World as Will and Gratitude

The broad brush of court philosophy has had its way with the works of Schopenhauer. The academic industrial estate has declared as the philosophical ‘pessimist’. Naturally, like all efforts of propaganda, if a slogan is repeated enough by the right people it sticks.

Anyone who has studied a single philosopher to a relative depth will be aware of what I’m talking about: Hume as mere empiricist, Kant as mere moralist, Foucault as mere pervert… Intellectual recruits are told that an encounter with Schopenhauer should depress them, and so it does. At the present time, this is simply the way the intellectual economy functions.

Regardless, I want to put forward my own interpretation of Schopenhauer’s observations on the nature of reality. My view is that, although his work contains some incredibly shocking material observations about life in general and the operations of the human body, it contains the possibility for a radical acceptance through its realism.