PHILOSOPHY OF MIND and desires What you will then know will no longer be an individual, but an eternal form, a particular degree of objectification of the universal will And you will lose yourself and become a pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge, seeing things sub specie aeternitatis ‘In such contemplation the particular thing becomes at once the Idea of its species, and the perceiving individual becomes pure subject of knowledge The individual, as such, knows only particular things; the pure subject of knowledge knows only Ideas’ (WWI i 179) In contemplation free from the servitude of the will, we lose our concern with happiness and unhappiness Indeed, we cease to be individual: we become ‘that one eye of the world which looks out from all knowing creatures, but which can become perfectly free from the service of will in man alone’ Every human being has it within his power to know the Ideas in things, but a specially favoured individual may possess this knowledge more intensely and more continuously than ordinary mortals Such a person is what we mean by a genius Schopenhauer spells out for us the characteristics of the genius: the genius is imaginative and restless, he dislikes mathematics, and he lives on the borderline of madness His gift finds expression above all in works of art, and it is through works of art that those of us who are not geniuses can be introduced to the liberating effect of contemplation Schopenhauer spells this out in a detailed consideration of the various arts The deliverance from the tyranny of the will that is offered by art is, however, a limited and temporary one The only way to a complete liberation is by renouncing altogether the will to live.2 What, in Schopenhauer’s system, is the relationship between soul and body? First of all, there is a complete rejection of the dualistic idea that there are causal relations between the inner and the outer The will and the movements of the body are not two different events linked by causality: the actions of the body are the acts of the will made perceptible The whole body, with all its parts, Schopenhauer says, is nothing but the objectification of the will and its desires: Teeth, throat and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire; the grasping hand, the hurrying feet, correspond to the more indirect desires of the will which they express As the human form in Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory is considered in Ch 10 and his ethical theory in Ch below 197