Desire and dissatisfaction › Key Concepts: Representation, Objectification, and the Two Standpoints

The book's title names its two aspects. “The world is my representation” states its opening claim in the terminology used here: what is known is present to a knowing subject. Schopenhauer treats space, time, and causality as conditions of the experienced world rather than properties of the thing-in-itself.

But the second half of the title is where Schopenhauer departs from Kant. If we are part of reality, then we have access to at least one thing from the inside. My body appears to me in two ways at once: as an object among objects, subject to physical description, and as something I am, something I experience as effort, drive, hunger, impulse. Schopenhauer identifies the body's inwardly experienced willing with its outwardly perceived action (§18). He treats this as the key to interpreting other phenomena, not as a causal inference from an invisible mental event to a separate bodily movement.

Schopenhauer holds that the Will is one. Space, time, and plurality belong to the world of representation, so the Will that appears to us as countless competing individuals is, at bottom, undivided. In his ethics, the apparent separateness of persons belongs to appearance rather than ultimate reality. His pessimism interprets the conflicts that make life hard (competition, scarcity, loss) as the Will tearing at itself through individuated forms.

The mismatch between our two standpoints does real work too. From the outside, we explain our actions causally; from the inside, we experience them as our own striving. Schopenhauer holds both descriptions together: the will as thing-in-itself lies beyond the principle governing explanations within appearance, while particular actions are explained through character and motives. This dual standpoint sets up his distinctive view of freedom, not the capacity to choose any given action freely, but the possibility of a transformation in how one relates to wanting as such, which we will come to.