What Did Schopenhauer Really Want?

Schopenhauer placed the body at the center of philosophy — and posterity made a pessimist of him. The clichés are well known: the world as suffering, the contempt for women, the poodle in Frankfurt. They have a kernel of truth. But they obscure something that weighs far heavier than any anecdote: a question that remains open to this day. What happens to a philosophy that forgets the body?

The Body as Key

Schopenhauer’s starting point is an observation that sounds so simple it is easily overlooked. We have within ourselves, in the body, a possibility no other access to the world can provide: we experience ourselves simultaneously from within and from without. The body is an object among objects — visible, measurable, located in space. At the same time, it is lived from within as will, as drive, as striving, as hunger, as longing. In this duality, Schopenhauer said, we hold the key to the world in our hands.

Kant had claimed that the thing-in-itself — the reality behind appearance — was fundamentally unknowable. Schopenhauer did not contradict him on the surface, but with a surprising turn: through the body we experience the thing-in-itself directly. What we experience in the body as will is no representation, no image, no construct. It is reality itself, experienced from within. Not the intellect opens the door to the depths of the world — the body does.

This has consequences that reach beyond academic dispute. If the body is the key to reality, then every philosophy that ignores it is not merely incomplete. It is blind. Every science that excludes the interior from its description does not describe half the world — at best, it describes its surface.

The Will as World-Principle

Schopenhauer’s boldest step was to extend this bodily experience to all of nature. Everything that happens in nature, his thesis ran, has an outside and an inside. The outside is what one sees and measures. The inside is the will — a force that is not blind in the mechanical sense, but not spiritual in the rational sense either. All forces are will-forces. Gravity, the attraction and repulsion of atoms, the life-drive in every plant, in every ant: behind everything stands a metaphysical principle that physics can describe but never explain.

Physics, Schopenhauer held, requires metaphysics. It can describe nature, measure its forces, formulate its laws. But explain why these forces exist — that it cannot. Schopenhauer wrote: it is not about the matter but about the force. Not material composition explains the phenomenon, but the working itself — working through matter.

Here lies the crucial difference from Schelling and from the philosophy of nature in whose tradition this work stands. Schelling had written in his treatise on freedom: willing is primordial being. For him, the world-will was a spiritual will — a cosmic intelligence expressing itself in nature. Schopenhauer adopted the basic idea but shifted its orientation: his will is not spiritual but blind. It drives, it pushes, it wills — but it does not know what it wills. The will in Schopenhauer has no goal and no meaning. This blindness is the core of what people call his pessimism.

The question this raises is not an academic one but one that concerns anyone who thinks about their own existence: is the drive you feel in yourself blind or directed? Does the striving that moves you point beyond you toward something — or does it only circle around itself?

Indian Philosophy and the Question of Maya

Schopenhauer was one of the first Western thinkers to take Indian philosophy seriously. He read the Upanishads in a Latin translation and was deeply moved. His words about them belong to the most hymnic he ever wrote: it is the most rewarding and elevated reading that, the original text aside, is possible in the world. It has been the consolation of my life and will be the consolation of my dying.

What Schopenhauer found in the Upanishads was a confirmation of his own philosophy: the world of appearances as Maya — as veil behind which a deeper reality stands. And the principle of tat tvam asi, “that thou art” — which holds that the boundary between myself and the other is an appearance, not the essence of things.

Yet the identification is not without tension. For in Hinduism, Maya is not only illusion but also creative principle — the force of perpetual renewal, of the arising of forms and figures. This productive dimension of Maya Schopenhauer suppressed, or at least underestimated. His reception of Indian philosophy was no simple adoption but an idiosyncratic appropriation that pressed the foreign into his own mold of thought.

Compassion as Primal Phenomenon

Schopenhauer’s ethics is grounded in an experience he called a primal phenomenon: compassion. Not a commandment, not a duty, not a rational derivation stands at the beginning of his ethics — but a bodily experience. In the moment you feel compassion, you grasp that you are the other as well. You are not isolated. The boundary between you and the other is real in the world of representation, but not in the essence of things.

This is no sentimental claim. It is the logical consequence of his metaphysics: if the will working in you is the same that works in all beings, then the separation between individuals is appearance. Schopenhauer called it the secret passage connecting all beings — not through the intellect, not through a moral construction, but through the immediate experience of compassion.

For philosophical practice, this insight carries weight. The question Schopenhauer raises touches the heart of thinking empathy: can I, through my own interior, contact the interior of another? Can I feel my way into what is at work in another person? Schopenhauer would have said: in compassion, exactly that happens. And this capacity is no luxury and no method — it is the foundation of every genuine encounter.

Music as the Language of Will

One of the most profound chapters in Schopenhauer’s work concerns music. Music, his thesis ran, is the immediate sonic manifestation of the world-will. In it sounds what is at work in all beings — not as depiction, not as illustration, but as direct expression. Music does not portray the world. It is the will itself, translated into sound.

All the emotions that surge and hold sway appear in music. Schopenhauer saw in it a transcendent element that carries the human being beyond itself — alongside the rhythmic, the physically sensory dimension that is also there. Nietzsche adopted this thought entirely in The Birth of Tragedy: Greek tragedy as the interplay of Apollonian form and Dionysian intoxication. That is Schopenhauer, carried forward in Nietzsche’s language. And it is no coincidence that Wagner — who revered Schopenhauer profoundly — understood his music dramas as sounding philosophy.

What Comes After Death?

The question that occupied Schopenhauer most persistently was the question of death. His answer is surprisingly simple: what comes after death? The same as before birth.

An infinite time elapsed before my birth. What was I throughout all that time? Children, when told that they were not yet born then, insist that they were there. Schopenhauer took this childlike knowing seriously. He wrote: then I can console myself about the infinite time after my death with the infinite time I have already not been — as a well-accustomed and truly very comfortable state.

This is neither consolation nor nihilism, but a philosophical argument remarkable for its simplicity. Anyone thinking about death should think with equal urgency about the time before their birth. That we fear the one and do not notice the other shows that our anxiety is not directed at non-being itself, but at the loss of what we know.

From the standpoint of the will — that force working through everything — there is no arising and no passing away. The human being survives death because it has always already survived it, because it was always there, because it has always already exceeded time. Schopenhauer knew this cannot be made so simple. But he was honest enough to name the limits of his own philosophy.

What Schopenhauer Wanted

What Schopenhauer really wanted was a philosophy that begins with the living — with the body, with feeling, with compassion. He did not want to abolish the intellect but to assign it its place: not as master of the will, but as its instrument. He wanted to show that the world is more than its measurable surface — that behind what we see and calculate lies a depth accessible only to one who feels.

Schopenhauer remains a challenge. One misunderstands him or one succumbs to him. He has a suggestive power that is not easily dismissed, because his thinking begins exactly where every human being knows themselves most immediately: in the body, in the will, in the drive that carries us through life. That this drive is blind was Schopenhauer’s thesis. That it might be directed — toward something that exceeds the individual — is the question the philosophy of nature continues to pursue.

In a time that has elevated the measurable to the measure of all things, Schopenhauer is a reminder that the decisive questions of life cannot be measured.

Philosophical consulting carries forward what Schopenhauer left open — in a tradition that takes the body seriously as an epistemological foundation.

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