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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUERThe World as Will and Representation

The purpose of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer is to offer translations of the best modern German editions ofSchopenhauer’s work in a uniform format suitable for Schopenhauer
scholars, together with philosophical introductions and full editorial
apparatus.
First published in 1818, The World as Will and Representation
contains Schopenhauer’s entire philosophy, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics andphilosophy of art, to ethics, the meaning of life and the philosophyof religion, in an attempt to account for the world in all its signiﬁcantaspects. It gives a unique and inﬂuential account of what is and is notof value in existence, the striving and pain of the human condition
and the possibility of deliverance from it. This new translation of theﬁrst volume of what later became a two-volume work reﬂects the eloquence and power of Schopenhauer’s prose and renders philosophicalterms accurately and consistently. It offers an introduction, glossaryof names and bibliography, and succinct editorial notes, including
notes on the revisions of the text which Schopenhauer made in 1844
and 1859.
j u d i t h n o r m a n is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity University, Texas. She is co-editor of The New Schelling (2004) with Alistair Welchman. She has also previously translated works by Nietzsche including Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge, 2002) and The
Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, The Case of Wagner andNietzsche Contra Wagner (Cambridge, 2005).
a l i s t a i r w e l c h m a n is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Texas at San Antonio. He is co-editor of The New
Schelling (2004), and has also published numerous articles on contemporary European thought.
c h r i s t o p h e r j a n a w a y is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. His previous publications include Self andWorld in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (1989) and Schopenhauer: A Very
Short Introduction (2002). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion
to Schopenhauer (1999) and has edited and translated Schopenhauer:
The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (2009).

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T H E C A M B R I D G E E D I T I O N O F T H E WO R K S
O F S C H O PE N H AU E R

general editor

Christopher Janaway
Titles in this series:
The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics
translated and edited by Christopher Janaway
The World as Will and Representation: Volume 1translated and edited by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman
and Christopher Janaway with an Introduction
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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUERThe World as Will and Representation
Volume 1translated and edited by
JUDITH NORMAN
ALISTAIR WELCHMANCHRISTOPHER JANAWAY
with an Introduction by
CHRISTOPHER JANAWAY© in this web service Cambridge University Press

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More informationcambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UKPublished in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New Yorkwww.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521871846

c Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway 2010

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2010
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788–1860.
[Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. English]
The world as will and representation / Arthur Schopenhauer ; translated and edited by Judith
Norman, Alistair Welchman, Christopher Janaway ; with an introduction by Christopher Janaway.
p. cm. – (The Cambridge edition of the works of Schopenhauer)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-521-87184-6 (v. 1)
1. Philosophy. 2. Will. 3. Idea (Philosophy) 4. Knowledge, Theory of. I. Norman,
Judith, 1965– II. Welchman, Alistair. III. Janaway, Christopher. IV. Title.
b3138.e5n67 2010
193 – dc22
2010029486
isbn 978-0-521-87184-6 Hardback

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Contents

General editor’s preface
Editorial notes and references
Introduction
Notes on text and translation
Chronology
Bibliography

page vii
x
xii
xlvii
lvi
lix

the world as will and representation
volume 1
Preface to the ﬁrst edition

5

Preface to the second edition

11

Preface to the third edition

22

First Book: The world as representation, ﬁrst consideration.
Representation subject to the principle of sufﬁcient reason:
the object of experience and science

23

Second Book: The world as will, ﬁrst consideration. The
objectivation of the will

119

Third Book: The world as representation, second
consideration. Representation independent of theprinciple of sufﬁcient reason: the Platonic Idea:
the object of art

191

Fourth Book: The world as will, second consideration. With
the achievement of self-knowledge, afﬁrmation and negationof the will to life297v

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Contents

Appendix: Critique of the Kantian Philosophy

441

Variants in different editions
Glossary of names
Index

567
604
616

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General editor’s preface

Schopenhauer is one of the great original writers of the nineteenth century,
and a unique voice in the history of thought. His central concept of thewill leads him to regard human beings as striving irrationally and sufferingin a world that has no purpose, a condition redeemed by the elevation ofaesthetic consciousness and ﬁnally overcome by the will’s self-denial anda mystical vision of the self as one with the world as a whole. He is insome ways the most progressive post-Kantian, an atheist with profoundideas about the human essence and the meaning of existence which point
forward to Nietzsche, Freud and existentialism. He was also the ﬁrst major
Western thinker to seek a synthesis with Eastern thought. Yet at the sametime he undertakes an ambitious global metaphysics of a conservative,
more or less pre-Kantian kind, and is driven by a Platonic vision of escapefrom empirical reality into a realm of higher knowledge.
Schopenhauer was born in 1788, and by 1809 had gone against his
family’s expectations of a career as a merchant and embarked on a university
career. He completed his doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the
Principle of Sufﬁcient Reason in 1813, then spent several years in intensive
preparation of what became the major work of his life, The World as
Will and Representation, which was published at the end of 1818, with
1819 on the title page. Shortly afterwards his academic career suffereda setback when his only attempt at a lecture course ended in failure.
Thereafter Schopenhauer adopted a stance of intellectual self-sufﬁciency
and antagonism towards university philosophy, for which he was repaid bya singular lack of reaction to his writings. In 1835 he published On the Willin Nature, an attempt to corroborate his metaphysics with ﬁndings fromthe sciences, and in 1841 two self-standing essays on free will and moral
philosophy, entitled The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. A large
supplementary second volume to The World as Will and Representation
appeared in 1844, accompanied by a revised version of the original which
now appeared as Volume One; then in 1851 another two-volume work,vii© in this web service Cambridge University Press

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viii

General editor’s preface

Parerga and Paralipomena, a collection of essays and observations. Onlyin the 1850s did serious interest in Schopenhauer’s philosophy begin, witha favourable review appearing in an English journal and a few European
universities offering courses on his work. In this ﬁnal decade before his
death in 1860 he published a third edition of The World as Will andRepresentation and a second edition of The Two Fundamental Problems of
Ethics. After Schopenhauer’s death his follower Julius Frauenstädt produced
the ﬁrst six-volume edition of his works in 1873, providing the basis formany subsequent German editions up to the Sämtliche Werke edited by
Arthur Hübscher, which we use as the basis for our translations in thepresent edition.
Though Schopenhauer’s life and the genesis of his philosophy belong to
the early part of the nineteenth century, it is the latter half of the century
that provides the context for his widespread reception and inﬂuence. In
1877 he was described by Wilhelm Wundt as ‘the born leader of nonacademic philosophy in Germany’, and in that period many artists andintellectuals, prominent among them Richard Wagner, worked under theinﬂuence of his works. The single most important philosophical inﬂuence
was on Nietzsche, who was in critical dialogue throughout his career withhis ‘great teacher Schopenhauer’. But many aspects of the period resonate
with Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, his pessimism, his championing of
the Upanishads and Buddhism, and his theory of the self and the world as
embodied striving.
Over the last three decades interest in Schopenhauer in the Englishspeaking world has been growing again, with a good number of monographs, translations and collections of articles appearing, where before there
were very few. More general trends in the study of the history of philosophy
have played a part here. There has recently been a dramatic rise in philosophical interest in the period that immediately follows Kant (including
the German Idealists and Romanticism), and the greater centrality now
accorded to Nietzsche’s philosophy has provided further motivation forattending to Schopenhauer. Yet until now there has been no complete
English edition of his works. The present six-volume series of Schopenhauer’s published works aims to provide an up-to-date, reliable English
translation that reﬂects the literary style of the original while maintaining
linguistic accuracy and consistency over his philosophical vocabulary.
Almost all the English translations of Schopenhauer in use until now,
published though they are by several different publishers, stem from asingle translator, the remarkable E. F. J. Payne. These translations, whichwere done in the 1950s and 1960s, have stood the test of time quite well

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and performed a ﬁne service in transmitting Schopenhauer to an Englishspeaking audience. Payne’s single-handed achievement is all the greater
given that he was not a philosopher or an academic, but a former military
man who became a dedicated enthusiast. His translations are readable andlively and convey a distinct authorial voice. However, the case for new
translations rests partly on the fact that Payne has a tendency towards
circumlocution rather than directness and is often not as scrupulous as wemight wish in translating philosophical vocabulary, partly on the fact thatrecent scholarship has probed many parts of Schopenhauer’s thought with
far greater precision than was known in Payne’s day, and partly on thesimple thought that after half a century of reading Schopenhauer almost
solely through one translator, and with a wider and more demanding
audience established, a change of voice is in order.
In the present edition the translators have striven to keep a tighter rein on
philosophical terminology, especially that which is familiar from the studyof Kant – though we should be on our guard here, for Schopenhauer’s useof a Kantian word does not permit us to infer that he uses it in a sense Kant
would have approved of. We have included explanatory introductions toeach volume, and other aids to the reader: footnotes explaining some of
Schopenhauer’s original German vocabulary, a glossary of names to assist
with his voluminous literary and philosophical references, a chronology of
his life and a bibliography of German texts, existing English translations
and selected further reading. We also give a breakdown of all passages thatwere added or altered by Schopenhauer in different editions of his works,
especially noteworthy being the changes made to his earliest publications,
On the Fourfold Root and the single-volume ﬁrst edition of The World
as Will and Representation. A further novel feature of this edition is ourtreatment of the many extracts Schopenhauer quotes in languages otherthan German. Our guiding policy here is, as far as possible, to translatematerial in any language into English. The reader will therefore not be
detained by scanning through passages in other languages and having toresort to footnote translations. Nevertheless, the virtuoso manner in which
Schopenhauer blends Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish extracts
with his own prose style is not entirely lost, since we have used footnotes
to give all the original passages in full.
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Editorial notes and references

Three kinds of notes occur in the translation:(1) Footnotes marked with asterisks (*, ** and so on) are Schopenhauer’s
own notes.
(2) Footnotes marked with small letters (a, b, c) are editorial notes. Theseeither give information about the original wording in Schopenhauer’s
text (in German or other languages), or provide additional editorial
information. All (and only) such additional information is enclosed inbrackets [ ]. All footnote material not in brackets consists of words fromthe original text.
(3) Endnotes marked with numerals 1, 2, 3. The endnotes are placed at theback of the book, and indicate variations between the different texts ofthe essays published during Schopenhauer’s lifetime.
Schopenhauer’s works are referred to by the following abbreviations:Hübscher SW 1–7
BMFRFW
PP 1, 2WN
WWR 1, 2Sämtliche Werke, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Mannheim:
F. A. Brockhaus, 1988), vols. 1–7.
On the Basis of Morals [Über die Grundlage derMoral ].
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufﬁcient
Reason [Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom
zureichenden Grunde].
On the Freedom of the Will [Über die Freiheit desWillens].
Parerga and Paralipomena [Parerga und Paralipomena], vols. 1 and 2.
On the Will in Nature [Über den Willen in derNatur].
The World as Will and Representation [Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung], vols. 1 and 2.

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Editorial notes and referencesGB
HN 1–5
MR 1–4xi

Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Bonn: Bouvier,1978).
Der handschriftliche Nachlaß, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Frankfurt
am Main: Kramer, 1970), vols. 1–5.
Manuscript Remains, ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E. F. J. Payne(Oxford: Berg, 1988), vols. 1–4 [a translation of HN vols. 1–4].

Passages in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason are referred to by the standard
method, using A and B marginal numbers corresponding to the ﬁrst andsecond editions of the work. Other writings by Kant are referred to by
volume and page number of the monumental ‘Akademie’ edition (Berlin:
Georg Reimer/Walter de Gruyter, 1900–), in the form Ak. 4: 397. Translations are based on those in the relevant volume of the Cambridge Editionof the Works of Immanuel Kant. References to works of Plato and Aristotle
use the standard marginal annotations.

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Introduction

Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation was ﬁrst publishedin Leipzig at the end of 1818 (with 1819 as the date on its title page). It
consisted of a single volume, and aimed, as its 30-year-old author stated in
his preface, ‘to convey a single thought’. He went on to confess, however,that ‘in spite of all my efforts, I could not ﬁnd a shorter way of conveying
the thought than the whole of this book’, a book that ran to over 700 pages
and was not a little ambitious, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics,
philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, to ethics,
the meaning of life and the philosophy of religion, in an attempt to accountfor nothing less than the world: the nature of our cognition or knowledge ofreality and how it relates to reality itself, the nature of our existence and theexistence of everything in the world, what is and is not of value in existence,the pain of the human condition and the possibility of deliverance from it.
Schopenhauer rounds off his book with a detailed and incisive critique ofthe philosophy of Kant, whom he admired and respected, but to whom heboldly applied Voltaire’s saying ‘C’est le privilège du vrai génie, et surtout dugénie qui ouvre une carrière, de faire impunément de grandes fautes’ (It is theprivilege of true genius, and above all the genius who opens a new path,to make great errors with impunity) – words we may well have occasion to
apply to Schopenhauer himself.
This book is the major achievement of Schopenhauer’s life, and the backbone of his intellectual career. What we have provided here is an English
version, not of that 1818 text, but of the text as Schopenhauer reworked it
cumulatively on two later occasions. In 1844 he republished The World as
Will and Representation as a two-volume work, whose second volume runs
parallel with the themes in the ﬁrst and consists of ﬁfty ‘supplementary
essays’, some of them substantial and powerfully written pieces in theirown right. At the same time he revised the original World as Will and Representation, which henceforth became known as Volume 1. Many passages
are rewritten in this 1844 version and whole paragraphs are added, alongxii© in this web service Cambridge University Press

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Introductionxiiiwith elaborations of Schopenhauer’s original argument that were suggested
by his copious reading of philosophy and literature – ancient, mediaeval
and modern – and his knowledge of many of the expanding disciplinesof the nineteenth century, including the perhaps unlikely pairing of thebiological sciences and oriental scholarship. In 1859, the year before hedied, Schopenhauer revised the book once more, and Volume 1 acquired
yet more scholarly additions and clariﬁcatory changes, though still without
altering the essentials of his train of thought. The twice-revised version
is longer, richer and denser than the original. Schopenhauer’s approach isto accumulate inter-connecting passages and parallels, channelling a wide
variety of cultural sources into a single synthetic vision, and by the same
token directing the reader outwards to a wealth of intellectual reference
points. The text we have used for this translation is essentially this lastedition, subject to certain further revisions by various editors, startingwith Julius Frauenstädt in 1873, through Paul Deussen’s edition of 1911,
to Arthur Hübscher’s of 1988 which we treat as the standard text. Our
endnotes give detailed information about changes between the different
editions of Schopenhauer’s lifetime.
The nature of the ‘single thought’ that Schopenhauer alleges is containedin this weighty work (and presumably also in the even greater supplementary material of later years) has been the subject of some slightly perplexeddebate.1 If there is a single thought, it must be highly elusive or highly
complex, or both. But we can perhaps make an initial approach towards
what Schopenhauer means if we examine the framework of four Books
into which The World as Will and Representation is divided. Their titlesand discursive subtitles are as follows:(1) The world as representation, ﬁrst consideration. Representation subject to the principle of sufﬁcient reason: the object of experience andscience.
(2) The world as will, ﬁrst consideration. The objectivation of the will.
(3) The world as representation, second consideration. Representation
independent of the principle of sufﬁcient reason: the Platonic Idea:
the object of art.
(4) The world as will, second consideration. With the achievement ofself-knowledge, afﬁrmation and negation of the will to life.
What we ﬁrst notice here is an oscillation between the two key terms fromthe book’s title. At the core of the single thought, then, is this: one and the1

For one substantial discussion see John E. Atwell, Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The
Metaphysics of Will (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 18–31.

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xiv

Introduction

same world has two aspects, and we can learn about it by considering it asrepresentation, then as will, then as representation in altered fashion, then as
will in altered fashion. The two alterations in question introduce two morevital oppositions. With the world as representation, we can either consider
it subject to the principle of sufﬁcient reason, or independently of thatprinciple. With the world as will, we can either consider it descriptively forwhat it is, or we can consider it on an evaluative dimension – with respect
to its afﬁrmation or negation. This, however, leaves us with an immense
amount to explain. Let us next try to ﬂesh out these bare bones a little,
keeping in mind the four-part dynamic structure that any would-be ‘single
thought’ really needs to have if it is to map on to the work as a whole.
Schopenhauer uses ‘representation’ (German Vorstellung) in the same
way as his predecessor Kant uses it. It stands for anything that the mind
is conscious of in its experience, knowledge, or cognition of any form –something that is present to the mind. So our ﬁrst task in The World as
Will and Representation is to consider the world as it presents itself to us in
our minds. In ordinary human experience, and in the extension of this in
the realm of scientiﬁc enquiry, we encounter objects, and these are ordered
for us, necessarily, by space and time, and by relations of cause and effect.
All the ways in which the world is thus ordered for us are species of thesingle principle ‘Nothing is without a ground for its being rather than not
being’, otherwise known as the principle of sufﬁcient reason. Every object
is experienced as related to something else which grounds it. Everythingin space and time has a determinate position in relation to other thingsin space and time, everything that happens has a determinate cause, every
action relates back to a motive and to its agent’s character, every truth isgrounded in some other truth or in the evidence of the senses. So starting, as
we must, from the world as we ﬁnd it in everyday experience and empiricalinvestigation, we see a multiplicity of objects related in necessary ways. But
all of this tells us how the world must appear to us as subjects; it does nottell us how the world is when we try to consider it apart from the way it
presents itself to our minds. We must next move on to consider the aspectof the world beyond representation, the world as ‘thing in itself’.
In a word, Schopenhauer argues in his Second Book that the thing in
itself – what the world is beyond the aspect of it that appears to us – iswill. His guiding thought is that there is one single essence that underlies
all objects and all phenomena, ourselves included, one single way in whichthe ‘riddle’ of all existence can be deciphered. The single world manifests itself to experience as a multiplicity of individual objects – Schopenhauer calls this the objectivation of the will – and each member of this© in this web service Cambridge University Press

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xv

multiplicity, embodying the same essence, strives towards existence andlife. Human individuals are primarily beings who will and act, and share
their ultimate nature with every other being in the world. Human rationality and consciousness are extremely useful, and give us an instrumental
superiority over other beings, but are really only a froth on the surface, anddo not distinguish humanity from the rest of nature at the most fundamental level. Indeed, our advanced capacities for cognition can be explained,
for Schopenhauer, as serving the ends of willing: our ability to perceive
and investigate the world functions primarily to enable us to manipulate
objects that confront us, in order to continue existing and to reproduce
ourselves. If we are really to understand the world and our place within
it, we must not remain at the surface of the world as representation, butmust delve into this deeper and darker aspect of reality, the world as will –darker because everything that wills or strives is necessarily at the mercyof suffering, and because this suffering has neither point nor end. As longas we will, we suffer; but that we will, and ultimately what we will, is afunction of our inescapable essence, not something rationally chosen, andnot something we have the means to put an end to by willing.
At the mid-point of The World as Will and Representation we return toa new, and brighter, consideration of the world as representation. It canhappen, according to Schopenhauer, that we confront objects in a kindof experience that is out of the ordinary. We ﬁnd all the usual kinds ofrelation – space, time and cause and effect – suspended, and lose ourselvesin contemplation, forgetful of ourselves and of the distinction between
ourselves and what we perceive. This is aesthetic experience, an extreme
form of disinterestedness, a passive ‘mirroring’ of the world in which wecease to grapple with the world of objects, cease striving, and ﬁnd temporary
release from pain. While becoming as free as we can from subjectivity, we
apprehend nature in a manner that takes our cognition as close as possible tothe true essence of things: we perceive timeless features than run throughout
nature, which Schopenhauer calls Ideas, intending us to take this notion
in a sense close to Plato’s (or to what are often called Platonic Forms
nowadays). Art provides the best opportunity for this kind of experience
because it gives us a view of nature mediated through the exceptionallyobjective mind of a genius. Art enables in us as spectators a state of calmpassivity and enhanced objectivity, and the various art forms allow us torecognize diverse aspects of the will’s manifestation in the world, from, as
it were, a vantage point where our individual own will is not engaged.
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Introduction‘afﬁrmation and negation’, or at any rate the afﬁrmation and negation ofthe ‘will to life’ that Schopenhauer ﬁnds to be the essence of each individual. This ﬁnal part – by far the longest and, in Schopenhauer’s words, the‘most serious’ – is concerned with ethics, in both a narrower and broader
sense. Building on the descriptive account of the will from the Second
Book, Schopenhauer gives his own answers to conventional ethical questions: What are morally good and bad actions and characters? What is thenature of right and wrong? What constitutes compassion, and the virtuesof justice and loving kindness? In what sense, if at all, are our actions free?
But the main thrust of the Fourth Book is a broader ethical treatment of
the value of human existence as such – a profound and troubling discussionthat borders on religious territory while remaining resolutely atheist in its
conviction. Schopenhauer has argued that the life of the human individual
is inevitably one of striving and suffering, unredeemed by any ﬁnal purposeor resting point for the will that is our essence. Now he argues that somesalvation is needed from such an existence, but that it can only come fromthe restless will’s becoming ‘tranquillized’ by a deep metaphysical insightthat reveals individuality itself to be an illusion. The world in itself, outsideof the forms of space and time that govern the world as representation
for us, cannot be separated into individuals. The truly wise human being
would comprehend this and would cease to be attached to the strivings ofthe particular individual manifestation of will he or she is. Such a redemptive state – sometimes reached intuitively through the painful experiencesof life itself – is the will’s ‘self-negation’ or ‘self-abolition’. The will that is
the human being’s essence recoils from pursuing any of its goals, and thesense of individuality weakens to the point where reality can be contemplated with a serenity that is void of the usual pains of existence because
the subject has become void of all striving and void of the usual sense of
self.
the world of objects and schopenhauer’s‘introductory essay’
From 1809 to 1813 Schopenhauer attended the universities of Göttingen
and Berlin, studying philosophy among other subjects. He specialized early
on in the work of Kant and Plato, both of whom had a profound formative
inﬂuence on his thinking. He prepared The World as Will and Representationin the years 1814 to 1818, during which time he also began a life-long interest
in Indian thought, starting with extracts from the Upanishads in a Latin
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entry of 1816 Schopenhauer acknowledged the uniqueness of the mixtureof inﬂuences on him: ‘I do not believe my doctrine could have come about
before the Upanishads, Plato and Kant could cast their rays simultaneously
into the mind of one man.’2
Schopenhauer had published two works before The World as Will andRepresentation: a short treatise entitled On Vision and Colours (1816), andhis doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufﬁcient
Reason (1813). The latter is especially important to us here. In the ﬁrst
edition of The World as Will Schopenhauer referred to On the Fourfold
Root throughout as ‘the introductory essay’, and went so far as to demand‘that the introduction be read before the book itself, even though it is not
located inside the book but rather appeared ﬁve years earlier’ (Preface tothe ﬁrst edition, 7). It will be helpful, therefore, to give an outline of theargument of the essay.
Two relatively simple ideas set the framework for On the Fourfold Root.
One is the principle of sufﬁcient reason itself – that ‘nothing is without
a ground for its being rather than not being’. In fact this principle could
be translated more literally, if less conventionally, as ‘principle of sufﬁcientground’ (in German Satz des zureichenden Grundes). The idea is that everything is grounded in, explained or justiﬁed by, something else to which
it is related in a variety of distinct ways. The second main idea is that
all representation consists in the relation of subject and object. All cognition is by a subject and of an object. While the subject has cognition,and is presupposed wherever there is cognition, the subject itself is never
cognized. What the subject is conscious of is always some object, but all
objects are representations: ‘To be an object for the subject and to be ourrepresentation are the same. All of our representations are objects for the
subject, and all objects for the subject are our representations.’3 Thus if
we investigate the way our representations are organized, we shall at thesame time be understanding the basic structure that pertains to objectsof any kind. Schopenhauer now points out that our experience of objects
is always of them in relation to one another. We never have cognition ofanything ‘subsisting for itself and independent . . . single and detached’.
And whatever the particular content of our consciousness, there are certain
kinds of relation between objects that are fundamental and necessary: ‘all
our representations stand to one another in a lawlike connection in respectof form, which can be determined a priori’. Discovering the necessary23

MR 1, 467 (HN 1, 422).
FR § 16 (Hübscher SW 1, 27). Following quotes are from the same passage.

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kinds of connection between representations is discovering the necessaryconnections of all objects; and all these are connections of ground andconsequent. All are forms of the principle of sufﬁcient reason.
Schopenhauer shows how the principle of sufﬁcient reason covers quite
different species of ground–consequent relation and complains with somejustiﬁcation that previous philosophers have tended not to distinguish themclearly. Perhaps the most obvious of such species is the law of causality, theprinciple that everything that happens is the effect of some cause. This is
the ﬁrst form of the principle of sufﬁcient reason for Schopenhauer, andit governs all our empirical representations in space and time. Everything
we experience is spatially and temporally ordered, and whenever anything
happens at a place at a time, something must have occurred to determine
its happening. The relation between ground and consequent is always oneof necessity, according to Schopenhauer. Hence any alteration, anything at
all that ‘becomes’ or happens in the empirical realm of space and time (i.e.
in our empirical representations) happens necessarily, according to a law,as a consequence of some particular cause which is also in space and time.
However, we human beings do not simply represent the spatio-temporalworld to ourselves perceptually; we are able to form abstract concepts
and use them to think, to make judgements and to perform sequences ofreasoning. Any judgement we make, if it is to count as true, must also begrounded; but this form of grounding is quite distinct from that of causality,
and so constitutes a second form of the principle of sufﬁcient reason. It
concerns what would usually be called not explanation, but justiﬁcation.
Under this second heading Schopenhauer locates in turn four ways inwhich judgements can be grounded, and expresses them also as four kindsof truth. There is logical (or formal) truth, where a judgement is grounded
in another judgement from which it can be deduced. There is empirical
truth, when a judgement is grounded in an immediate non-conceptual
representation of experience. Then there is transcendental truth, for which
Schopenhauer adopts the Kantian idea that we can know something to
be true because it is a condition of the possibility of experience. Thesetranscendental truths, for Kant, are synthetic a priori: known without
requiring conﬁrmation through experience, yet not deducible merely fromconcepts, i.e. neither logical nor empirical truths. Schopenhauer follows
Kant closely here, giving the same sorts of examples of transcendental truth
as Kant had done in the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘Two straight lines do
not enclose any space’, ‘Nothing happens without a cause’, ‘3 × 7 = 21’.
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of experience. Finally, he puts forward a fourth kind of truth, which
he calls ‘metalogical truth’. Truths of this kind supposedly express theconditions that make thinking possible as such, but they do not play any
very prominent further role in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.4
The third form of the principle of sufﬁcient reason also trades directly on
a position that Kant espoused in the Critique of Pure Reason. Schopenhauer
has much to say in criticism of Kant, as we shall see, but the opening
section of the Critique called the Transcendental Aesthetic is one for which
he always has high praise. There Kant discusses space and time, and argues
that they are, in effect, features contributed to experience by our own
mind. Any world we can represent to ourselves must be in space and time:they constitute the formal structure that any objective world must takefor us, whatever its particular content. Thus they are the subjective formsof all experience that we can gain through our senses, and we can knowa priori that all experience must conform to them. All of this Schopenhauer
adopts. But space and time, as well as providing this necessary framework
for all experience, also give rise to another principle: that each part of spaceand of time is determined by its relation to the other parts. Every spatial
position is determined by spatial positions distinct from it, and determines
them, and likewise in the case of sequences of times. All parts of space andtime stand in necessary relations to one another. Schopenhauer follows
Kant in suggesting that there is a non-empirical, a priori form of cognitionof the necessary properties of space and time, to be had in geometry andarithmetic. So he ﬁnds here a kind of ground–consequent relationshipthat is not one of causality, and not a matter of the relationship between
judgements. This might be put by saying that a part of space or time isneither caused nor justiﬁed by its relation to other parts of space and time,
but rather is constituted by such relations. So Schopenhauer talks here of
the principle of the sufﬁcient ground of being.
With the fourth class of grounds and consequents Schopenhauer
broaches for the ﬁrst time the subject of willing, which later becomesso central in his philosophy overall. He is here concerned with the relationof motive to action, which, however, turns out to be a special case of theﬁrst class, an example of cause and effect. Schopenhauer has much more to
say about action and motive in his two later essays on ethics, as well as in
4

There are four such truths, which Schopenhauer lists in FR § 33 (Hübscher SW 1, 109): ‘a subject
is identical to the sum of its predicates, or a=a’; ‘a predicate cannot at the same time be attributed
to and denied of a subject, or a=–a=o’; ‘Of any two contradictory, opposing predicates one must
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The World as Will. The chief points he makes on the topic of willing in On
the Fourfold Root are as follows. We have inner cognition as well as outer.
That is, we not only have consciousness of the world of objects in space
and time, but we have self-consciousness. And in this self-consciousness,
Schopenhauer suggests, we are aware of ourselves as willing in different
ways: acting, trying, deciding, desiring and registering a range of positive
and negative affects and feelings that can also be called movements of thewill. Outer consciousness and self-consciousness are quite distinct. And
yet, when the will of which we are inwardly conscious is moved by someexperience coming from outer consciousness (which is what Schopenhauer
calls a motive: an experience that moves me to action), and when an actof will occurs, this sequence is at bottom no different from any relation of
cause and effect. Motivation, he says, in a memorable phrase ‘is causality
seen from within’.5 The insight that what we thus see from within (ourwill reacting to motives) belongs to the more general class of events being
determined by their causes, and that the law of motivation is a version of
the law of causality which governs the world of objects – this, he says, isthe foundation stone of his whole metaphysics.
With this very quick sketch of the ‘introductory essay’ in place, let us
now return to the four Books of The World as Will and Representation.
ﬁrst book
Schopenhauer uses his ﬁrst consideration of the world as representation to
give a comprehensive account of cognition and its relation to reality. Three
principal themes are worth commenting on here: idealism, the relation ofsubject and object, and the distinction between intuitive and conceptual
cognition. All three themes are announced clearly in §§ 1–3. Schopenhauer
ﬁrstly allies himself with transcendental idealism. According to this doctrine,
originally developed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, the objects that
we experience as outside of us in space and time, causally interacting inlawlike ways, constitute a world of appearance, and we do not experience
them in themselves. The objects of which any subject has conscious
experience are a species of the subject’s representations. The familiar worldof empirical things is a world of objects for a subject, which is to say a worldconsisting of the subject’s representations, and not a world that can be
regarded as existing in itself, independently of the way it appears and must
appear to an experiencing mind. The form of the mind itself necessarily
5

FR § 43 (Hübscher SW 1, 145).

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limits or shapes what this realm of objects can contain. The mind must
organize its objects as related to one another in space, as contemporaneousor succeeding one another in time, and as entering into regular patternsof cause and effect. These, for Kant, and for Schopenhauer, are truths apriori, truths that we can know independently of conﬁrmation throughexperience. They are ground rules for the possibility of experience itself.
Schopenhauer has various ways of arguing for transcendental idealism,
but places his main trust in the proposition ‘No object without subject’.
This proposition, he says, is so obviously true that anyone who understands
it must agree with it, and it establishes the truth of idealism at a stroke(had Kant acknowledged as much he would have saved himself and hisreaders a great deal of trouble, in Schopenhauer’s view). There is more thana suspicion that Schopenhauer understands by ‘object’ simply somethingthat presents itself to the mind of a subject – in which case ‘No object
without subject’ is virtually a tautology – but that at the same time hetakes the proposition to make a substantive claim by letting ‘object’ meansomething like ‘thing in the world’, or at least ‘cognizable thing in theworld’. It is one thing to say that anything’s being an object of cognition
for me depends on my being there as subject of the cognition; it is anotherthing to say that anything I have cognition of could not exist except as
cognized by me, or that anything human beings in general have cognitionof could not exist except as cognized.
Representation, for Schopenhauer, consists essentially in the relation
between subject and object, which are ‘necessary correlates’. They arenecessarily distinct: the subject of cognition can never itself be cognized
as an object, and is rather the elusive ‘point of view on the world’ that weall, as experiencing individuals, ‘ﬁnds ourselves as’. Subject and object arealso mutually presupposing for Schopenhauer. ‘No subject without object’is just as ﬁrm a truth, in his eyes, as ‘No object without subject’ – in otherwords, the subject cannot be there without having some cognitive content.
‘Subject’ does not mean the same for Schopenhauer as ‘person’ or ‘humanindividual’. These terms refer to items in the world of objects. The bodythat each of us experiences as our own is likewise an object in space andtime. But the subject is not an item in the world. So as person or embodied
human individual each of us is in and of the world, something existingas an object among objects. But in addition we are the subject in whose
consciousness all objects are present, but which cannot itself be conceived
as existing among them. The notion that our existence and sense of self
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different forms of consciousness are available to us as our sense of self
alters.
For Schopenhauer, the human mind, and indeed any conscious mind,
receives data through the bodily senses and structures them using what
he calls the understanding (Verstand) or intellect (Intellekt). Without thisstructuring we would register only a conglomeration of subjective sensations, but with it we attain a picture of material objects persisting in time,
occupying space and serving as the casual origins of observed changes and of
our sensations themselves. However, Schopenhauer’s account of cognitiondiffers from Kant’s superﬁcially similar account, in that for Schopenhauer
the understanding or intellect cognizes the world in a manner that is nonconceptual. Adopting another technical term of Kant’s, but altering its use,
Schopenhauer maintains that what the understanding gives us is intuition(Anschauung), which essentially means perceptual awareness of particular
objects in space and time. For Kant, the senses give us an array of intuitions, and the understanding provides concepts under which it actively
ordered the intuitions to produce an experience of a world of objects. Only
creatures capable of forming concepts and making judgements could havesuch experience in the full sense. But for Schopenhauer animals such asa dog or a horse, who are incapable of forming concepts, are as muchaware of a world of objects as any human subject: they perceive objects inspace and time as we do, being simply incapable of making judgements,
forming thoughts or carrying out reasoning, and hence being unable tocomprehend anything more than what is immediately present in theirperception.
§§ 4–7 ﬁll out the picture of the world of objects that is available to thesubject in empirical intuition. Empirical objects occupy space and timeand causally interact with one another. The causally efﬁcient occupant ofany particular portion of space/time is simply matter. So if one were to
take one’s philosophical departure solely from the point of view of theobject, one would arrive at materialism. However, to adopt this startingpoint is one-sided: in this way one cannot account for the subject andits consciousness. Just as subject and object are mutually dependent andcorrelative, so too there is a correlativity between subjective and objective
views of reality. Although he thinks materialism is correct as an accountpurely of objects, Schopenhauer argues that transcendental idealism is the
only consistent view that takes the subject as its point of departure. For
him it is also a mistake to contend that the subject is caused by objects orobjects by the subject; they are not causally related at all, merely correlative
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interaction of objects with one another, but it has another function in
Schopenhauer’s account of cognition. When we register alterations in ourbodily sense organs our understanding interprets these as the effects ofexternal causes, thus giving rise to genuine representation of objects as
opposed to mere sensations.
In §§ 8–15 Schopenhauer gives us a protracted discussion of reason
and the kind of representations it gives rise to, namely concepts. Reason(Vernunft) for Schopenhauer is the capacity to form and manipulate concepts discursively to frame thoughts and arguments, and is quite distinct
from understanding or intellect. Reason is closely linked to language, andis unique to human beings. For Schopenhauer concepts are secondary
representations abstracted from the primary material given in intuition,i.e. immediate cognition through the senses of objects in space and time.
Concepts are a kind of mediate cognition: they represent the world in a
general way by omitting the particularities of immediate intuition, but
remain dependent for any genuine content on those immediate intuitions
from which they are abstracted. Reason itself is instrumental in value:
it enables us, unlike other animals, to be guided in our actions by avast range of motives that involve thoughts about what is not present
immediately in intuition. Parts of Schopenhauer’s discussion of reason andconcepts are somewhat textbook-like in character, as he explains the way
concepts combine into judgements, and the way judgements build up
into syllogistic reasoning. He also puts forward an account of the manner in which the connotations of different concepts overlap and how thiscan be exploited in rhetorical persuasion, and talks about the vicissitudes
peculiar to rational beings, such as foolishness, stupidity, pedantry andlaughter.
The distinction made in § 12 between two kinds of cognition (Erkenntniß ) has an importance that resonates throughout The World as Will andRepresentation. With concepts and judgements we are capable of knowledge(Wissen). Animals have immediate cognition of the world of object, but
do not know. Reason confers on human beings, its sole possessors, many
advantages. Because of it they can acquire, communicate and store knowledge, perform logical reasoning, be scientiﬁc investigators, found societies
and undertake vast communal projects. Unlike animals, they can reﬂect
and act upon past experience, work out likely future consequences and havea wide range of goals. However, this opens human beings to a much greater
range of sufferings than animals; at the same time reason confers on humans
no special ‘dignity’, nor does it have any special connection with freedom
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reason’.6 The effective demotion of reason from any foundational role incharacterizing human behaviour or explaining what has moral worth, andthe consequent levelling that occurs between human beings and all otheranimals, are notable distinguishing features of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
In § 16 Schopenhauer’s positive account of the relation of reason to ethics
limits it to the calm reﬂection of the Stoic stage, and the First Book ends,
rather surprisingly, with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of
Stoic ethics, full of characteristically scholarly citations from ancient texts.
second bookIn the ﬁrst of his oscillations between aspects, Schopenhauer now maintains
that the account he has given of the world as representation, though true,is seriously inadequate. For by deﬁnition it does not tell us what we are in
ourselves, nor what anything in the world apart from us is in itself. All thisremains a ‘riddle’. § 17 opens the Second Book by portraying the enquirer
as searching for an ‘inner essence’ or a ‘meaning’ to the world. Already in§ 18, probably the most important pivotal section in the whole of The World
as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer proposes to solve the riddle, or
decipher the meaning, by claiming that the essence, the very being in itself
of all things, is will (Wille). The world that appears to us as representationis, in itself, will. Representation gives us the world as it is empirically,
diverse, plural, spatio-temporal, lawlike and open to investigation. But
we must make sense of the world and ourselves from within, not merely
experience its manifestations from a detached standpoint. Will is whatthat same world and we ourselves are metaphysically – one and the sameessence underlying all the many empirical appearances. This is the central
message of the Second Book of The World as Will and Representation, andof Schopenhauer’s philosophy as a whole.
In § 18 Schopenhauer begins by arguing from our immediate cognition of
our own actions. Schopenhauer suggests that whenever we are conscious of
ourselves, we are immediately conscious of ourselves as willing something.
This is a unique inner consciousness, distinct in character from our ‘outer’
awareness of the world in representation, and it gives us the vital clue toour own essence: it is that we strive towards ends. The intrinsic core of ourbeing is will. Schopenhauer makes a close connection between this and ouressential embodiment. When we will, the action of our body in pursuit of6This is best seen from the Appendix: Critique of the Kantian Philosophy (see 552); and from ch. 2
of BM.

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an end is not the separate effect of an ‘act of will’: rather the body’s actionis the act of will become manifest in the objective realm of space and time.
Even the body as such, whose function is to strive for ends, must be regarded
as will become concrete, will become object, as Schopenhauer says in § 20.
Thus the will that is our essence manifests itself in our body and its many
functions, including the brain and nervous system, with the result that the
self-conscious subject of cognition around which Kantian epistemology(and Schopenhauer’s own First Book) is structured is to be explained as
the result of physiology, but that physiology is ultimately explicable inmetaphysical terms as the manifestation of an underlying striving force innature. In the continuous discussion of §§ 19–22 Schopenhauer argues foran extension of the term ‘will’ to cover the essence of everything in theworld. In the human case ‘will’ embraces not only desires, but actions,emotions and affects, and non-conscious or ‘blind’ physiological processes
that can be described as end-directed. Schopenhauer then extends this idea
to the whole of nature, claiming that we can make sense of the world assuch by seeing its essence as a kind of blind striving manifesting itself in
multiple instances within our experience. Thus, again, the one world isboth representation and will.
A number of wide-reaching claims are made in § 23. One concerns theprinciple of individuation, or in the Latin phrase Schopenhauer likes touse, the principium individuationis. The issue here is what distinguishes
one individual thing from all others, and hence what makes plurality, theexistence of many distinct things, possible at all. For Schopenhauer the
principle in question is that things are distinguished from one another by
their position in space and time. But by the same token if we removed
space and time there could be no distinct individuals, no multiplicity.
Schopenhauer reasons that if the world as thing in itself must be conceived
as existing outside the subjective forms of space and time, then the world
as thing in itself must not be split up into separate individuals. This
thought becomes of ever greater importance as The World as Will andRepresentation progresses, and the illusoriness of the individual is especially
important in the ethics of the Fourth Book. Another central thought
introduced in § 23 has to do with freedom. Nothing in the empiricalrealm of individuals is free, because everything is subject to cause andeffect: everything that happens happens necessarily as the consequence ofsome ground. There are three different species of cause–effect relationshipfound in nature, in Schopenhauer’s view: simple cause and effect, which
occurs throughout nature at the level of physical and chemical explanation;
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where an effect is brought about by an event that occurs in cognition, aperceptual experience or thought. However, all these species are united
in that in each of them the effect follows the cause with necessity, as
speciﬁed by the principle of sufﬁcient reason. On the other hand, once
we reﬂect that the cause–effect relationship pertains only to the realm of
the subject’s representation, we can think of the world beyond its aspect
as representation, the world in itself, as being free – another thought that
Schopenhauer will capitalize on below in the Fourth Book.
In the latter half of the Second Book, in §§ 24–28, Schopenhauer
confronts his account of the world as will with the accounts of nature
given in the natural sciences. He is not hostile to science, and uses as
many scientiﬁc ﬁndings as he can to support his metaphysical account. But
science’s picture of nature runs up against a crucial limitation, in his view. Its
explanations always end with forces such as gravity or electricity which arecapable of no further explanation. He argues that a single, comprehensive
metaphysical explanation of all forces is needed. Schopenhauer’s view of
the natural world falls into the vitalist camp – there is a life force that cannever be reduced to any form of mechanistic process – but, for him, thelife force is just one manifestation of a universal unconscious end-seeking
or striving that is present in all the forces of nature. He introduces thenotion that nature is uniﬁed because it falls into certain universal kinds or
Ideas (on a more or less Platonic model) that express the same essence at
different degrees of clarity. Timelessly existing natural forces and natural
species form a system of expressions of the will that has internal and external
purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit): the parts of each organism ﬁt together toenable it and its species to function, and the whole of nature exhibits apurposive ﬁt between all the parts of the organic realm and between theorganic and inorganic realms.
It is of the greatest importance to note that the will is nothing remotely
like a mind or divine being for Schopenhauer: it lacks cognition or consciousness, cannot set itself goals or seek ends that are conceived as good.
Nor is the will itself in any sense good. It merely strives away in perpetuity, producing countless transient individuals along the way as a matter ofsheer brute fact. As The World as Will and Representation progresses thetone becomes more sombre. Willing goes on perpetually and without ﬁnal
purpose: it is built into us and into the whole fabric of the world. The individual’s existence is dominated by will: incessant desires and needs shape
all our perception and understanding of the world, ends can never ﬁnallybe fulﬁlled, suffering is ever-present, but the will drives us on to strive andwant more things that can never properly satisfy us even if we attain them.

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Throughout nature one being dominates and destroys another, the worldwill tearing itself apart, says Schopenhauer, because it is a hungry will andthere is nothing for it to feed on but itself. This vision of existence, painted
most vividly in § 27, has played a major part in earning Schopenhauer thetitle of the philosopher of pessimism.
§ 29 ends the Second Book by posing the following fundamental question: ‘Every will is the will to something, it has an object, a goal of its
willing: now the will that is presented to us as the essence in itself of theworld: what does it ultimately will, or what does it strive for?’ (187). And
the answer is: Nothing. The very question is misplaced because the will,though always moving, is never really going anywhere:
In fact the absence of all goals, of all boundaries, belongs to the essence of thewill in itself, which is an endless striving . . . [T]he striving of matter can always be
merely impeded but never fulﬁlled or satisﬁed. But this is just how it is with all
the strivings of all the appearances of the will. Every goal that is achieved is once
again the beginning of a new course of action, and so on to inﬁnity. The plantraises its appearance from the seed, through the stem and leaf to the ﬂower andfruit, which is again only the beginning of a new seed, of a new individual which
will run the whole course once again, and so on through inﬁnite time. It is just thesame with the life course of the animal: procreation is its highest point, and after
this is attained the life of the ﬁrst individual fades slowly or quickly away, while a
new life repeats the same appearance and guarantees for nature that the species will
be continued . . . [E]ternal becoming, endless ﬂux belong to the revelation of theessence of the will. Finally, the same thing can also be seen in human endeavours
and desires, which always delude us into believing that their fulﬁlment is the ﬁnal
goal of willing; but as soon as they are attained they no longer look the same andthus are soon forgotten, grow antiquated and are really, if not admittedly, always
laid to the side as vanished delusions; we are lucky enough when there is stillsomething left to desire and strive after, to carry on the game of constantly passing
from desire to satisfaction and from this to a new desire, a game whose rapid course
is called happiness and slow course is called suffering, so that the game might notcome to a end, showing itself to be a fearful, life-destroying boredom, a wearied
longing without a deﬁnite object, a deadening languor. (188–9)

The claim that ‘the world is will’ is fruitful and innovative in many
ways, particularly for the historically forward-looking picture it allows
Schopenhauer to paint of human life and its place within the natural world.
But it is also frustrating for the reader. The term ‘will’ takes on such a wide
use that we begin to wonder what sense it has, given that Schopenhauer
asks us, on the one hand, to construe all the processes of nature as analogous
to what we recognize in ourselves as willing, yet on the other hand rightly
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conscious motives in the way human beings do. Another much-discussed
problem concerns the possibility of our having any cognition of the thing
in itself. If it is beyond our cognition, how could we succeed in knowing
anything about it? This question is not really addressed in Volume 1 of
The World as Will and Representation, but Schopenhauer turns to it inchapter 18 of Volume 2, where he makes an important qualiﬁcation: wecannot know the world absolutely in itself, beyond all the forms of ourcognition, but we can make a generalization about the essence common to
all the phenomena we meet with in representation. Commentators havesuggested that, despite the terminology of ‘gaining cognition of the thing
in itself’, Schopenhauer might best be viewed, not as attempting to delve
into a realm of existence entirely beyond the empirical, but as offering a
ﬁgurative description of the empirical realm which allows us to make senseof it and our own existence within it – though, as he reminds us from time
to time, that intended sense or meaning will not be fully available to us
until we reach the end of the book as a whole.
third book
The central notion of the Third Book of The World as Will and Representation is that of a transformed consciousness that removes us from theeveryday concerns of the will. Here the Platonic ancestry of Schopenhauer’s
thought comes most clearly to the fore. In the alleged transformed consciousness we perceive a timeless Idea, one of the degrees in which thewill manifests itself throughout nature. To avoid confusion with Kantian
or Hegelian uses (or, as he thinks, misuses) of the word ‘Idea’ Schopenhauer typically adds a parenthesis and talks of ‘(Platonic) Ideas’. We canthink of the Ideas as universals that permeate nature and are accessible tohuman cognition through the out-of-the-ordinary experience of will-lessconsciousness. Schopenhauer’s key thought is that in moments of intensecontemplation we lose our normal sense of self as an individual striving
after ends and employing cognition as a means to attain them, and instead
we ‘mirror’ the world passively, thereby coming to see the universal in theparticular object of intuitive perception (rather than attaining knowledgeof it through concepts or abstract reasoning). This kind of experience has ahigher cognitive value than that of ordinary everyday consciousness, which
is taken up with particular objects and their spatial, temporal and causal
inter-connections. Indeed, will-less consciousness is a more objective kindof cognition than that of science, which only makes inferences about theuniversal forces of nature, and does not intuit them directly. While this© in this web service Cambridge University Press

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elevated contemplative consciousness lasts, our will is in abeyance. We do
not seek to understand the object we perceive in relation to what it can
do for us, whether we desire or need it, what associations it has with otherobjects or with our emotions:
we stop considering the Where, When, Why and Wherefore of things but simply
and exclusively consider the What . . . we devote the entire power of our mind to
intuition and immerse ourselves in this entirely, letting the whole of consciousness
be ﬁlled with peaceful contemplation of the natural object that is directly present,a landscape, a tree, a cliff, a building, or whatever it might be, and, according to asuggestive ﬁgure of speech, we lose ourselves in this object completely, i.e. we forget
our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, the clear
mirror of the object, so that it is as if the object existed on its own, without anyone
to perceive it, and we can no longer separate the intuited from the intuition as
the two have become one, and the whole of consciousness is completely ﬁlled andengrossed by a single intuitive image. (201)

In such a state nothing troubles us, because no felt lack or need moves
us at all. We are free of the will for some blissful moments, attaining apeace without which, Schopenhauer tells us, true well-being would be
impossible.
The opening sections of the Third Book (§§ 30–32) provide a somewhat
uneasy discussion of Ideas, which were introduced in the Second Book, butwhose relationship to the will was left in some obscurity. Schopenhauer
now links Ideas with the Kantian thing in itself. He says that the two ‘arecertainly not identical, but are nonetheless very closely related’ (193), andthen (quite implausibly) that Plato and Kant are ‘compelled and inspiredby the same world-view to do philosophy’ and that ‘both doctrines clearlymean exactly the same thing and have exactly the same ultimate goal’(196, 197). The positive use that Schopenhauer makes of this alleged transhistorical unanimity is as follows: the Ideas are to be construed as thatform of cognitive representation that takes us nearest to the thing in itself.
They are ‘the most adequate objecthood of the will or thing in itself . . . thewhole thing in itself, but in the form of representation’ (198). When weare seeing the world most selﬂessly, in the out-of-the-ordinary kind ofcontemplation, we still cannot have cognition of the world purely in itself,
but we are experiencing it in the most objective way.
After these preliminaries Schopenhauer embarks on an account of aesthetic contemplation. §§ 33–34 prepare for a stark contrast between aesthetic contemplation and ‘viewing things in the ordinary way’, where
cognition is thoroughly imbued with the needs and perspectives of thewill. In the transition from the ordinary cognitive state to that of will-less© in this web service Cambridge University Press

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xxx

Introduction

contemplation, both subject and object are transformed. The object isnow not the individual thing, but a timeless Idea apprehended in the process of perceiving the individual thing. The subject also ceases to be thehuman individual or person, and becomes ‘pure subject, the clear mirrorof the object’. A will-less, disinterested consciousness is one in which, fora time, we are able to forget the self from consciousness altogether. Aftersome evocative portrayals of the difference between timeless Ideas andtheir ever-changing, inessential appearances (§ 35), Schopenhauer reaches
the core of his argument in this Book, the claim that Ideas come to becognized uniquely in art (§ 36). The true artist is a genius, for Schopenhauer: someone who has to an abnormal degree the ability to remain in
the state of will-less objectivity, to experience the world with an intensityof perception that enables him to transmit his knowledge of universals to
the rest of humanity. Ideas are quite different from concepts (a contrast
that Schopenhauer picks up later in § 49). Concepts are human abstractions from the experience of individual things through the senses. Ideas
are features of reality discovered purely in immediate intuition, and arenot (contra Plato) accessible to discursive, judgemental thought or reasoning. Hence, for Schopenhauer, genius proper is not found in science ormathematics, nor can one become an artistic genius by learning rules orprecepts. Schopenhauer gives a generic character-portrait of the genius, andthen (§ 36) moves sideways to an interesting account of madness, which
he conceives as closely akin: ‘Great wits to madness sure are near allied’,
as Dryden said.7 On the other hand, he argues, the capacity for will-less,objective consciousness must be in all of us to some extent, since otherwise
the artist would not be able to communicate the vision of the Ideas andenable us to see nature through his eyes (§ 37).
One of the most frequently cited passages in The World as Will andRepresentation occurs in § 38 where Schopenhauer brings to a climax thecontrast between aesthetic contemplation and the ordinary way of viewing
things, and evokes the peculiar worth of the out-of-the-ordinary experience
for the human subject:
as long as our consciousness is ﬁlled by our will, as long as we are given overto the pressure of desires with their constant hopes and fears, as long as we are
the subject of willing, we will never have lasting happiness or peace. Whether
we hunt or we ﬂee, whether we fear harm or chase pleasure, it is fundamentally
all the same: concern for the constant demands of the will, whatever form they7

Though Schopenhauer misremembers this as from Byron. One should always be on the look-out
for misquotation, misattribution and loose paraphrase in Schopenhauer’s references.

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