At the other end of the philosophical spectrum from Saint-Simonian ‘materialism’, though sharing its rhetoric of progress, was Hegelian Idealism. It influenced not only critics such as Franz Brendel and A. B. Marx, but also the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner. Though Hegel opposed Romanticism, applications of his aesthetics to music by Marx and Liszt remained closer to it, noting the convergence of music and literature on Romantic subjectivity and responding with the new genre of ‘programme music’. Another Romantic project, the ‘new mythology’, was realized in Wagner’s operatic Gesamtkunstwerk. Its more ‘realist’ approach to feeling was derived from Feuerbach’s post-Hegelian philosophy and little changed by Wagner’s later enthusiasm for Schopenhauer. Though overshadowed by his universalizing and exclusionary goal of a ‘purely human’ art (one that had no space for Jewish artists), Wagner’s aesthetic technique remained faithful to the idea of theatrical illusion inaugurated a century earlier by Rousseau and Diderot.

Nietzsche’s late text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, has an important formal aim: to release images from the demands of reason. It also has a moral aim – to release the human will from its enslavement to preordained images, including from the image of itself. What would an image be for which its viewer still had to be invented? for which its viewer was being invented – in the image itself? This is the adventure of Nietzsche’s major work, which, like some literary works, is drunk with images, but they take a certain path of development, from knowing images to willing images. Instead of an image that presents knowledge for a knower, Nietzsche, through trial and error, develops a “willing image,” which first has a negative task, to liberate the will from its tie to established knowledge. But across the momentous book he also gradually sets aside images that stimulate an already existing will. The aim of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is thus like the aim of some literature, to give desire, wishing, wanting, hoping, and loving a new landscape in which it can change its genre and its objects, where it can learn to self-determine.

Wagner’s fascination with Indian literary culture followed a similar impulse from Schopenhauer, Friedrich Schlegel, and Karl Köppen, among others, as part of an ‘oriental renaissance’. The German construction of India, after William Jones’ pioneering work on Sanskrit Upanishads while in the East India Company, accrued around the promise of philological routes to the origins of world culture, demonstrating a primordial link between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. It also offers a context for Wagner’s passion for Buddhism, as distinct from Vedic Hinduism, and the figure of the Buddha, most notable in Die Sieger and Parsifal, but also traceable in the Ring.

This chapter aims to disentangle some the different views that have often been associated with the term ‘pessimism’. This includes the claims that (1) there is no historical progress; (2) this world is the worst of all possible worlds; (3) happiness is impossible; and (4) life is not worth living. The last thesis is identified as the central concern of the ‘pessimism dispute’, and three different justifications for it are presented. The final section of the chapter considers the expression of pessimism throughout human history and culture, with special attention paid to Schopenhauer’s analysis of religion.

This chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction and Schematism. In Heidegger’s view, these two sections inquire into the source of the categories that human understanding possesses a priori. Heidegger’s reading of both sections exhibits a characteristic move of his interpretive method, where he sees an innovative line of argument prioritizing the imagination emerge from a more traditional setup. The reconstruction also reveals some variety in how one can apply Heidegger’s interpretive method to the different parts of a text. Heidegger suggests that the traditional strand of argument is more prominent in the Metaphysical Deduction; while Kant attempts to derive the categories from the atemporal logic of the understanding, his references to the faculty of imagination at certain critical junctures reveal the breakdown of those attempts. By contrast, the emerging, innovative line of argument is more prominent in the Schematism, which quickly surpasses its traditional framing in order to offer a phenomenologically compelling account of how the categories, as ways of interpreting time (as constant, unidirectional, and so forth), inform our perceptual experience.

Chapter 6 is dedicated to examining an article by the Danish thinker, poet, and writer Poul Martin Møller, “Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality.” This article represents the most substantial treatment of nihilism in Danish philosophy. Møller reviews some of the then recent works in German literature about the controversial issue of whether Hegel’s philosophy contained a theory of immortality. He claims not only that Hegel’s philosophy does not have a theory of immortality, but also, absent such a theory, that it leads to nihilism. Like Jean Paul, Møller believes that the denial of immortality would render human existence impossible. Møller’s argumentative strategy is to use a reductio ad absurdum to refute the view that denies immortality. To begin, he assumes the correctness of this view, and then tries to explore further what precisely it would mean to hold it. Then from this he deduces negative consequences, which demonstrate that the view must be abandoned as contradictory. He follows this strategy through many different spheres: the life of the individual, social and political relations, art, philosophy, science, religion, and so on. He claims that all these spheres would collapse into nihilism if the belief in immortality is denied.

Chapter 9 gives a reading of Nietzsche’s account of nihilism based on his unfinished work known as The Will to Power. Given the death of God and the collapse of traditional values, people are debilitated by a sense of hopelessness and meaninglessness. Traditional values no longer seem meaningful. Nietzsche outlines three key cosmological values that one is obliged to abandon once one has reached the stage of nihilism: (1) the idea that there is any purpose or goal in the universe or in human existence; (2) the notion that the universe constitutes some kind of unity or coherent system; and (3) the very notion of truth itself. Nietzsche includes, among the group of metaphysical prejudices or false beliefs, the law of contradiction itself, which is often considered to be the very foundation of any kind of rational thought. These metaphysical prejudices constitute the preconditions for science itself. Nietzsche raises the question of the possibility of creating a new set of values on the strength of one’s own authority. But he believes that people in his age have not yet emancipated themselves from nihilism to the extent that they can do this.

Mikhal Oklot surveys the hazards of imposing philosophical readings on Chekhov while also probing his engagement with specific philosophical traditions – Stoicism, Cynicism, materialism – and the distinct resonance of his moral perspective with such figures as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and especially Schopenhauer as a key interlocutor and influence.

Robert Wicks examines the question of whether the thing-in-itself can be accurately described as “will.”Schopenhauer admits that, although our inner experience of our body as will leads us to generalize the will as the in-itself of other phenomena, this is not yet an accurate depiction of the thing-in-itself, as it is still subject to the form of time. Yet he persistently describes the in-itself of reality as “will,” and it is hard to see how anything other than an endlessly striving will could underwrite his pessimism. Wicks argues that Schopenhauer’s use of Christianity appears in his vocabulary of universal guilt, which is key to understanding how suffering is universal.However, a Christian interpretation of the mystical experience would push Schopenhauer in the direction of saying there is more to the thing-in-itself than will, since the mystical experience is experience of something, and if will is negated something must remain to be experienced. Wicks, however, argues that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is incompatible with any interpretation of the thing-in-itself that denies it to be will; this puts him in touch with a more Buddhist form of mysticism, and explains the enthusiasm with which he accepted Buddhism when he finally encountered it.

Many scholars and critics have maintained that Tolstoy, while a great writer, is a poor thinker, a mere amateur in philosophy. My chapter suggests that this venerable cliché of Tolstoy reception is untenable. The chapter has two parts. In the first, I discuss several philosophers with whose thinking Tolstoy engaged extensively and give a brief account of his relation to them. The main names here are well known: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Immanuel Kant. In the second part, I examine a somewhat unexpected but significant affinity Tolstoy’s fiction has with the thought of Baruch Spinoza. This affinity emerges most clearly in War and Peace. Although this section covers what is merely an affinity, it aims to show that Tolstoy’s greatest fictional work is one of the supreme artistic instantiations of an essentially Spinozist account of the world.

Alistair Welchman argues that Schopenhauer was a direct perceptual realist. This interpretation of Schopenhauer’s epistemology sheds light on two difficulties elsewhere in his thought. The first is in his theory of compassion. Schopenhauer’s official view is that in compassion we see through the veil of maya into our essential identity with all other beings as will. Many commentators find this extravagant and suggest a psychological account instead, in which we imagine ourselves into the situation of the other. However this is contradicted by Schopenhauer’s own account of a similar contemporary theory, in which he appears to suggest that we directly perceive the Other’s emotions. But there is another advantage to this view: Schopenhauer is also a direct realist about perception of meaning, and this has repercussions for his (late) view that his metaphysics is hermeneutic in nature.

Marco Segala argues that the tight seal Schopenhauer wanted to maintain between ordinary experience along with its investigation in the natural sciences on the one hand, and metaphysics on the other, is more porous than Schopenhauer can acknowledge in WWR 1. Segala proposes a rethinking of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of nature, conceiving it less as an “explanation” of science and more as a conceptual space in which metaphysics (Ideas) and science (natural forces) can interact. But ultimately, he argues, Schopenhauer abandoned the Ideas completely as having any role in scientific explanation, supplementing his philosophy of nature with a philosophy of natural science that anticipates modern approaches.

Dennis Vanden Auweele looks at Schopenhauer’s philosophy of religion. Schopenhauer, he argues, was in dialogue with contemporary scholars of Asia such as Creuzer who were actively researching Asian religions and developing philosophies of myth. According to Auweele, Creuzer had a great, though unacknowledged, influence on Schopenhauer’s thought, in particular his view that global systems of myth are related, and originate in South Asia. Schopenhauer parts ways with Creuzer, however, in developing a theory that systems of myth are rooted in intuitive rather than conceptual understanding. Myth is not a clear and abstract system of meaning, but rather an allegorical expression of basic metaphysical truths that the originators of mythology grasp intuitively. For Schopenhauer, systems of myth (and by extension religions) agree to the extent they share a grounding (pessimistic) intuition. Auweele finds resources in WWR for Schopenhauer to develop a theory of myth-making that accounts not only for myths that accurately depict reality (pessimistic systems of myth, for Schopenhauer) but for how and why some myths and religions get it wrong (and stray into optimism). The result is a sophisticated philosophy of religion and a useful and original intervention in a contemporary debate over the origin of myths.

Matthias Koßler argues that Schopenhauer's theory of character is relevant to the recent revival of the concept in the social sciences. He argues that the theory of character Schopenhauer presented in his later essays is inconsistent with the theory developed in The World as Will and Representation. In the prize essays, Schopenhauer develops the Kantian distinction between intelligible and empirical character, treating the former as an innate, unchangeable metaphysical entity, while in WWR Schopenhauer clearly emphasizes the importance of empirical evidence, even for his metaphysics, so that intelligible character must be thought of in relation to experience. Furthermore, reason itself is an essential component of being human, and rationality involves the possibility of partly resisting the effect of a motive on the will, hindering it from achieving expression in action. Thus, human species character cannot just be a set of fixed properties, but rather a general field of possibilities by means of which we use our rationality to individualize ourselves. In conclusion, Koßler recommends avoiding the Kantian terminology of intelligible versus empirical character that achieves prominence in the prize essays. Instead, we should speak of a general concept of personhood that is necessarily specialized into an individual character.

Sandra Shapshay looks at the joy Schopenhauer acknowledges us to feel in the presence of natural beauty. Many commentators subordinate this theory of pleasure to the cognitive aspect of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic. Shapshay resists this interpretation. But she also resists its opposite but still reductive or unifying strategy that minimizes the cognitive for the sake of the hedonic. Rather, she discards the notion that Schopenhauer had a unified aesthetic theory as not only false but undesirable. Instead, she shows that Schopenhauer develops two, mutually irreducible spectrums of aesthetic value, based on two different criteria. The spectrum that commentators acknowledge in Schopenhauer is the hierarchy of the arts, which puts architecture and fountainry at the bottom (as revealing the lower Ideas) and literature at the top, as a display of the higher, more complex ideas. The spectrum that is overlooked, but becomes visible if we take his more formalist views of natural aesthetics seriously, is the spectrum of the beautiful and sublime, where the beautiful – and botanical beauty in particular – lends itself more readily (than experiences at the sublime pole) to a state of mind that is not only tranquilizing but (in a departure from his usual attitude) positively joyful.

Bernard Reginster provides a different perspective on some of these themes, deepening our understanding of Schopenhauer's pessimism. This is rooted in the idea that there is something systematically delusive about desire, since fulfilling our desires does not give the lasting satisfaction we would want. But Schopenhauer holds out the possibility that we can detach from our desires through resignation. How is such detachment possible?Reginster confronts the same problem we saw in Chapter 1, that the act of denial of the will cannot itself be an act of will; but he looks to a solution Janaway rejected, namely, Schopenhauer’s appeal to a secularized version of the Christian concept of grace. In probing the structure of resignation, Reginster argues that it must involve some “incentive” in the form of cognitive insight into “the will's inner conflict and its essential nothingness,” (WWR 1, 68, 424–470) which leads one to voluntary asceticism, that is, mortification of the will, which in turn leads to resignation. He shows that Schopenhauer provides two mechanisms for this, plausible by the standards of contemporary psychology: hedonic adaptation (i.e. “getting used to” deprivation) and physical weakening of the body, which, as objectified will, weakens the will.

Stephan Atzert looks at the Asian traditions from which Schopenhauer drew two of his central ideas – Nieban (Nirvana) and Maja (Maya). Although Schopenhauer connected these ideas systematically in his philosophy, the concepts themselves emerge from quite distinct traditions: Maya is central to the Vendanta schools in India, while Nirvana is Buddhist. The two traditions use the concepts almost independently, though Schopenhauer blends them into a whole. Schopenhauer's source for his concept of Maja is the Oupnek'hat, which presents a quite specific interpretation of Maya as not only a passive source of delusion, but an active life force. Schopenhauer's access to the Buddhist conception of Nieban was also circuitous, and he doesn't use the term (Nirvana) with anything like the frequency that he uses Maya; and when he does use it, he sometimes treats it as an unhelpful euphemism for “nothingness.” Aztert argues that this philosophical ontologization of Nieban is misleading. Schopenhauer's sources in fact reject the identification of Nieban with nothingness as well as its identification with divinity (Brahmen). What is most basic both to his sources and to Schopenhauer's own account is Nirvana as release from suffering.

Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation is one of the central texts in the history of Western philosophy. It is one of the last monuments to the project of grand synthetic philosophical system building, where a single, unified work could aim to clarify, resolve, and ground all the central questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, aesthetics, and science. Poorly received on its initial publication, it soon became a powerful cultural force, inspiring not only philosophers but also artists, writers, and musicians, and attracting a large popular audience of nonscholars. Perhaps equally importantly, Schopenhauer was one of the first European philosophers to take non-Western thought seriously, to treat it as a living tradition rather than as a mere object of study. This volume showcases the enormous variety of contemporary scholarship as well as the enduring relevance of this beautifully written text.