In A Discourse of English Poetry, 1586, William Webbe claims that the need for such a text, designed to aid readers in identifying a native poetic tradition, emerges out of the explosive proliferation of printed works and the problems they pose for exercising judgment. 'Among the innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite fardels of printed pamphlets, wherewith this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study furnished, the greatest part I think . . . are such as . . . tend in some respect . . . to poetry . . . If I write something concerning what I think of our English poets, or adventure to set down my simple judgement of English poetry, I trust the learned poets will give me leave, and vouchsafe my book passage . . . to stir up some other of meet ability to bestow [travail] in this matter: whereby I think we may not only get the means, which we yet want, to discern between good writers and bad, but perhaps also challenge from the rude multitude of rustical rhymers, who will be called poets, the right practice and orderly course of true poetry.'

SCHOPENHAUER’S QUESTION

In Book Five of The Gay Science Nietzsche writes that 'unconditional and honest atheism' is 'the locus of Schopenhauer's whole integrity' and 'the presupposition of the way he poses his problem'. If we reject the 'meaning' Christianity assigns to the world, then, writes Nietzsche, 'Schopenhauer's question immediately comes to us in a terrifying way: Has existence any meaning at all?' (Gay Science §357). It is true that, for Schopenhauer, everything in ordinary life is characterized by Nichtigkeit, or nothingness, which might suggest the thought that life is meaningless. (Payne translates the term as 'vanity', which loses much of its power.) But Schopenhauer tends to speak more often in the vocabulary of value, asking whether life is a business which covers its costs, whether the world is bankrupt, whether this world is the best, or the worst, possible. Thus, with regard to pessimism, I shall take Schopenhauer's prime question to be: What value does existence have? and more particularly: What is the value of my being what I am? For Schopenhauer, as Nietzsche implies, certain answers that were once thinkable on the assumption of Christian dogma - that each of us is an immaterial substance or a pure, rational soul or part of some supernatural design - are not available.

It is common to complain that Schopenhauer has not received the recognition he deserves. At first sight, this complaint may seem unfounded. Over the past 150 years, Schopenhauer has reached a wider general public than most great philosophers. He has also in- fluenced leading artists such as Wagner, Thomas Mann, and Proust. Finally, he has had a tremendous, if often indirect, influence on continental philosophy. His emphasis on the will and his anti-intellectualism were the driving forces behind life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), a movement which, through Nietzsche, influenced existentialism and post-modernism. His pessimism was appreciated by unorthodox Marxists like Horkheimer. And his discussion of the unconscious has obvious parallels with psychoanalysis, which itself has exerted a significant collateral influence on continental philosophy.

Nevertheless, the worry that Schopenhauer may be unduly neglected is not without foundation. In the current climate, professional philosophy, as opposed to cultural studies or literary theory, is increasingly dominated by analytic philosophy, even on the Continent. And Schopenhauer’s influence on analytic philosophy in general has been even smaller than that of other nineteenth-century German philosophers like Hegel and Nietzsche. This is unjust, since his work features at least as many analytic arguments as theirs.

TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS

As the title of his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, suggests, Schopenhauer held that we know the world in two different ways, through our representations of objects in space and time and through our experience of our ability to move our own bodies by willing to do so. In his account of our knowledge of the world through representation, he accepted the core of Kant's transcendental idealism, the view that the spatial and temporal forms in which experience presents objects to us, as well as the basic structure of the concepts by means of which we think about and judge these objects, above all the category of causality, are impositions of our own minds on our experience, that is, they reflect the structure of our own perception and conception of reality but not any structure that reality has in itself independently of our representation of it. In his account of our knowledge of the nature of reality through our own will, however, Schopenhauer rejected Kant's inference that transcendental idealism, while it allows us to conceive of certain features of how things may be in themselves by means of our categories, and even to adopt certain postulates about them for the sake of our practical reason, that is, morality, completely precludes us from having any actual knowledge of them.

Many commentators accept Schopenhauer's claim that there are no significant changes in his thinking after 1818. I, however, argue that there are good reasons for maintaining that there are significant developments in his thought after that date and that these concern his doctrine of the thing-in-itself. Furthermore, I contend that it is Schopenhauer's increasing knowledge of and admiration for Eastern thought which provided the impetus for the changes in doctrine that occurred. I begin by outlining three significant shifts that occurred in Schopenhauer's doctrine of the thing-in-itself after 1818. I then discuss his degree of acquaintance with Eastern thought, and I suggest various similarities to and differences between Eastern teaching and Schopenhauer's doctrine. Finally, I argue that the identified shifts in Schopenhauer's doctrine of the thing-in-itself can be plausibly explained, at least in part, by his increasing familiarity with and appreciation of Eastern thought.

THE SELF AS WILL AND INTELLECT

In the German language, as in English, the pronoun or pronominal adjective selbst, or 'self,' lends emphasis to something or someone previously named. In its nominalized form, das Selbst, or 'the self,' the pronoun serves chiefly to identify a human being or person. A specifically philosophical usage of the nominalized form came into currency in England, chiefly through the work of John Locke, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, from where it seems to have made its way into German philosophical terminology a few decades later. A main function of the philosophical term has been to identify the core or essence of a human being, as opposed to what might be accidental or contingent about him or her. In particular, the self has been identified with a human being's soul or mind as opposed to his or her body. In a secondary usage, the term has been employed to distinguish between constituent parts or aspects of one and the same being, in particular to articulate the special status of someone's or one's own 'better self.'

AESTHETIC CONTEMPLATION: A PRELUDE

Schopenhauer devoted more than one-quarter of his principal work, The World as Will and Representation, to aesthetics. The chapters on aesthetics occupy the third section in both volumes of that work and depend for their clarity as much on the metaphysical theory that precedes them as on an acquaintance with the particular arts discussed. For Schopenhauer, genuine aesthetic experience, though rare, leads directly to an apprehension of metaphysical truth, to the core of genuine knowledge. This emphasis on aesthetic experience in obtaining knowledge is unusual, however, for by the middle of the nineteenth century the epistemological authority of the scientific method was pervasively secure throughout Europe.

No stranger to the empirical scientific disciplines, Schopenhauer began higher studies in a faculty of medicine and made progress for more than two years before switching to philosophy, which would become his life’s work. Although he insisted on separate emphases for science on the one hand and philosophy on the other, Schopenhauer nevertheless felt it prudent to corroborate his metaphysical claims by attempting to show their appearance in phenomena validated through scientific observation.

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.