The World as Will and Representation by Schopenhauer: A Complete Guide

What the Book Is

The World as Will and Representation, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, is a four-book philosophical treatise by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). The first edition was published in 1818 by F.A. Brockhaus in Leipzig. It sold poorly. Schopenhauer was thirty years old, convinced he had produced a work of genius, and offered by the market a near-total silence. The book earned him almost nothing. He spent the next decades teaching and writing supplementary essays while the first edition sat in warehouses.

In 1844 he published a substantially expanded two-volume edition. Volume one was a reprint of the 1818 text with corrections. Volume two contained long supplementary essays that expanded on each of the four books. A further edition with additional material appeared in 1859, a year before Schopenhauer's death. By this time the book was beginning to find its readers, and the 1851 collection Parerga und Paralipomena, a set of shorter essays on every subject that interested him, had brought Schopenhauer sudden popular fame.

The structure of the main work is disciplined. Four books correspond to the four aspects of the single thought the book wants to convey. Book One presents the world as Representation, the epistemological account of how the world appears to the intellect. Book Two uncovers the inner nature of the Representation: everything is Will. Book Three presents the suspension of Will through aesthetic contemplation and the philosophy of art. Book Four develops the ethical and soteriological consequences: compassion, asceticism, and the denial of the Will.

Arthur Schopenhauer in Context

Schopenhauer was born in Danzig (now Gdańsk) in 1788 into a wealthy mercantile family. His father intended him for commerce. His mother, Johanna, was a successful novelist and salon hostess who knew Goethe well. After his father's death (probably by suicide) in 1805, Schopenhauer gradually freed himself from the commercial path and entered university, eventually completing a doctorate at Jena with the dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), which remained the epistemological foundation of all his later work.

He met Goethe in 1813 and collaborated with him on colour theory for several months. The encounter was formative. Schopenhauer retained Goethe's insistence that philosophy must not lose contact with direct experience of phenomena, and the two remained in correspondence. He read the Upanishads in the 1802 Latin translation of Anquetil-Duperron, the Oupnek'hat, and was decisively influenced. Buddhist sources, though less available in early nineteenth-century Europe, reached him gradually through the early Indological literature.

He settled in Frankfurt in 1833, where he lived for the last twenty-seven years of his life with a succession of pet poodles all named Atma or Butz. He wrote in the mornings, played the flute for one hour after lunch, and took long walks with his dog. He died in 1860. His philosophical reputation rose rapidly after his death, and by 1880 he was one of the most read philosophers in Europe.

The Kantian Inheritance

The World as Will and Representation begins from Kant. Schopenhauer treats Kant's distinction between phenomena (things as they appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves) as the essential achievement of modern philosophy, and Book One elaborates it.

For Kant, the noumenal realm is in principle unknowable. The mind's categories, space, time, and causality, structure all experience, but we have no way to reach beyond them to know what reality is apart from our structuring of it. Schopenhauer accepts this almost entirely for the outer world. We know the world only as Representation, and the Representation is organised by what he calls the principle of sufficient reason in its four forms (logical, mathematical, physical, and volitional).

But Schopenhauer argues that there is one point at which we have direct access to the noumenal. My own body. I know my body in two ways: from the outside as Representation, and from the inside as Will. The inner knowledge is direct. It does not pass through the principle of sufficient reason. When I lift my arm, I do not first perceive my willing as a mental event and then observe the arm rising. The willing is the rising, experienced from within.

This is the opening through which Schopenhauer extends the insight. If my own body is directly known as Will from the inside, and if everything else in the world is analogous in structure to my body, then the inner nature of everything is Will. The noumenal, which Kant had declared unknowable, turns out to be knowable after all. Not by reasoning, but by a specific kind of introspective recognition.

Book Two: The World as Will

Book Two develops this identification. The Will is not the volitional faculty of the individual self. It is a metaphysical term for blind, purposeless striving that is the inner nature of all phenomena. The force by which a crystal grows into its lattice, a plant pushes toward light, an animal seeks food, a human pursues desire, and subatomic forces operate, is one underlying activity. The appearances differ. The inner reality is one.

The Will, for Schopenhauer, has specific properties. It is unconscious. It has no purpose in the ordinary sense, because purpose implies a goal external to the striving, and the Will is striving as such. It is one and undivided beneath its appearances: the separation of individual beings is a feature of the Representation, not of the underlying reality. It is insatiable, because its nature is striving, and striving by definition can never reach a final rest.

This last property is the bridge to the book's central ethical claim. If the Will is insatiable, and if we are expressions of the Will, then our lives are structurally unsatisfiable. Every desire, once met, produces only a moment's peace before the Will produces another desire. When no desires are pressing, the Will experiences this as boredom and immediately seeks new objects. Life oscillates between pain and boredom. Genuine rest is rare.

Schopenhauer's account of why existence is suffering is therefore not a report on his personal mood, as detractors sometimes suggest. It is a metaphysical deduction. Given the nature of the Will, given that we are the Will, suffering is the structural condition of existence. The question the remaining books address is what, if anything, can be done.

Book Three: Art and Aesthetic Liberation

Book Three presents the first partial escape. In aesthetic contemplation, the subject briefly steps outside the Will's demands. When fully absorbed in a beautiful object (a painting, a landscape, a poem), the person becomes what Schopenhauer calls the pure will-less subject of knowing. The ordinary self with its desires falls away. For the duration of the aesthetic experience, the person is freed from the oscillation between pain and boredom.

This is not mere escapism in Schopenhauer's account. In aesthetic contemplation, the perceiver grasps what Schopenhauer calls the Platonic Idea of the object, the objectification of the Will at its most essential. The beautiful is beautiful because it shows the Will's underlying pattern without the usual distortions of individual desire. The ordinary chair is a functional object for my use. The chair in a Vermeer painting is freed from my needs and shows itself as the Idea of chair.

Music has a special place in Schopenhauer's aesthetics. Where the other arts represent the Will through its objectifications, music expresses the Will directly, without the intermediary of Representation. This is why music produces effects the other arts cannot: it touches the inner nature of reality without translation. Wagner, who read Schopenhauer in 1854, built Tristan und Isolde on this doctrine.

The hierarchy of the arts in Schopenhauer runs from architecture (expressing the Will's lowest objectifications, mass and gravity) up through sculpture, painting, literature, and tragedy (which expresses the Will's conflict with itself), culminating in music. Each art has its own specific liberating power. Music's is the greatest, because it bypasses Representation entirely.

Book Four: Compassion and Denial of the Will

Book Four, the longest and most consequential, presents the deeper routes of liberation. Aesthetic contemplation is temporary. The Will returns as soon as the experience ends. The book's final chapters map the possibilities of permanent liberation.

The first step is compassion (Mitleid, literally "suffering-with"). When I genuinely perceive another being's suffering, the illusion of separation between self and other weakens. The principium individuationis, the principle of individuation through which the Will appears as many distinct beings, shows itself as illusion. Behind it, one Will. Compassion is the direct experience of this metaphysical identity, and it is the foundation of ethics. Schopenhauer systematised this argument in the separate 1840 essay On the Basis of Morality, which is still the most rigorous single essay on compassion-based ethics in Western philosophy.

Deeper than compassion is the denial of the Will. The saint and the mystic, Christian or Buddhist or Hindu, who has so fully perceived the Will's nature that they cease to cooperate with it, enters a state Schopenhauer treats as the highest human achievement. The Will is not destroyed (nothing can destroy it), but it is deprived of the individual cooperation through which it would ordinarily operate in this person. A specific peace becomes possible that aesthetic contemplation only approaches.

This is Schopenhauer's closest approach to the Buddhist doctrine of nirvana and to the Hindu doctrine of moksha. He knew the parallel and explicitly acknowledged it. The book's final pages, on the state of the saint who has denied the Will, speak in a register of reverence rare in German philosophy. "Nothing" in the ordinary sense is the only thing we can say about this state from outside it. From inside, it is everything.

The Upanishads and Buddhism

Schopenhauer was the first major European philosopher to take Indian metaphysics seriously as philosophy rather than exotic curiosity. He read the 1802 Latin translation of fifty Upanishads by Anquetil-Duperron (itself a translation of a seventeenth-century Persian version). The Oupnek'hat remained on his desk for the rest of his life, and he is quoted saying that "it has been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death".

The central Upanishadic doctrine of the identity of atman (individual self) and brahman (cosmic reality) is the metaphysical claim Schopenhauer independently reached through Kantian analysis. The tat tvam asi, "that thou art", of the Chandogya Upanishad is quoted at key points in Book Four. Schopenhauer treats his own system not as a new invention but as a specifically European development of insights available from the beginning in the Vedanta.

Buddhism reached Schopenhauer less directly, through early nineteenth-century Indological works. The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism (life is suffering, the cause of suffering is craving, the end of suffering is possible, the path is the Eightfold Path) track Schopenhauer's own argument closely. By the 1844 edition he was calling his system "Buddhist" with some pride and noting the parallels with pleasure. The convergence of Kantian metaphysics and Buddhist soteriology in one European thinker is one of the more striking events in nineteenth-century philosophy.

Influence: Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Wagner

The book's influence is difficult to overstate. Friedrich Nietzsche discovered it in 1865 as a twenty-one-year-old student in Leipzig. Nietzsche's early essay Schopenhauer as Educator (1874) is a tribute to the philosopher who first showed him what philosophy could be. Nietzsche's later work moves systematically against Schopenhauer's pessimism, but the engagement is deep all the way through. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Genealogy of Morals are unintelligible without Schopenhauer as background.

Richard Wagner encountered the book in 1854 and described the experience as the greatest intellectual event of his life. Tristan und Isolde (1859), Die Meistersinger (1867), and Parsifal (1882) are all in some measure Schopenhauerian works. Wagner's theory of music as direct expression of the Will is straight Schopenhauer.

Sigmund Freud acknowledged that much of his theory of the unconscious, of repression, and of the role of sexuality as a primary motive force had been anticipated by Schopenhauer. Freud sometimes claimed he had reached his positions independently and only later discovered Schopenhauer's priority. The historical record is complex, but the parallels are undeniable.

Carl Gustav Jung drew on Schopenhauer from his youth. The concept of the collective unconscious has Schopenhauerian ancestry in the doctrine that the Will is one beneath its appearances. Jung's theory of individuation owes much to Schopenhauer's account of the self's relation to the universal Will.

Among writers, Schopenhauer shaped Tolstoy's late fiction (The Death of Ivan Ilyich is pure Schopenhauer), Thomas Mann's novels (especially Buddenbrooks), Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Samuel Beckett's later fiction and drama, and Jorge Luis Borges's stories. Twentieth-century literature's preoccupation with suffering, futility, and the passing glimpses of liberation through art is in large part Schopenhauer's legacy.

Schopenhauer and Steiner

Rudolf Steiner treated Schopenhauer directly in The Riddles of Philosophy (GA 18), his major work on the history of Western philosophy. Steiner's verdict is precise. Schopenhauer grasped something real. The Will as Schopenhauer described it is a genuine insight into a feature of reality. But Schopenhauer lacked the further development that would have turned the insight into a proper spiritual science.

For Steiner, what Schopenhauer called Will is close to what anthroposophy calls the etheric or life forces at their lowest aspect. Schopenhauer saw the blind striving of the lower etheric activity and mistook it for the whole of non-physical reality. He missed the differentiated hierarchies of spiritual beings whose activity generates the etheric forces in the first place. His picture was therefore accurate as far as it went but truncated.

This reading is generous and sharp at the same time. Schopenhauer is not dismissed. He is placed. His work is a genuine stage in the philosophical development that would eventually reach the fuller picture Steiner presents in Occult Science. A reader who wants to move from Schopenhauer toward Steiner is therefore moving with philosophical continuity, not against it.

How to Read the Book

The World as Will and Representation rewards a specific reading strategy. The following approach tends to work.

Start with Schopenhauer's own more accessible shorter essays. Essays and Aphorisms (Penguin Classics), collected by R.J. Hollingdale from the Parerga und Paralipomena, is the best first entry. Schopenhauer's prose here is witty and direct. A reader who finds the shorter essays engaging can then commit to the longer work with a sense of the author's voice already in place.

Read Bryan Magee's The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (revised edition 1997) before attempting the main work. Magee gives the full system clearly and has the great virtue of loving the material. After Magee, the main work is significantly more accessible.

Read the four books in order. Do not skip Book One's epistemology even if it feels dry. Without Book One, the metaphysical move in Book Two does not land. Read one chapter per week. Allow time to digest.

Read the 1844 supplementary essays (Volume II in Payne's translation) alongside the relevant original chapters. Schopenhauer's mature reflections in the supplements are often clearer than the 1818 main text they are commenting on.

Pair the reading with one primary text from the Upanishads or the Buddhist canon. The Isha Upanishad, the Chandogya Upanishad, or the Dhammapada are good choices. Schopenhauer is most useful when the Eastern sources he drew on are also being read, not as illustration but as independent material.