Introduction

'The world is my representation.' The opening sentence proclaims the book's descent from Kant: the world we know is only appearance, presented to us in the forms of time, space and causality. But Schopenhauer goes further than Kant: we can know the thing in itself directly, from within, and it is will, a blind and never-satisfied urge to exist that manifests itself in all things, and in man as endless desire. Desire unsatisfied is pain, desire satisfied is boredom: 'life swings like a pendulum, to and fro between pain and boredom.' There are two ways out: art, above all music, in whose aesthetic contemplation we are released from the will for a while; and, like the saints and the Buddha, the complete denial of the will to live through asceticism and compassion. The four books treat in turn knowledge, nature, art and ethics.