Our World as Will and Representation | Arthur Schopenhauer

"The world is my idea." What does this mean? Does the world exist without us as subjects? And what structures our world as idea, that is, our representation of the world?

Schopenhauer gives his view on how our world is structured in his masterpiece: The World as Will and Representation. Here he describes the fundamental difference between that which we as subjects observe, our world as idea, and that which structures this world of Ideas - which would be the Will. The will is, in its lower objectification, phenomena like gravity, chemical processes and so on. And in its higher objectification it can be seen in living organisms as the "will to live". The force that makes our heart beat, which is the same force that lets waters flow, and that which pulls the earth to the sun...

---- Contents of this video ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

0:00 - Intro
1:51 - Part I: The World as Representation
8:06 - Part II: The World as Will
17:01 - Summary

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[ghastlyone]

This video needs about 7 Billion more views

[jonathanmoore]

Enjoying your work. Thank you very much.

[maxr.k.pravus]

Yet another good vid. Shame it lacks eng subs

[user_-qgyd]

I just love your channel. It has some of the best videos on the topics you cover. Thank you, and please post more!! Can’t wait for new vids as I regularly watch and rewatch all of them.!

[DiogenesNephew]

Seems like the "world" in the thumbnail should be a question mark rather than a picture of the earth, and the representation would be the earth on a screen or some such thing.

[JeffHardy]

high quality video sir good work, this channel will explode i hope soon,

[twahl]

Wowi this is awesome!! Really hope youll make a video covering the 3rd and 4th book:)))

[Haveuseenmyjetpack]

I believe Bergson was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer. Husserl & Wittgenstein as well.

Great video, keep it up and thank you!

[aahmadHv]

I have a question please … did he believed in universal and abstract entities as independent being ? If not then how he thought of them ?

[Philo-Vids]

The big question is:

Was Schopenhauer correct?

Wow! It takes genius to explaining the most complex, profound things in a language that is accesible to less capable thinkers.

That said, his Magnus Opus, the World as Will and Representation, could prove to be a very recondite tour de force, difficult read.

We may get the gist of his main thesis in a few clear, outlined sentences, but in order to comprehend his penchant for countless analogies and similes, one would be required an intellectual, multifaceted mind of the first rank, of the first order. I wish you good luck with that!

Try your wit with the Second Book of the aforementioned “World As Will and Representation, ” his trenchant critique on Immanuel Kant’s ornate philosophy. I read it many times, and I did not understand one sentence.

If you can understand such complicated thoughts (Books 1 and 2), then, you must be one of the most intelligent creatures whoever lived and walked on the surface of the Earth!

Finally, it is propitious to say that even Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, have all loaned countless concepts and ideas, at times outright plagiarism (e.g., the survival of the fittest, the supremacy of passions and the “irrational” viz., the unconscious, as a variant or metonym for the “will-to-exist” which precedes the threshold of consciousness or cognizance. Hence, Freud, who has loaned his ideas of the unconscious and dreams from Schopenhauer’s philosophy, is today lauded in USA as the godfather of psychology.

I shall forgo the cosmogony of Albert Einstein, it is quite Kantian, and it smacks of the Will-to-Exist.

The Big Bang…hmmm, I wish Schopenhauer’s philosophy could be tested as still relevant!! He makes it clear that Will is not a force, and it has neither beginning, nor an end. Interestingly, when speaking about biogenesis (Second Book, World as Will and Representation) Arthur Schopenhauer hints at the fact that the Will to Exist, since it is not confined to our linear materialistic inquiries, could make conditions appropriate, propitious, fertile and suitable for species still sleeping in the womb of time and space.

Wow! Can you believe that! Then, if we follow on the footsteps of Arthur Schopenhauer’s biogenesis, life “should” be a common phenomenon out there…in outer space.

[Alphardus]

Schopenhauer was not an indirect realist, a few of your pictures seem to paint it as such. Nor is he a Berkeleyan idealist 'To be is to be perceived'. Yes indeed, we would not have an representational first person experience, if our organs of experience do not exist but this doesn't affect the outer worlds existence-in-itself, you certainly wouldn't say that your parents didn't exist before you were born because you don't have an experience or representation of them? As if they rely upon that for their own existence. They would certainly have something to say about that, not to mention its plainly absurd and empirical observation of the world of phenomena/presentation, refutes such an absurd claim.
The Will was/is always objectified. The Will is primary, the mind/consciousness is secondary. The mind does not create the body, the body creates the mind. The Will creates the mind, not the other way around. Your first person experience of something does not give existence-in-itself to that which you experience. Everything is a thing-in-itself. Kant made this quite clear in his refutation of idealism. Everything external to me does not rely on my first person experience of it for its existence but my first person experience relies on my organs, nervous system, body as a whole etc, for the experience.
Schopenhauer is a form of direct realist. Kant was also an epistemological and ontological realist. Who also stated that 'things-in-themselves' exist independently from us perceiving/experiencing them, to deny that is to slip into a madhouse and usher in Berkeley's nonsense of a big mind aka God (Which is laughably not needed) which is always perceiving or a form of solipsism. Mainlander is better at this understanding in the School, after Schopenhauer, as Schopenhauer illegitimately claimed that causality in general is the function of the understanding. See 'The Transcendental Analytic'.

'Schopenhauer and Direct Realism' by RJ Henle.
'Schopenhauer's Kant critique and Direct Realism' by A. Welchman.
'Kant's proof of the existence of the Outer World' by Bianca Ancillotti.
'Critique of Schopenhauerian Philosophy' by Philipp Mainlander.