The transition from Kant to Schopenhauer is from the Thing to the Phenomenon.
In Kant, the Thing is Noumenal. In Schopenhauer the Noumenon is destroyed. But the thing survives, and, having shed its immortal coil, appears to Schopenhauer as a terribly flat screen of projection. Nietzsche realized the blissful eternal reality that exists in parallel to all thin appearances; the apparently existing will to such an image, which apparently possesses magical powers to pull off such a thing and have us live inside it.
This is how art mesmerizes, because it shows us the will of the artist. But that is for real art, Greek art, Roman art, and good films and cathedrals. Novels like the Lord of the Rings, too. It mesmerizes because it is superhuman to will something like that into existence. It defies all logic. Why would you need something like that? (War.) Only because the world is will and representation. But we can’t know that. So we opt to look at the story and disappear into it and drink in every aspect of life through its vessels. All of it is deep nothingness.
Our will for there not to be nothing mesmerizes us in the presence of artistic genius which is the power for there to be something.
Dionysos terrifies and shakes up the order of things but this chaos is only to distract us, intoxicate us so as to be able to endure the deeper presence, which is the non-being of identity, the fact that all belong to a giant consuming flame; the identity of experience is restored with Apollo.
But what I have deciphered through Apollo is what lies within Dionysos. What is the cause to the consuming flame. It is the very same hardness that Apollo manifests, to allow for the experience of the loss and gain of identity. Identity is nothing but a relatively stable flame. In stormy season, look for you identity in the flickering shadows on the wall. But at the core of identity is power, configuration, ability to demonstrate, to appear.
Phenomenon is the end goal. Theory traces the path toward it. Science tells its story. But the plot has thickened as of late.