The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had some very curious ideas about the body shapes of animals. To Schopenhauer, influenced by a mix of Kant, Plato, and classical Indian thought, the entire visible (‘phenomenal’) world of individual objects we see around us – everything from blades of grass to galaxies – is really just an illusion. What lies beneath and unifies this world of appearances is will. Not will for this or that, but simply will-as-such, a formless, insatiable craving for nothing-in-particular.
In the phenomenal world, this underlying will expresses itself in the form of individual animals and plants all striving for life. While Schopenhauer had a fairly progressive concern for the welfare of animals, he also believed that only humans (and only
