Schopenhauer: 'The World as Will and Representation': Volume 1 (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer)

an excellent work.

If you are familiar with Schopenhauer you are undoubtedly interested in how this translation stacks up against Eric Payne's... If you aren't and want to get to the meat of his philosophy, you have come to the right place. This is his magnum opus, with the forthcoming second volume containing supplementary essays. This book unveils his metaphysical system, which forms the backbone of his thought. If you are merely seeking his various and well-known rants on art, women, noise, etc., then you are looking for the two-volume Parerga and Paralipomena, which has also been edited into myriad smaller books multitudinous times. The World as Will and Representation would never survive such a butchering. Schopenhauer is massively misunderstood, misquoted, and quoted out of context. It is unfair to containerize his philosphy in short form, but I'll give an honest attempt. He picks up where he feels Kant left off, with the world as representation, which is to say mental picture. It is a biological fact that our brains receive a "feed" of sensory data through the nerves, and build a picture from it, which is the world we know. The problem then becomes, what, if anything, is the real world, the "thing in itself," apart from being represented in the mind? Space, time, and cause/effect thus become merely the "program" that our minds use to build this representation, and we have no reason to believe that they are valid outside of it. Even science cannot penetrate this veil. Schopenhauer's answer to the nature of the thing in itself is actually quite simple: our will. The desires and emotions we experience play out in time but not in space, and are the inner mechanism of causality. They are the direct line to ultimate reality, which he characterizes as an infinite striving. Applying this then to the rest of nature, he sees it in animals, plants, magnetism, gravity, and energy itself. Like white light through a prism the blind and indivisible will manifests itself through space and time as every single phenomenon in the universe, yourself included. Multiplicity is thus seen as an illusion, and death becomes a moot point. And as for the translation? I don't speak German but whereas Payne's translation was perhaps more literary and fluid, this is more modern, more technical, and definitely more particular. I am very familiar with the older translation and I feel that this one is considerably more careful. Between that fact and the supplementary notes I do believe it is currently definitive.

Generally, I do not rate items as five stars since that means the product far exceeded my expectations. Many reviewers rate an item as five stars simply because it meets their expectations, but that is a three-star rating for me. I have to give this Cambridge edition a rare five-star rating. The translation is fantastic, the introduction is superb, and the notes are above average. By far, this is the best translation of the work, and it is worth the extra money you will spend. If this is the first time reading Schopenhauer, I highly recommend reading On The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason before starting this. Follow his advice in the preface to volume one

The translation of these Cambridge Schopenhauer books is amazing, possibly the best. Unfortunately they are not the best quality books and don’t last as long as most paperbacks should these days, thus the 4 stars rather than 5. The hardbacks may be worth the extra price. And as usual Amazon shipped in a paper envelope and seriously damaged the book, again.

Though they don't tell their customers, Cambridge UP is selling print-on-demand copies of the books in its Schopenhauer series. I have made the mistake of purchasing two thus far, both of which were flawed in different ways. My new copy of "The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1" has a concave spine and black smudges on the edge of the pages. It also uses paper of rather poor quality. I'm forced to conclude that Cambridge has a quality control problem. The two books were printed in Las Vegas and Texas, where the people involved apparently don't care much about the finished product. As welcome as these new editions are for readers of Schopenhauer, the poor quality of the books themselves makes the series unappealing on the whole. At the very least, I would suggest you purchase a copy only if you can return it with ease. It feels like a crap shoot.

Full disclosure up front. I have both the Kindle edition and the paperback edition. The Kindle edition is formatted poorly, with noted interspersed directly into the text, which interferes with legibility. At least this is the case on my Kindle Fire 10”, the Kindle app for Windows, the cloud reader, and the iPhone app. Because of this, I ordered the paperback edition of both volumes. Initially, Volume 2 was scheduled to arrive one day ahead of Volume 1, but due to a postal service quirk, they arrived together the day Volume 1 was scheduled to arrive. This is not a disappointment: the dopamine hit of getting them both together was much better than two smaller dopamine hits of them arriving separately. Though I have not started the books in earnest, I have read the introduction and scanned Schopenhauer’s prefaces, and read the open wing two paragraphs of the first section, and find the translation easy to follow. I look forward to digging into it in depth. However, as this work is in large part a response to Kant, I chose to back up a step or three and take on Kant’s three critiques before diving head first into TWAWAR. I highly recommend the paperback versions over there Kindle versions, even though they are a bit pricier.