Appendices and Omissions

and to scourge with his sarcastic wit, whereby he always appears original and often acts as a purifying influence on the intellectual atmosphere. This satirical vein makes certain parts of this new edition of the Parerga Short for Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer's collection of philosophical essays and aphorisms. a most piquant read. Of course, through Schopenhauer’s idiosyncrasies, the same errors, weaknesses, and transgressions also transitioned into this edition—those which he displays with such brilliant naivety in the first edition and indeed in all his works, so that Schopenhauer’s enemies and enviers will once again find rich material for denunciations and character assassination.

But those who are capable of appreciating a great mind, and whose judgment carries any weight at all, will not be deterred by this, nor will they be disturbed in their recognition and veneration of Schopenhauer’s intellectual greatness. For they know that where there is much light, there is also much shadow. They also know that, as George Sand says—a saying that our Schopenhauer always liked very much—everyone has the faults of their virtues original French: "chacun a les défauts de ses vertus." This suggests that a person's negative traits are often inextricably linked to their positive ones..

Schopenhauer’s faults, which I am not at all inclined to deny, are precisely the faults of his virtues; they are closely intertwined with them, and without them, we would not have been able to taste the fruits of those virtues. Schopenhauer was a genius, and every genius, simply as such, has certain faults flowing from his nature, which no one recognized as well or described as truly as Schopenhauer himself, in his unique chapter on genius in The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer's primary philosophical work, published in 1818, which argues that the world is driven by a blind, irrational "Will.". However, Schopenhauer was not merely a genius, but also a human being, and consequently, like every human individual as such, he carried with him the faults and weaknesses he brought into the world at birth, as well as those acquired through his education and life circumstances...