  What many luminaries of European culture found gripping in Schopenhauer’s thought was his doctrine of the world as having two aspects related to each other as two sides of the same coin: (1) an ultimate foundation as “will”—a blind, purposeless urge or striving akin to energy—which he identified with the Kantian thing in itself (for competing interpretations of the argument for this identification see: Atwell  1995; Janaway 1989, 1999a; Young, 1987; DeCian &amp; Segala 2002; Cartwright 2001; Jacquette 2007; Shapshay 2008; and Wicks 2008); and (2) a world of representation, i.e., the will qua thing in itself as it “objectifies” itself and appears to human beings through their shared mode of cognitive conditioning.