Will and Representation

Will and Representation traces two of philosophy's oldest and most entangled ideas — the human faculty of willing and the mind's power to represent the world to itself — across twenty-five centuries and two civilizational traditions. Opening with Aristotle's fourfold psychology of desire and closing amid the paradoxes of Buddhist no-self, the book follows the will as it hardens into Augustine's divided soul, is legislated by Kant's autonomous reason, dissolves into Hume's bundle of impressions, and finally becomes, in Schopenhauer's cosmic Will, the blind striving beneath all appearance. Alongside it, in a second and equally sustained history, representation is born in medieval canon law, transformed by Descartes and Kant into the very medium of experience, and unraveled by Saussure, Foucault, and Baudrillard into a play of signs answerable to nothing beyond itself.
The book's central claim is that these two histories are not accidentally parallel. They reproduce, at every turn, a single deep division in Western thought — between a rationalist-realist tradition that treats mind as answerable to reason and to a stable reality, and a naturalist-skeptical tradition that treats mind as a natural event reason can narrate but never command — a division the author traces back to the first quarrel in Greek philosophy, between Parmenides's unchanging Being and Heraclitus's ceaseless flux. In its final chapter, the book puts this architecture to an unusual test, turning to the Sāṃkhya, Vedānta, and Buddhist traditions that Schopenhauer himself named as confirmation of his own philosophy, to ask whether the same fault line appears — or breaks down — outside the West altogether.
Rigorously argued and unusually wide in range, Will and Representation is at once a history of two philosophical concepts and an argument about the shape philosophical disagreement itself tends to take, wherever the mind turns to examine its own activity.