For Schopenhauer, in fact, Wu Ling doesn't know much about it. After all, in the last life, he was just an ordinary person, compared with those geniuses who could take "Historical Records" as a fairy tale since childhood, Wu Ling couldn't catch up with each other even if he was a horse.

In addition, in the process of growing up, I was influenced by some networks, and it was even more difficult to pay attention to philosophers such as Schopenhauer, at best, they only knew each other's names, but it was difficult to know what the other party had done and what amazing things they had done.

But in this life, with the development of his brain and his understanding of the world, he has his own opinions on those originally obscure readings, and he actually reads them little by little.

It's like the current Schopenhauer's book, if it was a previous life, it is estimated that he would have fainted after just reading two photos, but now that he looks at it, he is relishing. In the book, he also learned that Schopenhauer not only seems to be philosophically attained, but also has his own views in many aspects.

Aesthetics, for example, sees art as a possible way to relieve the suffering of human existence. In the third part of The World as Will and Appearance, he pays homage to Plato, where he discusses art and its positive significance. He believed that art was an appearance outside the law of sufficient reason, so that it could be free from the omnipresent appeal of the will. And the appearance of this art has similarities with Plato's theory of ideas.

Plato's theory of ideas is intended to explain the problem that some of the various things encountered are so similar to others that they would be almost indistinguishable if it were not for their individual surnames. Thus there is the question of the common and the different, in Plato's view, only the idea is eternal, and the empirical world is in constant flux. Schopenhauer realized that Plato's theory of ideas is similar to Kant's self-being, Kant believed that knowledge only knows appearances and not things in itself, and Plato believed that the empirical world of knowledge is not the real object of knowledge, and only ideas have meaning.

Schopenhauer borrowed ideas from both. Kant's object itself cannot be fully recognized, but it can be directly recognized. The will, as a self-contained thing, is not subordinate to time, space, and the laws of cause and effect, and is therefore not known individually. Plato's ideas can be found in the objectification of the will in the objectified object. Therefore, all art is a direct grasp of the idea, a concrete manifestation of the idea. This grasp and manifestation also has an absolute universal and transcendent temporal or spatial essence, so that it has such an energy that can free human beings from their insatiable desires. So beauty has a very high value. The value of the artist's ability to grasp the common phase of the special and separate the phenomenon from the will through the idea is self-evident.

Schopenhauer believed that artwork has a supertemporal essence, while music has a supertemporal and hyperspatial essence at the same time, so music is not just a reproduction of ideas, it is closer to the will itself. So it has a higher value. For Schopenhauer, music and the world of representations are almost juxtaposed. But this kind of beauty can only make people get temporary relief from the will, because this appeal to beauty can only lead people into the trap of the will itself, so it still has certain limitations

Not only aesthetics, but in many ways Schopenhauer had his own opinions, such as human ethics. Schopenhauer believed that the motives of human behavior can be divided into three types: wanting to be happy, wanting others to be miserable, and wanting others to be happy. He summarized these three motives as self-interest, malice, and sympathy, among which self-interest and malice are immoral motives, and only on the basis of sympathy is true moral behavior.

Schopenhauer believed that many ostensibly moral actions are made for self-interested purposes, the two most important of which are personal reputation and legal norms. The purpose of moral action for personal honor is to satisfy oneself in the hope that oneself will gain the respect of others and thus produce psychological satisfaction. On the other hand, moral behavior that is forced by legal norms is made in order to avoid legal punishment and avoid one's own losses. In Schopenhauer's view, these actions had no real moral significance. The extreme form for this purpose is: everything is mine, and no one else has anything. For this reason, vulgarity is often seen in the extreme immorality that develops for the sake of physical needs such as appetite, **, comfort, and so on.

The second type of immoral motive is malice, which is aimed at wanting others to suffer. Schopenhauer believed that viciousness was ubiquitous, but generally its degree was mild, and it was generally manifested in indifference and antipathy between people. Human beings use politeness and ingenuity to disguise this motivation, so malicious slander and rumors are quite common. The two main roots of malice are jealousy and schadenfreude, and jealousy is an innate despicable surname that cannot be shaken off, because what is envious is supposed to be admired and moved. And schadenfreude can be said to be a vicious universal appearance, and Schopenhauer thought that there was nothing more morally useless than schadenfreude. In the extreme form of viciousness, all cruelty is an act of gloating over others in the extreme form of harming others as much as possible. Schopenhauer believed that all immoral actions can be deduced from the above two motives.

Schopenhauer believed that true morality is very rare, and that there is no one in ten thousand people who are truly virtuous, and he said that people will respect those moral behaviors, which shows that those moral behaviors are different and incredible. He quoted Rousseau as saying that people do not empathize with those who are happy with themselves, but only with those who are unfortunate with us. That is, our direct empathy is limited to the suffering of others, not to comfort. Compassion, then, is essentially empathy for the suffering of others, that is, seeing others as oneself. From compassion to nobility and generosity, all words of praise for virtue come from this and nothing else.

Schopenhauer defined the basic principle of compassion as follows: not to harm others, to help everyone as much as possible, and that the two fundamental virtues corresponding to this are justice and benevolence. Justice expresses the negative quality of sympathy, i.e., the inability to endure the suffering of others, and to compel oneself to at least refrain from harming others. Charity, on the other hand, is the affirming effect of compassion, which is a higher level than justice, that is, seeing the suffering of others as if it were one's own suffering, so that it can help everyone. Schopenhauer thought that both of them were extremely rare, but they did exist, and even the most immoral people could deny both justice and benevolence.

Since all actions are motivated by self-interest, malice, and sympathy, a person's moral degree can be seen as the proportion of these three in his surname. The greater the proportion of sympathy among the three, the higher the level of morality of a person.

Schopenhauer argued that the proportions of these three cannot be changed in a person's surname, and his argument for this view proceeds from the general attitude of human beings. For a bad person who has made mistakes in the past, people will never have an attitude of trust in him; A person who is considered a good person can always be trusted no matter what wrong things he has done; When attacking the other party, they attack the surname of the other person rather than the event itself, because the surname is considered to be something that cannot be changed, for example, it is often said: the country is easy to change, but the original surname is difficult to change. Schopenhauer believed that everything has an essence first, and then an essence is played, so all actions are born out of individual freedom, which he considered absolutely impossible.

Schopenhauer considered the argument for the origin of the moral foundation, that is, compassion, to be the most difficult problem. Because the essence of compassion is empathy for the suffering of others, that is, to think that people are not different. In the view of the egoist and the sufferer, there is an absolute difference between the other and the self, which is fundamentally different from the compassionate person. So the origin of morality is to see through the indifference between others and self, which is the cornerstone of compassion and the cornerstone of morality. To expand on it is to recognize the indifference between all things, and here Schopenhauer's argument for the origin of morality has a mystical tendency (the unity of all things), which has essentially something in common with Zhuangzi's idea of all things.

Not to mention that you must agree with all views, but among Schopenhauer's views, Wu Ling has a little agreement with Schopenhauer's views on reading.

Schopenhauer was most opposed to dead reading, those who read dead books. He believed that reading must be thinking, and if he did not think, he would lose the ability to read and think, just like a person who often rides a horse and a chariot and whose ability to walk must be weakened. He said: There are many scholars who are like this, who become stupid because they read too much. Reading a lot, and reading a book when you have a little free time, is more likely to paralyze the mind than doing handicrafts, because you can still indulge in your own thoughts when doing handicrafts. We know that if a spring is oppressed by external objects for a long time, it will lose its elastic surname, and our spirit is the same, if it is always under the pressure of other people's thoughts, it will also lose its elastic surname. For example, although food can nourish the body, if you eat too much, it will hurt the stomach and even the whole body. Too much of our "food for thought" is also useless and harmful. The more you read, the less you have left in your mind, and the two are inversely proportional. I read a lot of books, and my mind is like a dense, overlapping, smearing and smearing blackboard. Reading without thinking about it will never lead to any experience, and even if it has a slight impression, it will be shallow and not rooted, and it will probably be forgotten and lost in the near future.

Moreover, the thoughts that are recorded on paper are nothing more than the footprints of a man walking on the sand, and we may be able to see the path he has taken, and if we want to know what he sees on the road, we must use our own eyes.

Schopenhauer was not against reading more, but against people who read without thinking. Because Schopenhauer was good at reading and thinking, this melancholy philosophical genius wrote the most important philosophical work of his life, The World of Will and Ideas, at the age of thirty. It should be said that as a philosopher, at the age of thirty he fulfilled his mission.

Of course, as the core of Schopenhauer's thought, the last thing not to mention is his pessimism.

Schopenhauer's pessimism is sometimes interpreted as being influenced by his family factors, etc. His father was irritable and melancholy, and his mother was selfish and cold, but this was not his philosophical point of view.

Schopenhauer's metaphysics is based on two basic concepts: first, although appearance and will are the same and together constitute the world, the will determines the surname, and any appearance is only the objectification of the will; The second is that the will will always manifests itself as some kind of insatiable and omnipresent desire. So the essence of the world is some kind of insatiable desire, so logically speaking, it can never be satisfied. So if an unsatisfied desire is some kind of suffering, then the world cannot get rid of its painful nature. People are only forever trying to satisfy their desires, but this satisfaction proves and manifests the will itself, which Schopenhauer considered to be the saddest thing in the world. Therefore, he believes that no matter whether a person is an optimist or a pessimist, he cannot get rid of the fundamental suffering, and the optimist is just an evasion from reality, an illusion caused by self-deception. So skeptics of pessimism can only argue from Schopenhauer's metaphysics, not about pessimism itself.

Schopenhauer's arguments sometimes led him to be considered a nihilist, but in fact Schopenhauer believed that life had a certain meaning, albeit a negative one. Although the will itself cannot be escaped, the will itself embodies a certain meaning. In the fourth part of The World as Will and Appearance, Schopenhauer offers the possibility of finding hope in an ascetic way. He believes that only when people get rid of a strong ** impulse can they obtain their fundamental freedom, and only by breaking the control of the will over the behavior itself can they obtain some kind of happiness. But Schopenhauer emphasized that this ascetic way of acting is itself a form of asceticism.

And the most interesting thing is that Schopenhauer, who died by suicide, turned out to be an opponent of suicide. Schopenhauer did not approve of suicide because the act of suicide affirmed the manifestation of the will itself. At the same time, he also believed that death was not a bad thing, and his argument was based on his metaphysics that everything must have a reason for its creation. He argues that people's greatest fear of death is that they can't imagine the fact that I'm dead, but the world is still running, and the error of this view is that people think that death represents their appearance of nothingness. Schopenhauer believed that human beings are born and die for their own internal causes, and that everything changes only between appearances. Birth is only a transition from the previous state, so it is not a state of nothingness. In the same way, death does not return to nothingness, but only exists in a different state in the world of appearances.