Introduction to Schopenhauer - The World as Will

Schopenhauer’s central claim is that the world is not ultimately a rational structure of objects, but an expression of a blind, restless “Will”—a force that drives life from within and makes human existence fundamentally miserable. The significance is immediate: if the inner engine of reality is striving rather than meaning, then philosophy’s job shifts from explaining the world from the outside to uncovering what that striving is, and what it implies for how people should live.

The lecture frames this project as a response to a deeper problem: most people do not treat existence as mysterious, and even when they do, they often assume the physical world exists independently of perception. That assumption raises a classic epistemic question—how could anyone know the world “as it is” rather than only “as it seems,” filtered through perception, memory, and thought? The discussion traces the dispute through major modern philosophers. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is linked to rationalism and the hope that reason can reach objective knowledge. David Hume is presented as pushing empiricism, arguing that knowledge comes through experience and is therefore always shaped by the knower’s perspective. Immanuel Kant is positioned as dissatisfied with both, and as the turning point that reshapes the terms of the debate.

Kant’s “transcendental idealism” draws a sharp line between the phenomenal world—how things appear to us—and “things in themselves,” which cannot be known. Experience, Kant argues, depends on organizing principles such as space and time (forms of intuition) and causality (a category of understanding), along with other categories. These rules are not features of reality in itself; they are conditions for there being a knowable world at all.

Schopenhauer’s “intellectual rebirth” comes from adopting Kant’s core idea while rejecting what he sees as an inconsistency. If space, time, and causality are mind-dependent, then it makes no sense to say that things-in-themselves cause representations, since causation itself requires a knowing subject. Yet Schopenhauer also insists that something must underlie appearances. The way forward, he argues, cannot be through outward observation, because starting from representations never escapes representation. Instead, the only accessible “subterranean passage” is inward experience—especially the body.

From within, the body is not merely an object among objects; it is also the site of direct awareness of raw striving. That inner force is what Schopenhauer calls Will. The body and Will are treated as one reality presented in two ways: the body as representation, the Will as immediate experience. Sexual desire, survival instincts, and the broader drive toward nourishment and propagation are offered as evidence that life everywhere is powered by the same underlying striving.

Because all life feeds on life, Will becomes not benevolent purpose but a hungry impulse that turns manifestations against one another. The lecture underscores this with a grim image: turtles laid for eggs are torn open and devoured, then the cycle repeats endlessly—an emblem of how the Will objectifies itself through suffering. Schopenhauer therefore concludes that the separateness of things is illusory and that everything, organic and inorganic alike, is ultimately one with everything else at the level of Will. The lecture closes by pointing to the next step: if humans are manifestations of Will, then peace can only come through escaping it.