Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is the author of early genius. His main work, The World as Will and Representation, was published in 1818 when he was thirty years old. He is so sure he is producing something so sublime that he cannot understand why the resonance is practically zero. On the contrary, his mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, gains a reputation as a novelist. In the world of philosophy he wants to enter, in Germany, eyes are turned to Hegel, whose class is overcrowded, while the novice teacher who is so confident with the new world system has almost a few students. . He will eventually achieve the sought-after celebrity in the last decade of his life, but the path that has taken him there has not been the direct metaphysical system but the art of knowing how to live, or his talent for aphorisms that speak about it. The art of being right.. And at the height of this wave of fame, he will finally see recognition of the importance of his near-death system, rooted in voluntarism against Hegelian idealist rationalism.
The eternal will, manifested in all phenomena of nature, from gravity to the motives of human will, surrounds and explains the world (insufficiently) as we represent it, and in the face of a life that consists essentially of suffering, Schopenhauer draws inspiration from Christian mystics and Buddhism, who discovered the negation of the will to live. The best relief from suffering would be almost suicide, but he acts in despair and allows himself to be a slave to his will, thus giving us the ideal solution, the artist and the ascetic. The artist has the ability to get out of the chain of current needs with his free and disinterested way of knowing. And the hermit learns to rest in the closest thing to nothing. Since there is no personal God and – as pantheists claim – a deified world cannot be defended, hope would paradoxically consist in the rejection of the will to live. Hence his irrationalist philosophy and famous metaphysical pessimism: we are in the “worst of possible worlds”, the opposite of what Leibniz’s Theodicy reached when he wanted to justify evil in the world.
In The Art of Being Right, Schopenhauer, with a nervous sensitivity and very critical of the human condition, examines the sources that lead one to prefer the subjective satisfaction of being right rather than knowing the objective truth. Much of the material is taken directly from Aristotle, his sophistic arguments against true syllogisms that are either clearly false or simply fail to prove the truth. But the Danzig philosopher believes that the peripatetic philosopher fell short in his analysis and therefore devoted himself to a kind of systematization of the ways of deception, collected in 38 strategies.
Presented by Luis Fernando Moreno Claros, one of the best commentators on German work and biography, the book brings together some fragments from Parerga and Paralipómena (i.e. Sobras and its complementary texts) along with the main booklet. set of system). Comparing both texts, we can see that in the first he openly affirms or denies that he is suitable for the art of deception (per fas et per nefas), while in the second he will try to be aware by denying his previous position. from deceptions to claim the truth. That is, the book we are examining can be read by both a sophist (to deceive) and a philosopher.
The assumptions in which Schopenhauer finds himself are those of a will that knows how to put on a mask to take intelligence where it wants. Reason is inadequate and human nature is perverse. It helps that the uncertainty of the truth is so deep. Therefore, there is a wide variety of plot traps, and these include concealment, exaggeration, angering the enemy, ambiguities, empty refinements, inappropriate generalizations … as well as questioning, ad hominem. authority (ad verecundiam), you too (tu quoque), or simply changing the main subject for another subsidiary (mutatio controversiae)…
A book that puts us in front of an eristic debate that is typical of the 19th century (and Aristotle’s time) but which no longer seems to belong to our time. Accustomed to cameras and the free reproduction of what was recorded, who would dare to use cheap footage, complex manuals, and any deviation from reality in a heated ideological debate today? It would be like digging your own political grave. The pessimistic Schopenhauer could never have guessed that the critical spirit of the general citizen would render the art of knowing how to lie useless.