Abstract

One of Schopenhauer’s pinnacle contributions to philosophy was the discovery of the nature of the noumenon. Whereas Kant was content to leave the question of the thing-in-itself forever a mystery, Schopenhauer devised a strategy by which to peer beyond the veil of phenomena. The key which unlocks the mystery of the noumenon lies in Schopenhauer’s analysis of bodily agency as an examination of concrete acts of willing presents “a way from within … to that real inner nature of things to which we cannot penetrate from without” and thereby opens, “so to speak, a subterranean passage, a secret alliance, which, as if by treachery, places us all at once in the fortress that could not be taken by attack from without.”