Arthur Schopenhauer

His chief inspirations were Plato, Kant, and the Upanishads. He is, in fact, the first Western philosopher to have related his thought to Hindu and Buddhist ideas. However, his most distinct contribution to philosophy is in his insistence that Will is more than thought in both man and nature.

…………….But the general upshot, that the universe is a single ‘vast’ cosmic Will to Exist which experiences itself through an apparent diversity of conscious beings is a spatio-temporal and deterministic world, is clear enough and strongly argues. This Will is said to be unconscious in inanimate nature, but it is hard to see how once can understand Schopenhauer unless it is supposed that it has some sort of dumb feeling of itself, even if there is not a contrast between subject and object required for consciousness in any full sense.

More than anything else, Schopenhauer is famous as the philosopher of pessimism. The wretchedness of the world and the nastiness of human nature, he contends, with many striking examples, is evident enough empirically. But it is also a necessary truth, following from the very nature of its underlying reality, the Will. Will seeks constantly for a quietus which from its very nature as striving it could only reach by forfeiting its main goal, existence; indeed pleasure has really only a negative character as the relief from the suffering which is its normal state. Moreover, in its apparent pluralization, each part of the phenomenal world is powered by a drive to survive at the expense of others, so that there is a universal and appalling war of all against all.

The only lasting solution, however to our misery comes when people become so aware of the necessary wretchedness of life, of this misery of existing as futile manifestations of the cosmic Will to Live, that they lose all wish for existence and gratification. This what happens in the case of the genuine saint, an ascetic who has no concern with living and prospering. In him the Will to live has denied itself. Or rather, there is only a faint twinkling of it left, hardly enough to sustain the picture of a world of things in space and time. When he dies this twinkling will utterly cease and with it the world of which he was conscious, since this consisted in nothing but his picture of it. For Will and its picture of the world cannot continue to be when it no longer desires, and the world cannot be when the Will ceases, since it only the Will’s own delusive picture of itself.

Excerpts from “This Philosophers” (Oxford University Press)

When someone ‘wills’ something they have an aim in mind; they’re trying to do something. But that is not at all what Schopenhauer means when he declares reality at the level of the World as Will. The Will is aimless, or, as he sometimes puts it, ‘blind’ It isn’t attempting to bring about any particular result. It doesn’t have any point or goal. It is just this great surge of energy that is in every natural phenomenon as well as in our conscious acts of willing things. For Schopenhauer there is no God to give it direction. Nor is the Will itself God. The human situation is that we, like all reality are part of this meaningless force. ~ Page 135 "A Little History of Philosophy" Author: Nigel Warburton

Schopenhauer's concept of 'Will' should not be understood in the common sense as simply wanting something for oneself, but is much more than that. It is essence of what it means to be human. Previous to Schopenhauer, much of the philosophical tradition places mankind as the thinking animal, as a rational, conscious being, but Schopenhauer saw consciousness as the mere surface of our minds. Under the conscious intellect is the unconscious will which is a striving, persistent force. .... ~ Page 18 (Except: Nitsche -- Essential understanding - Author Roy Jackson)