The World as Will and Representation

⚖The case for it

Behind every phenomenon is blind, striving Will: purposeless, insatiable, the source of all suffering. Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to take Indian philosophy seriously, and his pessimism is weirdly liberating. Influenced Nietzsche, Wagner, Wittgenstein, Freud, and Borges. The prose is gorgeous, which helps when the message is that existence is fundamentally painful.

— the canon

✕The case against

Schopenhauer demands homework: he tells you, in the preface, to read his doctoral dissertation first, master Kant, and then read this book twice. Take him at his word and you owe him months. The system itself is one intuition (blind Will behind everything) unfolded across a thousand pages, and the second volume mostly elaborates what the first already said.

— the honest librarian