What is Essays and Aphorisms about?

Essays and Aphorisms is R. J. Hollingdale's selection from Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena — the supplementary essays he published in 1851, which paradoxically became the work that finally brought him fame after decades of neglect. The aphorisms and essays cover an enormous range: on the sufferings of the world, on the wisdom of life, on religion, on women, on books and writing, on noise, on genius, on the vanity of human desire. The tone ranges from bleakly lucid to occasionally cantankerous, but consistently bears the mark of a writer who has thought about what he is saying rather than simply repeating convention.

Schopenhauer's philosophy rests on the claim that the fundamental reality underlying all phenomena — including the human organism — is will: a blind, purposeless, insatiable striving that is never satisfied and produces suffering as its inevitable byproduct. The individual will desires, achieves briefly, and immediately desires again. Boredom fills the gaps between desires; pain fills the failures; and the brief satisfactions merely clear the way for more wanting. This is not temporary or accidental but the structure of existence itself.

Despite this metaphysical pessimism, the practical wisdom sections are remarkably useful. Schopenhauer argues that the wise person pursues not the satisfaction of desires but the minimization of suffering; not status or wealth but the conditions for a clear, untroubled mind. Health, basic security, intellectual occupation, and limited social entanglement are what genuinely conduce to what passes for happiness. The sections on individualism, solitude, and the damage done by public opinion are sharp and frequently quoted.

The essays on religion are notably measured: Schopenhauer respected mystical traditions — particularly Hindu and Buddhist — for their insight into the illusory nature of the individual self and the value of renunciation, while dismissing what he saw as the naive optimism of Western theism. His account of the relationship between pessimism and Buddhist doctrine influenced Nietzsche (who later sharply departed from him) and continues to generate scholarly attention.