210SCHWEITZER, ALBERT
Schopenhauer accepts Immanuel Kant’s
distinction between the world as it
appears to perception and as thing- in-it-
self, existing independently of the mind.
Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer further
believes that thing-in-itself, the world in
reality outside of thought, is not entirely
unknowable, but can be grasped non-
descriptively as Will. Schopenhauer char-
acterizes the world as Will as uncaused,
objectless, and therefore subjectless, pure
willing, which is also sometimes identi-
fied as blind urging or undirected desire.
Schopenhauer maintains that the world
we experience is the objectification of
ceaseless conflict, in that the world is
constantly trying to achieve every incom-
patible desire through its manifestations.
The result is the inevitable strife that
results in individual lives, from the colli-
sion of social groups in competition and
war, struggles for dominance and survival
in the animal kingdom, and in the
forces and events of inanimate nature.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism is based on
the fact that the world in reality is neces-
sarily the source of perpetual conflict,
from which there can never be lasting
peace. To live is to suffer, Schopenhauer
concludes, citing the first principle of
Buddhism as a religious anticipation of
the same conception he arrives at through
philosophical inquiry. Schopenhauer
believes that there are nevertheless two
paths to limited salvation from suffering,
both of which involve denying or over-
coming the individual empirical will
experienced as desire in our mental lives.
The two methods of salvation involve
either saintly religious asceticism, the
monk’s way; or self-transcending aes-
thetic contemplation of the beautiful and
sublime, the way of the aesthetic genius,
in which all persons can also participate
at least to a limited extent. Schopenhauer
rejects the existence of God, because
there is nowhere in his metaphysics of the
world as Will and representation, thing-
in-itself and as it appears to the mind,
where God as a divine personality might
intelligibly be said to belong. As a result,
despite praising certain religious doctrines
as glimpses of more penetrating philo-
sophical truths, Schopenhauer considers
all conventional religion to be a poor sub-
stitute for rigorous metaphysics, suitable
only for persons incapable of engaging
in deep philosophical study. His works
include Fourfold Root of the Principle of
Sufficient Reason (1813), On Sight and
Colors (1816), The World as Will and Idea
(1818), On the Will in Nature (1836), The
Two Basic Problems of Ethics (1841),
and Parerga und Paralipomena (roughly
translated as Comments and Omissions,
2 vols., 1851).SCHWEITZER, ALBERT (1875–1965).
A German philosopher, theologian, and
doctor, distinguished by his advocacy of
a reverence for life principle (that made
vegetarianism essential) and his study
of the historical Jesus. According to
Schweitzer, Jesus lived in earnest expecta-
tion of the historical intervention by the