Schopenhauer, Arthur - Thomas Mann (essay date 1939)
Thomas Mann (essay date 1939)
SOURCE: "Schopenhauer," in Essays of Three Decades, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947, pp. 372-410.
[Mann was a German novelist, short story and novella writer, essayist, and critic who acknowledged a deep indebtedness to Schopenhauer's philosophy. In the following essay, Mann overviews Schopenhauer's metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics and evaluates their historical significance.]
The Pleasure we take in a metaphysical system, the gratification purveyed by the intellectual organization of the world into a closely reasoned, complete, and balanced structure of thought, is always of a pre-eminently Æsthetic kind. It flows from the same source as the joy, the high and ever happy satisfaction we get from art, with its power to shape and order its material, to sort out life's manifold confusions so as to give us a clear and general view.
Truth and beauty must always be referred the one...
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