The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature

Schopenhauer on conduct, character, the state, and the freedom we only imagine we have — a selection Saunders drew partly from essays left in manuscript.

by Arthur Schopenhauer180 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

First published: 1851(aged 63)
Original language: German

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Overview

Not a book Schopenhauer wrote but one Saunders assembled, this English selection gathers six essays on how people actually behave — on human nature, government, character, moral instinct, and the free will he denied we possess. The translator drew them from the ethical and political chapters of Parerga and Paralipomena, the 1851 miscellany, and topped them up from writings left unpublished at Schopenhauer's death, arranging under an invented title material the author had scattered. The thread through them is a hard naturalism about conduct: character is innate and unchangeable, so moral improvement is mostly self-knowledge and not reform; the state exists to stop people devouring one another, not to make them good; and the felt freedom of the will is a standing illusion, since a given person in given circumstances can do only one thing. What lifts this out of pure bleakness is his account of moral instinct — the spontaneous compassion that occasionally overrides self-interest and that he made the whole basis of ethics elsewhere. Parerga was the book that ended thirty years of neglect and made Schopenhauer briefly a European celebrity in his last decade; Saunders' English selections, made in the 1890s, carried these particular pages to readers who would never open the German. They read as a shrewd, disillusioned anatomy of why people do what they do.

Key concepts

What does operari sequitur esse mean here?

Doing follows being: a person acts as they are. Conduct flows with necessity from an innate, unchangeable character, so what someone does never reveals a free choice, only what they already and unalterably are. This naturalism about action runs through every essay in the selection.

What is moral instinct in these essays?

The spontaneous, unbidden compassion that now and then overrides self-interest — the one impulse Schopenhauer credits with real moral worth. It is not a principle reasoned out but a direct stirring at another's suffering, and it is the same fellow-feeling he made the whole foundation of ethics elsewhere.

What place does egoism hold in his account?

It is the baseline of nearly all conduct. Each person treats himself as the centre of the world and others as means, and Schopenhauer's hard naturalism expects exactly this — which is why he sees genuine kindness as the rare exception that needs explaining, not the norm. Most behaviour needs no motive beyond self-interest.

If the will is unfree, why hold anyone responsible?

Because responsibility attaches to what a person is, not to a choice they never had. Their deeds necessarily express a fixed character, and it is that character we judge them for. On Schopenhauer's view, determinism does not hand anyone an alibi; it relocates responsibility from the isolated act to the enduring self behind it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Why People Do What They Do

Is conduct something a person can reform by effort, or the unfolding of a nature settled at birth and only ever disguised?

A hard naturalism runs through these gathered essays: character is innate and unchangeable, so moral improvement is mostly self-knowledge and not reform. The state exists to stop people devouring one another, not to make them good, and the felt freedom of the will is an illusion, since a given person in given circumstances can do only one thing. What lifts it clear of pure bleakness is his moral instinct — the spontaneous compassion that occasionally overrides self-interest — read here as a shrewd anatomy of conduct rather than a sermon on it.

human nature
individuality
will
ethics
judgment
consciousness
character
moral psychology
political philosophy

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Within this work

passages held: 180
distinct concepts: 275
by passages held, corpus-wide: #141

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: criticism with genius.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 9 pairings. 30 shared passages in all. 91 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
criticism	genius	5
happiness	subjectivity	5
boredom	intellect	4
genius	intellect	4
happiness	individuality	4
boredom	happiness	2
individuality	intellect	2
individuality	subjectivity	2
intellect	subjectivity	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1813 On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature (Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde; und, Ueber den Willen in der Natur)
Schopenhauer's 1813 doctoral dissertation, and the book he told readers to finish before opening his masterwork; the 1836 essay bound with it hunts for the same metaphysics in natural science.
DEEN
1841 The Basis of Morality (Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik)
Two ethics essays written for academic prize contests — one crowned in Norway, one famously denied the Danish medal though it stood alone — issued together in 1841 as The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics.
DEEN
1851 Essay on Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith (Über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt)
An excursion into the paranormal — ghosts, second sight, animal magnetism — explained through his own metaphysics of will; the fifth of the six long essays in the 1851 Parerga.
DE
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims (Parerga und Paralipomena)
Half of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, the companion to The Wisdom of Life; Saunders split the two for English readers. Practical maxims for living, drawn from the 1851 collection.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature you are here DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, a Dialogue, Etc.
A dialogue on whether a useful faith can also be a false one, heading a cluster of essays on religion and art that Saunders drew from the 1851 Parerga.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism
The pessimism most readers know him by, stated without the metaphysics — Saunders' selection of the shortest, bluntest essays from the 1851 Parerga.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; the Art of Controversy (Parerga und Paralipomena / Nachgelassene Schriften)
Not from the Parerga at all: a manual of thirty-eight debating tricks that Schopenhauer drafted around 1830, left unpublished, and that reached print only in 1864, from his posthumous papers.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Literature
One of the topical selections Saunders carved from the Parerga for English readers, this one on writing, reading, and style; published in 1891.
DEEN
1851 The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: the Wisdom of Life (Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit)
His most cheerful book, a guide to happiness that opens the Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life; the pages John Oxenford's 1853 essay singled out when he introduced Schopenhauer to English readers.
DEEN
1851 Über die Weiber
Notorious far beyond its length: a few hostile pages on women from the second volume of the 1851 Parerga, an embarrassment to his admirers and a standing charge against him.
DE
Anmerkungen zu Locke und Kant sowie zu nachkantischen Philosophen (Anmerkungen Zu Locke Und Kant Sowie Zu Nachkantischen Philosophen)
Undated notes from his literary remains, engaging Locke, Kant, and the post-Kantian idealists; manuscript material sorted by his editors after his death, never a book he wrote.
DE
The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt Als Wille Und Vorstellung)
The masterwork, and the whole of his philosophy: one argument he refused to recast, only enlarge, across three editions between 1819 and 1859. Every other title on this shelf leads toward it or away from it.
DE

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