User:Alcmaeonid/Sandbox3

Lead
Despite its general precedents within the philosophical family of double-aspect theories, Schopenhauer's particular characterization of the world as will, is nonetheless novel and daring. It is also frightening and pandemonic: he maintains that the world as it is in itself (sometimes he crucially adds, “for us”) is an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty. Within Schopenhauer's vision of the world as will, there is no God to be comprehended, and the world is conceived of as being utterly meaningless. When anthropomorphically considered, the world is represented as being in a condition of eternal frustration, as it endlessly strives for nothing in particular, and as it goes essentially nowhere. It is a world far beyond any ascriptions of good and evil.

"The World as Reality and Appearance."

Background
"How could Schopenhauer uphold the Kantian dogma of the unknowability of the 'thing in itself' and at the same time speak of having solved the 'riddle' of the 'thing in itself'? He overcame this difficulty by realizing how the 'will' had shown itself to him as the 'thing in itself': it was not the imagined, discursively recognized will which he identified with the 'thing in itself' but the will percieved in 'internal experience' and felt in his own body."

"..the will here appears as a living body with the iron command to nourish it... Man...is a concretion of a thousand wants and needs. With these he stands on the earth, left to his own devices, in uncertainty about everything except his own need and misery. Accordingly, care for the maintenance of this existence, in the face of demands that are so heavy and proclaim themselves anew every day, occupies, as a rule, the whole of human life. With this is directly connected the second demand, that for the propagation of the race. At the same time dangers of the most varied kinds threaten him from all sides, and to escape from them calls for constant vigilance. With cautious step and anxious glance around he pursues his path, for a thousand accidents and a thousand enemies lie in wait for him. Thus he went in the savage state, and thus he goes in civilized life; there is no security for him."

AS lead
Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher best known for his work The World as Will and Representation. One of the broadest and deepest influences on late 19th and early 20th Century thought, he was the first to propose a blind and irrational "Will-to-live" as the underlying basis of all reality. The denial of this Will became the foundation of an Ethics that advocated either a thorough going ascetic lifestyle or one relieved by an ongoing participation in the arts. An Athiest and pessimist, he was the first great Western philosopher to incorporate eastern Hindu and Buddhist thought into the Western canon.

Notes & references

 * Safranski, Rüdiger (1990) Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-79275-0