The World as Will and Representation (WWR; ), 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.) 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 before Schopenhauer's death. In 1948, an abridged version was edited by Thomas Mann.Thomas Mann, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung von Schopenhauer in einer gekürzten Fassung dargeboten von Thomas Mann (Zurich: Classen, 1948).
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"Schopenhauer, Arthur. World as Will and Representation, Preface to the First Edition. 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" () 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.
Unlike Kant, who argued the "thing-in-itself" was unknowable, Schopenhauer contended that we have a direct, non-representational window into it through our own bodies. He posited that the human body is simply the "objectified Will" made visible in time and space. Furthermore, he argued that the human intellect is not a divine or magical faculty but a purely biological tool—a secondary phenomenon evolved to serve the irrational needs of the Will. This "biological demotion" of the rational mind heavily influenced later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, and provided an early philosophical precursor to modern evolutionary psychology.
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 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)especially John Oxenford, "Iconoclasm in German Philosophy", in Westminster Review, new series 3 (1853): 388–407 and a three volume translation by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, titled The World as Will and Idea, appeared already in 1883–1886,Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Idea, 3 vols. transl. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1883–1886) 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 translated several other works of Schopenhauer) as late as in 1958Arthur Schopenhauer "The world as will and representation", transl. by E. F. J. Payne (Indian Hills, Colorado: The Falcon’s Wing, 1958) (paperback editions in 1966 and 1969).Arthur Schopenhauer "The world as will and representation", Courier Dover Publications (1969) A later English translation by Richard E. Aquila in collaboration with David Carus is titled The World as Will and Presentation (2008).Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Presentation, trans. Richard E. Aquila in collaboration with David Carus (New York: Longman, 2008) 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).
There is some debate over the best way to convey, in English, the meaning of Vorstellung, a key concept in Schopenhauer's philosophy that is 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."
In the introduction to his translation with David Carus (first published 2008), Richard E. 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. 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"Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Presentation, trans. Richard E. Aquila in collaboration with David Carus (New York: Longman, 2008), p. xvi and is potentially misleading from Schopenhauer's principal point.
Relationship to earlier philosophical work
Schopenhauer demands that his doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which appeared in 1813, be read before WWR as an introduction. Referring to On the Fourfold Root, Schopenhauer states in the preface to the first edition of WWR that it is "absolutely impossible to truly understand the present work unless the reader is familiar with this introduction and propaedeutic, and the contents of that essay are presupposed here as much as if they had been included in the book".
Furthermore, Schopenhauer states at the beginning that his book assumes the reader's prior knowledge of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Schopenhauer asserted that his philosophy was the natural continuation of Kant's, and is regarded by some as remaining more faithful to Kant's metaphysical system of transcendental idealism, expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), than any of the other later German idealists. However, The World as Will and Representation contains an appendix entitled "Critique of the Kantian philosophy", in which Schopenhauer rejects most of Kant's ethics and significant parts of his epistemology and aesthetics. As Schopenhauer explains: "However much I take the achievements of the great Kant as my point of departure, a serious study of his works has nonetheless enabled me to discover significant errors, and I have had to separate these errors out and show them to be unsound so that I could then presuppose and apply what is true and excellent in his theories in a pure form, freed from these errors."
Schopenhauer saw the human will as our one window to the reality behind the world as representation, i.e. the external world as we experience it through our mental faculties. According to Schopenhauer, the will is the 'inner essence' of the entire world, i.e. the Kantian thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), and exists independently of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason that govern the world as representation. Schopenhauer believed that while we may be precluded from direct knowledge of the Kantian noumenon, we may gain knowledge about it to a certain extent (unlike Kant, for whom the noumenon was completely unknowable). This is because, according to Schopenhauer, the relationship between the world as representation and the world as it is 'in itself' can be understood by investigating the relationship between our bodies (material objects, i.e. representations, existing in space and time) and our will. Another important difference between the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Kant is Schopenhauer's rejection of Kant's doctrine of twelve categories of the understanding. Schopenhauer claims that eleven of Kant's categories are superfluous "blind windows" meant for the purposes of architectonic symmetry. Schopenhauer argues that there are three a priori forms by which our minds render our experience of the world intelligible to ourselves: time, space, and causality.
Schopenhauer also states in his introduction that the reader will be at his best prepared to understand the theories in The World as Will and Representation if he has lingered in the school of "the divine Plato": Schopenhauer frequently acknowledges Plato's influence on the development of his theories and, particularly in the context of aesthetics, speaks of the Platonic forms as existing on an intermediate ontological level between the representation and the Will. The reader will be at an even further advantage if they are already familiar with the ancient Indian philosophy contained within the Upanishads.
Development and structure of the work