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On the Freedom of the Will. On the Freedom of the Will (German: Ueber die Freiheit des Willens) is an essay presented to the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in 1838 by Arthur Schopenhauer as a response to the academic question that they had posed: "Is it possible to demonstrate human free will from self-consciousness?"
In the English language, this work is known under three different titles. Although English publications about Schopenhauer played a role in the recognition of his fame as a philosopher in later life (1851 until his death in 1860) [4] and a three volume translation by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, titled The World as Will and Idea, appeared already in 1883–1886, [5] the first English translation ...
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The Will to death, which is an inverted form of Schopenhauer's Will to live, is the principle of all existence ever since the origin of the world. Indeed, God [note 2] gave himself death, as it were, in creating the world, and since then, annihilation constitutes the only "salvation" of being, its only possibility of "redemption".
Schopenhauer referred to asceticism as the denial of the will to live. Human life is a ceaseless struggle for satisfaction and, instead of continuing their struggle, ascetics break it. It does not matter if these ascetics adhere to the dogmata of Christianity or to Dharmic religions , since their way of living is the result of intuitive knowledge.
Schopenhauer’s central proposition is the main idea of his entire philosophy, he states simply as “The world is my representation”. The rest of his work is an elaborate analysis and explanation of this sentence, which begins with his Kantian epistemology, but finds thorough elaboration within his version of the principle of sufficient ...
Schopenhauer believed that while all people were in thrall to the Will, the quality and intensity of their subjection differed: Only through the pure contemplation . . . which becomes absorbed entirely in the object, are the Ideas comprehended; and the nature of genius consists precisely in the preëminent ability for such contemplation. . . .
With Schopenhauer, the silencing of the will is a rare event. The artistic genius can achieve this state temporarily, while only a few saints have achieved total cessation throughout history. For Mainländer, the entirety of the cosmos is slowly but surely moving towards the silencing of the will-to-live and to (as he calls it) "redemption".