The World as Will and Idea: Abridged in 1 Vol

by Arthur Schopenhauer, Jill Berman (Translator), David Berman (Editor)

The nineteenth-century idealist philosopher and precursor of Freud

The World as Will and Idea (1819) holds that all nature, including man, is the expression of an insatiable will to life; that the truest understanding of the world comes through art and the only lasting good through ascetic renunciation. Unique in western philosophy for his affinity with Eastern thought, Schopenhauer influenced philosophers, writers, and composers including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Wagner, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett.

The Work presented here appeals not only to the student of philosophy but everyone interested in psychology, literature and eastern and western religion.

This paperback edition is the most comprehensive available and includes an introduction, bibliography, selected criticism, index and chronology of Schopenhauer's life and times.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Classics, German Literature, Literature

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1818

About the author

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in the city of Danzig (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; present day Gdańsk, Poland) and was a German philosopher best known for his work The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer attempted to make his career as an academic by correcting and expanding Immanuel Kant's philosophy concerning the way in which we experience the world.

He was the son of author Johanna Schopenhauer and the older brother of Adele Schopenhauer.

Reviews

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is not voluminous, but it is deep and wide in subject matter. It is a book to mull over. Schopenhauer uses multiple examples to support his arguments. These are helpful and part of the philosopher's artistry.

A little about the author: sandwiched between two, perhaps more well known thinkers, Kant and Nietzsche, sits a clearer and more quotable writer, a more pragmatic philosopher, and a greater influence on authors, musicians, and artists. He does not purport a system for academics to disentangle. His pessimism is often described as depressing.

But Schopenhauer is a superior realist who can live in a world of ideas. He presents the problems of humanity and offers solutions. They may not be solutions many folks would like to try; indeed, Schop did not practice asceticism, though he prescribed it as an escape from the suffering of the world.

The writing is refreshing, insightful, and grounded in more reason than most. There is truly original thought here.

He is present in the work and/or mentioned directly by Darwin, Freud, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, Edgar Saltus, Ivan Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, Carl Jung, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Einstein, Joseph Campbell, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut, Wittgenstein and Thomas Ligotti, to name some heavyweights.

Now, for the book itself:

The Will is not only energy. All living things, and even non-living objects, are manifestations of the Will.

Kant was right, that we cannot know the thing-in-itself wholly. However, through one's consciousness in relation to the body, in voluntary and involuntary movements and processes, we can gather an idea of the Will, which does the moving and motivates all action.

We intuitively relate all objects around us and everything we experience only as far as how they relate to other objects, and especially how they relate to us: how they affect us, how we perceive them.

The Will is in eternal flux; thus, the world is in eternal flux. This takes us back to Heraclitus.

Without a subject to acknowledge and play by the same rules as an object, the object is nothing. The world is full of many subjects and many objects. We are subjects to objects which are subjects to us.

A sensation should not be held as the cause of, or to come from, an object, but as merely something that our senses, one of them at least, has sensed. We only know that an object is real because it stimulates at least one of our senses.

Our objective comprehension is subjective.

When we say something is matter, we not only say that something exists but also that it is perceived.

An easy starting point to ponder the Will: involuntary acts of the body--unwanted thoughts, innate desires, absent-minded gestures of the hands while speaking.

The Will, apart from the body, is still only knowable abstractly. This means Kant's thing-in-itself, as unknowable, still holds validity. But Schopenhauer has taken things beyond Kant, his garrulous, moralistic predecessor.

The Will is present in non-living objects. It gives objects their particular qualities. In living things, the Will can be subordinated in a more overt manner.

A stone rolls down a hill, an animal hunts its prey--both are manifestations of the Will.

Gravity does not cause the stone to fall to earth. The cause is the stone's proximity to earth. Gravity is always there.

Causality is only present in time and space. Gravity and all energy is eternal and exists outside time and space.

Schopenhauer's Will takes Plato's Forms and expresses them in myriad replicas we see in time and space.

Though we harness fire & electricity, etc, these things would exist if we did not harness them. Nature's laws sometimes seem extraordinary to us, but they are not. The laws are consistent. We become shocked when we see a natural phenomenon that is new to us, but we should not be. It has always been so and will always be so when circumstances dictate.

Animals must eat plants and one another. Everything preys on something and/or is preyed upon by something. This displays the constant strife, the essential discord, of the Will. The Will feeds on itself. Humanity devours itself. Everything is trying and striving to express its highest Form, and to do so generally impinges on the striving of something else.

The Will is the force propelling evolution, all the tiny mutations.

Our actions are guided by motives which are guided by the Will. The Will wants to strive, thrive, and live.

Nothing, not gravity, a stone, an insect, or a human ever reaches a final goal. All is merely eternally becoming.

The Will is pure desire. In humans, the intellect must be called on to temper the Will. The Will does not plan. It desires; its motives can be hidden.

Human disposition is always cycling through three states of emotion: desire, momentary satisfaction, and boredom. Two of the three cause pain and suffering, and the other is ephemeral.

Schop says the Kantian "thing-in-itself" is the Will, but not a realized objectification of the Will. It is the becoming part of the thing, since Kant's thing needn't take any form.

Everything we see is only a copy of an Idea, coming and going in time and space.

Knowledge can break free from the Will. When an individual is involved in, producing or contemplating or executing, something artistic, the individual breaks free from the awareness of time and space; thus, it can break from the Will. But this can only be temporary.

A loss of individuality comes from perceiving the object as the Idea, without relationships to other things subject to causality. An individual can become a "pure subject of knowing." This respite from the Will is fleeting, though. One must sustain this higher level to produce art.

On nostalgia: we look back on things and see them in an objective light. We forget all the worries and troubles we had in those times. The time elapsed separates us from our old subjective selves, even though our current selves are as subjective as ever.

Beauty can facilitate our transference from subjective knowledge of particular things to the objective contemplation of Ideas.

In music, melodies represent the great striving and gratification of the will. Catchy, short melodies in dance music mimic everyday pleasures. Winding, meandering melodies with painful discord and sustained, languid notes show sadness and tragedy, while gratification is expressed when the music falls back to the key-note.

Like in Buddhism and Hinduism, in Schopenhauer, we are taught that the best way to live would be by denying the Will. But here it's by using the intellect, knowledge, art, and wisdom to totally set oneself free from cravings and desires. Still, for the most part, this is impossible.

I will leave off with a few quotes from the gloomy philosopher and some from others he used in this most remarkable philosophical masterpiece:

Schopenhauer:

"The world is my idea."

"The body is a condition of the knowledge of the Will."

"Genius is the clear eye of the world."

"The Principle of Sufficient Reason is thus again the form into which the Idea enters when it comes to the knowledge of the subject as individual."

"Often, we don't know what we wish or what we fear."

"For one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten which are denied."

(on literature) "Man's unspeakable pain and misery, the triumph of malice, the tyranny of mere chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent, are here presented to us; and in lies a significant hint as to the nature of the world and of existence."

"Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence."

Agrippa von Nettesheim:

"It is us he inhabits, not the underworld, nor the stars in the sky. The spirit who lives in us makes those."

Plato:

"What is that which always is, and has no becoming? And what is that which is always becoming and never is?"

"Time is the moving picture of eternity."

Goethe:

"No ill can touch him who looks on human beauty; he feels himself at one with himself and with the world."

"To fix in lasting thoughts the hovering images that float before the mind."

Thomas Paine:

"It is only a short step from the sublime to the ridiculous."

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The world is my idea:”



And so with these words Schopenhauer begins his magnum opus with one of the most provocative opening lines in all of literature. He continues, “a truth which holds good for every thing that lives and knows,… [Man] knows not a sun, and not an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him exists only as idea–that is, only in relation to something else, the one who conceives the idea, which is himself.”

The whole of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is contained in these lines. The book that follows works to undo the assumptions the reader brings to them–primarily those surrounding “himself”. Read:

“We never know it [the subject], but wherever anything is known, it is the knower.”

“however immeasurable and massive this world may be, its existence hangs nonetheless by a single thread: that is, the actual consciousness in which it exists.”

“The world’s existence is irrevocably subject to this condition, and this brands it, in spite of all empirical reality, with the stamp of ideality and therefore of mere phenomenal appearance. As a result, the world must be recognized, at least from this aspect, as akin to dreaming,”

“inference from sensation to its cause which, as I have repeatedly pointed out, lies at the foundation of all sense perception, is certainly sufficient to signal for us the empirical presence in space and time of an empirical object, and is therefore quite enough for the practical purposes of life; but it is by no means sufficient to afford us any conclusion as to the existence and real nature, or rather as to the intelligible substratum, of the phenomena which in this way arise for us.”

Just as I’ve already suggested, so Schopenhauer himself reiterates throughout: “There is, indeed, just one thought which forms the content of this whole work.” And indeed this is just as much the case as it is the crux. The very pervasive difficulty is in trying to understand something that is impossible to understand from the way we are conditioned to know the world–which is under the forms of time and space. For Schopenhauer’s will lies outside of time and space, outside of cause and effect, outside of change and fate–all of which is mostly impossibly for us to completely comprehend.

Hence accusations of contradictions. But of course Schopenhauer presupposes such, and, just as he, through this work, fixates his reader in an exercise of understanding something that is near-impossible to understand, he also reconciles not only his own seeming contradictions but more ubiquitous ones such as that between fate and free-will. And this–you may have guessed–he does by incessantly hashing out the relationship between will and idea. In a very generalized nutshell such reconciliations are an insistence that certain dualisms are the same thing looked at from different perspectives.

–The will is infinite, timeless, spaceless, absolute, free. It is the eternal all-knowing knower.

–Idea, being the manifestation of the will, is also infinite and yet exists only temporally, spacially; it exists only in condition, and is completely fated. Inside of it, each of us is only the will itself inside of time and space–i.e. the will seeing itself from a limited perspective, which, for being limited, draws it/us into the delusion of individuation or plurality.

“in the case of such beings as have knowledge,…the individual is the support of the knowing subject, and the knowing subject is the support of the world.”

The mystery in this equation can be somewhat lightened by ruminating on the concept of infinity or as Schopenhauer puts it:

“life has infinite time and infinite space to erase the distinction between the possible and the actual,”

Likewise, Schopenhauer’s uncanny sensitivity allows him to shed light on the foundations of human error:

“It is an error great as it is common that the most frequent, most universal and simplest phenomena are those that we best understand;”

He very elegantly and succinctly sums up man’s tragic penchant to assume and forget:

“Men quietly resign themselves to starting from mere qualitates occultae which they had given up trying to elucidate because they intended to build on them, not excavate beneath them.”

In all my limited investigation, I’ve never found a more compelling account of the cosmos. I sympathize with Borges’ regret and joy in the fact that he wouldn’t ever write an account of his worldview because Schopenhauer had already done it for him. Although it should be said that the fact that much of what Schopenhauer himself said had long existed in eastern metaphysics–primarily Buddhist and Hinduist–didn’t suffice to prevent him from writing his. And so we are the benefactors of this stubbornness. For, a large part of the thrill is to have both the rigor of a western style delineation and the–at least partial–validation that is the historic force of an ancient spiritual practice. This is not to say that the equating of any kind of western philosophy with an eastern spiritual tradition–or vice versa–proves its truth, but for those who recognize for themselves an experiential, non-dogmatic truth in one or another, it is rather exhilarating to jump over onto a parallel wire and see this truth from a different and uniquely established perspective.

“If we lose ourselves in contemplation of the infinite greatness of the universe in space and time, meditate on the the millennia of years that have passed and are yet to come, or if the night-sky actually brings before our eyes countless worlds, and so forces upon our consciousness the immensity of the universe, we feel ourselves reduced to nothing; as individuals, as bodies vitalised, as transient phenomena of will, we feel ourselves like drops in the ocean, dwindle and disperse into the void. But against this spectre of our own futility, against such mendacious impossibility, there rises up at once the immediate consciousness that all these worlds exist only in our ideation, only as modifications of the eternal subject of pure knowing, which we find ourselves to be as soon as we forget our individuality, and which is the necessary support of all worlds and all eras, and the condition of their existence. The vastness of the world which previously troubled us, now rests in us; our dependence on it is cancelled by its dependence on us.”

A brief note on this particular book (Everyman):
- It’s abridged. I never thought I’d read an abridged book much less defend one. Now that I’ve done the former–having been tricked in part by the fact that its abridgement goes slyly unmentioned on any part of the book’s exterior–I will do the latter. According to the editor, the hundreds of pages of lanced-off prose is mostly “digressions in which Schopenhauer excoriates his philosophical opponents.” Though I’m one who finds these excoriations highly entertaining, I count myself fortunate in being tricked into imbibing this more concentrated version in my major introduction to Schopenhauer’s own words. Tangents and references to unfamiliar thought, however entertaining, would have only weakened the understanding I ultimately gained.
- Translation. You’ll notice other Schopenhauer books titled, The World as Will and Representation, and The World as Will and Presentation, and perhaps wonder whether he is making some rather fine distinction each by writing an entire separate book. Worry not (Or should I say, ‘worry’?); these are merely translations of the same. I don’t necessarily have a pony in this race, yet–I plan to read them all–but I’ll say that the translator makes some very strong and salient points for the case of ‘idea’, most notably the hard-to-argue-with point that Schopenhauer himself, when translating Kant into English, used ‘idea’ for the German Vorstellung.

[Erick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m really glad I decided to read the abridged version of The World as Will and Idea. What is here is more than enough to understand Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will. The only reason I can see reading all three volumes of the unabridged work is when one wants to hang on Schopenhauer’s every word like Schopenhauer does himself. Of course, I had already read three of his works before this, so I already went into this fairly well grounded in Schopenhauer’s system. Schopenhauer himself requires someone to have read The Fourfold Root before reading this. I honestly don’t think that is necessary.

I don’t want to overly disparage Schopenhauer. No, I wasn’t that impressed with his philosophy. It has some interesting points. As I’ve said before though, I don’t think he was that original, or that consistent. Let’s just take his focus on the will for starters. If one defines will as desire, or more specifically, a desire for manifestation, then Schelling already beat him to the punch. But so did Boehme before Schelling. Both Schelling and Boehme made desire for manifestation a transcendent power. They didn’t use the word will, but that is simply semantics. The meaning is ultimately the same. It does cause one to appreciate that they probably were onto something profound, but Schelling, like Schopenhauer subsequently, divorced desire from mind. This was one of my big issues with Schelling, and it’s an even bigger issue with Schopenhauer. In this work, Schopenhauer does appeal to Platonic Ideas (cf. pg. 68-71) as the objectified means of the will’s working in the world. He doesn’t make these Ideas transcendent, but they do seem to be somewhat detached from his more mundane phenomena. In Plato, the ideas are tied to a transcendent mind or reason. No such thing exists in Schopenhauer, so his ideas are divorced from the appropriate Platonic context. It is puzzling how a blind will could ever give rise to these secondary ideas (cf. pg. 246). Schopenhauer makes will completely free in its transcendence, but in the world of knowledge and phenomena, he makes it controlled by these. How does such a primary mode become so weak when it finds itself in the domain of secondary modes? How could it even generate these controls? He lauds religious ascetics and even claims that they can overcome this will, but it isn’t obvious to me how such an overarching power could ever be tamed in the way he suggests.

It is also plain to me that Schopenhauer owes a lot to Spinoza. Schopenhauer’s will is a primary substance (pg. 87), and it functions like Spinoza’s primary substance. He also makes it just as deterministic. Here Schopenhauer isn’t the most consistent either though. In his work on Freedom of the Will, he accords a very deterministic framework for will. He also makes will deterministic in the realm of phenomena in this work (cf. pg. 188). It is the most apparently deterministic in the lower lifeforms, but becomes more individually deterministic in higher lifeforms like human beings. Schopenhauer apparently sees will as working within constant conflicts between forms where it sublimates lower forms in order to form higher ones (pg. 73). Although his debt to evolutionary thought is obvious, it still isn’t clear how will can ever be controlled in specific instances like the internal functions of an individual lifeform. All body parts—internal and external—are manifestations of will, but obviously its desire for sublimation is controlled here. Despite his supposed influence on psychology, Schopenhauer has almost no appreciation for the role of the subconscious. Even when the subject of subconscious motives should be readily apparent to him, like when he discusses organ function (pg. 47-49), he completely depreciates the role of the subconscious. In this respect, Herbart and Carus are superior. They at least recognized that motivations and knowledge are partially unconscious. Apparently, Schopenhauer doesn’t accept any of that.

To Schopenhauer’s credit, he can’t be labeled a materialist. He has an appreciation for metaphysics and religion, but those elements don’t seem to gel in his own system very well. His influence on Nietzsche is obvious throughout this work. His asides regarding the sufferings of genius I found interesting. I give this work around 2-and-a-half stars. It’s about average.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, I've just finished rereading The World As Will and Idea (for the second time) and am determined to make this comment amusing, if not outright fun. Schopenhauer's masterwork goes this way:

1) Kant had almost everything right when he said that we live in a reality of mental representations (phenomena) and are incapable of connecting directly with the underlying things-in-themselves (noumena).

2)HOWEVER, Schopenhauer knows what the basic thing-in-itself is: It's Will. Will in the rocks, the seas, everything material and everything organic, you and me, too.

3) It remains somewhat unclear to me exactly how Schopenhauer can know this if he agrees that mortals cannot transcend the phenomenal, but he makes a comprehensive case for the one-ness, the unity, of all that exists, attributing a grand fatality to it that sweeps us along. In fact, he would say we don't exist to be swept along, we only think we do, because we are inseparable from the Will, and can only rarely, under special circumstances, deduce its own existence through such things as art and the suppression of our own feeble will. Be ye Shakespeare or be ye an ascetic, ye shall know that what we see is us, and what sees us is us, and what is going on is that the Will is working its wonders through and around us. More explicitly, Schopenhauer cites the Chandogya Upanishad: Thou Art That (Tat Tvam Asi)

4) So dial back to the '60s and remember Ram Dass and everyone like him and then consider the fact that these colorful folk were completely anticipated by Arthur Schopenhauer, a 19th century German philosopher who was not really very colorful and never danced with flowers in his hair.

5) The first two "books" of The World as Will and Idea are laborious. We get the amendments to Kant and we get a trip back to Plato's Ideas. The third and fourth "books" are spectacular. If you are an artist of any kind or a connoisseur of any kind, you will find that Schopenhauer makes a wonderful case for why you are enamored of writing, painting, and most of all, music. We are talking about negative capability here--the gift of genius that enables an individual to be more than a single consciousness but rather a wide range of roaring consciousnesses, in effect, the full tumult of creation (Goethe, Beethoven, name your greatest hero.)

6) Now, such apex moments and figures don't last and aren't commonplace, as we know. So here we get Schopenhauer the pessimist telling us that we are mere incidental twitches in Will's fury. His advice, then, really, is to abandon all hope and accept the truth of illusion...the illusion of gain, of desire, of immortality, of personal autonomy. A certain kind of Christian or Buddhist or hippie would know that the world is suffering, not fight it, and seek to aline herself with ... nothing (which is Schopenhauer's last word.)

7) I would raise a question or two or three. My first question would be whether Schopenhauer's Will couldn't just as well be called Being. My problem with Will is that it implies volition, as in pursuing an end. My second question would be whether the reality of human experience--having and raising children, doing useful work for oneself and others--is necessarily as grim and pointless as Schopenhauer submits. And my third question is whether it isn't rather ironic that to be an accomplished artist or devoted ascetic requires immense will. The blank page and empty stomach in the morning are not comforting company; it takes as much ferocity of intent to write as it does to go without eating.

8. There is one other book, and perhaps only one other book, that struck me as even more bleak and depressing than The World as Will and Idea. That is Consilience by Edward O. Wilson, a materialistic interpretation of the unity of knowledge. But Schopenhauer's work is the greater intellectual triumph. Wilson rides the back of science. Schopenhauer rides the wings of pure thought. What's more: unlike his European predecessors, Schopenhauer easily and readily and correctly connected East and West.

[Roger · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's plenty about the content of Schopenhauer's work here on Goodreads and elsewhere online - I won't add to it. What I will say is that Schopenhauer was the most honest and sincere of the great thinkers. While other philosophers in the western canon offer ideal worlds, pure reason, knowledge of God, aesthetic affirmation, concrete moral values, and mystical shades of Being, Schopenhauer deals earnestly and sensitively with the causes of wordly suffering, the wellsprings of human motivation, and the route to exaltation. There's no other major thinker whose work connects so directly to the reader's experience of life. Schopenhauer was free from both financial necessity and academic imperatives, and so he described in his books the world just as he saw and felt it without worrying about pleasing an audience - he was passionately committed to what is true. His pessimism turns some people off, of course, but it's simply not possible to point to any of the examples of worldy suffering that Schopenhauer describes and argue that they're not true. Nor is it possible to argue that Schopenhauer's account of the source of that suffering is mistaken. Indeed, his argument that optimism is actually a deeply wicked position to hold is irrefutable. For that reason, he should be respected as much as he respects the reader with his honesty. Another commenter in this thread used the word 'cynicism' to describe Schopenhauer's thought - there are many cynics in the history of philosophy; Schopenhauer is not one of them. The World as Will and Idea is nothing if not a passionately sincere work. That sincerity, combined with the beauty and clarity of its style and the brilliance of Schopenhauer's metaphysical system, makes it one of the very greatest books.

One final word.....Schopenhauer's work is not off-limits to those without any academic philosophical training, but I would recommend doing two things before tackling this tome: first, get the Penguin Essays and Aphorisms of Schopenhauer, read RJ Hollingdale's excellent introduction, then read the book; second, look around online and try to familiarize yourself with the basic ideas of Kant's philosophy. Wikipedia is all right for this. Just get a working knowledge of Kant's notions of noumena/phenomena, theory of perception, categories of the understanding, that kind of thing, and that will prepare you for Schopenhauer's refinement of Kantian idealism. Some knowledge of Plato will help too.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't say I quite made it all the way through. Yet, his work constitutes a breath of fresh air! After reading all too many postmodern philosophers (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.) - Schopenhauer makes what seems to be a bold statement - objective facts can be known by digging beneath interpretations, yet most people never do this precisely because it takes an extreme amount of effort. Therefore, the human experience of reality tends to be more ethereal, and appears to be nothing more than willling various illusory ideas that are taken to be reality... he is definitely not saying 'everything is an idea, the world is unknowable' ...being disinterested is practically impossible for the vast majority of people, which means that only an elite few who have trained (philosophers, scientists, etc.) will ever have access to objective reality. To the great majority of people purely intellectual pleasures are always inaccessible.

One more interesting point - beautiful passage that really ushers in Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence (although Schopenhauer should be partial credit for that concept):

"Suppose we were allowed, for once, a clear glance into the kingdom of the possible, and over the chains of causes and effects; if the earth-spirit appeared and showed us in a tableau all the greatest men, enlighteners of the world, and heroes whom chance destroyed before we were ripe for their work; then showed us the great events that would have changed history, and brought us periods of the highest culture and enlightenment, but whihc the blindest chance, the most insignificant accident, hindered at the outset; lastly the splendid powers of great individuals that would have enriched whole epochs, but which, misled either by error or by passion, or compelled by necessity, they squandered on unworthy or unfruitful objects, or even wasted away in play....

"If we saw this, we would shudder and lament at the thought of the lost treasures of whole period of history. But the earth-spirit would smile and say, 'The source from which the individuals and their powers proceed is as inexhaustible and boundless as time and space... no finite measure can exhaust that infinite source; therefore undiminished eternity is still open for the recurrence of any event or work that was nipped in the bud." (p.107).

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

my favorite part in schopenhauer is his discussion of music, in which he qualifies leibnitz's aphorism that music is "an unconscious exercise in arithmetic whereby the mind does not know it is counting" with the claim that music is "the unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing"... i also like it when he draws parallels between indian philosophy and descartes

[Frater · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, many answers to be found by reading Schopenhauer!

[Arjun Ravichandran · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a crabby old fart. This book is the keystone of his entire thought. At times, old Schopie is so pessimistic that you can't help laughing. Unlike usual philosopher, he writes decently, and the book is quite easy to read. His insight on art and genius seem to me to be spot on.

[Ignacio Gasca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird and wonderful work despite the ironically exuberantly outlined depressing philosophy. Pretty awesome how in one sweep he tackles metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and psychology all following this relatively linear, although repetitive, route.

Basic, basic, premise. He accepts kant’s transcendental idealism – world as representation – but goes further. He argues humans exist as object AND subject. You’re aware of your hand as an external object (just stare at your hand for 30 seconds doing random movement), but you’re also able to experience your hand (relax…) as a weird intangible feeling. The duality here is equal to the duality between representation (the external reality) and the Will (the internal, groundless, driving force of life). Sprinkle Plato’s Ideas in the middle and you get every step along the way. The seed, the template and the experienced thing. Pretty neat.

After this is basically where he brings in all of buddhism moving like he’s discovered something new. Life, as evidenced by the self-combating nature of the Will, is pure suffering and the only escape is to tear down the veil of Maya, to gain insight into the thing-in-itself. You do this through aesthetic contemplation – classical music is the awesomest – or through ceasing desire – apparently starvation is the awesomest…?

All in all, mad ting interesting. Bits on aesthetics I thought were particularly so. Good art to Schops is that which through contemplation takes you out of yourself, transforms you into the pure subject of knowledge (knower of the Idea behind representation, the essence of tragedy as oppose to the fact of someone dying and it being sad). Purity in its seperation from the Will ‘and thus from all individuality and the pain that proceeds from it’. Emphasis on music which whilst other arts ‘speak only of the shadow’ music penetrates through and ‘speaks of the essence’.

The writing is tremendous. Apart from the tedious repetitions which weren’t all that enlightening, or subtle, the language is poetic and flowery, as if on top of showcasing his factual representational argument, he tries to allure you to the essence of his argument, if you Will…

‘Every individual, every human being and his lifespan is only one more short dream in the mind of the endless spirit of nature, which it playfully sketches on its infinite page – space and time – allows to remain for a moment so brief that it is infinitesimal by comparison, and then rubs out to make room again. And yet every one of these fleeting forms, these shallow notions, must be paid for by the whole will to life, in all its passion, with much profound pain, and finally with a bitter death, long feared and making its appearance at the end.’

Ethics was meh, and to be completely honest I didn’t get all that depressed by his ideas. All this buddhism stuff is cool I guess, but sometimes a yn j be enjoying the journey.

[- Jared - ₪ Book Nerd ₪ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a worth while read! Although it was very thought provoking, I didn't feel it meshed well with my understanding of the universe and life. Essentially Schopenhauer's thought is that the ultimate underling reality that governs everything in the universe is the 'Will'. Not individual will, but this sort of ominous Will of the universe. Sort of like the Brahman in Hinduism. Like in the Hindi teachings Schopenhauer suggests that his work illustrates the importance of Removing the veil of Maya (ignorance) and then you can face the ultimate truth, the Will! You can very easily notice the influence of eastern thought on his work if you'd studied Hinduism and Buddhism. Although I don't feel that Schopenhauer's view of reality is in fact accurate, I highly recommend that one read this work as it is cited very often in various other works and it is indeed interesting to consider and study. I haven't read any of his other works so maybe there is more truth to be found there than in 'The World as Will and Representation'. If nothing else, this work inspires one to look up and read the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita (or Vedanta) and other Hindi works for a better understanding of Schopenhauer's inspiration.

You can freely read much of these on project Gutenberg's website www.gutenberg.org. One thing you won't get from reading their works, however, is an insight into their lives. For that you'll want to checkout Wikipedia or autobiographical published work (if any). After that, you may want to read other's interpretations, criticisms, and commentary of the work in order to gain more insight.

[Douglas Grion Filho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genuinely thought-provoking and fascinating stuff, though you have to go through Schopenhaur's hater personality to get to it. Personally I found this hater incel very funny. Here are some quotes that made me laugh out loud: 

"The logical method of mathematics is repugnant to genius, for it does not satisfy, but obstructs true insight"

"No real work of architecture as a fine art can be made of wood"

"This need for excitement of the will shows itself especially in the devising and playing of card-games in which, truly, the pitiable aspect of mankind finds expression"

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m my opinion, the greatest work of the greatest western philosopher. What a huge achievement to be able to use the evolution of will and idea to describe all of nature. It’s no surprise it took him so much writing to describe the theory. A breadth of truth and understanding unlike anything else in the West, spanning physics, math, religion, art, music, psychology, and intelligence, under a framework most relatable to philosophy.

[Paige McLoughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I swear the first time I read Schopenhauer I had a nervous breakdown leading to hospitalization around 2002 (the lead up to the Iraq war didn't help my nerves either). Anyway, this book's cosmic pessimism both fascinated me and seriously stressed me to the breaking point. I come at it with a little distance these days but that first reading hit me like a ton of bricks.

[Predrag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read in philosophy.

[Callum Woodford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schopenhauer's work has formed the backbone of the many of the great thinkers of the 20th century. Always logical and implementable thoughts on our reality.

[Andreas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wittgenstein called Schopenhauer a shallow philosopher and, indeed, this entire book - his magnum opus - hinges on one single idea. The genius of Schopenhauer, however, consists in the fact that he takes this idea and uses it to explain the whole of existence.

The gist of it is that a universal, unconscious focce, the will, is driving all that happens in nature, from the simple rock to nature's highest form, man. The will drives man to desire and the rat race to satisfy those desires, only to stir up new desires when the previous ones have been satisfied, basically condemning man to a life of suffering from desire, alleviated by brief patches of happiness or satisfaction. The only moments when we overcome this eternal struggle is when we transcend desire by submerging our will in the appreciation of art, of which the highest form, according to Schopenhauer, is music.

With an obvious wink to eastern philosophy and western asceticism, Schopenhauer hints that complete denial of the will is possible to the most noble of men, leading them to a blissful state of nothingness. It is of course this nihilism that Nietzsche raged against, and called the greatest deception of mankind since christianity, in his quest to wholeheartedly say YES to life instead of denying it in view of a (non-existing) afterlife.

Apart from seeing the entire world as a manifestation of the same, universal will, Schopenhauer also conceives of the world as idea: the world and its objects only reveal themselves to the observing subject, and consequently we can never be sure that the world would exist without the observing subject, the I - solipsism, in a word.

In essence, Schopenhauer builds upon the inner/outer dichotomy of Kant's transcendental idealism, but his novel insight is bringing man's embodiedness into the equation: we can validate some of our inferences about the world through our knowledge of the one object we know best of all: our own bodies.

Though personally I prefer Nietzsche's affirmation of life over Schoperhauer's mix of platonism, christianity and eastern philosophy, centered on suffering and offering only nihilism as an alternative, The World as Will and Idea struck me as a work of mind-altering genius and psychological insight, inspiring countless generations afterwards (think for instance the inspiration it must have given Freud for his ideas on the unconscious). And, despite its pessimism, its hard to refute Schopenhauer's grand theory of everything. I haven't heard or read about anyone after him to repeat this kind of feat, but then again I'm not a trained philosopher. Also, it's refreshing to read a philosopher who can actually write coherent sentences (looking at you, Hegel).

[Pytho Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

Old timey philosophies seem so outdated, cumbersome, pedantic and....tired...... to me in the 21st century. Yet, what a concept! The world as will and idea. That's exactly how it seems to me, psychologically, spiritually and yes.....materially.
It's very difficult to read this boring book, and Arthur has a hard time making his case.
Even though I sympathize with the underlying philosophy, I actually resented wasting hours of my diminishing lifespan painstakingly trudging through this work. I still WANT to read this, so that I can at least link up, or attempt to link up, a European philosopher's ideas with my own, something I haven't been able to with Kant, Nietzsche, Aristotle (though Plato and Socrates I have affinity towards), Wittgenstein and so on.
I prefer my philosophy derived from the works of tried-and-true scientists and technological practitioners. They bicker and beg to differ from one another to an amusing extent, and you can make just about anything you want out of their carefully tested and elucidated theories.
The Big Bang Theory, there really isn't any proof that a regular human can understand, and an awful TV show I could only stand for about three minutes, and was grateful when the commercial came along and I could switch channels to The Antiques Roadshow.
But the Will and the Idea that was generated from the hypothetical expansion from an infinitely, literally infinitely small SOMETHING, which kind of invented time, space, matter and energy out of nothing and built the universe. And of course, our world as will and idea.
God=Intentional fabric of everything, INTENTION and WILL TO BE, Everybody and everything kind of intends to be in the next second, and of course kind of intends that there is a next second to be. And you say, nonsense, but, how can you prove it?
Is a crystal a collection of atoms that INTENDED, that WILLED itself, to be a crystal?
Did flying creatures evolve out of the intention to escape those pesky ground predators?
Cities were intended to be by early settlers out of need, desire and convenience.
Elements were intended from the very beginning of time, and were created from the intentions of stars and star-stuff.
Prove it! Prove it to be false!
I intended to write this, just a few seconds ago. Probably nobody will intend to read any of it, and what Nobody's intention is is something I don't care to think about.

[Neil McCrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was arguing with a friend about whether or not it was important to study philosophy. During the argument, I quoted Schopenhauer from memory but was beset with doubt not long after the argument was over. (I had convinced my pal that studying philosophy was important at least for understanding the ideas that shaped various historical events, but they remained dubious over its importance for anything else and whether anyone other than academic specialists need study it.) The only cure for my doubt was to dust off The World as Will and Idea and re-read it.

The first thing I discovered was that my battered old copy was abridged. I flew to the internet to read the excised bits and quickly discovered that they were simply further examples to bolster his ideas, and not particularly necessary for understanding.

My second surprise on this re-read was just how much old Arthur had anticipated what Nietzsche or someone like him would do with his work. Schopenhauer had a pretty good idea of the way his Will to Life might become Will to Power and he had some strong objections to philosophy heading in that direction. I'm sure this isn't news to most philosophy students, but for some reason that little nugget escaped my attention back in the day.

As for a rating, this is such a keystone work of Western Philosophy that I can't give it anything other than 5 stars.

[Readius Maximus · Rating 5 out of 5]

How refreshing to read a philosopher who is mostly comprehensible, explains things coherently and gives multiple examples to make sure you get it! On top of that Schopenhauer system is simple but there is some room for complexity and a gradient of things instead of the Hegel's of the world who jam literally everything into the Geist or Nietzsche who makes everything the will to power.

Schopenhauer starts by talking about the subject object and the issue of perception and concludes that both are necessary. IE if the tree falls in the woods and no subject is there to hear it did it make sound? Schopenhauer would say no and without the subject there is no object or tree and forest. The object is of the phenomenal world get's reflected in the subject consciousness as idea.

Hence the world as idea. The idea though is just the realm of sufficient reason or the phenomenal material world. Any human can operate in this realm however only the genius artist can comprehend and intuit the Platonic Idea which are archetypal and unifying that are a priori of the material world and life generating. The concept is what can be put together by the ordinary post material experience.

[Biblioworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Мудрый человек с чисто немецким стройным порядком в мыслях.
Я не могу согласиться со многими его выводами. Хотя он и был неплохо осведомлен о естественных науках, многие его утверждения опровергаются экспериментами и исследованиями.

С другой стороны, для меня вся философия это просто род литературы и искусства.
Мы не роботы, нам нужны ощущения, осознание ценности нашей жизни.
Естественные науки в этом плане могут только привести к тяжелой депрессии.
Поэтому, читая философские труды я без проблем прощаю автору любые теории, как прощаешь автору фантастического романа противоречия даже здравому смыслу.

В этом отношении важно, чтобы сам ход мыслей тебе был близок и отзывался в твоей душе.
Отточенность построений немецких мыслителей мне доставляет удовольствие. И абсолютно не важно, что я могу быть не согласен с исходным положением, на котором зиждется все последующее.

[Harry · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I started reading this I was a little disappointed. Where was witty, English-style, sardonic prose that I was told to expect from Schopenhauer, and that I’ve seen before? Luckily once he got through the metaphysical foundations (which are still very soundly argued) Schopenhauer’s vast cultural knowledge shines through in his explications on suffering, art, psychology, and religion.
Sometimes you’re just predestined to be drawn to certain figures because of inexplicable childhood bumf. In my case I had a dream/image of the world as countless fists shooting up and falling back upon one another, so I don’t know why it took me so long to read this.

[Zach Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book 3, about how music and art are the closest thing to perfection and philosophy in the world, is easily my favorite here, with Book 4, which brings Schopenhauer's philosophy to real life and examines its implications and implementation, is great as well. First two books are overly theoretical and kind of a snoozefest, especially as Schopenhauer comes off more misogynistic, narcissistic and loveless there than in the back half of the book.

Glad to have this all abridged into one volume -- seems the ideal way to read this in my mind.

[E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thirty years ago as an undergrad in a modern philosophy class, I first read some Schopenhauer. And despite him being a pessimist, I find the writing beautiful and the ideas exhilarating, even if I didn't fully agree with them.

All these decades later, I feel the same, now having read more fully his major work.

[Khajiit J'jirra Roudhari]

[Bryce]

dunno whats going on

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was the first I read after Critique of Pure reason which made the subject matter easily accessible. I really enjoyed the idealism of the will as that which is the thing in itself and the idea the objectification of it. Schopenhauer does an excellent job coming to these conclusions based on Platonic forms and Kantian metaphysics. The book is worth reading on this account.

I did not read this book for a treatise on metaphysics however, I read it because I am a musician and was thoroughly curious as to how Schopenhauer comes to the conclusion music is a tapping into the noumenal realm itself. I can say I was highly annoyed at his elitist interpretation of art. While the thought of music being a source for tapping into and drawing out the will, very cool idea, but the critical assessment of art is not one I agree with.

Enjoyable over all, and having good knowledge of the Upanishads and Vedas texts make the holistic standpoint of the book easily identifiable. I mostly agree with what he says regarding the idea of samsara, or Schopenhauer's pessimism, but I always get annoyed with philosophers who purport to know something about the world.

[Terese · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started reading "The World as Will and Idea" some two years ago and was quite disheartened, feeling it's content to be above my head, and I gave it up until recently. I picked it up again after reading some Berekely, Hume, Kant etc etc and found that it was a lot more comprehensible now :)

That said, I very much enjoyed Schopenhauer's abridged mental meanderings and reasonings, some parts were informative, some parts I agreed with but ultimately his philosophy is not really for me. His texts are well worth the time they demand, they will demand some focus, but I found them too... well lets just say that I agree with Nietzsche's "man will wish Nothingness rather than not wish at all"

[Hunter Kinder · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most coherent philosophical texts I've ever read. This is an important one because its at a turning point for many fields of science and it clears up a bunch of what Kant wrote.

I liked how it was equal parts transcendental idealism but also draws heavily on Buddhism, Christian mysticism and Hinduism. Yet the man comes at it from an atheistic point if view, devoid of thr so called freedom of the will.

His definition of the will is unmatched and it's a key tenant of his philosophy and many's to follow.

Just a thought: I also think his fluency in Latin gave him an edge in developing his philosophy as it's the form he read of many sacred doctrine.

[Арсений · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first two books profoundly because of the powerful description of the world.
There were many sections I found inspiring even, and there were many insights involved.
The latter two not so much, because
a) I'm too stupid and lazy to understand everything said
b) Still not sure what to think of the ideas therein (eg, negation of will)