The World as Will and RepresentationArthur Schopenhauer
About The World as Will and Representation
opens with the sentence "The world is my representation," and spends Book One pressing Kant's point that everything given in space, time, and causality is appearance. Book Two names the thing in itself. Each of us knows one object from the inside, our own body, and what we find there is will: not choice or deliberation, but a blind striving that objectifies itself in gravitation, in plants, in animals, and in every human act.
Everything else follows from that identification. Willing arises from lack, and lack is suffering. Satisfaction is negative, only the momentary stopping of a want, and it opens onto boredom until the next want arrives. Pleasure has no positive existence of its own. The swing between pain and boredom is what a life of desire amounts to, and no rearrangement of circumstances changes the structure.
Book Three finds the one reliable interruption. In aesthetic contemplation the subject stops willing, stops seeing things in their relation to its own purposes, and becomes the pure knower of the Platonic Ideas, the grades at which the will makes itself object. Beauty is whatever invites that state. Schopenhauer ranks the arts by the Idea each presents, from architecture through sculpture, painting, and poetry up to tragedy. Music sits outside the ranking. It copies no Idea but the will itself, which is why it reaches the hearer without passing through anything represented.
The Syntopicon draws on the book for will, desire, pleasure and pain, art, and beauty, because Schopenhauer binds all five into one account: desire is the will suffering itself, and art is the only place the willing stops.