1788-1860. German philosopher whose The World
as Will and Idea 1818 expounded an atheistic
and pessimistic world view: an irrational
will is considered as the inner principle of
the world, producing an ever-frustrated cycle
of desire, of which the only escape is
aesthetic contemplation or absorption into
nothingness. This theory struck a responsive
chord in the philosopher Nietzsche, the
composer Wagner, the German novelist Thomas
Mann, and the English writer Thomas Hardy.