4 Books You MUST Read According to Schopenhauer

Deep within an essay On the Art of Thinking for Oneself, Schopenhauer has four novels to recommend his readers. Of course, they are each in a different language... He also gives us objective, measurable standards to judge the artistic merit of a novel. Schopenhauer looks at how much a novel deals with the inner life -- the more it deals with the inner life of the protagonist, the more artistic a novel becomes because it’s the inner world that excites our interest - not the outer world of representation. Schopenhauer’s recommended reading list: 1) Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne () 2) Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse by Jean-Jacques Rousseau () 3) Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe () 4) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes ()