Schopenhauer's goal was to establish a systemic approach to the fleshing out of his philosophical perspective. He attempted to understand the world in which he found himself and attempted to form a coherent interpretation of human experience. He thought it was necessary to underline the hidden reality behind the world of empirical observation.
Schopenhauer began his work from the premises of Idealist Immanuel Kant. According to Kant the human mind is pre programmed to see the world in a certain way. Kant argued that we perceive the world in terms of spatial temporal relationships and in relationship to causality (but it was Hume which later awakened him from his "dogmatic slumber" regarding the issue of causality with the result of reversing Kant's conclusions regarding the actuality of cause and effect relationships.).
Kant concluded that just because things appear to be a certain way does not mean that this is the way that the actually are. In this respect Kant distinguished between "things as they appear to be" and "things as they are in themselves." Kant argued that all possible experiences come to us through our faculties and that what we experience depends not just upon the reality, which we perceive, but also upon what our faculties can interpret of the object, which we are perceiving or experiencing.
In this respect, all experience is subject dependent according to Kant.
In other words Kant proposed that we can see reality as it appears to be, but not as they actually are and that unless an object makes itself known to us in a manner which is conducive to the receptive potential of the mind the reality cannot be known due to the fact that we have no means of interpreting it.
Schopenhauer took the proposal of Kant and asked if we could get a closer understanding of what a perceived object or reality might actually be. As will be seen, Schopenhauer was not nearly as pessimistic about this possibility as was Kant.
Bryan Magee argues that Schopenhauer is the one successor in the realm of philosophy, which carried forth the philosophy of Kant "with insights of profoundest import." (Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, 158-59) and from Schopenhauer Magee sees one direct line of philosophical thought to Nietzsche, and through Nietzsche the line continues into modern existentialism.
