All of Schopenhauer's answers for human relationships

“One must have no idea how the world works if one thinks they will become popular with their intelligence and perception.”

The best-selling series "Selects" from Oxy Publications is enriched with seven new titles, seven new small books of great thoughts, which come to add to the previous 16 titles. Our Relationship with Others is an excerpt from the collection of essays-philosophical reflections by Arthur Schopenhauer, published in 1851 under the title "Parerga und Paralipomena".

Schopenhauer himself described this collection as "incomparably more popular than anything else so far," while thematically complementing perhaps his most famous work, "The World as Will and Representation".

"Our Relationship with Others" is published as an essential reference point both for scholars of the great German idealist and for the history of philosophy in general.

Why is it preferable to lower our level a bit in our interactions with others? How is it explained that people are not interested in anything unless it touches them personally? Why is kindness and genuine appreciation for someone we’ve just met not the best advisors? What is politeness after all, and why do we do good to ourselves when we judge others?

With his famously incisive and by no means diplomatic style, Arthur Schopenhauer offers to provide answers to these and many other questions, provided, of course, that we desire contact with other people, even though "in reality we should be very happy if we have no relationship with them".

About the author: Arthur Schopenhauer, born in Danzig, Germany in 1788, is the philosopher who first introduced the supremacy of will over intellect, indirectly questioning all expressions of idealistic philosophy since the time of Plato and profoundly influencing thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud, yet he became famous mainly due to his pessimism.

“Our life is an episode that vainly disturbs the bliss and tranquility of nothingness,” he writes. A scholar of Eastern philosophies from a young age and notorious for his uncompromising and even dogmatic writing and behavior style, after years of traveling through many European countries, he spent the last three decades of his life in Frankfurt, accompanied by revolvers and his dog, until his death in 1860.