Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who developed a profoundly pessimistic philosophy grounded in the concept of Will — a blind, insatiable, irrational force that he held to be the inner nature of all reality. His major work, The World as Will and Representation, argues that the world we experience is mere appearance, while its underlying reality is Will — a source of endless striving and suffering. He drew on Kant's distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself and on Hindu and Buddhist thought to arrive at a vision of existence as fundamentally painful.