The Art of Being Right: Schopenhauer's 38 Stratagems

Arthur Schopenhauer composed The Art of Being Right (Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten) around 1830, according to the German Wikipedia entry: a 46-page manuscript the author never published in his lifetime. The text also circulates in English as The Art of Always Being Right, a variant title for the same work. By its own nature it remains an unfinished treatise: a list of recorded techniques, not a book polished for the press. The material surfaced only after the philosopher’s death, in 1860, among the papers scholars call the “Manuscript Remains”. According to Wikipedia DE, it was his pupil and editor Julius Frauenstädt who published it for the first time in 1864, within the collection of manuscript papers Schopenhauer left behind. For over a century readers knew only that version; a philologically reliable critical edition arrived only after 1966, edited by Arthur Hübscher.

Logic and dialectic: a distinction that gets lost

Schopenhauer opens the treatise with an observation that anchors everything that follows: philosophers spent centuries on the rules of logic but left a darker art, the art of disputation, almost entirely unexplored. The English Wikipedia entry makes the point by calling the work an “acerbic, sarcastic” treatise — a tone worth keeping in mind through every page that follows.

According to Wikisource EN, in T. Bailey Saunders’s English translation, Schopenhauer defines controversial, or eristic, dialectic as the art of disputing so as to come out on top, regardless of whether one is right or wrong on the actual merits of the question. It’s the work’s central claim: logic concerns the correctness of reasoning, eristic dialectic concerns only the outcome of the dispute in the eyes of whoever is watching.

Practical example: in a classroom debate over which energy source makes the most sense, one student argues that “solar power costs too much.” An opponent using Extension answers as if the student had said “every form of renewable energy costs too much,” a much broader claim and one far easier to knock down with a single counterexample. The original student, unless they catch it, ends up defending a position they never actually took.

The German title, Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten, uses a verb meaning to “keep” or “retain” the right side of the argument. Whoever applies these stratagems is aiming only to still be standing when the discussion ends.

The stratagems, one at a time (though not in order)

Wikipedia EN confirms the number handed down: 38 stratagems, each paired with the countermove for recognizing and resisting it. Schopenhauer himself, in the manuscript, speaks of “about forty” techniques according to Wikipedia DE — a sign that the list stayed unfinished, and that the exact count depends on how one counts variants of the same move.

The name “Schopenhauer’s Socratic method” for one of these stratagems should not be confused with the method of Socrates himself, who used questions to search for the truth alongside his interlocutor, in a spirit of shared inquiry. Schopenhauer borrows that same form for an opposite purpose: readers who want to dig further into the historical figure of Socrates can turn to the Recap on the Socratic method, his trial, and the search for truth.

Stratagem number 23 out of 38 deserves its own mention, because it describes a three-step mechanism rather than a single move: according to Wikisource EN, it consists of contradicting every claim the opponent makes until, irritated, they overstate their own position to the point where it becomes attackable. The last on the list, number 38, is the end of the road: when the opponent is winning on the merits, what’s left is the personal insult, which Wikisource EN calls the extreme resort of someone out of arguments and which the treatise names the Argumentum ad personam.

Why the author refused to publish it

Yet the treatise was never published, by Schopenhauer’s own choice. According to Wikipedia DE, the treatise’s purpose was to teach how to appear, in a dispute, as the one who “keeps the right” by any means, fair or foul — the Latin formula used is per fas et nefas. And that very purpose, the same source says, disgusted Schopenhauer enough that he chose not to publish the text himself: a catalogue he wrote but never signed for print.

The work’s first English translator, T. Bailey Saunders, in his 1896 preface, presents it as a partly ironic text, assembled from papers Schopenhauer left unfinished and published only after his death, according to Wikisource EN. And the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one of the leading academic philosophy reference works in English, describes it explicitly as a satirical account of dialectic — an independent, academic confirmation that the tone is not that of a conduct manual.

This treatise is a minor piece next to the philosophical system Schopenhauer built in his main work: readers who want to place it inside Schopenhauer’s philosophy as a whole will find there the pessimism and the theory of the will from which this catalogue of rhetorical tricks also grows.

One name, two different books

The word “stratagems” on its own points, almost every time, to a different work: the 36 Stratagems of Chinese tradition, a compendium of military and political tactics with an origin and era unrelated to Schopenhauer. The two works share only the word: one concerns military and political strategy in ancient China, the other a verbal dispute between two people in early nineteenth-century Germany.

Readers coming to this treatise from other classics of logic and argument will also find points of contact with Aristotle’s logic, which first codified the rules of correct reasoning, the very discipline that, according to the opening lines of the treatise, philosophers had studied closely while leaving the dialectic of disputation almost untouched.