What ideas of Schopenhauer's are you interested in?

[MJD]

What ideas of Schopenhauer's are you interested in?

[John]

MJD wrote: "What ideas of Schopenhauer's are you interested in?"

I just requested a short introductory book on Schopenhauer from the library. I'll let you know which ideas jump out at me when I'm finished.

[John]

Some of the ideas that caught my attention and that I'd like to read more about:

1. his basic concept of space and time being concepts that we impose on reality in order to talk about the world, although in reality they do not exist at all

2. the differences between our intellect and will

3. his ideas on ethics, especially the egoism, compassion, and malice which we all have in different ratios

4. the conflicts between free will and The will

[MJD]

John wrote: "Some of the ideas that caught my attention and that I'd like to read more about:

1. his basic concept of space and time being concepts that we impose on reality in order to talk about the world, a..."

1) I think this was covered a bit in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and "The World as Will and Idea"

2) Covered well in "The World as Will and Idea" (also "On the Will in Nature" helps a lot in terms of thinking about what he means by "will")

3) Covered well in The Basis of Morality

4) Covered well in Essay on the Freedom of the Will

[MJD]

I'm primarily interested in his concept of the "will" and idea of overcoming it.

To me, his concept of the "will" and its problematic properties seems a lot like Darwinian natural selection (which is very interesting because he formulated these ideas well before Darwin published his ideas).


Even more interesting to me is that his conception of the "will", his ideas about it being problematic, and his ideas about overcoming it seem similar to a book that I recently completed called Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright.

As Wright says of natural selection: "Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive." This seems similar to Schopenhauer's conception of the "will", and Wright's ideas about the need to overcome it and possible ways to do so seem a bit similar to Schopenhauer's ideas about overcoming the "will."