ABSTRACT
Of the nineteenth-century philosophers and thinkers whose activity derives directly from Kant, Artur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is both one of the most radical and one of the most ambivalent. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, his magnum opus, made no impact on its first publication in 1818, and had to wait twenty-six years for the second edition which was to prove so influential. He propounded his system at the age of thirty-one, but spent the remaining forty years of his life writing commentaries and excursuses to it, neither advancing nor retreating from his prepared position; he felt himself to be the preacher of an inspired message, but the world did not share his feelings. He has come to be seen as the proponent of views which are central to the Romantic aesthetic, yet he had scant contact with the Romantic writers and thinkers of his day and makes virtually no reference to them in his writings. And on the personal plane, the asceticism and the attainment of a state of will-less nonexistence which represent the culmination, in practical terms, of his philosophy, are in stark contrast to the self-centred and sometimes ignoble pleasure-seeking of his own comfortable material existence.
