The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1: Volume 1

I have spent this past year becoming quite acquainted with Arthur Schopenhauer. I can say, without hyperbole, that it has been an experience unlike any other. Unlike Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer's prose is consistently beautiful, and his literary style is essential in conveying truths about the world and ourselves that can be quite unpalatable. Schopenhauer's view of the world is bleak, and I agree with his assessment. He speaks of the blind drives and cruelties that motivate our species, and indeed the world itself, years before Nietzsche; and unlike Nietzsche he certainly did not embrace that cruelty. As a metaphysician, Schopenhauer reveals many insights and a few weaknesses. S. appropriated several facets of Kant's transcendental idealism, but whereas Kant believed that all things possessed the attribute of "things-in-themselves", S. asserts that all things are comprised in essence as "Will". It is essential to grasp that S. defines "Will" as blind desire, NOT as a conscious universal mind (i.e., God). Schopenhauer's philosophy is thoroughly atheistic, although many of his philosophical insights slot neatly with Buddhism and parts of Hinduism. Personally, I feel that of all the philosophers of transcendental idealism that came after Kant, Schopenhauer's system of blind will as the noumenal thing-in-itself to be the only one that is remotely plausible. Schopenhauer's metaphysical insights on the arts are a mixed bag, but still intriguing. As a music lover, Schopenhauer unsurprisingly rates music as the greatest art and the sole art form that completely circumvents the will. In other words, music appreciation is completely contemplative, and does not involve egoism. I would rate music as the greatest of the arts too, but music can easily involve egoism: sensual music can make me desire sex, harsh music can make me feel abrasive, etc. In my opinion, his ranking of the arts, as a part of his metaphysical system, easily collapses when viewed as literal fact, but as poetic metaphor it works quite well. Schopenhauer's greatest flaws are in the areas of natural science. His views on the development of consciousness are brilliantly insightful and slot easily with Darwinian theory, but he falls far short in denying the existence of atoms and preferring Goethe's theory of color over Newton's. On ethics, S. is consistently insightful, but few would find his ethical thought attractive. Schopenhauer's beautiful prose on the essential irrelevance of death (especially in Volume II) is some of the most sublime there is. I mostly concur with Schopenhauer's views on animals, although I disagree with his belief that there is occasional justification for the exploitation of animals for human survival. As a vegan, I find Descartes', Spinoza's, and Kant's views on animals to be repulsive, so Schopenhauer's views are definitely an advance. Schopenhauer's view on sex is of the St. Augustine school, and as such I find it to be the least attrac

If you are clever enough to shave away the nagging scientific details which have expired with time (as they all do), as well as the great philosopher's personal opinions, you will find this to be one of the greatest works ever written. For me, it was the end of philosophy; good answers to the questions I have always wrestled. An important thing to remember about Schopenhauer is that, as far as I know, he is the last great system-builder, the last philosopher in the traditional sense, who set out to create an entire picture of the world. His concept of the will, when fully grasped, is powerful and very simple. He is simply saying that there is one reality within all phenomenon, a "blind, irresistible urge" in his words, manifesting itself as the world. It is a mind-blowing concept: that the hungers and desires that push and pull you along are actually the stirrings of the same "force" (for lack of a better word) that also reveals itself in such phenomenon as gravity, magnetism, and the very energy that composes all matter; and that this restless and indestructible power is your true being. The downside is that it is insatiable and forever striving, with no goal being final, and satisfaction an eternal delusion. The hardest part of this book to grasp is Schopenhauer's acceptance of transcendental idealism, which states that you only know the world through your five senses and your brain, and that therefore the objects you think you know directly have been conditioned by the process of perception, and are not things-in-themselves (this was Immanuel Kant's contribution to philosophy). It is not quite as difficult as it reads, and it may sound rather mystical until a proper understanding of what he is talking about strikes you unexpectedly one day. When it struck me I immediately re-read the book, and it was like reading it for the first time. Anybody familiar with "The Matrix" will be ahead of the crowd here, for the creators of that film were very familiar with Schopenhauer (in "The Matrix Reloaded," it is Schopenhauer's book (with the title in the original German) that the Persephone character pulls to open the door to the Keymaker). Just keep in mind that the world you percieve around you is most assuredly a mental construct (or mental picture) that is created by your brain from data conveyed by the nerves. It is not the world directly, it is a "representation" of the world. The only thing which is known to you directly (at least in part), is yourself, and therein lies the will, forever hungry, all of your emotions being its acts within the field of time. To properly grasp the idealistic half of his work (the world as representation), I strongly suggest the essay in vol. II called, "On the Fundamental View of Idealism."

What do humans' social wish for power and their instinctual drives do to their attempts to create knowledge? What does the fact that our minds were created by evolution mean for us? Schopenhauer thought hard about these issues that remain vital today, and his answers continue to ring true today. Schopenhauer, it is true, was hampered by writing before -The Origin of Species- appeared, but he managed to have figured out most of the implications of evolution prior to Darwin. Schopenhauer's evolutionary psychology is far more convincing and cogent than the "social Darwinism" associated with Spencer and Sumner, because he questions whether the struggle for existence -ought- to be given free rein. And in the same way, Schopenhauer asks similar questions to those that were asked in the 1960's by Michel Foucault. Given that humans are wilful animals, motivated by power and other desires, in what sense can their attempts at knowledge, or their attempts to express it, ever be reliable? Or are they all somehow tainted by this wilfulness? In his notion that all life is the result of a blind, unconscious Will, Schopenhauer also was a major influence on Freud, whose conception of the unconscious owes so much to this work. His ultimate conclusion, though, is not pretty. Life is evil because it requires pain: hunger, lust, and anger are goads that whip us into serving life's agenda, which we might not have chosen upon reflection. The requirement of desire as motivator means that life always carries with it a necessary measure of pain. Not a happy conclusion, but a seemingly inevitable one. Schopenhauer is also to be praised for his style: writing about things that most people can in fact understand, he sees little use for jargon, and is rich in example. He is a pleasure to read after Hegel or Kant.

Although the scientific premises of his philosophy are now considered outdated, Arthur Schopenhauer's contribution to modern philosophy continues to be an enduring and endearing one. Despite the fact that he wrote in the framework of Kantian idealism -- (with its dual-world metaphysics of "phenomenon" and "thing-in-itself") -- his thought has branched out into several directions, proving to be influential on some of the literary and philosophical luminaries of the nineetenth as well as the twentieth centuries. In his metaphysics, he was a voluntarist, propounding the nonrational, universal will as the ultimate reality (the "thing-in-itself") and the driving force behind all the manifestations of organic life as well as inorganic nature. The voluntarist doctrine of the will to power of Nietzsche was evolved from Schopenhauer, as well as the metaphysical vitalism of Bergson and, most patently, Freud's theory of the unconscious. In his epistemology, he was a phenomenologist and idealist, following the footsteps of Berkeley and the critical idealist Kant. In his aesthetics, he was a Platonist, holding the ontologically originary Form, or what he terms the "Platonic Idea" to be anterior to the aesthetic representation. In his ethics, he argued that to live means to desire and desire entails nothing but suffering. His reasoning was that desire induces suffering when it is frustrated from acquiring its object; upon overcoming its hindrances and realising its object, desire results in boredom since it has a new object in view and the cycle continues indefinitely. As such, desire leads inevitably to suffering. Schopenhauer's answer is asceticism ("the denial of the will-to-live"). The wise man does not commit suicide, but abstains from this life of useless striving and hopes for an annihilating death. In the meantime, he will look with compassion and pity upon his suffering fellow creatures. This element of Schopenhauer's philosophy reflects his unremittingly melancholy and pessimistic temperament, culminating, according to his biographer, in intense paranoia and the habit of sleeping at night with a loaded pistol tucked under his pillow. His ascetic morality is unique in modern Western philosophy. Being an atheist, Schopenhauer was arguably the first philosopher to effect a thorough break with the Judaeo-Christian tradition and to introduce strong elements of Eastern religion in his thought. (His voluntarism and asceticism have Hinduist and Jain Buddhist roots in the doctrine of reincarnation "metempsychosis" and the application of austerities upon oneself to liberate the soul from the karmic matter which magnetises it and causes it to be painfully reborn into the world of pain.) In terms of his style, he was an undisputed master of German prose style, writing in a lucid, witty and jargon-free Romantic "essay-style". He has exerted an influence on a number of key modern literary figures, such as Mann, Conrad and Ha

Schopenhauer proves that a German philosopher does not have to be nearly unintelligible to appear profound. Unlike Hegel and Heidegger, Schopenhauer does not hide behind ambiguous words or phrases. To the reader, Schopenhauer's views are as profound as they are clear. Starting where Kant left off, he gives new meaning to the word will; he makes will the thing in itself. Both volumes are essential reading. The first offers his entire system. From epistemology to metaphysics, to a great essay on where his philosophy differs from Kant's, the first volume is the foundation for the second. The second volume is classic Schopenhauer; this is the acid-tongued curmudgeon most people think of when they bother to think of him at all. The sections on death and the metaphysics of sexual love are mind-blowing. As it is expressed in his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer's genius and originality of thinking tower over the views of most thinkers being pushed in universities today.