Reality doesn't exist on its own. Without subjectivity to perceive the objectivity of the world, the way in which space, time, and the universe in general exist would be radically other. For example, can time be said to pass if there is no-one for whom time passes? What is the difference between a universe that began 14 billion years ago and one that started 14 years ago, if there is no one to count the years? Philosopher David Bather Woods here argues, using the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, that the will that makes up our subjectivity also makes up the world. Therefore, denying the will, as is taught in Buddhism and other world religions, can turn the universe into nothing.

There is the way the world appears, and then there is the world as it is in itself. Arthur Schopenhauer’s masterpiece The World as Will and Representation, first published in 1818, fleshes out this distinction with two propositions: “The world is my representation” and “The world is my will.” We are perhaps more familiar with the idea that the world appears as a representation. The world appears to us as an object for a subject; the subject plays a constructive role in organising the experienced world. But what does Schopenhauer mean when he says that the world is my will? What is the will?

The will, it turns out, is many things.

First, the will is the will. That’s right: before expanding the concept of the will to such grand metaphysical proportions, Schopenhauer begins with some observations about our everyday experience of the will. We human beings experience ourselves, on the one hand, as representations like any other. We have a look, a smell, a sound, a taste, and a texture; we are located in space and time; we have personal causal histories; are capable of, and susceptible to, causal effects: in other words, we are our bodies. But, on the other hand, we experience ourselves in a way that is unlike any other representation. We experience what it is to be this representation. We are directly acquainted with its inner animations: its stirrings and passions, wants and desires; its incentives and motives, deliberations and decisions. In other words, we are our wills.

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Human beings are still an embodiment of the same thing as other natural beings, only we are differently equipped.

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Yet the will, to Schopenhauer, is not only the will. The will is also a clue to the nature of metaphysical reality. How so? To begin, the will tells us that there is more to objects than how they appear in representation. We can know this, according to Schopenhauer, because we know there is more to us than our representation. Think of it this way: What would our experience of the world be like if it only consisted of objects as represented by subjects? If, that is, we were only representing subjects, not also willing subjects? Schopenhauer says we would be like Engelskopf: angel-heads floating above the world as representation. We would assume that there is no more to reality than what lies at the level of representation. But this isn’t how we experience the world. On the contrary, the will roots us in the world and gives us direct access to one of its representations—namely, ourselves—in an entirely different aspect. We are given to assume, then, that other objects, too, have a reality beyond representation. And our only clue as to the nature of that reality is, you guessed it, the will.