The World as Will and Representation

Wondering if anyone has read this and how you proceed to beginning it. I know someone who read through it but I doubt they actually understood it. Reading the preface you need to read Principle of Sufficient reason, Shcopenhauers crticism of Kant, and Critique of Pure Reason, also a slew of other Principles and Laws need to be read. Anyone read this book what did they think?

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Seems like a meme. I doubt anyone on Veeky Forums understood it. I just got through Anti-Oedipus and didn't understand any of it so I'm increasingly skeptical of philosophy tomes in general.

OP that book is hard without a decent philosophical background.
You should probably have a grasp of kant and also plato which schopi loves. I recommend you read the Parerga Und Paralipomena that was published laterfirst which is a series of essays that explains things in a easier way, but i'm not sure if there is an english translation.

He's lying when he says you need to know Fourfold Root.

Schopenhauer is not that complicated. It's a good book to start out with. If you understand the distinction between the noumenon and the pheomenon, in Kant's philosophy, you're fine.

He's basically taking that essential Kantian dualism, the "thumbnail sketch of Kant" version of Kant where we are confined in the finitude of the phenomenal, and then associating (from his actually fairly limited knowledge of Buddhism/Hinduism) the Buddhist/Hindu concept of maya (illusion) with the phenomenal, which valorizes it as merely determinate, while associating the noumenon with the realm of pure Being (which he turns into Will, a drive [Trieb] that impels maya/the phenomenal) that is thereby valorized as the Real.

It's an easy connection to make because it is already deeply embedded in Christian theology for 1500 years by the time of Schopenhauer's writing. It's the same reason that neo-Platonists often apply the same reduction to Buddhism/Hinduism now. We live in a mere "echo" or "emanation" of true Being, and therefore we ought to "ascend" (by suspending our susceptibility to the emanated and illusory) toward true Being, toward true knowledge of the Will.

It's a very attractive metaphysical response to Kant.

You're just a newfag desu AO is it's own thing entirely, hardly even philosophy

Anti-Oedipus literally was a number one bestseller in france when it came out. If millions of of frenchmen can do it, you can do, too. But you can't just jump in without reading up on the context etc.

I disagree with schopenhauer's philosophy being an attractive response, it's basically a nightmare version of neoplatonism at the end of the day, the pure being is just Will,blind and empty and striving, without Telos, a completely blind force and the only way to escape is to listen to music and become an ascetic or some shit.

>Doesn't use Cambridge picrel.
TRIGGERED.

So Being = Will = Noumena which drives phenomena? Which part of this is the Real? Is it Being = Will = Real = Noumena?

I totally agree, I just meant that it's an attractive metaphysical "next move" to make when you're post-Kantian and you need to make sense of the world in Kantian terms, but Kant isn't helping you out. I do agree it's horrifying though - but then again, that's because I am even more neo-Platonist and I think the Will is (at least part of) the Good and the True, if not a personal God, so I'm sure a Buddhist would be just as horrified by me for trying to bind their "soul" to samsara.

The Real is the realm of true Being beyond the veil of illusion - that's the neo-Platonist element, also the Gnostic, the idea that what we experience is all just illusion and we ought to be escaping it. Sorry if I said it all shitty and confusing.

It's confusing because the phenomenal is often talked about as the Real as well, in that it is what we take-to-be, it's what we predicate about, it's what we assume is real, or for certain Idealists (like Hegel, depending on your perspective of Hegel), it simply is the "Real." But in general, that old Platonising model which the West keeps recapitulating really has a hate-on for the phenomenal, the material, the this-worldly "doxa" of our immediate and intuitive experience.

Good book on situating Schopenhauer's Buddhism is Schwab's Oriental Renaissance.

And at the same time we also place a barrier between the phenomenal and the material.

You ought to read Plato, Fourfold Root, Critique of Pure Reason. Once you've got the main ideas of those down, this should be easy enough.

>Schopenhauer's Buddhism
Don't waste your time on his oriental influences. It can be intersting as a side read, but the real substance of Schopenhauer is in response to the Western tradition. If you know the basics of buddhism or vedanta, then you already have more than enough knowledge.

Yeah just read Kant’s page in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and you’ll be fine

How many copies of anti-oedipus sat in a table or shelf unread past the first few pages?

>If millions of of frenchmen can do it
Millions of Frenchmen can pose, which is what the French are best at. Those were mainly coffee table ornaments.

You're in good shape user, nothing to worry about. There would be something wrong with you if Anti-Oedipus made sense. Most inconsistent work of "philosophy" ever produced. Totally unreliable in every way. "B-but muh fluid ontology"....

That would be cool if people found a way to put into practice other than dropping out of society and living off their parents' trust funds/rich spouses, etc.

>You should probably have a decent grasp of Kant

Heheheheh... You mean like Schopenhauer?? :-/ Dude didn't even read the second critique, as evidenced by his theory of the will.

I can confirm that this is a good overview.

Fantastic posts.

Don't you think that Kant's treatment of the will is even more nuanced than that put forth by Neoplatonists (I can only speak about Plotinus)? I mean, merely saying that the will is always oriented towards the good is one thing, but it's entirely another to show how that interacts with freedom and the world of presentation. It seems like it's pretty easy to backslide from neoplatonism towards a gnostic dualism where good and evil become meaningless terms.

tfw really want to read this schwab book but it costs >$100 and cannot afford

>Schopenhauer disagreed with Kant therefore he didn't understand him

>Implying Kant wasn't actually describing reality in the second critique.

Wasn't Schopenhauer's account of the Will describing reality in the same way?

i hate Veeky Forums so much god this thread is sad

Not in the slightest! For Schopenhauer, there is will without (true) ends, whereas for Kant ends are of the essence of will. The will is, (almost) literally Practical Reason. It's what allows us to tie cognition together and map out our lives in a meaningful way.

As far as I could tell from my reading of v1 of The World as Will & Representation, Schopenhauer's account of the will describes it as directed by the imagination, which is really a personalized version of the endless striving of the (morally neutral at best) world.

For Kant, the will is what can dignify us. For Schopenhauer, it's what degrades us.

By "in the same way," I meant that, for both of them, the will or willing is what precedes all activity in the world. Schopenhauer gives it a negative content, Kant gives it a positive content.

The will precedes all meaningful activity in the world for Kant and is essentially connective. For Schopenhauer, it seems to be generated by the illusory ends of universal strife. The will is the beginning of fragmentation, which is why only art in a unified sense can offer relief.

Schopenhauer gives the will a morally-neutral naturalistic content that promotes suffering. Kant gives it a tendency towards good, with a strong possibility of falling victim to pathology.

>The body is given in two entirely different ways to the subject of knowledge, who becomes an individual only through his identity with it. It is given as an idea in intelligent perception, as an object among other objects and subject to the law of objects. And it is also given in quite a different way as that which is immediately known to everyone, and is signified by the word 'will.' Every true act of his will is also at once and without exception a movement of his body. The act of the will and the movement of the body are not two different things objectively known, which the bond of causality unites; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect; they are one and the same, but given in entirely different ways -- immediately, and again in perception for the understanding. The action of the body is nothing but the act of the will objectified, i.e. passed into perception. It will appear later that this is true of every movement of the body, not merely those which follow upon motives, but also involuntary movements which follow upon mere stimuli, and indeed, that the whole body is nothing but the will objectified, i.e. will become idea.

For Schopenhauer, the Will not only precedes all meaningful activity, but also all that is apparently meaningless.

Start with Essential Schopenhauer. Very easy to understand and you get a good grasp on his thoughts.

amazon.ca/Essential-Schopenhauer-Selections-Representation-Writings/dp/0061768243

Don't really understand the conflation of voluntary and involuntary acts. Seems like he's trying to naturalize the will, which doesn't make any sense to me, as the will is by lies beyond experience, while nature is the realm of possible experience. Reinhold has some pretty interesting things to say about such attempts to naturalize the will in his "Fundamental Concepts". He seemed to think it was what happened when people who have abused their freedom come to such a point of self-loathing that they would prefer their will to be mechanized than to take responsibility for its activities.

I'm fairly certain Schopenhauer that wanted desperately to pierce that awful veil, to grab maya by the throat and make her do his bidding. I'm less convinced that this worked out very well for him.

Great pic, BTW.

O enlightened user tell us more about your metaphysical understandings

DIdn't Schope spend his youth studying Kant and isn't Will and Representation his argument against Kants philosophy? I haven't started the book yet only reading the introduction but this is what I recall being explained about Schopes life when he was in his 20's.

as you said in the introduction to the 1st ed. it is stated you should read his dissertation "über die vierfache wurzel des satzes vom zureichenden grunde". After reading about halfway through that one I realised, I would not understand his book without having read Kant so I postponed it.

bumping a good thread

>westerners speculating on hindusim

don't listen to these pseuds, schop is comparatively easy to read, will and representation is about a bunch of different shit and still interesting without understanding of speculative philosophy

Schopenhauer believes that he is a genius, and (you're right) believes that his work provides an effective refutation of Kant. His philosophy is good (for thrills and chills), but it's not on Kant's level. There is a noteworthy lack of consistency and subtlety that are nearly omnipresent in Kant's works.

From my reading of his "The World as Will", I believe that Schopenhauer spent quite a while studying Kant's first critique, but neglected its conclusion, as well as the second and third. Thus, I'd say that it is by no means necessary to read Kant before Schopenhauer. Neither is it necessary to read the laundry list of other books that he tells you to read.

He'll berate you for not reading what he recommended throughout the book, but will review all of the relevant points for you anyway. This is one of the few aspects of Schopenhauer's writings that makes me feel like he probably wasn't all that bad. He must have been pretty self-aware of being a tight-assed curmudgeon.

People like Schopenhauer because he gives them "the feels". This is valid, but it doesn't make him a serious philosopher.

Read The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee. That's all you need.

I read it without any prior philosophical knowledge and enjoyed it immensely. Went back and read all the recommended works and then re-read Will and Rep along with volume 2. It is my favorite book.

Anti-Oedipus got BTFO by Michel Clouseb

Meant Clouscard