This first English translation (by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp) of
Schopenhauer's work had a considerable impact on contemporary
writers, notably on Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad who found in
Schopenhauer's view of the human will as essentially evil a
confirmation of their own pessimistic views of human nature. The
spirit of this pessimism is caught in Conrad's epigraph to his
story 'An Outcast of the Islands' which comes from Calderon (q.v.)
via Schophenhauer: ?For man's greatest offense is that he has been
born?. For further information see Arthur Schopenhauer's
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The World as Will and
Idea]
, The Literary Encyclopedia profile by Kelsey Wood, College of
the Holy Cross
Please
log in to
consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing
institution (
see List), you should be able to access the LE on
campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we
offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a
personal user account with your institutional email address. If
you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal
subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under
Individual Subcriptions.
116 words
Save this article
If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to
your 'Account' here