand for translations indicate that his fame has at all diminished abroad. The favour with which the new edition of his posthumous papers has been received induces me, therefore, to resume a task which I thought, five years ago, that I had finally completed; and it is my intention to bring out one more volume, selected partly from these papers and partly from his Parerga.

      A small part of the essay on The Art of Controversy was published in Schopenhauer’s lifetime, in the chapter of the Parerga headed Zur Logik und Dialektik. The intelligent reader will discover that a good deal of its contents is of an ironical character. As regards the last three essays I must observe that I have omitted such passages as appear to be no longer of any general interest or otherwise unsuitable. I must also confess to having taken one or two liberties with the titles, in order that they may the more effectively fulfil the purpose for which titles exist. In other respects I have adhered to the original with the kind of fidelity which aims at producing an impression as nearly as possible similar to that produced by the original.

      T.B.S.

      February, 1896

      1.

      PRELIMINARY: LOGIC AND DIALECTIC.

      By the ancients, Logic and Dialectic were used as synonymous terms; although [Greek: logizesthai], to think over, to consider, to calculate, and [Greek: dialegesthai], to converse, are two very different things.

      The name Dialectic was, as we are informed by Diogenes Laertius, first used by Plato; and in the Phaedrus, Sophist, Republic, bk. vii., and elsewhere, we find that by Dialectic he means the regular employment of the reason, and skill in the practice of it. Aristotle also uses the word in this sense; but, according to Laurentius Valla, he was the first to use Logic too in a similar way.[1] Dialectic, therefore, seems to be an older word than Logic. Cicero and Quintilian use the words in the same general signification.[2]

      [Footnote 1: He speaks of [Greek: dyscherelai logicai], that is, difficult points, [Greek: protasis logicae aporia logicae]]

      [Footnote 2: Cic. in Lucullo: Dialecticam inventam esse, veri et falsi quasi disceptatricem. Topica, c. 2: Stoici enim judicandi vias diligenter persecuti sunt, ea scientia, quam Dialecticen appellant. Quint., lib. ii., 12: Itaque haec pars dialecticae, sive illam disputatricem dicere malimus; and with him this latter word appears to be the Latin equivalent for Dialectic. (So far according to Petri Rami dialectica, Audomari Talaei praelectionibus illustrata. 1569.)]

      This use of the words and synonymous terms lasted through the Middle Ages into modern times; in fact, until the present day. But more recently, and in particular by Kant, Dialectic has often been employed in a bad sense, as meaning the art of sophistical controversy; and hence Logic has been preferred, as of the two the more innocent designation. Nevertheless, both originally meant the same thing; and in the last few years they have again been recognised as synonymous.

      It is a pity that the words have thus been used from of old, and that I am not quite at liberty to distinguish their meanings. Otherwise, I should have preferred to define Logic (from [Greek: logos], word and reason, which are inseparable) as the science of the laws of thought, that is, of the method of reason; and Dialectic (from [Greek: dialegesthai], to converse—and

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