The German Genius

thing to be different from another, he said, they had to occupy space and time; but space and time are aspects of experience and must exist only in the empirical world. Even something like numbers, abstractions that “seem to exist” beyond space and time, can only be entertained in our minds because of our understanding of succession, which is itself unintelligible without the notions of space and time. 17 Schopenhauer concluded from this that, outside space and time, “everything must be one and undifferentiated.” In other words, total reality consists of two aspects—phenomena, a world of many material objects, located specifically in space and time, and the “noumenal realm,” which is a “single, undifferentiated something—spaceless, timeless, non-material, beyond all reach of causality.” This realm is inaccessible to experience or knowledge.
    Schopenhauer said further that he thought the two realms were different aspects of the same reality understood in different ways. For him, the noumenon is the inner significance of what we apprehend in the phenomenal world. Although Schopenhauer wasn’t at all religious (he was a declared atheist, one of the first people to publicly admit this), he said he was making the kind of distinction a Christian makes in his understanding of the soul, as something significant hidden inside us. Down deep, said Schopenhauer, we are, all of us, the same something, but a something we can never fully apprehend. For Schopenhauer, there is an ultimate oneness of humanity, a realm we all share. Most important, we are compassionate because we realize that if one person injures another, that person in some way injures himself or herself. For modern tastes this is more than a little mystical. It also belies Kant’s argument that ethics are rational. 18
    The second aspect of Schopenhauer’s basic system—much easier to understand—is that he thought human life was bound to be tragic. Life, he said, is made up of endless “hoping,” “striving,” “yearning”—we are always, from our earliest days, reaching out for something. This endless yearning is inherently unfulfillable, for as soon as we get what we want, we want something else. This is our predicament. 19
    It is a predicament that is made all the worse by the third element in his thought, that we are, most of the time, selfish, cruel, aggressive, and heartless in our dealings with each other. If he was right, he said, if the noumenal and phenomenal worlds are the same reality but apprehended in different ways, this must mean that the noumenal realm itself is amoral and terrible. This was his famous—notorious—pessimism. Schopenhauer had a problem with what to call this terrible, blind, purposeless noumenal world and though he eventually came up with the word “will,” he was never entirely happy with it. He chose that word, and the phrase “the will to live” because it seemed to him to be the “ultimate impulse” within us. 20 For Schopenhauer, we have to recognize the various manifestations of this will to exist, and to overcome them if we are to achieve contentment away from the world.
    He thought that one of the reasons religions take the form they do is that most people cannot stomach profound metaphysical and moral truths when stated baldly—they have to be sugarcoated in parables, myths, and legends. Schopenhauer thought that religions embody the profoundest truths there are, and he also thought they had a great deal in common with creative art. 21 This led him to his fourth main argument, that the most accessible way for us to see into the heart of things—if only momentarily—is through sex and art, particularly the art of music.
    Art apart, Schopenhauer’s focus on sex was surprising, but to him it obviously had a wide-ranging effect on human behavior. He said: “If I am asked where the most intimate knowledge of that inner essence of the world, of that thing in itself which I have called the will to live , is to be found…I must point to ecstasy in the act of copulation …That is the true essence and core of all things, the aim and purpose of all existence.” (He also added, “What is all the fuss about?”) 22
    Art was similar: whatever a work of art is, once we are absorbed in it, we forget ourselves. At the same time, for Schopenhauer, each of the arts is representational—except music. Therefore, music is the expression of “something that cannot be represented at all, namely the