In 1818, a thirty-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer published a book he believed would change philosophy forever. The World as Will and Representation was his masterwork, a systematic attempt to answer the oldest question in philosophy: what is the fundamental nature of reality? His answer was radical, disturbing, and devastatingly simple. Behind everything you see, hear, touch, and experience lies a single force. Not God. Not reason. Not atoms or mathematics. A blind, purposeless, insatiable striving that he called Will. This Will has no intelligence, no plan, no goal. It simply drives. It pushes every living thing to survive, to reproduce, to...