Book: Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer

In the very first sentence of "The World as Will and Representation" Schopenhauer declares that for "every living and knowing being" the truth "the world is my representation" is valid (1, 18). In its general form, it is almost self-evident. Indeed, trying to imagine an unimaginable world leads to contradiction. In any view, you can select the represented, or object, and the representing - the subject. Schopenhauer believes that the great mistake of the previous philosophy was the desire to establish a subordination between subject and object. Materialists wanted to deduce the subject from the object, idealists like Fichte, the object from the subject. In reality, subject and object are correlative to each other.