I have been reading a little about Schopenhauer. I was sort of chipping away at his book, the World as Will and idea.
Schopenhauer developed Kant's idea of the thing in itself. Kant thought that beyond our perception and experience, there is an underlying reality which is beyond the grasp of our understanding: "understanding cannot go beyond sensibilities." this underlying reality is what Kant called the "thing-in-itself." Simply put, what we see is what our mind make us see. A chair looks like chair to us because that's how our eyes perceive it, and this is how our mind process the perception but the chair is not limited to what we see. The chair has properties that our senses and our mind cannot perceive because of the limitation of our senses and our minds and we cannot go into the "thing-it-self.". Our understanding is like an a air-jet. The higher the jet fly to the atmosphere, the lesser air it gets and in the process, it will crash and burn. (Heard this from Prof. Cahoone).
Schopenhauer thought that the underlying reality was the will. (Other philosophers, especially the idealist, proposed mind/s, or ideas, as the underlying reality.)
The Will is the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer's Will is not the individual psychological will, but a universal metaphysical principle, spaceless and timeless and uncaused, even as Hegel's Reason, as he held, is not merely an individual function. The Will, says Schopenhauer, manifests itself in the individual as impulse, instinct and craving. The Will, again, it is that appears as consciousness and body. Thus the true self of man is identified with the Will.
Everything in the world, too, becomes an expression of the Will. The world is Will and Idea and has no independent material existence. The Will is above the Idea and is the only reality. The Will is blind, unconscious, and the Idea which is conscious is only its appearance in the intellect. We see nothing anywhere except the Will and the body which is the expression of the Will. Right from unconscious matter up to the self-conscious man the Will alone reigns supreme. It appears unconscious in something and conscious in another. It is all strife, activity, yearning that we observe everywhere. Desire is the cause of all things. With the Yogavasishtha, Schopenhauer would say that there is the eye because there is desire to see, there is the ear because there is desire to hear. The body and bodily functions are the expression of the Will. The digestive organs are the objectifications of hunger, the feet of the desire for movement, the brain of the desire for knowledge. There can be no body, and no world, without the Will. Longing, craving, or function, determines the nature of being, of the kind of organisation which becomes the body of the Will. The Will-to-live is the root of all things. It is the cause of struggle, suffering, pain. The Will is the great evil that accounts for the misery of all beings.
Schopenhauer's concept of the Will is fascinating. The Will is the Reality and it is blind urge. Consciousness or intelligence is its phenomenal effect made manifest in higher organisms in order to pave the way for the work of the Will in the world. For Schopenhauer intelligence is not the essential nature of the self. It is only a production of the brain created by the Will for its own purposes. Consciousness is an appearance, Will the Reality which is the immortal force that never dies with the death of individuals, never perishes through change. It may manifest itself in a mortal shape as individuals, but it cannot itself cease to be. The Will is imperishable being. (Swami Krishnananda)
