“The World Is My World” Wittgensteinʼs Tractatus and Schopenhauerʼs World as Will and Representation

This chapter attempts to re-evaluate the pertinence of Schopenhauer's philosophy to Wittgenstein's early work, his Notebooks and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 1 It is well known that as a young man Wittgenstein was taken by Schopenhauer's work. 2 Some commentators have noted similarities between moments in Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation and propositions of the Notebooks and the Tractatus. 3 Yet, the difficulty is always whether and how to incorporate these similarities into a unified reading of Wittgenstein's early philosophy. It might very well be the case that in order to recognize the role Schopenhauer's thought plays in the Tractatus, it will be necessary to reorient our reading of that work. 4 In my chapter, I will relate the duality of aspects, which Schopenhauer expresses as “The world is my representation” and “The world is my will” to the single moment Wittgenstein expresses as “The world is my world” (5.641). I will argue that properly articulating these affinities will illuminate the internal relation between a number of important terms in Wittgenstein's argument such as world, life, limits, significance and ipseity. It will also have important consequences for the understanding of Wittgenstein's conception of value.