The World as Will and Representation

Summary

Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first. Book I treats the world as representation, subject to the principle of sufficient reason. It begins with the claim that the world is my idea: everything known exists only as object for a subject, ordered by space, time and causality, which are forms of our cognition, as Kant had shown. Schopenhauer then distinguishes perception, shared with animals, from abstract concepts, which are the special work of reason, and discusses laughter, error and the practical wisdom of the Stoics. Book II turns to the world as will. Each of us knows our body in two ways, as an object among objects and, from within, as will; an act of will and a movement of the body are one and the same thing seen twice. By analogy Schopenhauer extends this inner knowledge to all of nature: gravity, magnetism, plant growth and animal instinct are grades of objectification of a single blind, purposeless striving, the thing-in-itself. Organs are the visible expression of desires: teeth, throat and bowels are objectified hunger, the genitals objectified sexual desire. Nature is a scene of endless conflict as the will devours itself. Book III returns to representation, now freed from the principle of reason, in aesthetic contemplation. In beholding beauty the subject becomes a pure, will-less subject of knowledge and grasps the Platonic Ideas, the fixed grades of the will's objectification. Schopenhauer surveys architecture, landscape, sculpture, painting, poetry and tragedy, discusses the closeness of genius to madness, and offers a theory of madness as a breakdown of the thread of memory. Music stands apart: it does not copy Ideas but expresses the will itself. Book IV, the ethical book, describes the will's assertion and denial. Because willing springs from need, life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom, and happiness is only the temporary removal of a want. Egoism, malice and the state arise from the will's self-division; justice and loving-kindness arise when someone sees through the veil of Maya, the illusion of individuality, and recognises the same will in others, so that all true love is compassion. The highest step is the denial of the will to live in asceticism, resignation and holiness, as among Christian mystics, Hindu sannyasis and Buddhists. Suicide, by contrast, is an assertion of the will. The book ends with the world reduced, for those in whom the will has turned, to nothing.

Plot or Argument

• First Book: The world as idea, first aspect (§§1–16)

  The world as object for a subject, structured by the principle of sufficient reason in its forms of space, time and causality. Perception versus abstract reason; theories of laughter, error and science; the Stoic sage as the ideal of practical reason.

• Second Book: The world as will, first aspect (§§17–29)

  The body known from within as will; the identity of willing and bodily action; the extension of will to all natural forces as the thing-in-itself; the body's organs as objectified desires; nature as the will's self-conflict.

• Third Book: The world as idea, second aspect (§§30–52)

  Platonic Ideas as the adequate objectivity of the will; will-less aesthetic contemplation; genius and its relation to madness; the beautiful and the sublime; the hierarchy of arts culminating in tragedy; music as a direct copy of the will.

• Fourth Book: The world as will, second aspect (§§53–71)

  Character and freedom; life as suffering and boredom; the negativity of happiness; affirmation of the will in sexuality and egoism; wrong, justice and the state; virtue as compassion arising from seeing through the veil of Maya; the denial of the will in asceticism and holiness; suicide; nothingness.

• Appendix: Criticism of the Kantian philosophy

  Schopenhauer's critique of Kant, accepting the distinction of phenomenon and thing-in-itself and the ideality of space and time, but rejecting most of the categories and Kant's ethics of duty.

• Supplements (1844)

  Fifty chapters expanding each book, including essays on death, on the metaphysics of sexual love, on heredity, on the vanity and suffering of life, and on the road to salvation.

Lessons

• The body is the will made visible

  Schopenhauer's key move is to begin metaphysics from the inside of one's own body, where willing and movement are the same event. Desire is not a mental addition to a physical machine; the organs themselves express it. This anticipates later views that put embodiment and drive at the centre of the mind.

  • Is the inner experience of moving one's arm really a window onto the nature of all things?
  • What is gained by describing teeth and bowels as 'objectified hunger'?

• Between pain and boredom

  Because willing begins in want, satisfaction only removes a pain and leaves either a new want or empty ennui. Schopenhauer's pendulum is one of philosophy's starkest accounts of why pleasure does not last, and it remains a reference point in debates about hedonic adaptation and depression.

  • Is happiness really only 'negative', as §58 claims?
  • How does Schopenhauer's pessimism differ from a clinical description of depression?

• Art as a brief release from striving

  In contemplation of beauty the subject forgets itself and its desires, and 'the wheel of Ixion stands still'. Music goes furthest, voicing the will itself without images. This theory made Schopenhauer the philosopher of artists, from Wagner to Mann and Proust.

  • Why does Schopenhauer place music above all the other arts?
  • Can aesthetic absorption serve as a real refuge from suffering, or only a pause?

• Compassion as seeing through individuality

  For Schopenhauer, morality does not rest on duty or reason but on the recognition that the same will suffers in every being. When the veil of Maya grows transparent, another's pain becomes one's own. The ethics extends to animals and draws openly on Hindu and Buddhist thought.

  • Does a metaphysics of a single will make compassion more rational, or only more mysterious?
  • Why does Schopenhauer insist that 'all true and pure love is sympathy'?

• Suicide affirms what it seems to deny

  In §69 Schopenhauer argues that the suicide wills life and rejects only its conditions, so that killing oneself is an act of strong will, not its denial. Only the ascetic who ceases to will escapes. The argument is philosophically distinctive and needs careful handling outside its metaphysical frame.

  • How does Schopenhauer distinguish suicide from the ascetic's death by starvation, and is the distinction coherent?
  • What would a clinician find helpful, and what dangerous, in this chapter?

Context

Schopenhauer wrote in the generation after Kant, when Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were building idealist systems around reason and spirit. He claimed to be Kant's true heir while insisting that the thing-in-itself was not reason but blind will. He was among the first European philosophers to engage seriously with Indian thought, reading the Upanishads in Anquetil-Duperron's Latin translation (Oupnek'hat) from 1814, and he admired Buddhism. His pessimism contrasted sharply with the optimism of Hegelian history.

Composition

Schopenhauer composed the work in Dresden between 1814 and 1818. Brockhaus published it in December 1818 with the date 1819; it sold very poorly and much of the edition was pulped. A second edition in 1844 added a second volume of supplements, and a third edition appeared in 1859, the year before his death. Haldane and Kemp's three-volume English translation (1883–1886), titled The World as Will and Idea, was the standard English version until E. F. J. Payne's translation of 1958.

Reception

Ignored for three decades, the work found readers after 1851 and became enormously influential in the second half of the century. Wagner read it in 1854 and reshaped Tristan und Isolde around it; Nietzsche's first book began as a Schopenhauerian work; Tolstoy, Hardy, Conrad, Mann, Proust and Beckett drew on it. Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious extended it, and later commentators, and eventually Freud himself, noted its anticipation of psychoanalytic ideas about drive, repression and sexuality.

Comparisons

• essays-and-aphorisms

  The essays from Parerga and Paralipomena popularised the system's conclusions on suffering, suicide, women and noise in a witty, accessible form; the main work supplies the metaphysics they presuppose.

• the-birth-of-tragedy

  Nietzsche's Dionysian and Apollonian are recast from Schopenhauer's will and representation, and his account of music as the direct voice of the will comes from Book III; Nietzsche later turned against the pessimism and the denial of the will.

• critique-of-pure-reason

  Book I adopts Kant's ideality of space, time and causality, and the appendix criticises the Critique at length; Schopenhauer's innovation is to claim that the thing-in-itself Kant left unknown is accessible from within as will.

• ethics

  Spinoza also posits one substance behind all things and sees human beings driven by striving (conatus), but he ends in intellectual love and joy, while Schopenhauer ends in resignation and the denial of the will.

• the-bhagavad-gita

  Schopenhauer's veil of Maya, renunciation and identity of self with all beings draw on Vedanta; the Gita's teaching of action without attachment offers a contrast to his preference for quietist withdrawal.

• the-interpretation-of-dreams

  Schopenhauer's §36 theory that unbearable pain drives the mind to destroy the thread of memory and fill gaps with fictions closely anticipates Freud's repression, and the will's primacy over intellect anticipates the unconscious wish.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening sentence of the First Book, which claims that the whole world exists only as idea for a knowing subject, and Schopenhauer's illustration of the eye that sees a sun and the hand that feels an earth.
• The turn in the Second Book, §18, where Schopenhauer argues that we know our own bodies twice, once as objects and once from within as will, and then extends that inner knowledge by analogy to gravity, magnetism, and plant growth.
• The account in the Third Book of aesthetic contemplation, where for a moment the beholder becomes a will-less subject and the wheel of Ixion stands still, and the special place given to music.
• The discussion of genius and madness in §36, where madness is described as a broken thread of memory.
• The Fourth Book's movement from suffering, through compassion and seeing through the veil of Maya, to the denial of the will in the ascetic, and the argument in §69 that suicide asserts rather than denies the will.

Key terms and names

Representation (Vorstellung)

The world as it appears to a knowing subject, ordered by space, time, and causality. Haldane and Kemp translate it as idea, so the opening claim reads that the world is my idea.

Will (Wille)

Schopenhauer's name for the inner nature of all things: a blind, endless striving that he first discovers in his own body and then finds in every force of nature. It is the thing-in-itself behind representation.

Principle of sufficient reason

The rule that everything has a ground or reason, which governs all ordinary knowledge of objects. Schopenhauer holds that it applies only to the world as representation, not to the will itself.

Platonic Ideas

The fixed grades of the will's objectification, such as the types of species and natural forces. They are grasped in aesthetic contemplation, when knowledge breaks free of the will's service.

Veil of Maya

A term Schopenhauer borrows from Indian thought for the illusion that individuals are truly separate. Those who see through it recognize the same will in others, and their virtue is compassion.

Denial of the will to live

The highest state in the Fourth Book, reached through resignation and asceticism, in which the will turns against itself. Schopenhauer finds examples among Christian saints and mystics, Hindu renouncers, and Buddhists.

Thing-in-itself

Kant's term for reality as it is apart from our perception. Schopenhauer accepts Kant's distinction but claims, against Kant, that we can know the thing-in-itself from within as will.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What does Schopenhauer mean by saying that the world is my idea, and how does the example of the eye and the sun support the claim?
2. Comprehension How does Schopenhauer argue in the Second Book that the act of will and the movement of the body are one thing?
3. Comprehension Why does Schopenhauer say that happiness is only negative, and how does the image of the pendulum between pain and ennui illustrate his view?
4. Interpretation Schopenhauer extends what he knows of his own body to all of nature by analogy. Is this a strong argument, and what would be lost if we refused to make the analogy?
5. Interpretation In aesthetic contemplation the wheel of Ixion stands still. Why does Schopenhauer give art, and especially music, such a high place in a philosophy that otherwise sees life as suffering?
6. Interpretation Schopenhauer argues that suicide is not a denial but an assertion of the will. What distinction is he drawing, and why does it matter to his ethics?
7. Big Question Is the deepest human longing a desire that must be extinguished, or a desire that can be satisfied?

Faith Connections

• Romans 7:15-25 (Scripture)

  Paul describes a will divided against itself and cries out for deliverance from the body of death. Schopenhauer read the Christian doctrines of original sin and grace as pictures of the will's affirmation and denial, and Romans 7 shows where he found an ally and where Paul's answer, deliverance through Christ, differs from his own.

• Ecclesiastes 1:2-8 (Scripture)

  The Preacher sees all things as vanity and notes that the eye is never satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing. This is close to Schopenhauer's picture of endless want, though Ecclesiastes ends by commanding the fear of God rather than the denial of the will.

• Augustine, Confessions I.1 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine writes that the human heart is restless until it rests in God. He agrees with Schopenhauer that desire is restless and never satisfied by worldly goods, but holds that the restlessness points to a fullness beyond it rather than to nothingness.

• Theologia Germanica (the German Theology) (Great Conversation)

  Schopenhauer praises this late medieval mystical treatise in the Fourth Book as a witness to the will's denial. It teaches the giving up of self-will, but so that God's will may live in the soul, which shows both how close Schopenhauer came to Christian mysticism and where he parts from it.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Everything known exists as object for a subject, and so the world as known is representation. But each of us knows our body from within as will, and by analogy all of nature is the objectification of one will. Will is endless striving springing from need, and need is pain. Therefore life is essentially suffering, and the only lasting release lies in seeing through individuality, which yields compassion, and finally in the denial of the will itself.

Rhetorical device: argument from analogy. In the Second Book, §18-19, Schopenhauer argues that since we know our own bodily movements as will, we should understand every other body in nature by the same key, so that gravity, magnetism, and growth become grades of the same striving we feel in ourselves.

Debate: Resolved: Schopenhauer is right that all satisfaction is only the removal of a want.

Memory Work

what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth

Thus its life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and ennui

Writing Prompts

Essay: Schopenhauer places music above every other art because it expresses the will itself rather than copying its Ideas. Argue whether this account of music is consistent with his claim that the will is the source of all suffering.

Comparison with Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Nietzsche learned from Schopenhauer but turned against him: where Schopenhauer counsels the denial of the will, Zarathustra teaches affirmation and the eternal recurrence. Compare Schopenhauer's pendulum between pain and ennui with Zarathustra's drunken song asking for life once more, and argue which response to suffering is better reasoned.

Medical Lens

Schopenhauer was widely read in physiology and visited asylum patients in Berlin's Charité, and his work has unusual relevance to psychiatry. §36 offers a theory of madness as a disorder of memory in which gaps are filled with fictions, distinguishes it from delirium, and proposes that intolerable suffering drives the mind to destroy the painful memory, an idea often cited as anticipating repression and dissociation. His thesis that will (drive) is primary and intellect secondary, together with his emphasis on sexuality as the focus of the will, foreshadows Freud. Book IV's analysis of suffering, boredom and the negativity of pleasure is a touchstone in discussions of anhedonia and hedonic adaptation, and §69 is one of philosophy's most discussed treatments of suicide, including voluntary starvation by ascetics. Schopenhauer's own temperament, his father's death and his anxieties are frequently read into the system; such readings are biographical interpretations, and the pessimism should not be equated with a diagnosis.

• Second Book, §§18–20

  Identity of willing and bodily movement; pain and pleasure as immediate affections of the will; organs as objectified desires.

  Mind BodySexuality Medicalized
• Third Book, §36

  Genius and madness compared; theory of insanity as a broken thread of memory filled with fictions, giving rise to monomania, melancholy or folly; the difficulty of obtaining histories from asylum patients; madness as a refuge from unbearable grief.

  Madness PsychosisDementia MemoryObsession MonomaniaAsylum InstitutionTrauma Shell Shock
• Third Book, §38 and §52

  Aesthetic contemplation as release from the suffering of willing; music as the expression of the will and the language of feeling.

  Philosophy AS Therapy
• Fourth Book, §§56–59

  Life as constant striving, pain and boredom; the negativity of happiness; the sum of suffering in human life.

  Melancholia Depression
• Fourth Book, §60

  Affirmation of the will in the sexual impulse; the genitals as the focus of the will.

  Sexuality Medicalized
• Fourth Book, §§68–69

  Asceticism, fasting and self-mortification; suicide as affirmation of the will; voluntary starvation by ascetics, with cases reported in contemporary sources.

  SuicideStarvation Nutrition

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write a scene in which the young Schopenhauer, visiting the Charité, interviews a patient whose memories are full of invented episodes, and begins to draft §36.

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation between Schopenhauer and Freud in which Freud must admit what he owes to the theory of madness as flight from unbearable memory.

• Essay

  Compare Schopenhauer's pendulum between pain and boredom with modern research on hedonic adaptation and anhedonia. Is pessimism a philosophical position or a mood?

• Classroom

  Play the slow movement of a late Beethoven quartet and ask students to test Schopenhauer's claim that music expresses the will directly, without images or concepts.

Further Reading

• Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer

  Selections from Parerga and Paralipomena.

• On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Arthur Schopenhauer

• Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, Rüdiger Safranski

• The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Bryan Magee

• Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction, Christopher Janaway