Arthur Schopenhauer - the world as will and representation. Synopsis of Arthur Schopenhauer the world as will and representation

Arthur Schopenhauer

The world as will and representation

Ob nicht Natur zulezt sich doch ergründe?

[And won’t nature finally reveal itself?]

Preface to the first edition

I want to explain here how this book should be read so that it can be better understood. What it has to communicate is one single thought. And yet, despite all my efforts, I could not find a shorter way to present it than this entire book.

I consider this idea to be something that has been the subject of searches for a very long time under the name of philosophy, which is precisely why historically educated people have considered it as impossible to find as the philosopher’s stone, although Pliny already told them: “How many things are considered impossible until they come true.” "(Hist. nat. 7, 1).

Depending on which of the different sides to consider this single thought, it turns out to be what was called metaphysics, and what was called ethics, and what was called aesthetics. And, of course, she must “be all these things” if she really is what I say she is.

System of Thoughts must constantly have an architectonic connection, that is, one where one part always supports another, but is not supported by it, where the cornerstone finally supports all the parts, without itself being supported by them, and where the top is supported by itself, without supporting anything. Vice versa, one single thought, no matter how significant its volume, must maintain perfect unity. If, nevertheless, for the purpose of transmission, it allows division into parts, then the connection of these parts must still be organic, that is, one where each part supports the whole as much as it itself is supported by it, where no one is the first and not the last, where the whole thought from each part benefits from clarity and even the smallest part cannot be fully understood if the whole is not understood in advance. Meanwhile, a book must have a first and a last line, and therefore in this respect it always remains very unlike an organism, no matter how its content resembles it: there will thus be a contradiction between form and matter.

From this it is clear that under such conditions there is no other way to penetrate into the thought presented here than read this book twice, and, moreover, for the first time with great patience, which can only be drawn from a benevolent trust that the beginning almost as much presupposes the end as the end presupposes the beginning, and each previous part presupposes the subsequent one almost as much as the subsequent one presupposes the first. I say “almost” because this is not quite the case, but honestly and conscientiously everything possible has been done to first present what is least likely to be explained only from what follows, as in general everything has been done that can contribute to the utmost clarity and intelligibility. To a certain extent, this could have been successful if the reader, while reading, thought only about what was said in each individual place, and did not think (which is very natural) about the possible conclusions from there, thanks to which, in addition to the many actually existing contradictions to the opinions of our time and, probably the reader himself, many more come, biased and imaginary. As a result, passionate disapproval arises where there is still only an incorrect understanding, all the less recognized as such because the clarity of syllable and precision of expression, acquired with difficulty, although they leave no doubt about the immediate meaning of what was said, cannot simultaneously indicate and its relationship to everything else. Therefore, as I have already said, the first reading requires patience, drawn from the trust that the second time much or everything will appear in a completely different light. In addition, serious concern for complete and even easy understanding of a very difficult subject should serve as an excuse if repetition is encountered here and there. The very structure of the whole - organic, and not like links in a chain - sometimes forced me to touch the same place twice. It was this structure, as well as the very close interconnection of all parts, that did not allow me to carry out the division into chapters and paragraphs that I so valued and forced me to limit myself to four main sections - as if four points of view on one thought. However, in each of these four books, one must be especially careful not to lose sight of the main idea to which they belong, and the consistent course of the entire presentation, due to the details that are necessarily discussed. This is the first and, like the following, inevitable demand presented to the unfavorable reader (unfavorable to the philosopher, because the reader himself is a philosopher).

The second requirement is that the introduction to it be read before this book, although it is not in the book itself, but appeared five years earlier, under the title “On the Fourfold Root of the Law of Sufficient Reason.” Philosophical treatise." Without acquaintance with this introduction and propaedeutics, it is absolutely impossible to correctly understand the present work, and the content of the said treatise is as much assumed here as if it were in the book itself. However, if he had not appeared several years before her, he would not have opened my main work as an introduction, but would have been organically introduced into his first book, which now, since it lacks what was said in the treatise, shows a certain imperfection by this very fact. gap and must constantly fill it with references to the mentioned treatise. However, it would be so disgusting for me to copy from myself or painstakingly retell once again what had already been said once that I preferred this path, even though now I could better present the content of my early treatise and clear it of some concepts arising from my then excessive enthusiasm for Kantian philosophy - such as, for example, categories, external and internal feeling, etc. However, these concepts are also there only because until then, I had never, in fact, plunged deeply into working on them . Therefore, they play a secondary role and do not touch the main subject at all, so the correction of such places in the mentioned treatise will be accomplished in the reader’s thoughts by itself thanks to familiarity with “The World as Will and Representation.” But only if from my treatise “On the Fourfold Root” it is completely clear what the law of sufficient reason is and what it means, what its power does and does not apply to; if it is understood that this law does not exist before all things and that the whole world does not appear only as a result and in force of it, like its corollary, and that, on the contrary, the law of sufficient reason is nothing more than a form in which an object constantly conditioned by the subject is recognized everywhere , whatever kind it may be, since the subject serves as a cognizing individual - only in this case will it be possible to begin the method of philosophizing that was first tried here, completely different from all that existed before.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) began his philosophical career as a privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1820, and his interests had previously undergone a number of metamorphoses.

The study of natural science, and in particular medicine, at the University of Göttingen soon gave way to a deep passion for the philosophy of Kant. In 1813–1814, in the literary salon of his mother, at that time a famous writer, he became quite close to J. V. Goethe, who had a great, although very contradictory, influence on him. In the same year, 1813, Schopenhauer published his first philosophical treatise, “On the Fourfold Root of the Law of Sufficient Reason,” in which he quite sharply diverged from the entire previous philosophical tradition. The treatise, as if in embryo, anticipates almost his entire philosophy, which was soon set forth in Schopenhauer’s main work, “The World as Will and Representation” (1818, published in 1819).

Already his early works are distinguished by a style of presentation that combines the visionary, prophetic intonations of the German mystic J. Boehme, and the bile, sarcasm, dark wit, and causticity of the French thinker Voltaire.

The lectures of J. G. Fichte, listened to by A. Schopenhauer in 1811, as well as the unsuccessful competition with Hegel’s lecture courses, forever pushed the philosopher away from the field of “academic” philosopher and developed in him a persistent hostility to modernity and its problems. From now on, the solitary life of the thinker becomes Schopenhauer's life style. The only major event was the flight in 1831 from Berlin to Frankfurt am Main due to the cholera epidemic that swept through Germany and, in particular, caused the death of Hegel. In Frankfurt, Schopenhauer complements and interprets in detail the main ideas set out in his work “The World as Will and Representation”, writes an essay dedicated to “will in nature”, as well as collections of aphorisms that reveal in a new way certain facets of his teaching. He pays a lot of attention to the study of Buddhist philosophy, which affected his ethical ideas.

Schopenhauer characterized his teaching as the revelation of a secret that other thinkers could not reveal before him. The philosopher put the solution to the mystery of the world and what lies at its basis in the title of his most important work, “The World as Will and Representation” - everything else, like the work itself, was only a commentary, addition and clarification of this basic idea.

Starting from Kant's idea of ​​the primacy of practical reason, the most important component of which was free, “autonomous” will, Schopenhauer defends the primacy of will in relation to reason, which essentially meant a movement in the anti-Kantian direction. On this path, he developed many interesting and sensible ideas regarding the specifics of the volitional (related to will) and emotive (related to emotions) aspects of the human spirit, their role in people's lives. Criticizing rationalistic philosophy for turning the will into a simple appendage of the mind, which is contrary to real life, Schopenhauer argued that the will, that is, the motives, desires of a person, the incentives to action and the very processes of its implementation are specific, relatively independent and largely determine the direction and results of rational knowledge.

“Reason,” as the previous philosophy understood it, was declared by Schopenhauer to be a fiction. Will must be put in place of reason. But in order for the will to be able to “measure its strength” with the “omnipotent” reason, as the philosophers made it, Schopenhauer, firstly, presented the will as independent from the control of reason, turned it into “absolutely free will,” which has neither causes nor grounds. Secondly, the will was, as it were, thrown over the world, the Universe: Schopenhauer declared that the human will is akin to the “mysterious forces” of the Universe, some of its “volitional impulses.” So, the will was turned into the first principle and the absolute - the world became “will and idea.” The “mythology of the mind” gave way to the “mythology of the will.” The one-sidedness of rationalism was contrasted with the extremes of voluntarism. All the diversity of the surrounding reality, all forms of life appeared in Schopenhauer as manifestations of substantial will, intuitively, by analogy with the “cognitive subject,” transferred from the inner world to the outer world. In a person, his feelings become an adequate manifestation of the will, and above all, sexual desire, which represents the “real focus of the will.” In the context of the ever-becoming will as the will to live, the intellect, according to Schopenhauer, can appear in the following forms: as “intuition” that knows the will; in the form of a servant, an “instrument” of the will; in the form of weak-willed aesthetic contemplation and, finally, in the form of conscious opposition to the will, struggle against it through asceticism and quietism. The last aspect, associated with opposition to the will, is the subject of Schopenhauer's ethics, which substantiates his theoretical and personal pessimism and misanthropy. Suffering cannot be eliminated from people’s lives, so he sees liberation from it in asceticism, in the renunciation of the body as a manifestation of the will and, finally, in the immersion of the individual will into the world, that is, its transformation into non-existence.

In Schopenhauer's philosophy, the individual is the center of self-interpretation, knowledge itself is of a kind of anthropological nature, it is anthropomorphic, moving from subject to object, always by analogy with the subject. Hence, all categories of the world opposing the subject - space, time, causality - are interpreted by the philosopher, in essence, physiologically. The world as a representation is a product of the activity of the brain of a subject who not only knows, but above all wants, drives.

Assessing Kant’s transcendental idealism, Schopenhauer wrote: “Kant quite independently came to the truth that Plato tirelessly repeated, expressing it most often as follows: “This world that appears to the senses has no true being, but is only eternal becoming; it simultaneously exists and does not exist, and its knowledge is not so much knowledge as a ghostly dream." It is not at all accidental that this particular philosophy in the middle of the 19th century found such a wide resonance among the creative intelligentsia. The composer R. Wagner, the Basel historian J. Burckhardt, and especially the young professor of classical philology, who spent a lot of time studying the philosophy of Plato and the philosophy of pre-Socratic Greece, F. Nietzsche, became followers of Schopenhauer.

The surrounding world is a mirage, a phantom, a creation of a functioning mind - a myth that is created by each individual under the guise of objective reality, projected by him outside himself.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) - German irrationalist philosopher. Was born in. Danzig (today Gdansk), a small rentier who lived his entire life on interest from inherited capital.

After graduating from university, Schopenhauer came to get a job with Hegel himself, who accepted him as a teacher. Schopenhauer scheduled his lectures at the same time when Hegel, the rector of the university, a philosopher at the zenith of his fame, spoke to the students. Schopenhauer, of course, failed - the students went to listen to Hegel. Having worked, with grief in half, until the end of the semester, Schopenhauer never engaged in teaching again, for which, however, he did not particularly grieve. Indicative, however, was the very fact of a direct collision between two people representing two completely different eras in philosophy.

In 1819, Schopenhauer completed the main work of his life, the book “The World as Will and Representation,” which was far ahead of its time, but was not noticed by his contemporaries, was not understood, and the author was forced to take almost the entire circulation of the book from the publishing house and keep it at home for decades .

"The World as Will and Representation" (1818) is Schopenhauer's main philosophical work. In this work, A. Schopenhauer puts forward the following concept: at a certain stage of development, two different worlds arise. One does not exist objectively, but only in our imagination. What we call reality (nature, society, culture, history and our lives) is only an appearance, a play of the imagination, what in the Hindu tradition is called “maya” (that is, deception, temptation, ghost).

The second, true world is the world of a secret, invisible essence, will, this is Kant’s “thing in itself.”

Will is the absolute beginning of all existence, the root of everything that exists, what a cosmic force (in a certain sense biological in nature) that creates the world and man.

Subject and object, space and time, the diversity of individual things and the causal relationship between them appear. All this “exists” because this is how human consciousness is structured with its a priori forms of sensuality and reason.

A person in this world is a slave of the will, the latter created his intellect so that he would learn the laws of the world, survive better and adapt to this world. Man always and everywhere serves not himself, not his interests, but freedom. The will forces her to live, no matter how meaningless and pitiful human existence may be.

Will is the otherworldly core of the shell of life, and representation is the objectification of will, its manifestation. The concepts we developed in our illusory world cannot be applied to freedom: time, space, number, causality, etc.

In will there is no past, no future, no plurality, which means that it is given all and at once as the only world will.

Will is “wanting”, “aspiration”, but since in the world of essence there is nothing else besides will, then it does not have the object of desire, desire. Since freedom has no goal outside itself, it is necessarily directed towards itself, it only “wants to want” and nothing more.

“The world as idea” and “the world as will” are two sides of a split world, which as a whole can be described as suffering.

A. Schopenhauer argued that any suffering is “positive”, and satisfaction is “negative”. At the same time, he started from the obvious psychological fact: we feel all the needs and all the desires only when they are dissatisfied, and the state of dissatisfaction is suffering. Even a sufficient desire only temporarily stops suffering. Everyone's life is thus a chain of changing sufferings that constantly arise.

For A. Schopenhauer, good does not exist at all - people traditionally call the temporary absence of suffering good. People strive to end suffering by realizing their aspirations and getting pleasure. Those who have the appropriate means (means) and opportunities, or have a limited range of desires, can even satisfy all of them for a time. But then they are overcome by boredom, which causes new suffering.

You can stop suffering only by giving up any desires, ceasing to exist, turning into nothing, reaching the state of “nirvana.”

A. Schopenhauer describes the world with black colors. The world is bad in every way: aesthetically it looks like a caricature, intellectually it looks like a madhouse, from a moral point of view it looks like a fraudulent nest, and in general it looks like a prison. According to Schopenhauer, it would be better for such a world and such a person not to exist at all.

Author of the term "pessimism" (from the Latin Pessimyc - worst). Man lives in the worst possible world. She is pathetic and suffering. Human egoism is extremely strong. Most of a person's troubles are rooted in it and are explained by it. Many people would prefer the destruction of the world over the preservation of their own lives.

One of these thinkers was the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer(1788–1860). In his works, primarily in the fundamental work “The World as Will and Representation,” he sought to create a fundamentally new and comprehensive teaching, opposite rationalistic philosophy of the New Age, including the philosophy of Leibniz and Hegel.

In his philosophy, Schopenhauer proceeded from the assumption of the existence two worlds - the world in which people live and act, and the otherworldly world beyond them, in which the world will operates and manifests itself in different ways. It was this world that he called authentic. Acting in it unconscious world will embodied in all phenomena of the Universe and at the same time alien to them, exists as a certain “thing in itself” mentioned by us, which Schopenhauer’s compatriot Immanuel Kant discussed in his time.

Schopenhauer wrote: “The will is like a furnace in itself, completely different from its appearance, and completely free from all its forms into which it enters.” The blindly acting world will in its endless unconscious manifestations is elusive to people, unknowable by them. At the same time, it manifests itself in their will, which is also unconscious and determines all their behavior. Schopenhauer considered the world around man to be inauthentic, derived from the world's will and existing only in the imagination of people.

Schopenhauer noted that the world will doesn't have any of yours grounds. It is “free from all multitude”, i.e. from the many phenomena of the Universe - it alone in the world exists outside of time and space." However, in time and space there are many phenomena through which it manifests itself, including universal gravity, magnetism, in general all physical, chemical and biological processes, behavior and the activities of people, etc. People have only mystical ideas about it, far from understanding its essence. In man and his will, it manifests itself just as blindly (unconsciously), embodied in his instinctive activity and actions.

Schopenhauer pointed out many times instinctive impulses in the behavior of animals and people. At the same time, he could not ignore the conscious activity of man, but stated that it is carried out under the influence of conscious instincts. In any case, the original and deepest motivating force of people’s activity and behavior was recognized as the instincts for life rooted in their psyche. This idea was subsequently comprehensively developed by other philosophers, as will be discussed below. And now let us note that it is precisely the instinctive contemplation of people of the world around them, and not at all their analytical thinking, that, according to Schopenhauer, plays the main role in their perception of reality and in the preservation of the human race.

According to Schopenhauer, the world will often manifests itself in the ideas of people not only unreasonably, but absurd. For her there is no past or future. Hence, there is neither the unity of human history derived from it, nor its consistent development. There are only many one-time manifestations of human existence in time and space. At the same time, Schopenhauer reflected on the pressure of time on the existence of each person and nation. He exclaimed: “Time constantly oppresses us, does not allow us to take a breath and stands behind everyone like a torturer with a whip. It leaves few people alone.” According to Schopenhauer, the flow of events in time is reflected in people's ideas as an incoherent flow of chance, similar to the flow of cumulus clouds in windy weather. There is nothing regular, nothing more or less constant. Everything is unpredictable and unreliable. Hence the uncertainty of people in the direction of their activities, the fear of the unknown.

In addition, Schopenhauer continued, people are constantly in a state of contradiction and struggle among themselves. All this happens under the influence of the unconscious world will on their existence, which itself is in a state of inherent internal contradictions. The latter lead to her splitting and to a struggle with herself. From Schopenhauer's reasoning it follows that evil is rooted in the very beginning of the world, those. in the otherworldly blindly acting world will. This is also one of the fundamental ideas of his philosophy.

Although Schopenhauer sought to create a comprehensive philosophy in which the universal problems of the world and man would be solved, nevertheless, the main content of his teaching was to solve ethical problems. In his writings he presented man as a being suffering, acting under the influence unconscious impulses of one's will isolated from other people, able loneliness. In such a state, a person is most often unable to adequately perceive any of his own kind and their suffering, as well as current events, because he is depressed by his own suffering and loneliness. His suffering seems insurmountable to him. He has no way out of the tragic circumstances for him, and more and more, as Schopenhauer wrote, he talks about death, which seems to him to be a deliverance from the suffering he is experiencing.

Comprehending this kind of spiritual state of a person and the reasoning of various thinkers on this matter, similar to the reasoning of Schopenhauer, the great Russian writer A. M. Gorky rightly noted that even if they think about the suffering of man, even about the suffering of the whole world, they are silent “about the aspirations of the world destroy suffering; if they remember this, it is only in order to declare: suffering is invincible."

In his ethical reasoning, Schopenhauer, in fact, reflected the life of single individuals left to themselves, their experience of their suffering due to the inability to satisfy their basic needs and live with dignity, realizing their abilities, receiving recognition from other people and society. This is evidenced by many of his works, primarily his main work, “The World as Will and Representation,” one of the chapters of which is entitled “On the insignificance and sorrows of life.”

This chapter was published in a separate edition and was included in the collected works of Schopenhauer, published in Moscow in 1992. In it, he outlined one of the main provisions of his philosophy as follows: being a manifestation of the unconscious world will, a person’s will also unconsciously directs his actions. Having awakened to life from the night of the unconscious, she “sees herself as an individual in some endless and boundless world among countless individuals who are all striving for something, suffering, wandering; and, as if frightened by a heavy dream, she hurries back to her former unconsciousness.” .

But gradually the individual with his will adapts to the human world and begins to act like other individuals. He expresses a constant “want” to realize his claims, which are largely of an uncertain nature. He, like other people, manages to “only meagerly maintain his life” through tireless work and eternal worries, repeated every day. There is a constant struggle with need that lasts throughout life. And death is visible in the future.

Schopenhauer ironically declared: “Everything in life tells us that man is destined to experience in earthly happiness something deceptive, a simple illusion.” A person does not experience real happiness. This makes his life sad and short-lived. “Relatively happy people are mostly happy in appearance.” Life is depicted by Schopenhauer as a continuous deception in the small and large. “We are deceived either by hope or by its fulfillment. The present never satisfies us, the future is unreliable, the past is irrevocable,” he wrote. And he continued: “Time turns all our pleasures and joys into nothing. And then we ask ourselves in surprise, where did they go?”

Schopenhauer repeated again and again that the very lives of people confirm that all their aspirations and desires were deception and delusion. He also expressed this conclusion in poetic form in the work “On the insignificance and sorrows of life”:

"Both old age and experience lead at the same time

To the last hour, when destined.

To understand after much care and torment,

That in life we ​​wandered along the path of error."

The leading role in Schopenhauer's ethics is given to justifying selfishness as a motivating force that directs a person’s will and all his actions. According to this thinker, all a person’s egoistic aspirations are aimed at survival in a world incomprehensible to him, at satisfying his various “wants” (desires), and protection from various kinds of suffering. At the same time, a person ignores the desires of other people and often acts to their detriment. Egoism is interpreted by Schopenhauer as original, deeply internal a property of a person’s character over which he has no control. This character trait separates people, entrenches their loneliness, which increases their suffering. Being ineradicable, egoism determines the behavior of people at any time and under any circumstances.

From Schopenhauer’s point of view, a person’s life in the world, his fate (“lot”) is determined by the following circumstances: firstly, by what is he like? a person, what he has - health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, mental abilities, education; secondly, the fact that a person It has, those. various types of property; thirdly, than is Human in the minds of other people. This determines their attitude towards him. All these factors influence whether a person will be happy among other people or not. At the same time, the true moral and other qualities of a person and other people’s ideas about him can differ significantly. Between them, Schopenhauer wrote, there is the same relationship “as between real kings and theatrical ones.” A similar relationship exists between a person’s true properties and his ideas about himself. Various kinds of delusions are a characteristic feature of his existence in the world, such is his constant state of mind.

At the same time, it varies from person to person. Noting this, Schopenhauer wrote that the perception of reality by a spiritually undeveloped person will be “poor and pale” in comparison, for example, with its perception by Cervantes, who, sitting in a miserable prison, wrote Don Quixote. According to Schopenhauer, a person with an undeveloped consciousness and a poor spiritual world “is doomed only to sensual pleasures, to a quiet life in the family circle, to base sociability and vulgar pastime.”

It may seem strange, but Schopenhauer sharply condemned the appropriation of the merits of his people or his nation by a person if he is proud of belonging to them. Most cheap pride he thought national pride , supposedly it reveals a person’s lack of significant individual qualities. Otherwise, he would not have “grasped” what he shares with millions of people. Anyone who has significant personal superiority, according to Schopenhauer, clearly sees the shortcomings of his nation, having them constantly before his eyes.

A significant place in his ethical views is given to the problems of moral dignity and honor of a person, especially female and male honor, knightly and civil. He associated the solution to these problems primarily with the development of man’s spiritual world, his individual consciousness.

It must be admitted that in the above statements of Schopenhauer there are many judgments that sound relevant in our time, namely: statements about the subconscious and unconscious behavior of people in certain situations, about their instinctive and intuitive perception of the phenomena of reality, about some principles of ethics, for example about the need to avoid situations that cause people suffering, that one should not give in to illusions, that one must realistically assess the conditions of one’s life and one’s capabilities, etc.

And yet it should be borne in mind that Schopenhauer’s philosophy as a whole does not correspond to reality. We are talking not about the reality that, according to Schopenhauer, exists in people’s ideas, but about the one that exists objectively in its natural and social form, in which human civilization develops. One cannot help but say that his philosophical judgments were expressed by him in the context of his very pessimistic views. He presented the real life of people mainly in a dark, even gloomy light, in tragic tones.

At the same time, we must not forget that the irrationalistic perception of the world and man’s place in it is, to one degree or another, inherent in many thinkers, including philosophers, scientists, writers, poets, artists, musicians, and other representatives of culture.

Currently, the influence of Schopenhauer's philosophy on people's minds remains significant. This is explained, in particular, by the many tragedies that people in many countries experienced in the twentieth century and are experiencing in the current one. His views had a significant influence on such areas of modern philosophy as the philosophy of life, existentialism, pragmatism, intuitionism, psychoanalysis, etc.

• Schopenhauer A. The concept of will // His own. Selected works. M.: Education, 1992. P. 41.
• Right there. P. 42. Aphorisms and maxims. P. 16.
• Right there. P. 18.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is one of the first consistent critics of Hegel and the creator of an original philosophical concept that puts an indefinable will at the foundation of the world. Fame came to Schopenhauer only at the end of his life. This was especially offensive because even in his youth Schopenhauer created a philosophical concept, which he outlined in his book "The World as Will and Representation" (1819).

Schopenhauer's philosophy was based on two principles: the world is the ego will in itself and at the same time the world is a representation for me. Every body is an objectification of the will, and the will is the in-itself being of the body. The will, known to man)" is in itself the inner essence of all forces: the force that induces the development of plants; the force due to which crystallization occurs; the force that attracts the magnet to the North Pole; even the force of gravity acting in all matter and towards the moving stone to the earth, and the Earth to the Sun. Will lies outside of any time and space, it is not subject to causality, has no basis and purpose. Objects determined by space and time (representations) are studied by science, based on the principle of causality. , capable of pure contemplation and endowed with unusual imagination, is able to perceive the eternal idea and express it in poetry, visual arts, music. The will is always in aspiration, aspiration is its only essence. It does not set any achievable goal, and it is not capable of anything. to what ultimate satisfaction, i.e. happiness.

Schopenhauer's philosophy is deeply pessimistic, but it is a kind of “optimistic pessimism.” With his inherent artistic talent, Schopenhauer vividly depicts life's suffering in all its forms and actions, suffering from which there is no other salvation except the destruction of the will to live, the transition to non-existence (nirvana). Destruction results in justice and compassion, which are the foundation of morality. The feeling of compassion, Schopenhauer emphasizes, applies not only to humans, but equally to animals.

The concepts of the immortal soul, divine purpose and human dignity do not exist for Schopenhauer. Man is a part of nature, and reason gives him only a slight advantage over other living beings. The human race is a restless animal who struggles and suffers, whose essence is expressed in sexuality and selfishness. There is no goal in life, a person is in a difficult situation because his very existence is a problem. Only genius and holiness, aesthetic perception and overcoming individualism open the way to salvation.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Schopenhauer occupied an important place in European culture. Under his influence was the composer R. Wagner, who was obviously particularly influenced by Schopenhauer's thoughts about music as a direct, immediate expression of the efforts of the will, as well as the idea of ​​renunciation of the will. Schopenhauer was read with enthusiasm by F. Nietzsche and L. Tolstoy, T. Mann and M. Proust, the young L. Wittgenstein, G. Mahler, R. Strauss, I. V. Turgenev, C. Beckett, G. Borges and others. In A.P. Chekhov’s play “Ivanov,” one of the characters mentions Schopenhauer as an outstanding thinker. The charm of Schopenhauer's work is largely due to his literary mastery. Schopenhauer's works are characterized by an excellent prose style, understanding of the laws of composition and drama - each next statement amazes with its imagery and is timed to the moment when it can produce the maximum effect. All this makes the transition from systematic philosophical study to novel or opera about as smooth as it can be. The strongest impression was made by Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory, his philosophy of music, understanding of the unconscious, interpretation of irresistible sexual attraction, pessimism and solution to the question of the value of human existence.