World as Will and Idea Volume 1

In this towering work of German idealism, Arthur Schopenhauer attempts what he believed Kant had failed to accomplish: a complete account of reality and our knowledge of it. His radical claim is this - the world we perceive is not the world as it truly is. Behind the veil of representation, behind the ordered phenomena that appear to our consciousness, lies something far stranger and more terrifying: an endless, aimless Will that drives all existence. This blind, ceaseless striving manifests in every atom, every organism, every human desire. And it is the source of all suffering. What we call happiness is merely the temporary cessation of want, a brief pause in the Will's endless hunger. Published in 1818 when the author was just thirty, this book was largely ignored for decades until Schopenhauer watched the fashion of Hegelian philosophy fade and his own star rise. Its influence would reshape modern thought: Nietzsche built upon it, Freud found in it a predecessor to his own theory of drives, Wagner heard in it the justification for his music. It remains the most honest and unflinching account of human misery ever written by a philosopher - and the most profound argument for why we might look beyond the will to find any lasting peace.