Accordingly, he proposed to remedy both defects of the Kantian theory at once, by the doctrine that reason is only theoretical and the will not phenomenal but noumenal. In short, he comes to the dogma that the Absolute is simply Will, or what might more fitly be called Desire — a darkling, dumb out-striving, in itself unconscious, whose impulsions, under a perpetual thwarting from some mysterious Check,[1] give rise to what we call consciousness.
The whole of being was thus reduced to terms of inner or subjective life. There was the dark undertow of the ever-heaving Desire, and woven over it the shining image-world of Perception: the universe was summed up as Will and Representation, Of this Will we knew nothing, save that it was insatiable; the forms of consciousness were not its expression, but its repression — its negation. Ever the higher these rose in the ascending evolution of Nature, in reaction against its wilder and wilder throbbings, ever the more bitterly must their necessary finitude thwart the infinity of its blind desire. Universal life was thus, from its own conditions and essence, foredoomed to misery. Its core was
- ↑ Schopenhauer nowhere expressly admits the existence of this; rather, he continually evades it, putting forward the essential insatiability of the Will as the explanation of pain, and so of consciousness. But the implication seems tacitly and unavoidably present everywhere. So also, as Hartmann has rightly noted, is the implicit assumption that the Will is intrinsically conscious, after all.
