The Art of Being Happy

Especially during the Berlin period - after the failed attempt to give lectures as a young private lecturer in competition with Hegel until his flight from the cholera-stricken Prussian capital (1831) - Schopenhauer liked to occupy himself with the writing of small treatises, which he obviously conceived for his own practical use and did not publish. The best known is the so-called Eristic Dialectic or The Art of Being Right, which has been edited posthumously from his estate. The little treatise on Eristics is not the only one of its kind. Schopenhauer wrote other short treatises in the same style, including a little handbook of practical philosophy, which resembles - in structure and arrangement by rules - the Eristic Dialectic. He calls it "Eudämonologie" or "Eudämonik", literally: Doctrine of Happiness, more freely: The Art of Being Happy. A real gem, which until recently has remained hidden and unnoticed in the estate. **

** * Translated from the foreword of Franco Volpi, p. 7ff