§205

Since in my main work I was sufficiently thorough in my treatment of the conception of (Platonic) Ideas and their correlate, the pure subject of cognition, I would consider it superfluous to return to it again here if I did not consider that this is an investigation which, in this sense, had never been undertaken before me; this is why it is better not to hold anything back which might someday be welcome as its elucidation. Naturally I presuppose in this regard that those earlier discussions are familiar to readers.

The real problem of the metaphysics of beauty can be very simply expressed thus: How are pleasure and delight in an object possible without its having any kind of connection to our willing?

For everyone feels that delight and pleasure in a thing can really only stem from its relation to our will or, as people like to say, to our aims, so that delight without a stirring of the will seems to be a contradiction. Still, the beautiful in itself quite obviously stirs our pleasure and our delight, without having any kind of connection to our personal aims, thus to our will.

My solution has been that in the beautiful we always perceive the essential and original forms of animate and inanimate nature, thus Plato's Ideas of the same, and that this perception has as its condition their essential correlate, the will-free subject of cognition, i.e., a pure intelligence without intentions and aims. Therefore the will completely disappears from consciousness when an aesthetic perception appears. But it alone is the source of all our sorrows and sufferings. This is the origin of that pleasure and that delight which accompany the perception of the beautiful. Thus it rests on the removal of the whole possibility of suffering. – If one were to object that then the possibility of delight would also be suspended, it should be remembered that, as I have often explained, happiness and satisfaction are of a negative nature, that is, they are merely the end of suffering, whereas pain is positive.

§196

It may be a result of the ancient affinity of all beings of this world of appearance by means of their unity in the thing in itself, but in any case it is a fact that they all bear a similar type and that certain laws prevail among them all as the same laws, if only this is conceived generally enough. From this it can be explained how not only the most heterogeneous things can be elucidated or visualized in relation to one another, but also how suitable allegories are found even in descriptions where they were not intended. A choice sample of this is provided by Goethe's incomparably beautiful fairy tale of the green snake. Every reader feels himself almost forced to seek an allegorical interpretation of this, which is why, shortly after its appearance, this was also done by many with great earnest and zeal and in the most diverse ways, to the great amusement of the poet, who in this case had no allegory in mind. The account of this is found in Düntzer's Studies of Goethe's Works, 1849; I knew about it already for a long time from personal remarks made by Goethe. – Aesopian fables owe their origin to this universal analogy and typical identity of things, and on it depends the fact that the historical can become allegorical and the allegorical historical.

More than everything else, however, the mythology of the Greeks has from the beginning provided material for allegorical interpretation, because it invites this by delivering schemata for visualizing almost every fundamental idea, indeed, in a certain sense it contains the archetypes of all things and relationships, which, precisely as such, shine through always and everywhere; after all it arose actually from the playful drive of the Greeks to personify everything. Thus even in the most ancient times, indeed already by Hesiod himself, those myths were allegorically interpreted. So for instance it is only this same moral allegory when he enumerates (Theogony, ll. 211 ff.) the children of the night and soon after (ll. 226 ff.) the children of Eris, namely: effort, harm, hunger, pain, battle, murder, quarrelling, lying, injustice, disaster and the oath. His description of personified night and day, sleep and death is again a physical allegory (ll. 746–65).

§379

The concave mirror can be used for many kinds of similes, for instance, it can be compared to genius, as occurred above in passing, inasmuch as it too concentrates its powers on one spot in order to project a deceptive but embellished image of things, or generally to amass light and warmth to astonishing effects, like the mirror. The elegant polyhistor, on the other hand, resembles a convex diffusing mirror which simultaneously displays just beneath its surface all objects and even a miniaturized image of the sun, projecting them in all directions at everyone, whereas the concave mirror works only in one direction and demands a specific position of the viewer.

Secondly, every genuine artwork can also be compared to the concave mirror insofar as what it really communicates is not its own tangible self, its empirical content, but instead something lying outside of it which cannot be grasped with the hands, and which can only be pursued by the imagination as the real but elusive spirit of the thing. For more on this see my main work, chapter 34 of the second volume.

Finally a hopeless lover can also epigrammatically compare his cruel beloved to a concave mirror, which like her shines, enflames and consumes, all the while remaining cold itself.

§380

Switzerland resembles a genius: beautiful and sublime, yet poorly suited to bear nourishing fruit. On the other hand Pomerania and the marshlands of Holstein are exceedingly fertile and nourishing, but flat and boring like the useful philistine.

§380a

I stood before a gap trampled into a ripening cornfield by a careless foot. There I saw between the countless identical, perfectly straight stalks heavily laden with ears a great variety of blue, red and violet flowers which were extremely beautiful to look at in their naturalness and with their foliage. But, I thought to myself, they are useless, unproductive and really mere weeds which are tolerated here because they cannot be got rid of. Yet it is they alone that lend beauty and charm to this sight. Thus in every respect their role is the same as that played by poetry and the fine arts in serious, useful and productive civil life, which is why they can be regarded as its symbol.

§298

The animal voice serves only the expression of the will in its stimulations and movements, but the human also serves that of cognition. This is connected with the fact that the former almost always make an unpleasant impression on us, with the exception of a few bird voices.

During the origin of human speech it was quite certainly interjections that were the first to express not concepts but, like the sounds of animals, feelings – movements of the will. Their different forms arrived at once, and from their diversity arose the transition to substantives, verbs, personal pronouns and so on.

The words of humans are the most lasting material. If a poet has embodied his most fleeting sensation in words properly suited to it, then it lives in them for thousands of years and stirs anew in every receptive reader.

§298a

It is well known that especially in matters of grammar the older languages are the more perfect, and they become progressively worse – from lofty Sanskrit on down to English jargon, this cloak of thoughts sewn together from rags of heterogeneous fabrics. This gradual degradation is a weighty argument against the favourite theories of our optimists who smile so solemnly, theories about the ‘constant progress of mankind for the better’, with which they would like to distort the deplorable history of the bipedal race; but moreover it is a problem that is difficult to solve. For we simply cannot help thinking of the human race as it first emerged somehow from the womb of nature as being in a state of complete and childlike ignorance, and consequently as crude and clumsy; how is such a race supposed to have thought up these highly artificial language structures, these complicated and manifold grammatical forms, even if we assume that the vocabulary was only accumulated gradually? On the other hand at the same time we see everywhere how the descendants stick with the language of their parents and only gradually undertake small changes in it. But experience does not teach that the languages perfect themselves grammatically in the succession of generations, but rather, as I have said, precisely the opposite, namely they become increasingly simpler and worse.

§70

Nature is the will insofar as the will beholds itself outside itself, for which its standpoint must be an individual intellect. This is likewise its product.

§71

Instead of demonstrating the wisdom of God from the works of nature and of artistic drives like the English, one should learn from these things that everything that comes about through the medium of representation, hence of the intellect, even if this were one enhanced to the level of reason, is mere bungling compared with that which proceeds directly from the will, as the thing in itself and unmediated by any representation, as are the works of nature. This is the theme of my essay On Will in Nature, which I therefore cannot sufficiently commend to my readers; in it one finds expounded more clearly than anywhere the true focus of my teaching.

§72

If one observes how nature watches over the preservation of the species with such excessive care, by means of the omnipotence of the sexual drive and by virtue of the incalculable surplus of seeds which is prepared in plants, fishes and insects to replace the individual often with hundreds of thousands, while nature on the other hand is little concerned about individuals, then one arrives at the assumption that just as the production of individuals is something easy for nature, the original production of a species is extremely difficult for it. Accordingly we never see these newly arising. Even spontaneous generation, when it occurs (as it does without doubt especially in the case of epizoa and parasites generally) produces only known species; meanwhile the very few extinct species of the fauna currently inhabiting the earth, e.g. the dodo bird (didus ineptus) cannot be replaced by nature, even though they were part of its plan. Therefore we stand amazed at how our eagerness has succeeded in playing such a trick on it.

§73

In the glowing primordial nebula of which the sun that extended to Neptune consisted according to the cosmogony of Laplace, the chemical elements could not exist actually, but instead merely potentially. However, the first and original separating of matter into hydrogen and oxygen, sulphur and carbon, nitrogen, chlorine, etc., as well as into the different metals that are so similar and yet sharply separated, was the first striking of the common chord of the world.

In June 1850 Schopenhauer had completed his two-volume work Parerga and Paralipomena, and was looking for a publisher. He sent a letter to F. A. Brockhaus, who had previously published his The World as Will and Representation, and explained how he viewed the new offering:

Schopenhauer was 62 years old and would live for another decade. But in that final ten years he produced only revised versions of the works that were already behind him in 1850: The World as Will and Representation, On Will in Nature and The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. The contents of the new, popular work were already settled, and Schopenhauer requested only a small honorarium, but Brockhaus turned the proposal down, and Schopenhauer asked his friend Julius Frauenstädt for assistance in finding another publisher. As a result of Frauenstädt's efforts Parerga and Paralipomena was finally published in 1851 by A. W. Hayn of Berlin. Schopenhauer specified that there was to be a print-run of only 750, and no honorarium at all.

In describing these writings as ‘miscellaneous’ Schopenhauer used the word vermischt, which might also be rendered as ‘mixed’. Indeed his Latin phrase for them in his letters is opera mixta. But his characteristic love of a learned phrase from an ancient language had led him to choose two Greek words for his title: parerga meaning ‘subordinate works’ or works ‘apart from the main business’, paralipomena things ‘left aside’ or ‘passed over’. So this suggests a variety of pieces that for one reason or another did not fit into the programme of The World as Will and Representation, the work that defined his philosophy, or pursued different tacks that interested him but were not essential to that programme.

§377

That the exterior of a human being graphically reproduces his interior and the face expresses and reveals his whole essence is an assumption whose a priori nature and thus certainty are demonstrated by the universal desire, which appears at every opportunity, to see someone who has distinguished himself in any way, bad or good, or who has produced an extraordinary work or, failing this, at least to learn from others what he looks like. Hence, on the one hand, the rush to those places where he is expected to be, and on the other the efforts of the daily newspapers, especially in England, to describe him minutely and strikingly, until soon thereafter painters and engravers give us graphic portrayals and finally Daguerre's invention, so highly valued for precisely this reason, satisfies our need most perfectly. Likewise in ordinary life everyone examines the physiognomy of everyone they meet and tries secretly to ascertain his moral and intellectual nature in advance from his facial features. All this could not be the case if, as some fools imagine, the appearance of a man were of no significance, as if the soul were indeed one thing and the body another, relating to the former as a coat to the man himself.

On the contrary each human face is a hieroglyph which truly can be deciphered, indeed whose alphabet we bear within us ready-made. A human being's face even says more and is more interesting, as a rule, than his mouth, for it is the compendium of everything that he will ever say, being the monogram of all this human being's thinking and striving. It is also the case that the mouth expresses only the thoughts of a man, while the face expresses a thought of nature. Therefore everyone is worthy of being carefully observed, even if everyone is not worth talking to. – Now if each individual is worth observing as an individual thought of nature, then so too in the highest degree is beauty, for it is a higher, more universal concept of nature: it is nature's thought of the species. This is why it compels our gaze so powerfully; it is nature's fundamental and main thought, whereas the individual is only a secondary thought, a corollary.

§68

The current controversy playing out among professors of philosophy between theism and pantheism could be allegorically and dramatically portrayed by a dialogue that might be held in the pit of the theatre in Milan during the performance. One of the interlocutors, convinced that he is in the great, famous puppet theatre of Girolamo, admires the artistry with which the director has constructed the puppets and guides the play. The other objects: ‘Not in the least! We are instead in the Teatro della Scala, the director and his associates themselves are acting along and are actually concealed in the characters we see before us; even the poet is acting along.’

But it is amusing to see how the philosophy professors ogle pantheism as if it were a forbidden fruit and do not have the heart to help themselves to it. I have already described their behaviour in this matter in my essay ‘On University Philosophy’, where we were reminded of the weaver Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. – Alas, the bread of the philosophy professor is a bitter loaf! First they must dance to the pipe of the ministers, and once they have managed this in an appropriately dainty manner, they can be fallen upon outdoors by savage cannibals, the real philosophers; they are capable of sticking someone in their pocket and taking him along, to produce him occasionally as a pocket-Pulchinello to enhance the merriment of their lectures.

§69

Against pantheism I have mainly only this: that it does not mean anything. Naming the world God does not mean explaining it, but instead only enriching language with a superfluous synonym for the word ‘world’. Whether you say ‘the world is God’ or ‘the world is the world’ amounts to the same. Of course if one proceeded from God as though he were the given and the thing to be explained, and therefore said: ‘God is the world’, there is an explanation of sorts, insofar as something unknown is traced back to something better known; still it is merely a semantic explanation. However, if one proceeds from what is actually given, hence from the world, and now says ‘the world is God’, it is plain as day that nothing is said by this or at least the explanation is of something unknown by something less known.

Only one edition of Parerga and Paralipomena was published during Schopenhauer's lifetime. The second volume appeared as:

The present translation uses the text as edited by Arthur Hübscher, Arthur Schopenhauers Sämtliche Werke (Mannheim: F. A. Brockhaus, 1988), vol. 6. Hübscher's text is a confection based on A, but resulting from a substantial revision of it that includes numerous alterations and added material from handwritten sources. The majority of these come from Schopenhauer's own copy of A, in which he made extensive notes. Others come from passages in his manuscript remains. Working on the assumption that Schopenhauer was assembling revisions with a view to re-publication, in 1862, two years after Schopenhauer's death, Julius Frauenstädt incorporated many of these handwritten passages in a new edition, which he described as ‘improved and considerably augmented’:

Thereafter various revisions appeared in the versions of Schopenhauer's complete works under different editors, who have not agreed on the placing of all the handwritten passages. Here we simply follow Hübscher's decisions. (For a full account of the handwritten sources, editorial history and list of variations across the different editions, see Hübscher, SW 6, 699ff.)

The upshot of this process is that, although, almost without exception, all the words in the text we have translated are Schopenhauer's, he never saw a published German text that resembled the present edition very closely. Setting aside mere orthographical variations, there are hundreds of incorporated alterations to A of different kinds: some are small grammatical or lexical changes, some add emphasis to a point or give an extra bibliographical reference, some correct errors. Others insert substantial material amounting to whole paragraphs. In this translation we have been selective, noting only those changes to A that introduce significantly new material, or that have their source in the Manuscript Remains, in those manuscript books to which Schopenhauer gave the titles ‘Senilia’, ‘Spicilegia’, ‘Pandectae’, Philosophari’, ‘Adversaria’, ‘Cogitata’ and ‘Foliant’.

§272

First there are two kinds of writers: those who write for the sake of the subject and those who write for the sake of writing. The former have had thoughts or experiences that seem to them worthy of communicating; the latter need money and that is why they write, for money. They think for the purpose of writing. We will recognize them by the fact that they spin out their thoughts as long as possible and also elaborate half-true, crooked, forced and vacillating thoughts, and usually favour the twilight in order to appear as something they are not, which is why their writing lacks definiteness and full clarity. We are therefore soon able to observe that they write in order to fill up paper; sometimes we can observe this in our best writers, for instance in certain passages in Lessing's Dramaturgy and even in some novels of Jean Paul. As soon as we notice it, we should throw the book away, for time is precious. At bottom, however, an author cheats his reader as soon as he writes in order to fill up paper, because he alleges that he writes because he has something to communicate. – Honoraria and reservation of copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes solely for the sake of the subject writes anything worthy of being written. What an inestimable gain it would be if in all branches of a literature only a few exquisite books existed! But it will never come to that as long as honoraria are to be earned. For it is as if a curse lay on money: every writer becomes bad as soon as he in any way writes for profit. The most exquisite works of great men are all from the time when they still had to write for nothing or for a very meagre honorarium. Here too the Spanish proverb applies: Honra y provecho no caben en un saco. – The whole wretched state of literature in and outside Germany today has its roots in the earning of money through book writing. Anyone who needs money sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary consequence of this is the ruin of language.

§191

The name Pelasger, undoubtedly related to Pelagus, is the general designation for the small Asiatic tribes, scattered, supplanted, and wandering about, which first arrived in Europe, where they soon completely forgot their native culture, tradition and religion. On the other hand, they were favoured by the influence of the beautiful, temperate climate and good soil, as well as the many sea coasts of Greece and Asia Minor, and under the name of the Hellenes achieved on their own an entirely natural evolution and a purely human culture the like of which has never appeared anywhere in such perfection. Accordingly they had nothing but a childish religion meant half in jest; seriousness took refuge in the mysteries and the tragedy. To this Greek nation alone do we owe the correct interpretation and natural representation of the human form and gestures; the discovery of the only regular proportions of architecture, forever established by them; the development of all genuine forms of poetry, along with the discovery of truly beautiful metres; the setting up of philosophical systems according to all the basic directions of human thought; the elements of mathematics; the foundations of a rational legislation and generally speaking the normal portrayal of a truly beautiful and noble human existence. For this small, select people of the muses and graces was, so to speak, endowed with an instinct for beauty. This extended to everything; to faces, figures, poses, clothing, weapons, buildings, vessels, implements and whatever else there was, and it never ever abandoned them. Therefore we will always have strayed from good taste and beauty to the precise extent we have distanced ourselves from the Greeks, especially in sculpture and architecture, and the ancients will never become antiquated. They are and will remain the polestar for all our efforts, be it in literature, or in the plastic arts, which we must never lose sight of. Disgrace awaits the age that would dare to set aside the ancients. If therefore some corrupt, miserable and purely materially minded ‘time of now’ should desert the school of the ancients in order to feel more comfortable in its own conceit, then it sows disgrace and ignominy.

§290

Ignorance only degrades mankind when it is encountered in the company of wealth. The poor man is limited by his poverty and plight; his achievements take the place of knowledge and occupy his thoughts. On the other hand, wealthy men who are ignorant live merely for their pleasures and resemble animals, as can be seen every day. Added to this is the accusation that wealth and leisure were not used for what grants them the greatest possible value.

§291

When we read someone else thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. This is like the pupil who in learning to write traces with his pen the strokes made in pencil by the teacher. Accordingly in reading we are for the most part absolved of the work of thinking. This is why we sense relief when we transition from preoccupation with our own thoughts to reading. But during reading our mind is really only the playground of the thoughts of others. What remains when these finally move on? It stems from this that whoever reads very much and almost the whole day, but in between recovers by thoughtless pastime, gradually loses the ability to think on his own – as someone who always rides forgets in the end how to walk. But such is the case of many scholars: they have read themselves stupid. For constant reading immediately taken up again in every free moment is even more mentally paralysing than constant manual labour, since in the latter we can still muse about our own thoughts. But just as a coiled spring finally loses its elasticity through the sustained pressure of a foreign body, so too the mind through the constant force of other people's thoughts. And just as one ruins the stomach by too much food and so harms the entire body, so too we can overfill and choke the mind with too much mental food. For the more one reads, the fewer traces are left behind in the mind by what was read; it becomes like a tablet on which many things have been written over one another. Therefore we do not reach the point of rumination; but only through this do we assimilate what we have read, just as food does not nourish us through eating but through digestion.

§362

Better in my opinion than Schiller's well-considered poem ‘Women's Dignity’, which uses antithesis and contrast for its effect, are these few words of Jouy for expressing the true praise of women: ‘Without women our lives would be deprived of help in the beginning, of joy in the middle and of consolation in the end.’ The same thing is expressed more emotionally by Byron in Sardanapalus, Act I, scene 2:

Both characterize the right point of view for the value of women.

§363

Even the sight of the female form demonstrates that woman is destined neither for great mental nor for physical works. She bears the guilt of life not by acting but by suffering, through the pangs of childbirth, caring for the child, and subservience to her husband, for whom she is supposed to be a patient and cheering companion. She is not granted the most vehement sufferings, joys and expressions of power, but her life is supposed to glide by more quietly, less significantly and more gently than that of a man, without being essentially happier or unhappier.

§364

Women are suited to be nurses and governesses of our earliest childhood precisely by the fact that they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word, big children their whole life long, a sort of intermediate stage between a child and a man, who is the actual human being. Just look at a girl as she dawdles, dances around with and sings to a child for days, and then imagine what a man doing his utmost could achieve in her stead!

§134

Although I treated this topic in context and detail in my main work, I still believe that a small selection of individual observations, which continue to shed light on that discussion, will not be without value to many readers.

One has to read Jean Paul's Selina to see how a highly eminent mind preoccupies himself with the absurdities of a false concept as they impinge on him. He does not want to give it up because he has set his heart on it, yet he is constantly disturbed by inconsistencies which he cannot digest. The concept is that of the individual continuation of our entire personal consciousness after death. It is precisely this struggling and wrestling of Jean Paul's that proves that such concepts, put together from elements false and true, are not wholesome errors as is maintained, but on the contrary are decidedly harmful. For what is rendered impossible through the false opposition of soul and body, as well as through the elevation of the entire personality to a thing in itself which is supposed to last forever, is the true knowledge of the indestructibility of our real essence as one untouched by time, causality and change, and resting on the opposition between appearance and thing in itself. Indeed, this false concept cannot even be embraced as a substitute for truth, because reason constantly revolts anew against the absurdity that underlies it, but then also has to give up the truth that is associated with it by amalgamation. For in the long term truth can only exist in its purity; mixed with errors it shares in their frailty, as granite crumbles when its feldspar disintegrates, even though quartz and mica are not subject to such disintegration. Therefore things go poorly for the surrogates of truth.

§135

If in the course of daily interactions one were asked by one of the many people who wish to know everything but do not want to learn anything, about the continuation of life after death, certainly the most suitable and above all the most correct answer would be: “After your death you will be what you were before your birth.”