A disciple of Kant’s, Arthur Schopenhauer strove to find the moral mean between our constructs and existence. He was also, like Kant, a habitual walker. Not, it appears, for his own exercise, but rather for the health of one of the many poodles he owned during his seventy-two years. He formally named each one Atma, suggesting atman, the Hindu term for the eternal soul animating all individuals; he called his pooches, though, the more affectionate Butz. Some believe that his calling his different poodles—he especially loved a white one and a brown one—the same name exemplified his idea that animals could express almost no individuality, that they were simply similar exponents of the species.
Humans, he believed, are more aware of the principium individuationis, the principle of individuality. This principle shows Schopenhauer at his most Kantian. Reality for him, as for Kant, is ultimately unknowable, a mysterious irrepressible, selfish, desperate will to life. This Will, Schopenhauer’s version of the ding an sich, goads nature as well as humans to go to any length to survive, regardless of the welfare of others. Humans, however, at least struggle to understand the Will, and they do this by exercising their a priori cognitive power to individuate, to represent the unrepresentable Will to themselves in diversified spatial and temporal forms. Schopenhauer held that all human perception and knowledge are products of this mental mapping (akin to Kant’s categorizing) and thus are, like maps, approximations of a territory they can never capture with total accuracy. Such is the primary argument of Schopenhauer’s 1818 The World as Will and Representation.
Schopenhauer held that as long as we are controlled by Will, we are miserable, consumed with egotistical desires whose unfulfillment breeds pain and whose satiety causes boredom. We gain peace only by realizing that we and everyone else are driven to suffering by Will, and by consequently developing compassion for the collective. We all are in this together, so let’s help one another out. Acting on this insight, we temporarily deny our Will, escape our selfish striving.
Another way we ease our pain is by contemplating great art. Engrossed in Hamlet or Caravaggio’s David, we rise from our narrow “I” to contemplate, intensely, ecstatically, the universal. Of all the arts, music is the most powerful, since it transcends word and image and directly presents the oneness of the Will, and so transports us into an intuition of the unity behind diversity: “Music does not express this or that particular and definite joy, this or that sorrow, or pain, or horror, or delight, or merriment, or peace of mind; but joy, sorrow, pain, horror, delight, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without their motives. Yet we completely understand them in this extracted quintessence.”