Will

There is an experience nearly all of us have had and very few can explain: listening to a piece of music — a Beethoven symphony, a Mozart adagio, an unexpected chord in some ordinary song — and feeling something that cannot be put into words. It is not joy, not sadness, not any nameable emotion. It is as if the music touched a layer of our existence that lies beneath language, beneath thought, beneath everything we call “self.” Why does this happen? Why does music move us in a way that painting, poetry, and sculpture — however beautiful — can never quite replicate? ...

Arthur Schopenhauer Born in Danzig in 1788, into a wealthy merchant family, Arthur Schopenhauer was able to devote himself to philosophy with financial independence. He earned his doctorate with On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813) and at thirty published his major work, The World as Will and Representation (1818) — which, however, was almost entirely ignored for decades. Hostile to the then-dominant Hegel, he even scheduled his lectures at the same hour as his rival’s in Berlin, to no audience. Recognition came only at the end of his life, in the 1850s. He was also the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought (the Upanishads and Buddhism). ...