  By contrast, Schopenhauer does not believe that the aesthetician should start from the aesthetic judgment, but rather from immediate aesthetic experience, before the subject attempts to formulate judgments about that experience (WWR I, 530–531). The advocacy of this focus, rather than Kant’s focus on judgments, has to do with the ways in which Schopenhauer departs from Kant’s epistemology. Very briefly, the key issue has to do with the status of non-conceptual knowledge. As Kant famously held, “[t]houghts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A50–51/B74–75). Schopenhauer adheres to the first clause, but holds that there is indeed what today philosophers might call “non-conceptual content,” and what he referred to variously as “intuitive cognition” [intuitive Erkenntniß], “knowledge of perception” [anschauliche Erkenntniß] or “feeling” [das Gefühl]. This cognition allows us—and many non-human animals—to navigate and operate in the world to a great extent without concepts. Furthermore, for Schopenhauer, this is the kind of knowledge we gain, par excellence, through aesthetic experiences of nature and art; but this knowledge is not or at least not-yet conceptual, though it is a knowledge of the “Platonic Ideas” or essential features of the phenomenal world (more on the Ideas at section 3.2).