ABSTRACT
Positioned on the edge of solipsism, it was Schopenhauer who famously asserted that the world is my representation. We know that Schopenhauer’s philosophy exerted a strong influence on the early Wittgenstein, whose equally famous – and equally metaphysical – claim in his Tractatus that the world is all that is the case, resoundingly announced his early entanglement with grand metaphysics (if in linguistic, rather than ontological, form).1 Schopenhauer’s claim makes the world a mental, or individualistically interior, representation that is, indeed, private to the mind of the individual whose representation it is, a representation that constitutes at once the contents and the boundaries of private consciousness. It is thus, to borrow Thomas Nagel’s phrase, not only a claim concerning the necessity of entering that individual’s consciousness (where this possibility is denied by the solipsist and debated by others) to know what it is like to be that individual; it is, for Schopenhauer, a far stronger claim. The world is not a larger, realist place within which that individual consciousness is contingently situated, but rather the very idea of the world is unintelligible without first positing the existence of an individual consciousness that constructs it as, indeed, its own representation.
