on the subject of old, dead, German philosophers:

I've read a lot of Schopenhauer. There's a lot to disagree with, but I morbidly enjoy the radical pessimism - and how he manages to wrest a deeply humane, and compassionate ethics from his conviction that we live in the worst possible world and that the universe is a penal colony where we are punished for being born. He was way ahead of his time on animal rights (he was perhaps the first European philosopher to even take the subject seriously); animals are our fellow inmates - if they have a somewhat dimmer awareness of the nature of their punishment than we do, then it is still only right to treat them with compassion.

But if I ever reference or recommend him, I always add a caveat: He was rather badly misogynist.

Why do I single out the misogyny, given that he was also a bit of a racist and an antisemite? Mostly because the time he lived in was quite different from ours, and he wasn't any more racist or antisemitic than the cultural baseline (if anything he was *less* racist in practice; he was fiercely opposed to transatlantic slavery and European colonialism). But even for his own time, he was a misogynistic troglodyte. He *really* hated women, and actively fought against the advances of the women's suffrage movement. You could dig up 2000-year-older dead Greek philosophers and *still* find Schopenhauer to be a regressive throwback in comparison.

Sometimes I think about what historical philosophers would have been like if they'd grown up in the modern day, but still had the same foundational guiding values or ideas as they did. Eg. nu-Plato wouldn't have had kooky physics, but he'd still have been an idealist and an authoritarian. And I think if we did that to Schopenhauer, we'd get a nu-Schopenhauer who probably wasn't racist or antisemitic at all, but who'd probably be posting angry rants on manosphere forums.