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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.Read more ›
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54 of 54 people found the following review helpful
Imagine this. You are in your car at 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. It's hot. You're painfully lonely, you have no friends to speak of. The sun is beating on your face. You have absolutely nothing to do. You feel the pressure of time and consciousness. You hear an advertisement on the radio about another blow-out sale in a nearby mall. You want to scream. Sound familiar? This is when a nice cup of Arthur Schopenhauer is in order.
I first learned about Schopenhauer when I was in a rather low point in my life and was looking for a consolation in the philosophy section of a bookstore. There I stumbled across The Consolations of Philosophy, which had a section about Schopenhauer and his basic outlook on the human condition. I never had a problem with pessimism and in fact always looked for someone great to defend it. Anyway, I slowly started preparing myself for the first volume. I had no philosophical background, just an immense desire to understand Schopenhauer's point of view since I knew then it would become my metaphysical backbone.
One of the challenges was that English is my second language and I feared that philosophy in English will exact too big a demand on my language skills. But the realization that with Schopenhauer lay the answers to my angst was enough to commit to this project.
I first read The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, which I understood for the most part and became even more intrigued. I definitely gained some philosophical muscle and so I plunged into volume one shortly after.Read more ›
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82 of 89 people found the following review helpful
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.
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135 of 150 people found the following review helpful
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").Read more ›
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This item: The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1
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