On Human Nature

On Human Nature collects Schopenhauer's essays from Parerga und Paralipomena (1851) on the questions that follow once you accept his bleaker conclusions: how does character actually form, what is moral action grounded in, how should the state organise the wills of millions of self-interested animals, and is the will free in any meaningful sense? His answers are unsparing — character is largely fixed at birth, ethics rests on compassion rather than reason, the state is a necessary cage, and freedom is a useful illusion — but they are argued with the clarity that makes Schopenhauer one of philosophy's great prose stylists. Translated by T. Bailey Saunders in 1897.