What is novel about Schopenhauer's proposal, and the aspect of his thought which feeds most directly into Nietzsche, is the suggestion that perception is, by definition, through its own activity, apprehension of the noumenal.
As cognitive beings in the world, he argues, our faculties are already part of that which we are wanting to know.
Experience comes to us through our bodies.
The body is not just a casing or a means of mobility but that which locates us as sensory, sentient beings in the world. Instead of the binary model of appearance and thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer introduces the singular notion of the "will" reality conceived as a dynamic within which our acts and representations are enfolded.
An explanation of how subjective experience can be identified with objective reality, he writes