(1788–1860) Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, which draws from Kantian philosophy to argue that the world that humans experience exists only as a representation of reality, and that this representation varies from person to person. Schopenhauer argues that the world does not exist in itself—in other words, there is no objective, rational world that exists beyond the way a thinking, conscious subject interprets it. Schopenhauer and The World as Will and Representation in particular greatly influenced Nietzsche as a young philosopher, though as Nietzsche matured, he broke with Schopenhauer over Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism (a philosophical worldview that assigns negative value to life).