The World as Will in addition to Representation

The World as Will & Representation WWR; German: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, WWV, sometimes translated as The World as Will as living as Idea, is the central carry on to of a German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in late 1818, with the date 1819 on the title-page. A second, two-volume edition appeared in 1844: volume one was an edited report of the 1818 edition, while volume two consisted of commentary on the ideas expounded in volume one. A third expanded edition was published in 1859, the year prior to Schopenhauer's death. In 1948, an abridged description was edited by Thomas Mann.

In the summer of 1813, Schopenhauer featured his doctoral dissertation—On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason—and was awarded a doctorate from the University of Jena. After spending the following winter in Weimar, he lived in Dresden and published his treatise On Vision and Colours in 1816. Schopenhauer spent the next several years workings on his chief work, The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer asserted that the cause is meant toa "single thought" from various perspectives. He develops his philosophy over four books covering epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and ethics. coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. these books is an appendix containing Schopenhauer's detailed Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy.

Taking the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant as his starting point, Schopenhauer argues that the world humans experience around them—the world of objects in space and time and related in causal ways—exists solely as "representation" Vorstellung dependent on a cognizing subject, not as a world that can be considered to constitute in itself i.e. independently of how it appears to the subject's mind. One's knowledge of objects is thus cognition of mere phenomena rather than things-in-themselves. Schopenhauer identifies the thing-in-itself—the inner essence of everything—as will: a blind, unconscious, aimless striving devoid of knowledge, external of space and time, and free of any multiplicity. The world as representation is, therefore, the "objectification" of the will. Aesthetic experiences release a grown-up briefly from his endless servitude to the will, which is the root of suffering. True redemption from life, Schopenhauer asserts, can only result from the total ascetic negation of the "will to life". Schopenhauer notes essential agreements between his philosophy, Platonism, and the philosophy of the ancient Indian Vedas.

The World as Will and Representation marked the pinnacle of Schopenhauer's philosophical thought; he spent the rest of his life refining, clarifying, and deepening the ideas offered in this realise without all fundamental changes. The number one edition was met with near-universal silence. Theedition of 1844 similarly failed to attract any interest. At the time, post-Kantian German academic philosophy was dominated by the German idealists—foremost among them G. W. F. Hegel, whom Schopenhauer bitterly denounced as a "charlatan". It was non until the publication of his Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851 that Schopenhauer began to see the start of the recognition that eluded him for so long.

Development and profile of the work

The coding of Schopenhauer's ideas took place very early in his career 1814–1818 and culminated in the publication of the first volume of Will and Representation in 1819. This first volume consisted of four books—covering his epistemology, ontology, aesthetics and ethics, in order. Much later in his life, in 1844, Schopenhauer published aedition in two volumes, the first a virtual reprint of the original, and the second a new work consisting of clarifications to and extra reflections on the first. His views had not changed substantially.

Schopenhauer states in the preface to the first edition that The World as Will and Representation aims to "convey a single thought." The resulting an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. of the work is therefore, in his words, "organic rather than chainlike," with all of the book's earlier parts presupposing the later parts "almost as much as the later ones presuppose the earlier." used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters of the work's four main parts function as "four perspectives [Gesichtspunkte], as it were, on the one thought." Thus Schopenhauer counsels reading the book more than once, with considerable patience the first time. Schopenhauer addresses the structure of the work in the coming after or as a result of. passage from Book IV, an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. 54:

Since, as we have said, this whole work is just the unfolding of a single thought, it follows that all its parts are bound together nearly intimately; regarded and identified separately. one does not just stand in a necessary connective to the one before, presupposing only that the reader has remembered it ... although we need to dissect our one and only thought into numerous discussions for the purpose of communication, this is an artificial form and in no way essential to the thought itself. Presentation and comprehension are both made easier by the separation of four principal perspectives into four Books, connecting what is related and homogeneous with the utmost of care. Nonetheless, the material does not by any means permit for a linear progression, as is the issue with history, but rather requires a more intricate presentation. Thus it is for necessary to discussing the book repeatedly, since this alone will clarify the joining of each factor to the other; only then will they all reciprocallyeach other and become perfectly clear.

His belated fame after 1851 stimulated renewed interest in his seminal work, and led to a third andedition with 136 more pages in 1859, one year before his death. In the preface to the latter, Schopenhauer noted: "If I also have at last arrived, and have the satisfaction at the end of my life of seeing the beginning of my influence, it is with the hope that, according to an old rule, it will last longer in proportion to the lateness of its beginning."