Parerga and Paralipomena: Schopenhauer's Essays on the Wisdom of Life

A book meant as an appendix

In 1851 Arthur Schopenhauer published Parerga and Paralipomena, his last work. The Greek title literally means secondary works and things left over: an almost self-deprecating name, chosen for a book its author considered a mere accompaniment to The World as Will and Representation, his major systematic work.

The first volume, Parerga, collects six extended essays meant as supplements to his thought; the second, Paralipomena, gathers shorter pieces across 31 subsections. According to Wikipedia, the work wasn’t conceived as a summary of or introduction to Schopenhauer’s philosophical system: it was meant as supplementary reading for those who already knew it, while still aiming, in the author’s own intention, to stay understandable to readers encountering him for the first time.

Fame that arrived late, from a minor work

The Berlin publisher Hayn agreed to print the book, in two volumes, only after persuasion from Julius Frauenstädt, Schopenhauer’s disciple. The print run was just 750 copies, a figure that both Wikipedia and Christopher Janaway’s Cambridge edition agree on.

Within a couple of years, around 1853, things changed. The English critic John Oxenford wrote a review, “Iconoclasm in German Philosophy”, later translated into German: German readers met it with great interest, and before long the philosopher, until then almost ignored, began receiving the recognition he had waited decades for. The same review appeared in the Westminster Review. Schopenhauer spent his remaining years, until his death in 1860, enjoying a notoriety that had come late and only after a long wait.

Three kinds of good, and the wisdom of living

Within Parerga and Paralipomena, the best-known section is the Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life: it gathers Schopenhauer’s reflections on the goods of life, arranged in subchapters that run through Counsels and Maxims to a chapter on the different ages of life.

Schopenhauer opens the text by distinguishing three kinds of good: what a person is, what a person has, and what a person represents in the eyes of others. The table below sums them up.

For Schopenhauer, the first category outweighs the other two in shaping happiness. The same aphoristic approach, turned toward a different field, resurfaces in The Art of Being Right: there too, the quality of an argument depends on who is making it, not on the circumstances surrounding it.

To health in particular, Schopenhauer credits nine tenths of human happiness: sacrificing it for any other kind of happiness, money, career or pleasure, is for him the greatest of follies.

Practical example: two people spend the same quiet weekend alone, with nothing planned. Someone with a rich intellectual life, Schopenhauer writes, still finds excellent company in their own thoughts; someone without that inner resource grows bored in the very same solitude.

The swing between pain and boredom

Schopenhauer describes human life as a more or less violent oscillation between two negative poles. Pain arrives when a desire goes unmet; boredom, when the desire is already satisfied and nothing is left to pursue.

English translator T. B. Saunders sums up a rule Schopenhauer never tires of repeating: how much enjoyment a person gets out of anything external hinges on their own character, not on the thing itself. Health, inner resources, a mind that keeps itself company: this is what the book keeps coming back to, through the ranking of goods and the warning about health alike.