The World as Will and Representation: Part II

This is Part 2 of a new 2023 translation into American English of Arthur Schopenhauer's 1819 "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" Or "The World as Will and Representation". This work is sometimes translated as "The World as Will and Idea".

The first part was published in 1819, with a second version containing additional materials published in 1844.

This is Volume III in the Complete Works of Arthur Schopenhauer by Newcomb Livraria Press

Schopenhauer enjoys little fame in modern Philosophic studies but was critically influential on some of the biggest names in history- Kafka, Freud, and Nietzsche among them. Like Kant, he is responding English Empiricism, borrowing heavily from Kant but then developing a bizarre new type of Platonism which is deeply pessimistic and pseudo-Buddhist.

Schopenhauer's claim that reason is subject to Will is a critical shift that would be expounded upon by Nietzsche, leading to Freud's entire philosophic project. The entire idea of the Unconscious is rooted in Schopenhauer. From the brutality of this existence where we are oppressed and enslaved by the Will, art is the only escape. Here Nietzsche's Art-Philosophy begins to make sense in light of this deification of the experience of Art. Kafka was a reader of Schopenhauer, and one can see this emphasis on suffering being meaningless and inescapable.