ABSTRACT
Schopenhauer's philosophy is characteristic of German Romanticism and Idealism in its emphasis on the notion of expression. The Romantics reacted against the 'scientific' idea of the world as a set of distinct, but ultimately homogenous, entities linked to one another by external relations of mechanistic causality. Schopenhauer was a Kantian, and therefore held that the empirical world of causally related spatio-temporal substances existed only relative to the perceptual and conceptual apparatus of conscious subjects. Regarded as an expressive vision, however, Schopenhauer's philosophy is enormously impressive, and it is not surprising that many of the greatest European writers and artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were fascinated by Schopenhauer. Logic, as something set out in textbooks, is part of the ladder that people must kick away in order to climb up beyond it to enlightenment. Logical form cannot itself be spoken of directly, but it expresses itself in the ordinary propositions of people's language.
