With people it is so that he who knows much suffers much; the genius suffers most. Madness is even more a merciful path; nature chooses that path when suffering exceeds the limit of what is bearable. Suicide is also no way out. It destroys the individual manifestation of the will, but not the will itself. (Here it becomes clear how Schopenhauer's view, which is related to the Indian appreciation of life, must necessarily lead to the Indian idea of ​​rebirth. Schopenhauer's statement means: suicide is meaningless because the will immediately creates a new embodiment for itself.) And yet there is a way out. Schopenhauer even points out two paths: an aesthetic and an ethical one. One delivers temporarily, the other permanently. The permanent one resembles the path of Buddha. The aesthetic path to deliverance – genius and art. According to Kant, behind the phenomena stands that which he, obscurely but suggestively, called the thing-in-itself. According to Plato, behind the transient visible things stand their imperishable archetypes, the Ideas. Schopenhauer adopts both ideas. In the thing-in-itself he recognizes the will, in the Platonic Ideas the eternal forms in which the infinite will reveals itself. Can we gain knowledge of what lies behind the phenomena? We cannot, as long as the intellect remains subservient to the will. We would have to free ourselves from the fetters of the will and therefore also from the bondage to the willing individual – the necessary manifestation of the will in space and time. Is that possible? The animal cannot. Man can, but it will only happen exceptionally. The structure of our body already indicates this. The head rises above the torso; it grows out of the body and is supported by it, but is not completely subject to it. Man can become a pure, will-less subject of knowledge. He can achieve this through art, the work of genius. Art is the contemplation of things, independent of causality and independent of the will (compare Kant's 'disinterested pleasure'). Because ideas can only be understood by pure contemplation that proceeds from the object, the essence of genius consists in the ability to contemplate them. Genius is perfect objectivity, the ability to be purely contemplative, a 'clear world eye', and not for one moment, but long enough to reproduce what has been contemplated.