Kant posited that will is inextricable from judgment: one can only have goals if one has representation, concepts, a manifold of sensation etc. Schopenhauer proposed that will is more primordial than judgment, separable from it, a kind of cosmic, painful striving which produces representational manifolds only in certain cases. But he then went on to judge the will itself - pejoratively. Of all the figures in German Idealism, Schopenhauer is the only true ascetic, the only one with a genuinely religious attitude towards the world (despite his avowed atheism). To turn the will against itself, to negate it - as Schopenhauer recommended - is the fundamental ascetic gesture. But isn’t his version of asceticism ludicrously shallow compared to that of, say, the Upanishads (which he frequently invoked)? Genuinely religious asceticism always opens the ascetic to a higher world of angels and metaphysical realities that satisfy the will on a higher plane. Being a transcendental philosopher, Schopenhauer could not permit the existence of these higher planes - all he had access to was art as a kind of soporific.