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'The world is my idea.' So begins Arthur Schopenhauer's main work, and this first volume contains its four books. The world we know, he argues, following…
'The world is my idea.' So begins Arthur Schopenhauer's main work, and this first volume contains its four books. The world we know, he argues, following Kant, is only representation, the way things appear to our minds; but behind it lies the will, a blind, endless striving that drives everything in nature, from gravity to human desire, and makes life a cycle of want and suffering. Escape comes for a moment in art, especially in music, which he sees as a direct copy of the will, and more lastingly in compassion and in the denial of the will to live, which he compares with the teachings of the Upanishads and the Buddha.
Context and significance
Schopenhauer published the book in 1818, and it was neglected for decades before it influenced Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Freud and Thomas Mann. This translation is by R. B. Haldane and John Kemp. His lighter, more popular writings are in his Essays.
About the author
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was the son of a wealthy Danzig merchant and a successful novelist. His great work, The World as Will and Representation, appeared in 1818 and was almost entirely ignored; when he taught in Berlin, he scheduled his lectures at the same hour as Hegel's, and almost no students came.
He spent the rest of his life in Frankfurt with a succession of poodles, convinced of his own genius, until his collection of essays, Parerga and Paralipomena, finally brought him fame in 1851; a selection is in the library as Essays. He was the first major Western philosopher to draw seriously on Indian thought, calling the Upanishads the consolation of his life.