The World as Will and Representation
The World as Will and Representation (WWR; German: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, WWV), sometimes translated as The World as Will and Idea, is the central work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in late 1818, with the date 1819 on the title-page.[1] A second, two-volume edition appeared in 1844: volume one was an edited version 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 version was edited by Thomas Mann.[2]
Author
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung
R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp; E. F. J. Payne; Richard E. Aquila and David Carus; Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway
German
- 1818/19 (1st edition)
- 1844 (2nd expanded edition)
- 1859 (3rd expanded edition)
Germany
In the summer of 1813, Schopenhauer submitted 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 working on his chief work, The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer asserted that the work is meant to convey a "single thought"[3] from various perspectives. He develops his philosophy over four books covering epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and ethics. Following 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 exist in itself (i.e., independently of how it appears to the subject's mind). One's knowledge of objects is thus knowledge 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, outside of space and time, and free of all multiplicity. The world as representation is therefore the "objectification" of the will. Aesthetic experiences release one briefly from one’s 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 fundamental 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 presented in this work without any fundamental changes. The first edition was met with near-universal silence. The second edition 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".
English translations[edit]
In the English language, this work is known under three different titles. Although English publications about Schopenhauer played a role in the recognition of his fame as a philosopher in later life (1851 until his death in 1860)[4] and a three volume translation by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, titled The World as Will and Idea, appeared already in 1883–1886,[5] the first English translation of the expanded edition of this work under this title The World as Will and Representation appeared by E. F. J. Payne (who also translated several other works of Schopenhauer) as late as in 1958[6] (paperback editions in 1966 and 1969).[7] A later English translation by Richard E. Aquila in collaboration with David Carus is titled The World as Will and Presentation (2008).[8] The latest translation by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway is titled The World as Will and Representation (Volume 1: 2010, Volume 2: 2018).[9][10]
There is some debate over the best way to convey, in English, the meaning of Vorstellung, a key concept in Schopenhauer's philosophy and used in the title of his main work. Schopenhauer uses Vorstellung to describe whatever comes before in the mind in consciousness (as opposed to the will, which is what the world that appears to us as Vorstellung is in itself). In ordinary usage, Vorstellung could be rendered as "idea" (thus the title of Haldane and Kemp's translation). However, Kant uses the Latin term repraesentatio when discussing the meaning of Vorstellung (Critique of Pure Reason A320/B376). Thus, as is commonly done, one might use the English term 'representation' to render Vorstellung (as done by E. F. J. Payne in his translation). Norman, Welchman, and Janaway also use the English term 'representation'. In the introduction, they point out that Schopenhauer uses Vorstellung the same way Kant uses it — 'representation' "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."[9]
In the introduction to his translation with David Carus (first published 2008), Richard Aquila argues that the reader will not grasp the details of the philosophy of Schopenhauer properly without rendering Vorstellung as "presentation". It is the notion of a performance or theatrical presentation – of which one is the spectator – that is key in this interpretation. The world that we perceive can be understood as a "presentation" of objects in the theatre of our own mind.[11] Vorstellung can refer to what is presented or to the process of presenting it. Schopenhauer argues that what does the "presenting" – what sets the world as 'presentation' before one – is the cognizant subject itself. The primary sense of Vorstellung used by Schopenhauer, Aquila writes, is that of what is presented to a subject: the presented object (qua presented, as opposed to what it is "in itself"). Aquila argues that translating Vorstellung as 'representation' fails to "bring out the dual notion of that which is 'set before' a cognizant subject as its object, and the presentational activity of the subject therein engaged"[12] and is potentially misleading from Schopenhauer's principal point.
Influence[edit]
The first decades after its publication The World as Will and Representation was met with near silence. Exceptions were Goethe and Jean Paul. Goethe immediately started to read the magnum opus of Schopenhauer when it arrived and "read it with an eagerness as she [ Ottilie von Goethe ] had never before seen in him".[23] Goethe told his daughter-in-law that he had now pleasure for an entire year, because he would read it completely, contrary to his custom of sampling pages to his liking. The influence of Schopenhauer can be read in Gespräche mit Goethe and Urworte. Orphisch.
In the years where the work was largely ignored, Jean Paul praised it as "a work of philosophical genius, bold, universal, full of penetration and profoundness—but of a depth often hopeless and bottomless, akin to that melancholy lake in Norway, in whose deep water, beneath the steep rock-walls, one never sees the sun, but only stars reflected",[24] on which Schopenhauer commented: "In my opinion the praise of one man of genius fully makes good the neglect of a thoughtless multitude".[25]
This neglect came to an end in the last years of his life. Schopenhauer would become the most influential philosopher in Germany until World War I.[26] Especially artists were attracted to the work. No philosopher had given so much importance to art: one fourth of The World as Will and Representation is concerned with aesthetics. To be mentioned are Wagner (Influence of Schopenhauer on Tristan und Isolde), Schönberg,[27] Mahler,[28] who cites The World as Will and Representation as "the most profound writing on music he had ever encountered",[29] Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Jorge Luis Borges, Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence and Samuel Beckett.
The philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Philipp Mainländer both described the discovery of The World as Will and Representation as a revelation. Nietzsche commented, "I belong to those readers of Schopenhauer who know perfectly well, after they have turned the first page, that they will read all the others, and listen to every word that he has spoken".
Charles Darwin quoted The World as Will and Representation in The Descent of Man.[30] Some read ideas in it that can be found in the theory of evolution, for example, that sexual instinct is a tool of nature to ensure the quality of the offspring. Schopenhauer argued in favor of transformism by pointing to one of the most important and familiar evidences of the truth of the theory of descent, the homologies in the inner structure of all the vertebrates.[31]
Schopenhauer's discussions of language and ethics were a major influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein.[32][33][34]
Schopenhauer's views on the independence of spatially separated systems, the principium individuationis, influenced Einstein,[35] who called him a genius.[36] Schrödinger put the Schopenhauerian label on a folder of papers in his files "Collection of Thoughts on the physical Principium individuationis".[37]
