Schopenhauer

1886 · ref. 140948846 — London: Truebner & Co 1886. First British Edition. Very Good. First British edition and first English translation. Three volumes. 8 ads dated 7/11/83 4 xxxii 532; 8 ads viii 496 pp.; 8 ads viii 506 pp. Foldout table to Volume I facing p. 64. Bound in publisher's blue cloth stamped in black and gilt brown coated endpapers. Very Good with sunned spines rubbed at the extremities soiling and light stains to covers light foxing to cloth and textblock edges. Volume I: hinges starting front free endpaper detached. Volume II: hinges tender tidemark to lower front endpapers second ad leaf torn vertically in half with marginal loss to separated half fourth ad leaf torn from binding with loss of lower two-thirds. Volume III: lacking final ad leaf hinges tender tidemark to lower gutter of front endpapers. Housed in custom clamshell cases quarter navy morocco over blue marbled boards decorative gilt stamping to spines. The first British edition of Schopenhauer's magnum opus Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung which he first published in 1818 and spent a lifetime revising. Schopenhauer's depiction of life as eternal struggle met with a chilly reception from German idealists and the pessimist was not recognized as a major philosopher until 1851. It took another thirty years for Schopenhauer's most important work to be translated into English by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp but many of his theories were widely accepted by the end of the 19th century. His faith in art as a means to perceive the underlying truth of all things "the Will" influenced the French Decadent movement and the works of Wagner Kafka and Borges. Thomas Mann championed Schopenhauer's clear-eyed rationalism as a necessary counter to the twentieth century's glorification of instinct including bad instincts: "We have seen instead of pessimistic conviction deliberate malice." His work is as relevant now as it was when these books were first printed. Truebner & Co unknown books