A recent short entry on 'will' in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy uses one-tenth of its word length to inform us that 'the will reached its philosophical apotheosis in Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea (1818, 1844)'. This is correct insofar as the central term of that work's account of human nature, and of the nature of the whole world, is Wille, a word we can translate only as will. But it is apt to mislead. For in the history of the concept of will, Schopenhauer's intervention is idiosyncratic and perturbing. He does not simply take a pre-existing conception and give it an unwonted importance; he takes the word Wille and proposes for it a use that is revolutionary and far from straightforward.

WILL AND ‘THE RIDDLE’

Will makes its dramatic debut in Schopenhauer’s main work in §18 after a well-orchestrated build-up that allows it to be presented as ‘the answer’ to a tantalizing and vital riddle. The First Book of The World as Will and Representation has given a systematic account of the world of objects. Objects are objects of experience for a representing subject: there can be no object without subject, no subject without object. Objects are organized by space, time, and causality, the a priori forms of all representation. The subject perceives or has ‘intuitive representations’ and, using concepts, it thinks, reasons, and judges. Throughout all this its representations are ordered, each representation being grounded in others in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason in one of its four versions. But something is missing from this orderly scenario.

It is a commonplace of the history of ideas that there is an extremely close relationship between Schopenhauer and Freud. Nietzsche too is often cited as a philosophical precursor of Freud, but the proto- Freudian elements in his thought are naturally regarded as derived from his Schopenhauerian legacy.

The question of influence, or at any rate continuity, between Schopenhauer and Freud is of interest and importance on its own account, but it has further dimensions. Freud's life and writings are subject to continued interrogation, and his claims for the originality of psychoanalysis are regularly disputed. Whether or not enquiry into the origins of psychoanalysis can do anything to resolve the abiding controversy surrounding the discipline, they at least promise to increase our understanding by helping us to see what makes a conception of the unconscious specifically psychoanalytic.

On Schopenhauer’s side, the interest is this. Indisputably, Freud’s ideas have sunk deep into the natural consciousness of twentiethcentury Western culture. If Freud’s central theoretical concept does descend ultimately from Schopenhauer, then this is a reason, or a further reason, for regarding Schopenhauer’s philosophy as having a special importance for our self-understanding.

It is one of the paradoxes of Schopenhauer's philosophy, but one which is perhaps not sufficiently remarked on, that while the idea of knowledge seems central to that philosophy and crucial at various points for its interpretation, Schopenhauer himself says very little about it. Yet his starting point in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is the idea of a knowing consciousness, and the conclusion of his main work, The World as Will and Representation, brings in the conception of a form of salvation, a freedom from the ravages of the will, which is mediated by knowledge. It is not that Schopenhauer says nothing about knowledge. He claims, for example, that perception provides the basic formof direct knowledge of objects, and as the philosophical system develops, other forms of direct knowledge are introduced. By contrast, abstract knowledge, the only real form of knowledge proper (Wissen, as opposed to Erkenntnis, which is the general term for knowledge, including knowledge of objects), requires, as Aristotle also demanded, seeing why whatever is known is so, so that there is reference to a ground or reason for the truth in question.

Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophizing was motivated by ethical questions and concerns from its dawn to its twilight. In 1813, as he initiated his labour on his main work, The World as Will and Representation (1819), Schopenhauer envisioned a philosophy that would be metaphysics and ethics in one. Seventeen years later, with the vain hope of drawing an audience sufficient to justify a second edition of his unsuccessful main work, he published his additional reflections on the philosophy of nature as On the Will in Nature, in which Schopenhauer claimed more entitlement than Spinoza to call his metaphysics 'ethics.' And in his final book, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), which provided Schopenhauer with his first taste of the fame he desired so desperately, he wrote that his 'real philosophy' culminated in a 'higher metaphysical-ethical standpoint' (PI 313/H. 5, 333), something he self-consciously suspended to produce the eudemonology articulated in the essay 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life'. As the great Schopenhauerian scholar Arthur Hübscher has noted, Schopenhauer 'placed the ethical attitude at the centre and conclusion of his thinking.' The ethical attitude, however, was also at the beginning of his philosophical thought.

Arthur Schopenhauer lived from 1788 to 1860. His thought took shape early in his life, in the decade from 1810 to 1820, yet until the 1850s he was virtually unknown, and the period in which he became a powerful influence began only in the second half of the nineteenth century. He admired Rossini and Bellini but inspired Wagner, knew Goethe, and met Hegel, but was an influence after his death on Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, and the young Wittgenstein. His vision of the world is in some respects more bleak and cynical than we might expect for its period, more akin to that of existentialism or even of Samuel Beckett. Schopenhauer's world is neither rational nor good, but rather is an absurd, polymorphous, hungry thing that lacerates itself without end and suffers in each of its parts. None of us is in control even of our own nature; instead, we are at the mercy of the blind urge to exist and propagate that stupefies us into accepting the illusion that to be a human individual is worthwhile. In truth it would have been better had nothing existed. Although this philosophy originated in a pre-Darwinian and pre-Freudian age, it has a prescient cutting edge that can make the later time of evolutionary theory, psychoanalysis, and the 'Great' War seem the more truly Schopenhauerian era. 'By what mere blind propulsion did all these thousands of human creatures keep on mechanically living?' wrote Edith Wharton in a war novel of 1923, sounding, perhaps unknowingly, a Schopenhauerian note.

READING NIETZSCHE’S SCHOPENHAUER

It would not be misleading to say that at the time he wrote The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was so steeped in Schopenhauer that he perceived whatever he perceived through the lens of Schopenhauerian distinctions and categories. Certainly it is hard to make sense of the concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian, and many other insuf- ficiently explained aspects of Nietzsche's argument in that cryptic work, without relating them to Schopenhauer's more explicit and extensive arguments.

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason was written as an academic dissertation in 1813 when Schopenhauer was twenty-five. He presented it to the University of Jena, was awarded the degree of doctor of philosophy on the strength of it, and in the same year paid to have it published. Almost immediately afterwards he set himself to writing what was to be his major work, The World as Will and Representation, and this he completed in 1818. Many years later, he substantially revised and added to the Fourfold Root, publishing a second edition of it in 1847.

In his preface to this second edition, Schopenhauer refers to the Fourfold Root as ‘a treatise on elementary philosophy,’ and within limits that is precisely what it is. Consequently, it can profitably be read, especially in its first edition, as a self-contained treatise on the nature and structure of the world of common sense and science, and on the principles of knowledge, explanation, and necessity governing that world. But Schopenhauer also says in his second-edition preface that the Fourfold Root became the foundation of his ‘entire system,’ and almost from the start that is how he regarded it.

ON DEATH AND LIFE AS DYING

The concept of death is a fundamental adjunct of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of appearance and Will. Schopenhauer interprets death as the aim and purpose of life. He maintains that to live is to suffer, that the triumph of death is inevitable, and that existence is a constant dying. Yet Schopenhauer also insists that death is the denial of the individual will or will-to-live; that birth and death as events in the phenomenal world are alike unreal; that death is not complete annihilation; and that suicide, though not morally objectionable, is philosophically pointless because it affirms the will-to-live. The paradoxes in Schopenhauer's reflections on the nature of death must be understood in order to appreciate what he means by the empirical will in its relation to Will as thing-in-itself in his unique brand of post-Kantian idealism.

The body of work known as Milton's sonnets comprises twenty-five poems: twenty-three fourteen-line sonnets (five in Italian, eighteen in English); one fifteen-line canzone in Italian; and one English 'tailed' sonnet (the twentyline 'On the New Forcers of Conscience'). The first ten sonnets, including the five Italian ones plus the canzone, were published in Milton's Poems of 1645. These and the rest, save for those addressed to Fairfax, Cromwell, Vane, and the second one to Cyriack Skinner - apparently omitted for political reasons but included in the Trinity Manuscript - appeared in the Poems of 1673. Setting aside debates concerning the sonnets' dating and sequence, we shall focus here on some eleven of Milton's English sonnets, and on specific individuals or groups addressed or mentioned in them.

The public, topical, even heroic sonnet; the sonnet praising or counselling a friend, threatening or mocking an enemy; the sonnet marking a point or problem in the poet's own career - all these were recognized and accepted variations of the genre in sixteenth-century Italy, but were most unusual in mid-seventeenth-century England when Milton turned to them in conscious imitation of such models as the Italian poets Delia Casa and Tasso. For English readers, the sonnet was concerned with human love and sometimes, as in Donne and Herbert and one or two memorable occasions in Spenser, with divine love.

Milton idealizes the reader, and to this idealization his many readers have often consented. In part this follows from the idealization of himself that so drove Milton's endeavours from an early age. His careers as teacher, pamphleteer, civil servant, and poet were all founded in his passion for learning - a college friend teased him about his 'inexcusable perseverance, bending over books and studies day and night', and he was later proud to recall 'that from my twelfth year scarcely ever did I leave my studies for my bed before the hour of midnight' (YP i: 337, 4: 612). Such learning he encourages his readers to share. Later literary and educational tradition made much of this legacy by giving Paradise Lost a central place in the canon, and finding in the epic a valuable store of cultural capital. But Milton exalts the reader in another still more compelling way: by setting his learning aside and, out of respect for individual reason, asking readers to experience wholly their being in the world in relation to the divine. Here his success is more difficult to chart, but finds expression in the rich diversity of responses to his works over the last four centuries.

Intellectual historiography as it has commonly been practised is devoted to the formidability of tradition. It seeks to identify enduring suppositions - world-pictures, cosmological principles, models of nature, mind, time, and God - and to view their elasticity over great expanses of cultural history. It does not shy away from apparent examples of radical change. Indeed, some of these examples are its stock subjects - the seeming break between Christianity and antiquity, the rise of scientific empiricism, the self-proclaimed specialness of the various romanticisms. But, armed with concepts such as the 'unit ideas' of Arthur O. Lovejoy and the 'reoccupied positions' of Hans Blumenberg, intellectual historians have generally preferred to craft stories about gradual renovation and substitution rather than rupture and novelty. It is telling in this respect that in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, a work of tremendous scope and originality, and probably the most distinguished contribution to intellectual history in recent years, Blumenberg should keep returning to the oddly provincial point that the idea of progress does not derive from a secularization of Christian history: for a historian of ideas, the challenge of modernity is to get straight on its tradition. It can sometimes seem, in the light of this discipline, as if the course of Western thought were the internal conversation among fifty or so intellectuals dedicated to solving each other's problems while doomed to pass on new versions of them. This vision of thinking as the grandest of human games, self-generated and self-regulating, is responsible for a marked decline today in the authority of classical intellectual history. At the extreme of this suspicion, in the popular new Marxisms, the entire project of intellectual history, the boundary that constitutes its subject matter, appears wishful. Intellect is too flimsy and extravagant, too uneconomical, to have so grim and massive a thing as a history. Ideas are the forms ideology takes when forgetful of its purpose, and intellectual history dissolves into the forces at work in history at large.

When the Archangel Michael in Paradise Lost foresees the church attacked from without by persecution and from within by 'specious forms' so that 'truth shall retire / Bestuck with slanderous darts' (12.534-6), he summons along with the figure of Truth a picture of St Sebastian stuck full of arrows: who, however, did not die of those wounds but had to be executed repeatedly. Milton's epic is similarly susceptible to recurrent volleys; and his figure of Woman brought to life in Eve has been a primary target, with similar resurgent vitality.

Thirty years ago, a largely 'masculinist' critical consensus thought that Milton conformed to a traditional reading of the biblical Eve as inherently trivial, vain, and inclined to fall, thus denying Milton's assertion of eternal providence. Since then much work has been done - by Joan Bennett, Francis Blessington, Barbara Lewalski, Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Stella Revard, James Turner, Irene Samuel, Kathleen Swaim, Joan Webber, and Joseph Wittreich, to name a few - showing how Milton shatters this stereotype. More recently in the vanguard of attack have been feminists offended by Milton's partial acceptance of Pauline tradition concerning the subordination of wives and the misogynous diatribes he allows some of his dramatis personae. 'Resistant' readers writing from the point of view of gender - for example, Jackie DiSalvo, Sandra Gilbert, Christine Froula, Marcia Landy, Mary Nyquist, Patricia Parker, and Maureen Quilligan (178), some of whom admire Milton in other ways - challenge what Nyquist calls 'Western bourgeois or liberal feminism'; Nyquist interrogates the 'historically determined and class-inflected discourse of “equal rights” ' (99), shows that Milton's contemporaries of both sexes offered less genderspecific interpretations of Genesis, and finds that Milton's contractual interpretation of God's provision of meet help, contrasted with Rachel Speght's view of Adam as a 'passive recipient' of divine grace, serves 'an individualism paradigmatically masculine' (114-15).

On 10 August 1637 a pious young Cambridge graduate called Edward King was drowned in the Irish Sea when the ship carrying him to Ireland to visit his family struck a rock off the Welsh coast and sank. The author of some rather undistinguished Latin verses, King had intended to take Holy Orders and pursue a career in the church, but in 1637 he was still a fellow at Milton's old college, Christ's, which he had entered when Milton was in his second year. He was evidently a well respected and popular figure in the University community, so much so that when the news of his death reached Cambridge a group of his friends and colleagues decided to organize a volume of memorial verses in his honour. Although Milton does not appear to have been a particularly close friend of King's, he was nevertheless invited to contribute to the collection. Published in 1638 under the title Justa Edouardo King naufrago, the volume contained thirty-six poems in all, twenty-three in Greek or Latin followed by thirteen in English. Milton's contribution, the last in the collection, was Lycidas.

Matters of occasion

On first encountering Milton's Ludlow Masque - often referred to as 'Comus' - one might begin by considering what kind of text it is. A masque is a special kind of commissioned work, spectacular and 'multi-media' in presentation, and inevitably collaborative. It cannot be treated simply as its writer's 'poem' or a play. This kind of entertainment developed at the Jacobean and Caroline courts up to the time of the English Civil War. Ben Jonson (as poet until the early 1630s) and Inigo Jones (as designer) were the genre's most innovative exponents, though there were others. It was for masques that proscenium arch stages and movable scenery were first introduced in England. Masques were usually performed during the winter festive season after Christmas, or occasionally at other times, and they often represented the spectacular highpoint, involving huge expense. They featured younger courtiers as the 'masquers', who personated symbolic figures - often chaste goddesses, if it was a ladies' masque, or martial heroes, if it was a lords' masque - and whose function, apart from representing virtue, was to dance. They did not, at least until the arrival of Queen Henrietta Maria, usually speak, or sing: that was left to the servants.

The Renaissance is a period of heightened genre consciousness in literary theory and poetic practice, and Milton is arguably the most genreconscious of English poets. His great epic, Paradise Lost, is preeminently a poem about knowing and choosing - for the Miltonic Bard, for the characters, for the reader. One ground for such choices is genre, Milton's own choice and use of a panoply of literary forms, with their accumulated freight of cultural significances shared between author and audience.

Critics have long recognized and continue to discover in Milton's poem an Edenic profusion of thematic and structural elements from a great many literary genres and modes, as well as a myriad of specific allusions to major literary texts and exemplary works. Almost everyone agrees that Paradise Lost is an epic whose closest structural affinities are to Virgil's Aeneid, and that it undertakes in some fashion to redefine classical heroism in Christian terms (Bowra; Di Cesare; Hunter; Steadman 1967). We now recognize as well how many major elements derive from other epics and epic-like poems. From Homer's Iliad: a tragic epic subject - here, the death and woe resulting from an act of disobedience; a hero (Satan) motivated like Achilles by a sense of injured merit; and the battle scenes in heaven. From the Odyssey: Satan's wiles and craft and Satan's Odysseus-like adventures on the perilous seas (of Chaos) and in new lands. From Hesiod's Theogony: many aspects of the war in heaven between the good and evil angels. And from Ovid's Metamorphoses: the pervasiveness of change and transformation - diabolic and divine - in the Miltonic universe (Blessington 1979; Mueller; Aryanpur; Steadman 1968, 194-208; Hughes 1965; Revard; Harding 1946; Lewalski 1985, 71-6; Martz)

In 1671, when Milton published Paradise Regained, he had another piece printed along with it in the same volume. The title-page read: 'PARADISE REGAIN'D, A POEM In iv Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes'. Although Milton is reported to have composed his brief epic during the four years that had passed since the publication of Paradise Lost in 1667, no one knows when he wrote his tragedy. In Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained we hear the voice of the poet, a strong presence, pursuing 'Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme' (PL 1.16), sharing with his readers his prayers for inspiration (PL 3.1-3) and his judgements of the poem's actions. In Samson Agonistes, however, we make no contact with that authoritative voice except in the preface, entitled 'Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem which Is Call'd Tragedy', an 'epistle' to the reader requesting that his dramatic poem (which he did not intend to have performed on stage) be read in the context of Aeschylus', Sophocles', and Euripides' works, recognizing the power of ancient Greek tragedy to inscribe central truths.

It has been suggested that Milton chose the genre of drama for Samson Agonistes in order to let a wide range of readers share in the rich paradoxes and dilemmas of his poetic vision of human experience without requiring of every reader a 'fit' understanding of his religious and intellectual beliefs (Hale, 193; cf. PL 7.31). Nevertheless, Milton's preface indicates that in the tragedy we will find ourselves in the same Christian humanist world of the epics - the world as viewed by the philosopher Cicero and 'the Apostle Paul himself - and that, in submitting ourselves to this tragedy, we will enter an experience graver, more moral, and to our greater spiritual growth than even that of Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained; for, however we are able to receive it, the tragedy will work directly on our innermost selves, addressing the roots of sin and suffering in us.

In Book 8 of Paradise Lost, Adam recalls his first experiences on waking into life:

It is surprising to hear the newly created Adam speak so 'readily'; we might have expected him to take more time in finding words with which to express himself. We might even say that Adam takes speech and language for granted, but he is right to do so - precisely because they are granted to him. Unlike his descendants, Adam has no need to acquire language laboriously. In a word, Adam's language is natural, not conventional.

The Reformation was an important part of England's national identity in the seventeenth century and an important part of Milton's identity. While England defined itself as a Protestant nation over against the largely Roman Catholic Continent, Milton defined himself over against Protestant opponents at home, turning his antipapal rhetoric first against prelates in the Church of England, whom he called 'more Antichristian than Antichrist himselfe' (YP i: 850), and later against the Scots Presbyters.

Milton did not consider Luther's break with Rome to be the important watershed in western history it is now regarded, and usually he did not speak of the Reformation. In his prose tracts, however, he repeatedly writes of 'reformation', by which he means the work of returning the English Church - and the English nation - to the purity and simplicity of the Gospel. Milton views the work of reformation as a recurring task. In The Reason of Church-Government, for example, he refers to the plight of Old Testament prophets 'that liv'd in the times of reformation', to a 'more perfect reformation under Christ', and to the reforming message of the Lollards and Hussites who had anticipated Luther (YP 1: 799, 757). England's role in the modern reformation is for Milton a point of particular pride, and he firmly believes that England has been chosen to complete the Reformation, in which he feels called to participate.