The Art of Literature
Jun 2007 · Cosimo, Inc.
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108
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About this ebook
The Art of Literature: large print By Arthur Schopenhauer The volume now before the reader is a tardy addition to a series in which I have endeavoured to present Schopenhauer's minor writings in an adequate form. Its contents are drawn entirely from his posthumous papers. A selection of them was given to the world some three of four years after his death by his friend and literary executor, Julius Frauenstaedt, who for this and other offices of piety, has received less recognition than he deserves. The papers then published have recently been issued afresh, with considerable additions and corrections, by Dr. Eduard Grisebach, who is also entitled to gratitude for the care with which he has followed the text of the manuscripts, now in the Royal Library at Berlin, and for having drawn attention--although in terms that are unnecessarily severe--to a number of faults and failings on the part of the previous editor. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.
About the author
Arthur Schopenhauer traveled in childhood throughout Europe and lived for a time in Goethe's Weimar, where his mother had established a salon that attracted many of Europe's leading intellectuals. As a young man, Schopenhauer studied at the University of Gottingen and in Berlin, where he attended the lectures of Fichte and Schleiermacher. Schopenhauer's first work was The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), followed by a treatise on the physiology of perception, On Vision and Colors (1816). When Schopenhauer wrote his principal work, The World as Will and Idea (1819), he was confident that it was a work of great importance that would soon win him fame, but in this he was badly disappointed. In 1819 he arranged to hold a series of philosophical lectures at the same time as those of the newly arrived professor Hegel, whom Schopenhauer despised (calling him, among other creative epithets, an "intellectual Caliban"). This move resulted only in further humiliation for Schopenhauer, since no one showed up to hear him. Schopenhauer continued to be frustrated in repeated attempts to achieve recognition. In 1839 and 1840 he submitted essays on freedom of the will and the foundation of morality to competitions sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy but he won no prize, even when his essay was the only entry in the competition. In 1844 he published a second volume of The World as Will and Idea, containing developments and commentaries on the first. Around 1850, toward the end of his life, Schopenhauer's philosophy began to receive belated recognition, and he died in the confidence that his long-awaited and deserved fame had finally come. Schopenhauer's philosophy exercised considerable influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only among academic philosophers but even more among artists and literati. This may be in part because, unlike his German idealist contemporaries, Schopenhauer is a lucid and even witty writer, whose style consciously owes more to Hume than to Kant. Schopenhauer's philosophy is founded on the idea that reality is Will--a single, insatiable, objectless striving that manifests itself in the world of appearance as a vast multiplicity of phenomena, engaged in an endless and painful struggle with one another. He saw the same vision in the texts of Indian religions---Vedanta and Buddhism---which he regarded as vastly superior to Western monotheism. Schopenhauer's theory of the empirical world is an idealism, in which the doctrines of Kant are identified with those of Berkeley. In aesthetic enjoyment Schopenhauer saw a form of knowledge that is higher than ordinary empirical knowledge because it is a disinterested contemplation of the forms or essences of things, rather than a cognition of causal connections between particulars driven by the will's interest in control and domination. True salvation, however, lies in an intuitive insight into the evil of willing, which in its highest manifestations is capable of completely extinguishing the will in a state of nirvana. In his perceptive development of the psychological consequences of his theory, Schopenhauer gives particular emphasis to the way in which our knowledge and behavior are insidiously manipulated by our unconscious volition; this stress, plus the central role he gives to sexuality in his theory of the will, contains much that is found later in Freud (who acknowledged that Schopenhauer had anticipated his theory of repression). Schopenhauer's main influence on twentieth-century philosophy, however, was mediated by Nietzsche, whose theory of the will to power added a poignant twist by committing itself to the affirmation of the will while still conceiving it in essentially the same way---insatiable, painful, predatory, deceptive, and subversive of rational thought---which it had been in Schopenhauer's metaphysical pessimism.
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