On the Suffering of the World

Arthur Schopenhauer had a theory: that suffering is not incidental to human life but its very substance. We desire; we fail to get what we desire; if we do get it, we become bored and desire something else. The fundamental condition of consciousness is dissatisfaction. This is not pessimism as complaint — it is pessimism as diagnosis. And the treatment Schopenhauer proposes — through art, through compassion, through the gradual renunciation of the will — is, in its way, the most rigorous form of wisdom available to a secular age.

These essays, selected from his late masterpiece Parerga and Paralipomena and translated by R.J. Hollingdale, present Schopenhauer at his most accessible and his most brilliant. He writes about suffering, pain, boredom, noise, women, books, life, and death with a wit and a directness that make him one of philosophy’s great stylists — and with an honesty that most philosophers cannot manage or dare not attempt.

The ideal introduction to a philosopher who influenced Nietzsche, Freud, and Wagner — and who still has more to say about how life actually feels than almost any other thinker. Published by Penguin.