/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.23012668]

is it too dense for someone with very little philosophy background or can I just pick it up and read it? I have been meaning to get this for some time and recently finished my stack so considering to get this, but just cannot be sure.

please don't suggest me to start with the greeks.

[Anonymous No.23012699]

>>23012668
he literally says on the first page that you need to read Kant, and his earlier work as a prerequisite. and guess who you need to read as a prerequisite to Kant? that's right, stop being a lazy psued poser and start with the greeks.

[Anonymous No.23012766]

>>23012668
want to read a book about schopi? don't go to the original better go for Decoding metaphysics - Kastrup

[Anonymous No.23012781]

>reading refuted trash philosophy instead of watching a lecture on it at 3.5X speed
For what purpose?

[Anonymous No.23012883]

I tried and didn’t make it past page 100

[Anonymous No.23012901]

>>23012699
This.
You have to build up man. Be patient it pays off

[Anonymous No.23012908]

>>23012781
>refuted
let me guess,
hegelian?
yeah man, history definitely has grand purpose and several civilizations haven't disappeared into nothing

[Anonymous No.23012947]

If you are new to philosophy, then I strongly recommend ignoring what Schopenhauer says about reading the critical appendix on Kant (100pg~) first, and also I recommend willfully skimming sections on metaphysics and cosmology you don't understand or half-understand. Schopenhauer really did think that his system was a comprehensive one, complete with a natural philosophy which he felt was confirmed by empirical physics and zoology etc. You don't have to agree with any of it to find value in his general metaphysical perspective, and you don't even have to agree with his general metaphysical perspective to find a lot of value in the many insights he has into character, culture, etc.

To sum up this advice: Just don't let yourself get filtered or feel discouraged by all the straight-up metaphysical/cosmological parts. When in doubt, skim or skip a section and keep going. You can always come back and appreciate the book at a greater level later on, when you have more general philosophical knowledge or clearer metaphysical commitments.

The first sections are also some of the most difficult in this respect. He really gets into cultural and ethical matters more and more in subsequent sections. So hold on tight for those, or if you're the type of reader who doesn't mind doing this, jump around at will. Frankly, whatever gets you reading the parts that speak to you is a fine method. Again, you can always re-do things "properly" later if you end up liking Schopenhauer - the key on your first reading is to prevent you getting filtered and never even finding out WHETHER you like Schopenhauer.

Just remember that he has had many deep appreciators and readers over the years, most of whom were at odds with his metaphysics in one way or another. Not least being Wagner and Nietzsche, neither of whom says a word about Schopenhauer's metaphysics and doesn't give a fuck about it, and clearly didn't take Schopenhauer's own view of his system (i.e. that his metaphysics was airtight and final) seriously. So do exactly as they did, and just enjoy his genius as it strikes you. Reading chunks of Parerga and Paralipomena might also work for you. There are basically two Schopenhauers, historically speaking: the brilliant essayist and psychologist, and the metaphysician. 98% of the people influenced by him were 80/20 influenced by the former and latter, respectively. MOST people read him as a penetrating insightful thinker in general, and then had a GENERAL "feel" for his metaphysics. No one has been an "orthodox Schopenhauerian metaphysician."

However, if you DO have fairly deep philosophical knowledge, then Schopenhauer's metaphysical side is also great. Not many people can read and enjoy The Fourfold Root (as he recommends doing) but if you are one of those few then it is a great essay. Freedom of the Will is more a mixed bag, since its presumption of total un-freedom is hideous to most people, but it's peppered with his usual insights into character, culture, etc.

[Anonymous No.23013032]

>>23012947
thanks for the sweeping post, it affirmed some of my hunches and negated others.

from your explanation I feel like it's better for me to follow a roundabout way to get familiar with his work. because I am not the type of reader that can feel comfortable leaving details behind me and go further. from what I understand if I pick this, which seems to be a holistic scientific exposition of his philosophy, I will miss out on a lot of details and it will be a painful experience.

I understand it's the unpopular method as Schopenhauer fans here seem to have an uncompromising view of having a tight grasp of older concepts and philosophy of Kant before I dare read him, which I respect, but I am curious since I come across some snippets from him and want to read more.

do you think if I get P&P I could "get" what he is saying? is it like a compilation of his essays?

[Anonymous No.23013323]

We literally had this thread two days ago and a bunch of morons got mad at me for saying what this anon said >>23012699

[Anonymous No.23013394]

>>23012947
Great post.

[Anonymous No.23013413]

You are not an evil human; you are not without intellect and education; you have everything that could make you a credit to human society. Moreover, I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.
All of your good qualities become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others; of wanting to improve and master what you cannot command. With this you embitter the people around you, since no one wants to be improved or enlightened in such a forceful way, least of all by such an insignificant individual as you still are; no one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself, least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection.
If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.
Letter from Schopenhauer's mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, to her son. November 6, 1807.

[Anonymous No.23013425]

>>23012947
>No one has been an "orthodox Schopenhauerian metaphysician."
But why not? I always wondered this. People became Nietzscheans and Marxists, they live by Buddha, but not Schopenhauer. They just adopted aspects of his thought and adhered to his ethical teachings. Almost none have comprehensively embraced his metaphysics. Someone like Tolstoy looked at Schopenhauer as his greatest teacher in life but he embraced Christ after reading him, as did Wagner

[Anonymous No.23013475]

>>23013413
>Letter from Schopenhauer's mother
his rebuttal?
>History will remember you only as "Schoepenhauer's mother".

[Anonymous No.23013510]

>>23012668
Metaphysics the most abstruse language game.
To me it simply means physical truth in absence of an instance. That is my narrow poetic extension of physics but if you heed what I said, then morality is objective. Because metaphysics IS. IF there is a PHYSICAL basis for morality then it can or could be measured by an omniscient being. Every ancient trad CHUD religion says as much. Souls EXIST. Buddha btfo. There is a white flame of good the blackest negro shaman will testify there is. There is black smoke of the soul to ala amatetarasu. I claim to have seen the light and the smoke IRL with my own eyes. It's not the light of Jesus persay but some of these ghosts were Christians and others were not. This means ghost skype is possible and likely to happen in my lifetime to see ghosts interviewed.

[Anonymous No.23013518]

>>23013510
Thank you for coming to my CHUD Talk

[Anonymous No.23013620]

>>23013425
Metaphysics has been dead for 200 years. Nobody approaches metaphysics seriously anymore, and despite being the cornerstone of most philosophy pre-1800, moderners try to weasel around it and go straight towards ethics or epistemology, which DO still feel relevant. But you can't really do this. Metaphysics is the anchor of all philosophy, and without it the discipline has gone full retard as we can see.

>Almost none have comprehensively embraced his metaphysics. Someone like Tolstoy looked at Schopenhauer as his greatest teacher in life but he embraced Christ after reading him, as did Wagner
The answer is they never engaged with his metaphysics, but his conclusions. The idea that life is fundamentally (and provably) bad is how Schopenhauer influences people, from Nietzsche to Tolstoy to Houellebecq. You could read Doctrine of the Vanity of Existence and get 99% of what most people glean from schope in just a small handful of pages.

OP shouldn't feel too guilty for desiring to jump right into TWaWaR, but understand you will get a shallow perspective of it that prevents him from engaging with the metaphysics, so instead of being logical, your agreement with the book becomes "vibes-based" and emotional. If you want to read TWaWaR but don't believe in metaphysics, well... don't do it. Go read his essays, and come back when you have a proper metaphysical education.

Metaphysics is not "additional evidence" when it comes to philosophy. It is the ENTIRE evidence. It is the whole argument, the whole proof, the core of what Kant or Schopenhauer is saying.

In that respect, the late 19th century was a real degeneration of the intellectual world because nobody could even follow what Schopenhauer meant. They read him like a poet rather than a philosopher. That's why they found it so easy to reject him.

[Anonymous No.23013695]

It won’t be too dense for you but you will have absolutely no clue what he’s on about and even if you finish it it will be about as worthwhile to you as if you’d beat your head with a rubber mallet for however long it takes you to finish it. Start with the Greeks is a meme for literature but the only genuine way to begin learning philosophy.

[Anonymous No.23013735]

He gives an extensive summary of both Kant and Plato's philosophies in a page of text at the beginning of book three, literally telling you everything you'd need to know prior to reading the book. Don't fall for the meme, OP, his genius wasn't really in his metaphysics anyway, but in his more earthly passages on aesthetic, ethics and the like. You'll be fine.

[Anonymous No.23013761]

>>23013735
>his genius wasn't really in his metaphysics anyway, but in his more earthly passages on aesthetic, ethics and the like.
This nullifies the entire point of his work. If you read Schopenhauer and go "Oh he says animal cruelty is wrong, I also feel that way, so I like his book" you're not getting anything out of his work. Same with his pessimism. All you're doing is going "Hmm yes this agrees with how I already feel about life!" Maybe it feels good in the short-term, but you are not growing from it, you are not learning anything.

[Anonymous No.23013828]

>>23013761
That all you could muster to summarize his work outside of the vague "his metaphysics is real deep" is "animal cruelty is wrong" (which is only a tiny and insignificant remark in the scope of even just The World as Will and Idea, let alone his entire body of work) and "pessimism" (once again a stupefyingly vague description) signals you're the one who barely got anything out of it.

[Anonymous No.23013831]

>>23013828
It's a retarded take anyways, you don't have to accept his metaphysics or the idea of metaphysics to appreciate his system. Just like an atheist can get something from reading about religion

[Anonymous No.23014319]

>>23013828
>>23013831
>That all you could muster [yap yap yap...]
It's an example, was I supposed to list every possible remark from his works?

Everything he wrote was in the context of his metaphysics. That's why all his essays are peppered with references to Will and Idea. His works are filled with smaller remarks like aesthetic ideas, moral ideas, and references to biology, but even if these are proven wrong by modern medicine or differences in aesthetic taste, the philosophical logic remains. In other words, the rest of his corpus is subjective, while the logic is objective. By handling philosophy from this subjective angle, you're allowing it to turn into a popularity contest rather than a discipline of reason. This is similar to the old moral philosophers who asserted ethical claims with no evidence. It gives you a fuzzy feeling inside, but it tells you nothing about reality, it doesn't help you grow as a person or as a thinker.

Perhaps you agree animal cruelty is wrong. Perhaps you agree sexuality harms mankind. Perhaps you agree the masses have poor taste. But these are just stances; opinions. Unless you're ready to defend them with some chain of logic, they are meaningless. It's because people have approached Schopenhauer this exact way for the past 200 years that nobody truly learns from his writing. Considering Schopenhauer believed he solved philosophy: Do you think he'd be happy, knowing he supposedly ""influenced"" all these people, but none of them felt the impetus to actually *respond* to what he's saying? No, he'd feel insulted. If you want to know what he would say, go read On Judgement, Criticism, Approbation and Fame. He'd mark down >>23013831 and >>23013828 and >>23012947 as plebs who missed the point of his corpus. Just a small handful in a huge line of plebs like Wagner and Nietzsche who lacked the brains to engage with his logic, so they judged his work by other means.

Without his philosophical system, his essays have the same value as "What's your favorite Metallica album?" or "What's your favorite color?" If you can't see why this is, you're probably not cut out for philosophy. Which is okay. In the end, most people aren't.

[Anonymous No.23014694]

>>23013425

That’s because Schopenhauer will teach you more about God than most theological texts. But to be honest everything you can get out of Schopenhauer can be read in Eckhart, Jung, and the Tao te Ching. Especially Jung, who essentially synthesized Schopenhauer and Nietzsche if you read everything Jung wrote like I do every October

[Anonymous No.23015176]

>>23014694
You post this in every Schopenhauer thread but you are wrong. You are basically using Schopenhauer’s metaphysics to justify your pre-conceived notions about God. Schopenhauer never talks about God, in fact he completely rejects the idea and is by all intents and purposes an atheist.
If you read Schopenhauer thinking his conception of the Will equals God than you are not understanding him or willfully misreading him, like I said, to justify your own ends.

[Anonymous No.23015187]

>>23013510
>Metaphysics the most abstruse language game
>said the 20 year old who just read a summary of Wittgenstein for the first time and thinks he has all philosophy figured out

[Anonymous No.23015216]

>>23013425
Because as Schopenhauer says, his philosophical investigations have no utility, they have no purpose other than arriving at truth. And his ethics at the end are just asceticism, which as he said is the same lesson that many of the world religions fundamentally teach.

[Anonymous No.23015412]

>>23014319
There is a third option here. You can appreciate good arguments reframed within your own metaphysics.
This is what I do. I take what Schopenhauer is saying and apply it within my own philosophical thinking and find that it still fits! I am extended using my own premises. This is the power of great ideas is they can fit into many maps.

[Anonymous No.23015974]

>>23015412
This is the most based way of reading philosophy.

[Anonymous No.23016004]

>>23012947
I'd try to understand as much as possible of the arguments he is making, even in his metaphysics, as some of it, ime as someone in a similiar position, are relatively clear for discernment. It is mostly the parts where he references the fourfold principle that feel like there is something missing, though he still gives oversight of the general idea behind how it works within that context, at least so far in my reading.
It has been a somewhat challenging read, as this is my first philosophical read; it is most certainly nothing like reading a novel; you have to consider and visualize everything, connect different things, to build up a good framework. But so far it is very interesting.
I didn't quite get how you can perceive the intuitive forms of space and time; to me these seem like abstractions. Maybe he is referring to the imagination here, or just the perception of the blackness underneath our eyes?
I am not sure really.

[Anonymous No.23016203]

just read Berkeley's dialogues

[Anonymous No.23016833]

>>23015176

That was my first time posting on this board in years. You’re not wrong, I don’t give a fuck what he thinks about God lol because it’s completely irrelevant that he expressed truth about God with great eloquence while talking about whatever pet theory he had (talking about vol 4)