The Will, this formless, undifferentiated thing that stands self-sufficiently before and beyond the world that is subject to the principle of sufficient reason, the world of representation, is blind striving, pure contradictory movement. As pure contradiction, it is both itself and not itself while never and always being both. It's existence is not relative, not standing in comparison to something else; it is thus pure singularity. Due to the ambiguity of singularity, of undifferentiation, which is the ambiguity also of absolute contradiction, the Will is both itself and the Ideas. If the Will is chaos, though chaos without an order with which to compare it, a proto-chaos, then the Ideas are pure, undifferentiated order, though order without a chaos with which to compare it, a proto-order; thus, in the Will (though he may just as easily call it the Ideas), Schopenhauer sees the absolute coincidence of law and violence, order and arbitrariness, whose movement can only be characterized by the blind self-movement caused by its own contradiction, the dialectical explosion of its concentration as being and nothingness. We might liken Schopenhauer's Will to the Void in Schelling, which through the absolutely formal contradiction of “wanting nothing” and “wanting no thing,” the ambiguity of nothingness as both activity and passivity, explodes into being. The primordial ooze of existence bursts beyond itself while remaining completely within itself by its very contradictory nature.
Frederick Copleston sees the Ideas as “a sort of half-way house” between the phenomenal world and the world as Will, which is to overlay upon Schopenhauer's philosophy a hierarchical topology of neo-Platonic emanation, wherein the Will gradually objectifies itself into first the Ideas and then the world as representation. This interpretation sees the veil of Maya as a quantitative step on the Will's path to self-objectification. Not only does this understanding of the Ideas undermine Schopenhauer's dual perspectival understanding of the world (as one and the same thing from two different perspectives), but it also ignores Schopenhauer's claim, repeated by Copleston, that “the principle of sufficient reason has for [the Idea] no meaning” (Copleston 105). Though it is difficult to swallow, we must accept Schopenhauer's claim that the Idea is absolutely not part of the world as representation. It must be, then, synonymous with the undivided Will, both in contradiction to and at one with it.
The Will is, then, at first a mass of contradiction, and through it's self-movement, by its very nature, divides itself into absolute alterity in the form of the Ideas (Fig. 1 and 2). It's own neutral charge splits into positive (the Will) and negative (the Ideas); the Ideas revolve around the positive core of the Will and in complete dependence upon them. Without the Will, the Ideas spin off into non-existence and without the Ideas the Will loses its very nature as self-movement.
In pure space the Will, as charge, constructs, first at a low grade in inorganic nature, then at a higher grade in organic nature (Fig. 3). As Schopenhauer says, when the "phenomena of the will at the lower grades of its objectification, that is, in organic nature, come into conflict with one another, because each under the guidance of causality wants to take possession of the existing matter, there arises from this conflict the phenomenon of the higher Idea. This higher Idea subdues all the less perfect phenomena previously existing, yet in such a way that it allows their essential nature to continue in a subordinate manner, since it takes up into itself an analogue of them. This process is intelligible only from the identity of the will apparent in all the Ideas, and from its striving for higher and higher objectification" (Schopenhauer 144-45).
It is important to point out that only the phenomenon of the higher Idea arises from the conflict of lower phenomena, not the Idea itself. The Idea itself functions as a catalyst for the manifestation of its phenomenal appearance; as it draws pure matter towards it, it molds that matter more and more into its own likeness. At the pinnacle of the process of objectification stands the human being, both fully in the world as representation, the phenomenal world, and in the world as will, uniquely situated in the world's stratosphere, where he can glimpse both the stars above and the ground below. He is, however, pointed toward the ground upon which he arose, having backed in to his dual position much like Benjamin's angel. Schopenhauer's whole project might simply be described as turning this being around.
It is only with man that the process of the Will's objectification becomes intelligible. Before man it could not have been known that the Will was ever objectifying itself in the hierarchical form of the phenomenal world. Only retrospectively, only when the Will's objectification in the phenomenal world reached such a point that one of its phenomenal objectifications became so like it that it was it, could it be known that the Will had all along been objectifying itself.
It is because man is embodied that he has a dual nature, his body being the protrusion of his being, the Will, into the phenomenal world (Fig. 3, inset). In his protrusion he exists in space and time and is subject to the principle of sufficient reason. The veil of Maya intersects his being and bifurcates his world in two.
For Schopenhauer, then, the subject alone, as embodied in the individual human being, stands alone between the two worlds, or the one world divided upon itself, and thus in its existence alone is the “inner and essential destiny of the will” (Schop 310). Man, however, realizes that his existence is based upon a lack, that the entire hierarchical structure of the phenomenal world was built on its own fundamental lack, which is that it is ever not yet what it seeks to be. In every conflict wherein the phenomenon of a higher Idea arises, it becomes clear that this phenomenon is still not it, still not the Idea it seeks to emulate. And with every higher grade of phenomena the intensity of not being it, the intensity of suffering, increases. Man, then, as the highest objectification of the Will, suffers most.
But he does not suffer in vain; for only man is capable of severing his connection with this world, on the one side Will, on the other representation (Fig. 4). In turning away from the phenomenal world, he wrests away the Idea of himself from the Will in the most epic of struggles. In this struggle, which is the path of virtue and holiness, man comprehends his Kafka-esque proto-human reality and reaches up to the heavens to grab his own form, the completeness of his own lack. In doing so he sees himself “in all places simultaneously,” as all the constructions of the phenomenal world, as all the Ideas identical to the Will and thus as Will itself (Schop 380). In this realization he effects the dissolution of structure and the contraction of being. The thing freed by the abolition of the Will (and representation and the world) is “assuredly nothing,” but not a negativity in contrast to some positivity. It is absolute neutrality, disconnected finally from the epic elaboration of the Will's objectification. This thing, of course, though Schopenhauer goes no further, is of course the Will itself, returned to its primordial state, which is to say that man, in renouncing the world and abolishing the Will, becomes a world in potentia.
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