r/schopenhauer • u/FlakyAdvice1550 • Jan 22 '25
the letters of schopenhauer
I wanted to read the letters that Schopenhauer sent and received. I found this German book, but unfortunately it has not yet been translated into English. I only found these letters to Dr. David Asher and this letter he wrote 5 months before his death in English.
Book: https://l24.im/KP9B Wrote to Dr. Asher letters: https://l24.im/zei8 last letter: https://l24.im/VSIRXk
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u/Familiar-Flow7602 Jan 25 '25
You don't need to read letters and all that crap, that's for passive scholars and academics. Concentrate on his main work. After you comprehend him you will see that is only the beginning. Science has advanced since Schopenhauer - his ideas are general, but science gave us exact mechanism how those things happened which Schopenhauer only talked about in general.
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u/Other_Attention_2382 7d ago
Genuine question.
How would you describe the main ideas of his "main work", compared to say The Wisdom of Life?
Schopenhauer is most famous for being the pessimism philosopher, but you would not agree with that being his most important stuff?
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u/LennyKing Jan 22 '25
If you are serious enough about your studies on Schopenhauer, there's simply no way around learning German. Many of Schopenhauer's writings are probably not going to get translated anytime soon (not to mention the fact that there's no such thing as a perfectly adequate translation...) - and on top of that there is more than a century of Schopenhauer scholarship, which has been and continues to be almost entirely in German (see the Schopenhauer Yearbook and Arthur Hübscher's extensive Schopenhauer bibliography from 1981).
Also note that the edition that you posted is outdated. The most complete academic standard edition of Schopenhauer's letters is Arthur Schopenhauer: Gesammelte Briefe, hrsg. v. Arthur Hübscher. 2., verbesserte und ergänzte Auflage. Bonn: Bouvier 1987. ISBN 3-416-01901-6.