In this new edition, the reader (if he is motivated to look for such things) will find several parts reworked and developed into more precise determinations. I was concerned in this edition with moderating and lessening the formal character of the presentation by, among other things, using more expansive, exoteric remarks to bring the abstract concepts closer to ordinary understanding and a more concrete representation of them. Yet the condensed brevity made necessary by an outline, in matters that are abstruse anyway, leaves this second edition in the same role as the first, to serve as a text for the lectures [Vorlesebuch] in need of the requisite elucidation by the oral presentation. To be sure, the title of an encyclopedia ought to leave room for a less rigorous scientific method and for assembling items based upon external considerations. However, the nature of the matter entails that the logical connection had to remain the foundation.

There are, it would seem, more than enough promptings and incentives on hand that seem to make it compulsory for me to explain the position of my philosophizing towards what lies beyond it, namely, the bustling concerns of contemporary culture, some of which are full of spirit, some devoid of it. This is the sort of thing that can only happen in an exoteric manner, as in a preface. For, although these concerns link themselves to philosophy, they do not engage with it scientifically and thus bar themselves from philosophy altogether, conducting their palaver outside of philosophy and remaining external to it. It is unpleasant and even awkward to enter ground so alien to science, for this sort of explaining and discussing does not advance the very understanding that can alone be the concern of genuine knowledge. Yet it may be useful, even necessary, to discuss some of these phenomena.

In general, in my philosophical endeavours, what I have worked towards and continue to work towards is the scientific knowledge of the truth. It is the most difficult path but the only path that can be of interest and value for the spirit, once the latter has entered upon the path of thought and, once it is on that path, has not fallen prey to vanity but instead has preserved the will and the courage for the truth.

§1

Philosophy lacks the advantage from which the other sciences benefit, namely the ability to presuppose both its objects as immediately endorsed by representation of them and an acknowledged method of knowing, which would determine its starting-point and progression. It is true that philosophy initially shares its objects with religion. Both have the truth for their object, and more precisely the truth in the highest sense, in the sense that God and God alone is the truth. Moreover, both treat the sphere of finite things, the sphere of nature and the human spirit, their relation to each other and to God as their truth. Philosophy thus may definitely presuppose a familiarity with its objects – indeed it must do so – as well as an interest in them from the outset, if only because chronologically speaking consciousness produces for itself representations of objects prior to generating concepts of them.What is more, only by passing through the process of representing and by turning towards it, does thinking spirit progress to knowing by way of thinking [denkendes Erkennen] and to comprehending [Begreifen].

While engaged in thoughtful contemplation, however, it soon becomes apparent that such activity includes the requirement to demonstrate the necessity of its content, and to prove not only its being but, even more so, the determinations of its objects. The aforementioned familiarity with this content thus turns out to be insufficient, and to make or accept presuppositions or assurances regarding it appears illegitimate. The difficulty of making a beginning, however, arises at once, since a beginning is something immediate and as suchmakes a presupposition, or rather it is itself just that.

§2

Generally speaking, philosophy may initially be defined as the thoughtful examination [denkende Betrachtung] of things. If, however, it is correct (as it probably is) that it is through thinking that human beings distinguish themselves from the animals, then everything human is human as a result of and only as a result of thinking. Now insofar as philosophy represents a peculiar way of thinking, in virtue of which thinking becomes knowing and a knowing that comprehends things [begreifendes Erkennen], its thinking will be different from the thinking at work in everything human and which, indeed, is responsible for the humanity of all that is human, even though it is identical with the latter such that in itself there is only one thinking.

‘The world is my representation’: – this holds true for every living, cognitive being, although only a human being can bring it to abstract, reflective consciousness: and if he actually does so he has become philosophically sound. It immediately becomes clear and certain to him that he is not acquainted with either the sun or the earth, but rather only with an eye that sees a sun, with a hand that feels an earth, and that the surrounding world exists only as representation, that is, exclusively in relation to something else, the representing being that he himself is. – If any a priori truth can be asserted, then this is it; for this truth expresses the form of all possible and conceivable experience. This form is more universal than any other form, more universal than time, space and causality, which, in fact, presuppose it. If each of these forms (which we have recognized as so many particular forms of the principle of sufficient reason) applies only to a particular class of representations, then by contrast, subject/object dichotomy is the general form of all these classes. It is the only form under which any representation – whatever kind it may be, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical – is possible or even conceivable.

It is not to my contemporaries, it is not to my compatriots – it is to humanity itself that I entrust my now-completed work, in the confidence that humanity will find some value in it, even if this value will only gain recognition belatedly, this being the inevitable fate of all good things. It can only be for humanity, not for the generation that hurries past, caught up in the delusions of the moment, that my mind has unceasingly devoted itself to its work, almost against my will, throughout the course of a long life. Even the lack of interest could not shake my faith in its value during this time; I constantly saw the false, the bad, and finally the absurd and nonsensical enjoying general admiration and esteem, and reflected that if people who know how to recognize what is genuine and true were not so rare as to be sought in vain for twenty years together, then those who are able to produce it would not be so few that their works afterwards constitute an exception to the transitory nature of earthly things, so that we would lose the comforting prospect of posterity, which constitutes a necessary source of strength for everyone with a lofty goal. – Nobody who seriously takes on and pursues a problem that does not result in material advantage can count on the sympathy of his contemporaries.

Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation was first published in Leipzig at the end of 1818 (with 1819 as the date on its title page). It consisted of a single volume, and aimed, as its 30-year-old author stated in his preface, ‘to convey a single thought’. He went on to confess, however, that ‘in spite of all my efforts, I could not find a shorter way of conveying the thought than the whole of this book’, a book that ran to over 700 pages and was not a little ambitious, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, to ethics, themeaning of life and the philosophy of religion, in an attempt to account for nothing less than the world: the nature of our cognition or knowledge of reality and how it relates to reality itself, the nature of our existence and the existence of everything in the world, what is and is not of value in existence, the pain of the human condition and the possibility of deliverance from it. Schopenhauer rounds off his book with a detailed and incisive critique of the philosophy of Kant, whom he admired and respected, but to whom he boldly applied Voltaire's saying ‘C'est le privilège du vrai génie, et surtout du génie qui ouvre une carrière, de faire impunément de grandes fautes’ (It is the privilege of true genius, and above all the genius who opens a new path, to make great errors with impunity) – words we may well have occasion to apply to Schopenhauer himself.

The need to provide my listeners with a guide to my philosophical lectures first prompted me to let this overview of the entire scope of the philosophy come to light earlier than I would have otherwise thought appropriate.

The nature of an outline not only excludes amore exhaustive elaboration of the ideas in terms of their content, but also restricts in particular the elaboration of their systematic derivation, a derivation that must contain what is otherwise understood as a proof and that is indispensable for a scientific philosophy. The title was supposed to indicate the scope of the whole as well as the intention to reserve the details for the oral presentation.

In the case of an outline where the aim is to present an already presupposed and familiar content in a deliberately succinct manner, more consideration is given simply to the external purposefulness of the ordering and arrangement. The present exposition is not in this position. Instead it sets up a new reworking of philosophy according to a method that will some day be recognized, I hope, as the only true method, identical with the content. For this reason, I would have considered it more advantageous for the exposition, as far as the public is concerned, if circumstances would have allowed me to have a more elaborate work about the other parts of the philosophy precede it, a work of the same sort as I provided the public in regard to the first part of the whole, the Logic. Moreover, although it was necessary in the present exposition to limit the side of the content that lies closer to representation and empirical familiarity, I believe that, in regard to the transitions (which can be nothing other than a mediation effected by means of the concept), I have made this much evident: that the methodical character of the progression is sufficiently distinct from the merely external order that the other sciences look for, as well as from a mannerism that has become customary in treating philosophical objects. This mannerism presupposes a schema and in the process sets up parallels among thematerials just as externally as – and even more arbitrarily than – the first way does [i.e. the way of the other sciences].

What is true and genuine would gain ground in the world more easily if those who are incapable of expressing it would not at the same time conspire to suppress it. This circumstance has already delayed and impeded many things that could have done the world some good, even where it has not stifled them completely. The consequence of this to me has been that although I was only thirty when the first edition of this work appeared, I am only seeing this third edition in my seventy-second year. I find consolation for this in Petrarch's words: ‘If someone who has been running all day arrives in the evening, it is enough’ (On True Wisdom, p. 140). I too have finally arrived and have the satisfaction of seeing the beginnings of my influence at the end of my career, with the hope that this influence, according to an old rule, will last all the longer, since it was so late starting out.–

The reader will not miss anything in this third edition that was contained in the second, but will receive considerably more, since with all the additions it runs 136 pages longer than the second edition, although it has the same type.

Seven years after the appearance of the second edition I published the two volumes of Parerga and Paralipomena.

Schopenhauer is one of the great original writers of the nineteenth century, and a unique voice in the history of thought. His central concept of the will leads him to regard human beings as striving irrationally and suffering in a world that has no purpose, a condition redeemed by the elevation of aesthetic consciousness and finally overcome by the will's self-denial and a mystical vision of the self as one with the world as a whole. He is in some ways the most progressive post-Kantian, an atheist with profound ideas about the human essence and the meaning of existence which point forward to Nietzsche, Freud and existentialism. He was also the first major Western thinker to seek a synthesis with Eastern thought. Yet at the same time he undertakes an ambitious global metaphysics of a conservative, more or less pre-Kantian kind, and is driven by a Platonic vision of escape from empirical reality into a realm of higher knowledge.

Schopenhauer was born in 1788, and by 1809 had gone against his family's expectations of a career as a merchant and embarked on a university career. He completed his doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in 1813, then spent several years in intensive preparation of what became the major work of his life, The World as Will and Representation, which was published at the end of 1818, with 1819 on the title page.

In the First Book, the world was presented as mere representation, object for a subject; in the Second Book we considered this world from its other side and found that it is also will, and this proved to be the only thing the world is, apart from representation. In recognition of this fact we went on to name the world as representation (both as a whole and in its parts) the objecthood of the will, which accordingly means: the will become object, i.e. representation. We may further recall that such an objectivation of the will had many, albeit determinate, levels at which the essence of the will enters representation (i.e. presents itself as an object) with gradually increasing degrees of clarity and perfection. We already recognized these levels as Plato's Ideas, in so far as they are nothing but particular species, or the original, unchanging forms and qualities of all natural bodies, inorganic no less than organic, as well as the universal forces that manifest themselves according to natural laws. Taken together, these Ideas present themselves in countless individuals and details, relating to these as model to imitations.

§19

Logic is the science of the pure idea, i.e. the idea in the abstract element of thinking.