The World as Will and Representation

⚖The case for it

After Kant and Hegel the plain declarative sentences land as relief, and readers who reject the whole system still call him “a writer of clear prose.” Book III, on how art and music suspend willing for a while, is the stretch people call personally affecting rather than merely argued. Several picked it up at a low point and say the account of desire and suffering changed how they hold their own, one calling the experience “one of the greatest pleasures the study of philosophy has to offer.” Volume 2's standalone chapters on death and madness are the quotable ones, full of what one reader calls “razor-sharp observations and quotes,” and more than one reader would hand you those first. It sent readers to the Upanishads.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Schopenhauer opens by telling you to read Kant's first Critique and his own dissertation before starting, and “demands that his reader read his book twice.” Readers decline, then find the early chapters hard going. The move from knowing your own body as will to everything being will gets flagged as analogy doing work argument should, and one reader concludes “his philosophical system is annihilated as well” once that move fails. The biology propping it up is pre-Darwinian, which dates whole applied chapters. He interrupts himself to trash Hegel, Euclid and Newton. Twelve to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes, and readers warn against taking them back to back. His pages on women are a real cost.

— the honest librarian

29h

honest hours

41

sittings