The World as Will and Representation

Schopenhauer's main work, published when he was thirty and greatly expanded in 1844 with a second volume of supplementary essays. The first volume has four books. The first presents the world as representation: everything we experience is an object for a subject, ordered by space, time and causality under the principle of sufficient reason. The second argues that we know one thing from the inside, our own body as will, and that will is the thing-in-itself: a blind, aimless striving at work throughout nature. The third turns to art, in which we can contemplate the Platonic Ideas free from desire; music alone is a direct copy of the will itself. The fourth, on ethics, holds that life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom, that compassion comes from seeing through individuality, and that release comes only through denial of the will to live, as in saintly asceticism, drawing openly on the Upanishads and Buddhism. An appendix criticises Kant.

It is the great classic of philosophical pessimism and one of the first Western systems to engage Indian thought, and Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud and Wittgenstein all learned from it.