ABSTRACT
The will, does not influence thought and action, but permeates them. The conception of the ongoing process of human life adumbrated in the fore-going makes clear why it is difficult to imagine what emancipation from the will might look like. The crucial structural feature of the life process, as far as the human being is concerned, is the centering of the world in self-reference. Life is egocentric and cognition or representation is in service or, as Arthur Schopenhauer often writes, in slavery to such egocentricity. A charitable interpretation of Schopenhauer's position might start by noting that the notion of a pure subject of cognition does capture salient aspects of the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Starting with Immanuel Kant and continuing ever more forcefully across the work of Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, aesthetic experience is linked to a heightened sense of vitality and to the self-awareness of freedom.
