The Wisdom of Life, Counsels and Maxims

'The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.' Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century because his humanistic, atheistic, if pessimistic views chimed with a new secularism that was emerging from a Western society dominated by religion. Despite his rather forbidding image (and a few outdated views), he is one of the most approachable German philosophers, and this is certainly evident in these two key works, The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims. This is, says his translator, T. Bailey Saunders, because his theories were based on observation and experience - 'interpreting the world as it is'. In The Wisdom of Life, Schopenhauer considers eudemonology (the science of happiness) - 'the art of ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest possible amount of pleasure and success'. He begins by dividing 'differences in the human lot' into three: what a man is in the sense of personality; what a man has in terms of proper