The World as Will and Representation
The experienced world is representation, while restless striving supplies Schopenhauer's account of its deeper character.
Experience presents a world structured through the relation of subject and object.
Getting what we want rarely ends wanting altogether. Schopenhauer turns that familiar restlessness into a philosophical question about whether satisfaction can provide the lasting resolution desire promises.
Schopenhauer connects this representation with forms of human knowing.
The body is also encountered inwardly through desire and action.
He interprets that access as revealing will beneath appearances.
Will names persistent striving rather than a rational cosmic intention.
Art and compassion interrupt the ordinary chase in different ways. One changes attention, the other changes our relation to another's suffering; neither is simply another possession to accumulate.
Satisfaction is temporary because desire continually renews itself.
Aesthetic contemplation can interrupt the ordinary demands of striving.
Music receives a distinctive place in this account of art.
Compassion weakens the separation through which individuals disregard others' suffering.
Ascetic renunciation offers his most radical response to the will's restlessness.