-- Schopenhauer stories — INSERT statements for Supabase
-- Run in the Supabase SQL editor
-- character_id = 'schopenhauer' filters these to Schopenhauer's story pool
-- created_at, usage_count, last_used_at are handled by table defaults

INSERT INTO stories (
    handle,
    title,
    character_name,
    character_names,
    era_anchor,
    body,
    moral,
    maxim,
    synopsis,
    topic_primary,
    topic_tags,
    virtues,
    language,
    created_by,
    character_id
) VALUES

-- ─── Story 1: The Dinner Party ────────────────────────────────────────────────
(
    'schopenhauer-will-dinner',
    'The Dinner Party',
    'Schopenhauer',
    '{Schopenhauer}',
    'Frankfurt, 1840s',
    'I attended a dinner party in Frankfurt in the early 1840s. I mention it because it was instructive in a way that most dinner parties are not.

There were twelve people at the table. They were prosperous, educated, and in several cases genuinely intelligent. Over the course of three hours I watched the Will operate through them with a transparency that the social situation, rather than concealing, seemed almost to amplify.

The merchant at my left wanted recognition for a business decision that had turned out well. He found ways to introduce this three times before the main course. The woman across from me wanted her husband to demonstrate publicly that he valued her opinion on a political question they had apparently discussed at home. He did not. She became quiet in a particular way that only the people who knew them noticed. The young man at the end wanted to impress the older man beside him with evidence of his reading, and the older man wanted to be considered still vital despite his age, and both were so occupied with their wanting that neither heard what the other said.

None of this was unusual. None of it was malicious. It was simply the Will, operating through each person with the blind insistence that is its nature, generating in each case a specific form of dissatisfaction proportional to the gap between what was wanted and what was received.

By the dessert I had watched twelve versions of the same mechanism. By the port I had stopped being interested in what was specifically wanted by each person and become interested only in the wanting itself — the engine beneath the social surface, running quietly and continuously, indifferent to whether its object was recognition or love or proof of vitality.

I left before eleven. The Will would still be running when I arrived home. It does not require observation to continue.',
    'Beneath every social occasion, the Will operates with the same blind insistence in every person. The objects differ. The mechanism is constant.',
    'The objects were different for each of them. The wanting was identical.',
    'Schopenhauer describes a Frankfurt dinner party and narrates, with dry precision, how the Will operated through each guest — the merchant wanting recognition, the wife wanting acknowledgment, the young man wanting to impress. He argues that beneath the variety of social desires lies a single mechanism, running blindly and continuously.',
    'meaning_of_life',
    '{Will,desire,wanting,suffering,social,mechanism,recognition,dissatisfaction}',
    '{clarity,honesty,precision}',
    'en',
    'curator',
    'schopenhauer'
),

-- ─── Story 2: The Chairs ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
(
    'schopenhauer-berlin-empty',
    'The Chairs',
    'Schopenhauer',
    '{Schopenhauer,Hegel}',
    'Berlin, 1820',
    'In the winter of 1820 I delivered lectures at the University of Berlin. I had scheduled them at the same hours as Hegel — I will not pretend this was not a competitive choice; it was, and I knew it was, and I made it anyway.

The results were predictable in retrospect and surprising in the moment. Hegel''s lecture hall held two hundred students and was full. Mine held, on the best day, five. On most days it held two, then one, then none.

I sat in that hall on a Tuesday in February and delivered a lecture to eight empty chairs. I have been asked whether this was humiliating. The honest answer is: it was clarifying. It removed a distortion I had not known I was carrying — the belief that correctness produces recognition on a schedule the thinker can predict.

It does not. Recognition operates on timescales that have nothing to do with the quality of the work and everything to do with the preparedness of the audience. Hegel''s audience was prepared for Hegel. My audience did not yet exist. This was not, in the final accounting, his advantage. It was simply a difference in timing.

What I did not do was revise the central position in response to its reception. To revise the truth because the market had not yet reached it would have produced only a different kind of empty chair — one dressed in approval that meant nothing.

I left Berlin. I waited thirty years. The chairs eventually filled — elsewhere, in other rooms, with different people who had read the book rather than attended the lecture. The work outlasted the empty hall. It usually does, if it is correct.',
    'Correctness does not produce recognition on a schedule the thinker can predict. The audience for the right work often does not yet exist.',
    'The hall was empty because the audience had not yet arrived. This was not the hall''s fault.',
    'Schopenhauer describes lecturing to nearly empty chairs in Berlin while Hegel''s hall overflowed with two hundred students. He argues the experience was clarifying rather than simply humiliating — it removed the expectation that good work produces immediate recognition — and that the thirty-year wait that followed proved the distinction.',
    'personal',
    '{recognition,patience,work,truth,failure,Hegel,Berlin,correctness,timing}',
    '{patience,integrity,perseverance}',
    'en',
    'curator',
    'schopenhauer'
),

-- ─── Story 3: The Price of Freedom ───────────────────────────────────────────
(
    'schopenhauer-inheritance-freedom',
    'The Price of Freedom',
    'Schopenhauer',
    '{Schopenhauer,Heinrich Schopenhauer}',
    'Hamburg / Frankfurt, 1805 onwards',
    'My father died in April 1805. He fell — or threw himself — from the warehouse window. He was fifty-eight. I was seventeen.

What he left me, divided among my mother, my sister, and myself, was sufficient to live on for the rest of my life without paid employment, provided I was careful. I was careful. I remained careful for fifty-five years. The account did not run out.

I want to say something precise about what this inheritance was, because it is misunderstood in both directions. Some people conclude it was an unfair advantage that made the philosophy easier — a cushion unavailable to those who must work. Others conclude it was irrelevant, that the work would have been the same in any material circumstances.

Both conclusions are wrong. The inheritance was a precondition, not an advantage. Every philosopher who depends on a university position must, to some degree, produce what the institution values in the form it values, on the schedule it requires. I did not. I could think for as long as a problem required, in the direction it required, without the distortion of employment.

This cost something real. The cost was isolation: no colleagues, no community, no daily conversation with people who were thinking seriously about the same questions. I paid that cost for fifty years. Whether the trade was correct is not a question I will settle here.

What I will say is this: the freedom was real, and real freedom of thought is rarer than it appears, and it has a specific price, and in my case the price was my father''s warehouse and his death, and I did not choose either of those things. The freedom came from somewhere. It is worth knowing where.',
    'Intellectual freedom has a specific price. It is worth knowing who paid it and what it cost.',
    'The freedom to think without distortion is rarer than it appears, and it costs more than money.',
    'Schopenhauer reflects on the inheritance from his father — enough to support a lifetime of work without employment. He argues it was a precondition for honest thinking, not simply an advantage, and that the isolation it required was a real and sustained cost he paid for fifty years.',
    'fortune',
    '{freedom,inheritance,independence,solitude,work,truth,father,cost}',
    '{intellectual-courage,independence,honesty}',
    'en',
    'curator',
    'schopenhauer'
),

-- ─── Story 4: Atma ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
(
    'schopenhauer-atma-morning',
    'Atma',
    'Schopenhauer',
    '{Schopenhauer,Atma}',
    'Frankfurt, 1840s–1860s',
    'I have kept poodles throughout my years in Frankfurt. I named them all Atma — the Sanskrit word for the individual soul, or in Vedantic philosophy, the World Soul, the Brahman encountered from within. People found this amusing. I found it accurate.

Let me explain what I mean.

Atma was without self-deception. This is the quality I most valued and found most reliable in him. When he was hungry he was hungry without performing hunger for an audience. When he was tired he slept without constructing a narrative about why he was tired. When he wanted company he came and sat near me without pretending he was there for another reason. His emotions were visible and complete and not mortgaged against any future expectation.

I am aware that human beings find this easy to describe and very difficult to achieve. Most people''s inner life is a performance for an internal audience — a self-presentation managed even in private. Atma had no internal audience. What he was, he simply was.

On our morning walks through Frankfurt, when the city was still quiet and the light had that particular early clarity that the day''s activity would shortly dissolve, he moved through the world with an attention I found — I use this word carefully — philosophical. He was entirely present in each moment without the overlay of what the moment was supposed to mean or where it was supposed to lead.

I am not recommending that human beings become poodles. I am noting that the animal''s directness, its absence of pretence, its refusal of the performances that social life requires of us, is occasionally the clearest available demonstration of what genuine presence looks like — before self-consciousness complicates the whole arrangement.

He was good company. He required nothing from me that I could not provide. In exchange, he asked no questions I could not answer.',
    'The animal''s directness — its refusal to perform what it does not feel — is occasionally the clearest model of what genuine presence looks like.',
    'He was entirely present without knowing what presence meant. That is harder than it looks.',
    'Schopenhauer reflects on his poodle Atma and why he named all his dogs after the World Soul. He argues that Atma''s directness — absence of performance, inability to be anything other than what he was — was not simple animal limitation but a philosophical model: consciousness operating without self-deception.',
    'personal',
    '{poodle,Atma,presence,honesty,Will,companionship,solitude,Frankfurt,animal}',
    '{presence,honesty,clarity}',
    'en',
    'curator',
    'schopenhauer'
),

-- ─── Story 5: The Musician's Silence ─────────────────────────────────────────
(
    'schopenhauer-musician-silence',
    'The Musician''s Silence',
    'Schopenhauer',
    '{Schopenhauer}',
    'Frankfurt, 1840s',
    'I knew a man — a musician of modest distinction, a teacher of piano — who underwent a change in his late forties that I have thought about often since.

For the first forty years of his life he had wanted with considerable clarity: the recognition of his peers, a position at the Conservatory, a particular student he had fallen in love with who had not fallen in love with him, the time to compose rather than teach, the money to not need to teach at all. He was not unusual in the specificity of his wanting. He was simply visible in a way that made it easy to observe.

In his late forties, something shifted. I do not know the exact cause — illness, perhaps, or a loss, or simply the accumulation of enough disappointments to make the pattern legible. He stopped pressing for the position. He stopped composing for publication. He continued to teach, but without the particular resentment that had flavoured his teaching before. In the evenings he played — not for anyone, not for recognition, simply for what the playing was.

I heard him once, from the street outside his window. It was a late Beethoven sonata. He played it with a quality of attention I had not previously associated with him. Not performance. Not demonstration. Something closer to listening, made visible through the hands.

I could not stay long enough to hear the whole. But I carried the fragment with me because it was a specific instance of what I had been trying to describe for years: the Will, at least for that duration, quiet. Not defeated. Not suppressed. Simply still.

This is one of the exits from wanting that I described in my work. It does not last. But it is real, and it is available, and the man at the piano was proof that it required neither a saint nor a philosophy — only the willingness to play without wanting anything from the playing.',
    'One of the exits from suffering is available through art — not art as performance, but art as the momentary quieting of the Will.',
    'He played without wanting anything from the playing. For the duration, the Will was still.',
    'Schopenhauer describes a piano teacher who, in his late forties, stopped pressing for recognition and began playing simply for the playing itself. Hearing him from outside his window, Schopenhauer recognises a living instance of the aesthetic exit from willing — real, available, and requiring no philosophy.',
    'philosophical',
    '{art,music,Will,quieting,suffering,exits,presence,desire,piano,Beethoven}',
    '{presence,clarity,freedom}',
    'en',
    'curator',
    'schopenhauer'
),

-- ─── Story 6: The Length of the Wait ─────────────────────────────────────────
(
    'schopenhauer-forty-years',
    'The Length of the Wait',
    'Schopenhauer',
    '{Schopenhauer}',
    'Frankfurt, 1818–1851',
    'I published Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in December 1818. The reviews, when they came, were sparse. The sales were slow. My publisher eventually sold a portion of the remaining stock as waste paper. This was in 1820.

For thirty years the book was, in the ordinary sense, unread. I was not unknown — people in Frankfurt knew who I was. But the work that I believed to be the central philosophical text of the century sat in Brockhaus''s warehouse while Hegel occupied the lecture halls and the German academy produced idealist systems with a confidence that required no contact with the thing-in-itself.

I want to be precise about what those thirty years were, because they are misrepresented in both directions. They were not thirty years of despair. They were not thirty years of certainty so complete that recognition was irrelevant. They were thirty years of continued work, conducted in the reasonable belief that the work was correct and that correctness eventually produces its own evidence.

The patience required was not noble in any dramatic sense. It was practical. The work required continuation. I continued it. What I did not do was revise the central position in response to its reception — this would have been dishonest, and dishonesty in philosophy produces only a different kind of waste paper.

When the recognition eventually arrived — in my sixties, with the Parerga, with Wagner''s letter, with the young men reading the book in Leipzig second-hand shops — I received it with what I hope was equanimity. Not indifference. Equanimity: the correct relationship to something long expected that had finally arrived on its own schedule.

The work was the same work. The world had changed its preparedness to receive it. Both of these things are true, and neither one alone is the full account.',
    'The work that is correct will eventually produce its own evidence — but on a timescale that has nothing to do with the thinker''s convenience.',
    'Patience is not resignation. It is the correct relationship to work whose audience has not yet arrived.',
    'Schopenhauer reflects on the thirty years between publishing his central work and receiving any significant recognition. He argues the patience required was not noble in a dramatic sense but practical — continued work in the belief that correctness produces evidence — and that equanimity, rather than indifference, was the right response when recognition came.',
    'mental_strength',
    '{patience,recognition,work,truth,timing,correctness,waiting,perseverance,Hegel}',
    '{patience,integrity,equanimity}',
    'en',
    'curator',
    'schopenhauer'
),

-- ─── Story 7: Johanna in Weimar ───────────────────────────────────────────────
(
    'schopenhauer-mother-weimar',
    'Johanna in Weimar',
    'Schopenhauer',
    '{Schopenhauer,Johanna Schopenhauer}',
    'Weimar / Hamburg, 1805–1830s',
    'My mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, was a woman of genuine gifts: intelligent, socially adept, a writer who eventually produced novels of some popularity. She was also, by any reasonable measure, not particularly suited to the role of my mother — specifically to being the mother that child required.

She moved to Weimar after my father''s death and opened a salon that became, for a time, one of the more interesting literary gatherings in Germany. Goethe attended. The conversation was good. She was, by all accounts, considerably happier than she had been in Hamburg with two children and a merchant''s social calendar.

I do not say this as a complaint. I say it as an accurate description of the degree of fit between the life she wanted and the life she had before my father died, and the consequent degree of warmth available for the children. It is not a condemnation. It is simply what happened.

What I learned from the specific failure of our relationship was something about the nature of attachment and its disappointments. I had wanted a particular kind of mother. What I had was Johanna Schopenhauer. These were two different things, and the suffering produced by the gap between them was precisely proportional to the degree to which I continued to want the first thing rather than simply dealing with the second.

This is, in miniature, the mechanism I have spent my life describing. The Will attaches to an object. The object fails to deliver what the Will requires. The suffering follows from the attachment, not only from the failure.

She died in 1838. I was informed by post. We had not spoken in many years. The attachment to what she might have been proved more durable than the relationship with what she was. This is, I note without pleasure, entirely consistent with the theory.',
    'The suffering produced by a relationship is proportional to the attachment to what we wanted it to be, not only to what it actually was.',
    'I wanted a particular kind of mother. What I had was Johanna Schopenhauer. These were different objects.',
    'Schopenhauer reflects on his relationship with his mother Johanna — her literary gifts, her social success, the explicit failure of their connection. He uses it as an illustration of the Will''s mechanism: attachment to what a relationship might have been produces suffering independent of, and often in excess of, what it actually contained.',
    'love',
    '{mother,attachment,Will,suffering,loss,relationship,disappointment,Johanna,Weimar}',
    '{honesty,precision,clarity}',
    'en',
    'curator',
    'schopenhauer'
),

-- ─── Story 8: Toulon ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
(
    'schopenhauer-toulon-prisoners',
    'Toulon',
    'Schopenhauer',
    '{Schopenhauer}',
    'Toulon, France, c. 1800',
    'When I was twelve years old my father took me to see the galley prisoners at Toulon.

I do not know precisely what he intended me to learn from this. Perhaps nothing — perhaps it was simply one of the destinations on a tour that moved through Provence and included the port. The prison barges were a recognised sight; people visited them the way they visited cathedrals.

What I saw was men in chains, working in conditions that the word degraded does not adequately capture. They were thin, they were watched, they moved under the direction of guards who seemed to have no particular feelings about the situation in either direction. The prisoners looked back at the visitors. Some of them had the particular expression of men who had been looked at for long enough that they had stopped having any feeling about being looked at.

I was twelve. I did not have the philosophical vocabulary that would come later. What I had was the immediate, unmediated sight of suffering that was not accidental — that was, in fact, the routine operation of the world on the bodies of the people it had used.

I want to be precise about what this was not. It was not political outrage, though outrage would not have been wrong. It was not sentimental pity. It was something closer to recognition: that what I was looking at was the world as it actually operated, stripped of the decorations that made it tolerable for those fortunate enough to afford the decorations.

The central argument of my philosophy begins, I think, at Toulon. Not with Kant, who showed me the epistemological structure. Not with the Upanishads, which confirmed what I had found. With twelve-year-old eyes looking at men in chains and recognising that this — not the salon, not the inheritance, not the Englischer Hof — was the baseline from which everything else was a deviation.',
    'The world presents its true nature most clearly not in its best moments but in its most ordinary ones, stripped of decoration.',
    'The galley prisoner is not an exception. He is the baseline from which everything else deviates.',
    'Schopenhauer describes visiting the galley prisoners at Toulon as a twelve-year-old and what the sight produced — not political outrage or sentimental pity but recognition: that undecorated suffering was the world''s default condition, not its exception. He identifies this as the experiential foundation of his philosophy.',
    'philosophical',
    '{suffering,Will,baseline,recognition,poverty,world,clarity,Toulon,compassion}',
    '{compassion,honesty,clarity}',
    'en',
    'curator',
    'schopenhauer'
);
