Schopenhauer essays adelaide

Panentheism (i.e., all-in-God), as opposed to pantheism (i.e., all-is-God), is the view that what we can comprehend and imagine to be the universe is an aspect of God, but that the being of God is in excess of this, and is neither identical with, nor exhausted by, the universe we can imagine and comprehend.

Hence, Schopenhauer regards the world as a whole as having two sides: the world is Will and the world is representation. The world as Will (“for us”, as he sometimes qualifies it) is the world as it is in itself, which is a unity, and the world as representation is the world of appearances, of our ideas, or of objects, which is a diversity.

During this later phase of his life, Schopenhauer wrote a short work in 1836, Über den Willen in der Natur ( On the Will in Nature ), that aimed to confirm and reiterate his metaphysical views in light of scientific evidence. Featured in this work are chapters on animal magnetism and magic, along with Sinology (Chinese studies).

Schopenhauer states that the highest purpose of art is to communicate Platonic Ideas (WWR, Section 50). As constituting art, he has in mind the traditional five fine arts minus music, namely, architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry.