Whoever discovers Nietzsche with some intensity will shortly discover Schopenhauer. It had not been an accident that I firstsaw both of those names together on the first page of The Sea Wolf. It is all about unconscious will. On the first page of Schopenhauer's famous book,The World As Will and Imagination, I read the first sentence: "The world is my idea." I closed the book and couldn't re-open it for months. I was horrified by the idea of it all. It swept me away so quickly and completely. It disappeared the ground from beneath myfeet, and yet I didn't go anywhere. It gutted me and eviscerated me and yet left me standing or floating perhaps now, as a ghost, a geist, aghast.
"The world is my idea."
What a thing to say, what a think to think, what a way to be! What could it mean? What about me? What about reason and matter and existence? Everything that hadbeen naively and obviously real was reconstituted as something new and in a new universe. What an idea! Who thought of that? One hears it in the history of philosophy. Every objectivist knows it as a primo example of what not to actually allow yourself to think. It goes against the Laws of Logic, and opens the way to evil, harmful mysticism and it is definitely bad for the economy. It was an old idea but who thought of taking it seriously now? A simple unconscious prohibition fell away and I could actually hear the words, allow myself to hear the words for the very first time. How could a sentence re-orient my whole life in an instant? "The world is my idea."