Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Author: Arthur Schopenhauer · 1851 · Two volumes Parerga und Paralipomena — “appendices and omissions”

The Argument in One Paragraph

If [[the-world-as-will-and-representation|The World as Will and Representation]] is the cathedral, Parerga is the workshop, the pulpit, and the tavern put together in one sprawling two-volume collection of essays, aphorisms, polemics, and practical advice. It restates the central Schopenhauerian thesis — the world is will, existence is suffering, salvation lies in compassion and ascetic denial — but almost everywhere in a more personal, more accessible, and more lethal form. The first volume is mostly the history of Western philosophy recast as “how we arrived at my position,” plus a long attack on German university philosophy and the famous Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life (how to live a tolerable existence despite the cosmic verdict). The second volume is the shorter, stranger book: meditations on ethics, religion, suicide, suffering, love, women, reading, style, and death. Parerga was the book that made him famous at sixty-three, after decades of neglect.

What the Book Is About

Schopenhauer spent thirty years after the 1818 World as Will and Representation trying to get people to notice the book, and almost nobody did. In 1851, he gave up on the systematic mode and published instead a loose, two-volume collection of what he called parerga (side-works, things produced alongside the main project) and paralipomena (things left out, leftovers). He did not expect much. Inside a few years it was the best-selling philosophy book in Germany.

The content is impossibly varied, but two spines run through the whole thing.

Volume 1 — Philosophy Reframed

The first volume begins with a long historical sketch: Schopenhauer walks through Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Kant, tracing what he calls “the doctrine of the ideal and the real” — the centuries-long struggle to understand the relationship between the subjective world of mind and the objective world supposedly outside it. The whole history, as he tells it, is philosophy groping toward his own solution. Then comes a long “Fragments for the history of philosophy” that extends the story backward to the Presocratics and the ancient world, always showing flashes of the truth that only he has fully captured.

In the middle of the volume is the legendary polemic “On University Philosophy” — a sustained, vitriolic, often funny attack on the academic establishment of his day, especially the Hegelians, whom he accuses of turning philosophy into a salaried job that must tell pleasant stories to keep the state and the state church happy. “The truth that at all times has been a dangerous companion, a guest unwelcome everywhere” is his description of what real philosophy is like, and what university professors have sold out by refusing to host. The piece is a classic of anti-academic writing, and every disenchanted graduate student has reread it.

The volume closes with the Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, which is the section most first-time readers actually start with. Schopenhauer admits up front that this is a compromise: his real philosophy says happiness is impossible, but given that most people will pursue it anyway, he will offer his practical advice. He distinguishes what we are (personality, health, intellect) from what we have (wealth) and what we represent (reputation, rank, honor). He argues that the first category is the only one that really matters, because only it accompanies us everywhere; the other two are hollow. He extols solitude, warns against the wasted hours of sociability, defends the autonomy of the inner life, and produces a series of practical maxims that Nietzsche, Mann, and Tolstoy all quoted back to themselves for decades.

Volume 2 — The Strange One

Volume 2 is the shorter of the two but is where the book’s strangest and sometimes deepest material lives. The structure is chapters on isolated topics, each of which takes a single theme and drives it through the Schopenhauerian system.

“On the Metaphysical Need of Humankind” — why religion exists, how it differs from philosophy, why it is allegorical truth for those who can’t bear literal truth.
“On the Suffering of the World” — the bluntest statement of his pessimism anywhere: life as a penal colony, human beings as each other’s torturers and tortured, existence as something that “should not be.”
“On Suicide” — against Christian moralism that condemns the suicide: Schopenhauer argues suicide is not an evil, but it’s also not a solution, because it is still an affirmation of the will (the suicide wants these conditions to end; he still wants).
“On the Indestructibility of Our True Being” — his metaphysics of death. Since our inner essence is the Will, which stands outside space and time, individual death is not the destruction of anything real, only the end of a particular appearance. “After your death you will be what you were before your birth.”
“On Women” — the notorious chapter. Schopenhauer’s misogyny is not “of its time”; it was extreme even then, and it is the chapter that most clearly dates the book. The twentieth-first century reader can note it, read past it, and salvage the rest — but it is fair to acknowledge it costs the book readers it deserves.
“On Reading and Books,” “On Style,” “On Thinking for Oneself” — the aesthetic-practical chapters that have become independent classics. “Reading means thinking with another’s mind instead of one’s own.” “Style is the physiognomy of the mind.”

Key Concepts (as developed here)

Eudaemonology. Schopenhauer’s name for his reluctant wisdom-of-life project — practical advice on living tolerably, offered as a compromise with empirical existence even though his metaphysics says tolerable existence isn’t really possible.
The three categories of human good. What we are (personality), what we have (property), what we represent (reputation). Only the first is durable; the other two are borrowed or imagined.
The metaphysics of religion. Religion is “the metaphysics of the people” — an allegorical form of the truth for those incapable of grasping the philosophical form. False literally, true in what it gestures at. This framing influenced almost every subsequent secular analysis of religion.
Compassion as the moral foundation. Expanded from The World as Will. Real morality is not Kantian duty — it is the visceral recognition that another’s suffering is the same Will suffering in me.
The “evil animal par excellence.” Schopenhauer’s anthropology: human beings are not a fallen angel but the worst of the animals, because our intellect multiplies our capacity for cruelty without softening the Will.
Affirmation vs denial of the will-to-live. The ethical axis that organizes all of Parerga’s moral chapters.

Key Quotations

“The world is my representation.” — opening of the Sketch. Same first sentence as the magnum opus.
“A shameless charlatan who wants to fool the simpletons, and has found his people in the Germans of the nineteenth century.” — on Hegel. One of the great academic hit-jobs.
“Simplicity is the seal of truth.” — the anti-Hegelian epistemological razor.
“The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.” — from the Aphorisms. The condensed pessimism.
“In this world we have little more than the choice between solitude and vulgarity.” — the misanthropic maxim that everyone quotes.
“Everything that happens, from the greatest to the smallest, happens necessarily.” — his unyielding determinism about the phenomenal world.
“We all are stuck in our consciousness, as in our skin, and immediately live only inside of it.” — the existential isolation, stated more simply than anywhere else in philosophy.
“The world is simply hell, and human beings are on the one hand its tortured souls and on the other hand its devils.” — the bluntest statement of pessimism in the whole book.
“Regarding this world as a place of penance, hence as a prison, a penal colony as it were, a labour camp.” — life as moral atonement rather than gift.
“After your death you will be what you were before your birth.” — the cool metaphysical consolation.
“Religion is the metaphysics of the people.” — the formula picked up by everyone from Nietzsche to Marx.
“Reading means thinking with another’s mind instead of one’s own.” — from “On Reading and Books.”
“Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is more infallible than that of the body.” — from “On Style.”
“Nature is aristocratic, more aristocratic than any feudal or caste system.” — on genius.
“There is only one mendacious being in the world: it is the human being.” — from “On Psychology.”

Metaphors That Carry the Argument

Metaphor	What it signals	Where
The kaleidoscope	Human life as endless recombinations of the same elements — the same suffering, vanity, folly in different costumes.	Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life
The hollow nut	Social success, honor, the public self — a shell with nothing inside.	Aphorisms
The tangle of threads / labyrinth	Philosophy before Schopenhauer — the right thread is the will within us, the wrong threads are every attempt to start from the outside.	”Fragments for the History of Philosophy”
The dream of life	Fate as the Will’s unconscious staging of its own story, analogous to how a dreamer stages his own dreams.	”Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual”
The penal colony / labour camp	Human existence as a sentence being served for the guilt of existing at all.	”On the Suffering of the World”
The masquerade	Social life as a costumed ball in which everyone is hiding the Will behind borrowed masks.	”Psychological Remarks”
The blind man led by a guide	Religion as necessary allegory for those who cannot see the philosophical truth directly.	”On Religion”

Who He’s Arguing With

Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, and university philosophy in general. The central polemic. He accuses them not just of bad philosophy but of philosophical fraud — of being paid to say certain things.
Optimistic Christian theology. He finds the doctrine that this world was made “very good” by a benevolent creator obscene, given the amount of suffering in it. His preferred religions are Buddhism and ascetic Christianity, read through a Buddhist lens.
Rationalist theologians who try to de-mythologize Christianity. “The rationalists in their northern jejuneness” — he thinks they throw out the baby (asceticism, compassion, the doctrine of original sin as the Will’s affirmation) along with the bathwater.
Newtonian physics (in Schopenhauer’s quixotic defense of Goethe’s color theory). This is the weakest polemic in the book; he is wrong and Newton was right. It’s included in the history of the book rather than as an argument anyone still defends.

How It’s Written

The aphoristic-essayistic mode suits Schopenhauer better than the systematic treatise. His prose moves from lucid exposition to biting polemic to sublime metaphysical poetry sometimes within the same paragraph. He quotes Latin, Greek, Spanish, and French freely (often without translation), not to show off but to signal his alignment with a transhistorical “aristocracy of the mind” rather than his own time. The essays on style, reading, and thinking for oneself are among the most quoted pages of nineteenth-century prose.

The form is load-bearing. Schopenhauer thinks that true philosophy is not a system to be built but an intuition to be communicated, and the loose structure of Parerga — essay next to aphorism next to polemic next to parable — is an argument against the systematic pretensions of his enemies. The book walks its own talk.

Connections

Schopenhauer — the book that made him famous. The World as Will is the cathedral; this is the tavern where the conversations actually happen.
[[the-world-as-will-and-representation|The World as Will and Representation]] — Parerga is officially a set of appendices to it. Every aphorism here is, in principle, grounded in that system; but most readers can (and do) read Parerga first and pick up the metaphysics by osmosis.
Kant — the patron. Parerga is the most readable summary of what Schopenhauer thinks Kant got right and what he got wrong.
Tolstoy — the late Tolstoyan renunciation literature is, in many passages, Parerga transposed into Russian. The hostility to reputation and rank, the suspicion of sexuality, the compassion for animals, the preference for solitude — all of it has a Schopenhauerian address.
Mann — Parerga appears by name in Mann’s essays and implicitly throughout his fiction; Mann read it every summer and called it a book he “swam in.”
Dostoevsky — less direct than with Tolstoy, but the diagnosis of human beings as “evil animal par excellence” is something Dostoevsky takes seriously and answers through Christ rather than through Nirvana.

Lineage

Predecessors: The World as Will and Representation (the system this book sits alongside), Montaigne (the essayistic tradition of personal philosophy), Pascal (the aphorisms, the pessimism), the Stoics and especially Seneca, the Upanishads and Buddhist sutras, La Rochefoucauld.
Successors: Nietzsche (who read Parerga obsessively and whose aphoristic style is Schopenhauer’s with the sign flipped from minus to plus); Tolstoy (late); Thomas Mann; Wittgenstein’s private aphoristic writing; Cioran; the entire tradition of the twentieth-century philosophical essayist.

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Parerga and Paralipomena