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Brief Lives

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Alistair MacFarlane reviews the phenomenal life of a wilful mind.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) is one of the most famous books in philosophy. In it Schopenhauer anticipated the Freudian and Jungian ideas of the unconscious, and it has had a deep influence on many artists, most notably Wagner. Nowadays it is seldom read, and its message is notoriously difficult to accept. But it remains important because it presents a unique vision of the world, repellent to many, enthralling to some. In this book Schopenhauer gives us an uncompromising idea of Will as a primitive, elemental driver of our destiny, and so presents us with a harrowingly bleak vision of the human condition that uncomfortably anticipates many of the horrors of the Twentieth Century.

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