e, is really prior to experience. Schopenhauer differentiates between subjective experience or idea and will by way of the rational processes of human beings: "when the will is enlightened by knowledge, it always knows that it wills now and here, never what it wills in general." Ibid., 1089.
This is a point to which we shall return.
The conception of essence or thing-in-itself is important to Schopenhauer's view of music because his discussion takes him to the position that music is even more than an extraordinary instance of form or will. For Schopenhauer, music becomes will itself, even as it allows for the infusion of will into individual instances of itself. The musical expression is the expression of the subjective idea of the will. As a product of rational man, it is unavoidably will inflected or conditioned by human experience, which means that an individual instance of music belongs to the world. But the power of that expression is such that it reaches not only beyond its highest and best phenomenal reality but also beyond phenomenal reality itself, in the effect its projection into human experience has on that same experience.
[M]usic . . . never expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature, the in-itself of all phenomena, the will itself. It does not therefore express this or that particular and definite joy, this or that sorrow, or pain, or horror, or delight, or merriment, or peace of mind; but joy, sorrow, pain, horror, delight, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without the
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