The World as Will and Idea: Abridged in One Volume

xli, 290 pp. Translated by Jill Berman, edited by David Berman. Includes a chronology of Schopenhauer's life and times, suggestions for further reading, and index. The nineteenth-century idealist philosopher and precursor of Freud. The World as Will and Idea (1819) holds that all nature, including man, is the expression of an insatiable will to life; that the truest understanding of the world comes through art and the only lasting good through ascetic renunciation. Unique in western philosophy for his affinity with Eastern thought, Schopenhauer influenced philosophers, writers, and composers including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Wagner, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett.