The World as Will and Representation
Arthur Schopenhauer
Translated by E. F. J. Payne

or some cheerful and uplifting Christmas reading this year, I recommend the two-volume, 1300-page philosophical work The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer.

This book can be read as one of the early outpourings of Hinduism into the West, or as a defense of Kant, or as a highly entertaining (and well deserved) denunciation of Hegel. Schopenhauer says that we cannot know the world directly, but only indirectly from its representation created from sense data by the mind. This idea, which is generally accepted by cognitive psychologists today, borrows heavily from Buddhist and Hinduist philosophers, who taught that we only perceive an image of the world projected by our own minds. Therefore, Schopenhauer argues, both the object and the subject must really exist. This point of view is not really idealism, as is sometimes claimed, but a premonition of 20th-century psychology. Indeed, Sigmund Freud was heavily influenced by his work.

Schopenhauer also adopts the central tenet of Buddhism, which is that life is suffering. Suffering, and the need to reduce it, provide the driving force that keeps us alive. The will to live, or "will," is what distinguishes subject from object. Only the subject has a will. The subject acts not on the world, but on the world as it is represented in his or her own mind. Will is a natural law, he says, like gravity, which does not care about the goal, only about the process; or like electricity, which ceases to exist when it stops. To achieve the goal would be to die. Our will is the process of striving to overcome obstacles. The basis of will is need and pain: in this sense, all life is suffering [p.310]. Pain is essential to life [p.315].

It is somewhat unfair to characterize this as pessimism: science tells us that life is a dynamic process. Biochemical reactions seek equilibrium, but they reach it only in death. The will to live has its physiological basis in the need to escape from suffering. Even Nietzsche defended Schopenhauer on this point, saying, in effect, if it is true that life sucks then we die (which is as good a synopsis of Schopenhauer as any), we ought to be strong and embrace that.

Schopenhauer is sometimes overlooked today, probably because philosophy today thrives on transgressiveness and obscurity. Speak clearly and your work is considered trivial. Start finding answers, and you are taken outside and sternly pointed toward the Science building. But also, the strong influence of Eastern mysticism in his work distances Schopenhauer from the path of Western philosophy.

Volume One is divided into four Books: The World as Representation I, The World as Will I, The World as Representation II, and The World as Will II. Volume Two (translated by David Carus and Richard E. Aquila), is longer, and consists mainly of supplements to the four books. Here Schopenhauer contrasts the will and the intellect, which correspond roughly to the subconscious mind and the superego as used later by Freud. He says that the will is the actual and essential core of the human being and that no system of ethics can mold the will. The will alone survives after death. These ideas are backed up by lengthy and verbose speculation on the function of the brain, most of which would be regarded today as misinformation.

Schopenhauer also takes issue with Newton's theory of colors, preferring Goethe's view as expressed in Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) that darkness is an active component and that the colors shown by Newton's prism experiment were mere artifacts. It is a reminder that even scientific facts that we take for granted were controversial in earlier times.

Unlike his mentor Kant, whose sentences sometimes extend to two or more pages, Schopenhauer's writing is plain enough. He abjures pomposity and technical language, and his style is self-effacing, but typical of early 19th century writing: verbose and time-consuming to read, and, especially in the first two books, undisciplined, with seemingly endless, irrelevant tangents. If you're on death row (and, really, aren't we all), this is the ideal book to keep the executioners at bay. If you read both volumes, you will know the true meaning of pain.

nov 25, 2012. updated nov 05 2023