Schopenhauer sought to understand and describe the world and the things of the world. Building off of the ideas of Plato, Descartes, and Kant, however doing away with the aspect of dualism in their theories, he developed the concept of Will and Representation. The world as Will according to Schopenhauer is all that exists for knowledge, only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. Everything in the world is a representation and everything one sees is a representation in one’s mind. That which forces the Representation into being is the Will.In Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the thing-in-itself, or the Will, he proposes that experience is made up of subject and object. There is no object, (time and space, cause), without a subject (that which knows) and no subject without an object. In fact, to be an object for the subject and to be Representation are one in the same. Of these, the subject can never be known and knows everything that is knowable. Objects on the other hand are constructed by the activity of the intellect working upon sensations or bodily affections. Objects are constructed by the mind’s own activity out of sensations and at the same time are the result of natural and unknown forces. In our cognitive experience we never touch the real; things-in-themselves are not to be known on any terms by any intelligence. But in inner experience, in the consciousness of internal states we do come across something that is more than phenomenal; this is the will. The will has both an inner and an outer side, inner for immediate consciousness and outer for intelligence. The inner is the act of willing and the outer is bodily motion. These two are not different; they only appear in different ways. Will is the real thing, or thing-in-itself, its manifestations phenomena. Thus at the root of existence in all its varied forms there is Will supporting them, manifesting itself...
