You Only Know What You Think About

"contemplate & hospital" free AI image www.gemini.google.com

Human beings possess an innate nature at some point in their life to label and add meaning to what it is they experience, an idea that the late German philosopher expounded upon, Arthur Schopenhauer (Schopenhauer, 1970, p. 96), in which his basic philosphy is that we live in two worlds, the one in which we experience and feel and the world between our ears or the life we think about (Schopenhauer, 1970, p. 13). How can a person write something like a literary work that conveys a philosophical message about life, which is what made Schopenhauer's genius what it is? Context is everything.

With the help of R. J. Hollingdale, he draws attention to in his 1970 edited works of Essays and Aphorisms by that great pessimistic thinker. Schopenhauer lived just over seven decades, hailed from Germany, and fled during Napoleon's siege of the great empire in 1813, dodged the cholera, dealt with the death of a suicidal father, had a poor relationship with his mother, and was even sued for beating up a woman, despite being of a high intellectual mind (Schopenhauer, 1970). Although his influence is attributed to the works of Kant and Plato (Schopenhauer, 1970, p. 239), he likely did not express his thoughts in a manner that would be remembered as a form of artistic value; instead, he wrote about his thoughts and experiences in life.

Although a well-educated individual, he was penning his thoughts and dealing with his situations and circumstances as if he were also struggling with pessimistic dysthymia. In Schopenhauer's world, there was a struggle that is distant and unrealatable to readers of today with all of our advances in science, medicine and mental health, still any reader, rather and person can identify with Schopenhauer in as much as the following statement is true, that "What makes men hard-hearted is that everyone has sufficient troubles of his own to bear, or thinks he has" (Schopenhauer, 1970, p. 170).

References:

Schopenhauer, A. (1970). Essays and aphorisms (R. J. Hollingdale, Ed. & Trans.). Penguin Books.