The World as Will and Representation: volume 1 pdf

Arthur Schopenhauer is a German philosopher, usually famous for his pessimism about life as “a pendulum that swings between pain and boredom.” Schopenhauer actually lived alone and immersed for the greater part of his life, but his loneliness or personal suffering was not, as some think, a primary reason for formulating his pessimistic views of life. On the contrary, Schopenhauer's life - at least in its beginning - was not as bad as we might imagine, and it can be said that many opportunities were available to him to live a quiet academic and bourgeois life that satisfies the masses of people. of modern and ancient languages, as he went to dance and theater parties in his youth, His mother Joanna also set up a salon attended by many intellectuals, including the great German poet Goethe, but Arthur was constantly at odds with his mother, especially after his father's death. Schopenhauer later obtained his doctorate from the University of Berlin, and he was destined to have a quiet teaching career had he not chosen - stubbornly, courageous and perhaps naive - to give his lectures at the same time during which the most prominent German philosopher at the time, Georg Hegel, was giving his lectures, no one listened to Schopenhauer Who decided to retire from teaching and devote himself to writing. Schopenhauer offered his extremely insightful views on many issues, from epistemology and philosophy of science to philosophy of ethics and art, and he was careful in his thinking, following the example of the German philosopher Kant the “Great” as he liked to describe him, particularly in his strict self-criticism of his ideas. He also remained loyal to philosophy, resenting those who make it an "instrument of state purposes from above, and personal purposes from below". And he was firm in his conviction that he had accomplished his philosophical work not for his contemporaries or for the people of his country, but for humanity, because of his belief that everything of value needed a long time to gain its legitimacy. of moral authority) even daring to describe the latter as a “charlatan” and “mentally degenerate.”

The World as Will and Representation: volume 1 pdf by Arthur Schopenhauer

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 the will leads him to regard human beings as striving irrationally and suffering in a world that has no purpose, a condition redeemed by the elevation of aesthetic consciousness and finally overcome by the will’s self-denial and a mystical vision of the self as one with the world as a whole. He is in some ways the most progressive post-Kantian, an atheist with profound ideas 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 same time he undertakes an ambitious global metaphysics of a conservative, more or less pre-Kantian kind, and is driven by a Platonic vision of escape from empirical reality into a realm of higher knowledge.