Start with the essays
Essays and Aphorisms, the Penguin selection translated by R.J. Hollingdale, is drawn from his late collection Parerga and Paralipomena. It's short, it's arranged by topic, and it's where his prose is at its sharpest.
You get the pessimism, the misanthropy, the extremely quotable contempt for other philosophers, and, unexpectedly, a lot of practical advice about how to live that's more useful than most modern versions.
| Book | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Essays and Aphorisms | 1851 | Penguin selection from Parerga and Paralipomena. Start here. |
| The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1 | 1818 | The main work. Written by 30, ignored for decades. |
| The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2 | 1844 | Supplementary essays on volume 1, and often better than it. |
| On the Suffering of the World | 1851 | A short Penguin Great Ideas extract. The cheapest way in. |
| The Art of Being Right | 1831 (pub. 1864) | 38 dishonest debating tactics, described with relish. A minor work and enormous fun. |
What 'the will' means
His central claim: behind the world we perceive there's a single blind striving he calls Will, and everything, including us, is its expression. Not a will that wants anything specific. A will that just wants, endlessly, without object or satisfaction.
That's why he's a pessimist rather than merely gloomy. Desire is structurally unsatisfiable, since satisfying one want produces the next, and the gaps between wants are boredom. Life oscillates between the two.
His exits are art, which suspends willing for a moment, compassion, which recognises that the same will animates everyone else, and ascetic renunciation, which he admired and never attempted.
He read the Upanishads, and it shows
He's the first major Western philosopher to take Indian thought seriously rather than as a curiosity. He kept a Latin translation of the Upanishads by his bed and said it was the consolation of his life.
The resemblance is real: the Will resembles the striving that Buddhism identifies as the root of suffering, and his ethics of compassion arrives close to Buddhist ground by a European route. He noticed the parallel with satisfaction. Our Buddhism guide covers the original.
Who he made possible
Nietzsche found The World as Will in a second-hand shop at 21 and called it a mirror; his whole later work is an argument with it. Wagner set the Ring cycle to it. Freud conceded that Schopenhauer got to the unconscious first. Tolstoy, Beckett, Borges, and most of the pessimist tradition run through him.
365 Days of Philosophy places him in the sequence, one page a morning across the year.
Common questions
Which Schopenhauer book should I read first?
Essays and Aphorisms, the Penguin selection translated by Hollingdale. It's short, topically arranged, and shows his prose at its best. The World as Will and Representation can wait.
What did Schopenhauer mean by 'the will'?
A single blind striving underlying everything, including us. It doesn't want anything in particular; it just wants, endlessly. That structure is why he thought satisfaction was impossible.
Was Schopenhauer a Buddhist?
No, but he read the Upanishads closely and recognised the overlap with Buddhist ideas about desire and suffering. He's the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought.
Is Schopenhauer hard to read?
He's the most readable of the great German philosophers by some distance, and he's genuinely funny. The main work is long; the essays are not.
How did Schopenhauer influence Nietzsche?
Nietzsche found The World as Will at 21 and it shaped everything he wrote, first as discipleship and then as sustained rejection of the pessimistic conclusion.