The World as Will and Representation.have you read it?what is it about?

Answer 1

Schopenhauer admits to being influenced by Plato and it shows. I found the works to be a hard slog through a dedicated rationalism.

And that's the problem. A severe rationalist like Schopenhauer doesn't think that this ideas about the universe ever need to be checked or correspond to any kind of external reality... they just need to make sense and be internally self-consistent. That is what 'The World as Will and Representation' is largely about - Schopenhauer deciding about how the universe is, whether the univese really is that way or not.

Also like some people who believe they can make up whole universes in their heads and the real one doesn't matter, this work seems to verge on the solipsistic a lot. He asserts over and over again that this or that thing is just a part of some kind of universal will and not really there except in that sense.

That ironically, is very similar to my opinion of his work: It exists at a mind game, but there's nothing really THERE. Just fluff with no actual point.

Of course, your mileage may vary. So it goes.