What to say about this book? Well the first thing to say was I almost didn't finish it. Parts of it made me spit with fury. Schopenhauer was an arrogant hypocrite who claimed most people (excluding himself from the category) fail to see beyond the surface, and then doing exactly that on issues of gender and class. To say he was "of his time" is to ignore the fact that he claimed to speak eternal truths beyond the limits of his time. His chapter "On Women" really pissed me off. He failed completely to imagine that the failings he saw in women could have been a direct result of their place in society and his misunderstanding of who they actually were, below the surface. Some of the things he wrote made me laugh (sardonically) and others made me tremble with anger. Some examples: "Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of children precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted."; "[W]omen remain children all their lives, never see anything but what is closest to them, cleave to the present moment, take appearance for reality and prefer trifles to the most important affairs."; "Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies."; "More fittingly than the fair sex, women could be called the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor poetry, nor the plastic arts do they possess any real feeling or receptivity: if they affect to do so, it is merely mimicry in service of their effort to please."; "[T]he most eminent heads of the entire [female] sex have proved incapable of a single truly great, genuine and original achievement in art, or indeed in creating anything at all of lasting value." Schopenhauer argued that people needed to stop reading and start thinking instead. He claimed that reading other people's thoughts stopped us from creating our own. While I think a balance is necessary, reading allows us to expand our knowledge and the language we use, and thereby promotes rather than stifles original thought and allows us to communicate those thoughts more effectively. Occasionally he'd hit upon something that felt like truth, but rarely a deep truth. For example, this quote from the book is rather ironic considering what I've addressed above: " [I]f we see the individual obstinately clinging to his errors, with the mass of men it's even worse: once they have acquired an opinion, experience and instruction can labour in vain. So that there exists certain universally popular and firmly accredited errors which countless numbers repeat every day."
There are a few pearls and sound bites to be found, but as most of these have become memes, you can save your time and gyno-rage and leave this one on the shelves.
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