Bruton, 1/19/09
Notes on Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who lived from 1788 to 1860. Though few philosophers today are attracted to his grand metaphysical system, his views on aesthetics and the philosophy of music in particular are still of interest.
Schopenhauer follows Plato and Kant, both of whom he admired, in making a sharp metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality. For all three thinkers, the world as we tend to think of it - the world populated by flesh and blood people, tables, trees, pianos and the like – is not ultimately real. Rather, our everyday experiences involve encounters with the “phenomenal” world, the world as it appears. These thinkers differ, however, about what is ultimately real. Since Kant’s metaphysical views are not of particular importance to Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music, I will skip over them here and give a quick gloss on the other two.
Plato holds that reality is ultimately comprised of “Forms” (or “Ideas”). Plato’s Forms are universal essences or archetypes; he thinks there are Forms of things like Beauty, Justice, Humanity,Numbers and Goodness. The Form of Beauty, for example, is what all beautiful things have in common. As he sometimes puts it, beautiful things “participate” (to different degrees) in the Form of Beauty. He also thinks the Forms are independent of the particular things that participate in them; they are eternal and unchanging. Plato’s metaphysical picture is illustrated poeticallyand famously in the “Allegory of the Cave” found in The Republic. In this fable, prisoners sit chained up facing the wall of a cave, as they have for their whole lives. Behind them is a fire, and beyond that is the opening of the cave facing outwards towards the sun. Behind the prisoners and in front of the fire is a low wall. People pass behind this wall lifting up signs of animals and other objects. On the wall of the cave in front of them the prisoners see only shadows of these signs and of their own bodies. Objects outside the cave are real, but what is seen by most prisoners is at best only a pale imitation of a copy. The point of the story is that most of us are like prisoners who live in a world of shadows; we know the world in a very imperfect way. A prisoner who broke free of her chains could, with some effort, learn to look at the fire. With greater determination and training she could exit the cave and see the true reality outside of it. Rare individuals can even learn to see the sun itself, which in Plato’s allegory represents the Form of the Good. The Form of the Good is “the universal cause of all things right and beautiful – the source of truth and reason.”
Schopenhauer agrees with Plato’s division between appearance and reality, as has been said, but his notion of reality is dramatically different. For Plato, reality is rational. What is real is, at bottom, fundamentally understandable. (A similar thought is expressed centuries later by Leibniz in his Principle of Sufficient Reason, according to which there is a sufficient reason why everything that is, is, and is not otherwise.) For Schopenhauer, though, reality is fundamentally irrational. It is Will (Wille). ‘Will’ for Schopenhauer denotes a blind, impersonal, incessant, inscrutable, all-powerful andpurposeless striving, something like what we would now characterize simply as “energy.” Will is “absence of all aim, of all limits… an endless striving.” It is “a blind, irresistible urge.” (Think, for example, of the force of gravity, magnetism, the survival instinct, and constant yearning and desire.) Schopenhauer’s conception of reality stands in poignant opposition to his idealistic predecessors – Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling – who thought that everything was moving towards a just and harmonious end. Schopenhauer, though, will have none of that: everything is ultimately meaningless. But Schopenhauer thinks that Will has a double-aspect – it is both Will and representation, as the title of his masterwork signals. (‘Representation’ is a better translation of the German ‘vorstellung’ than ‘idea,’ although the latter is used in our translation.) On one hand, the world is just Will, and Will is what it really is. On the other hand, we experience the world primarily through our representations of it, representations which include sense perceptions, desires, feelings, abstract concepts, and so on. But neither Will nor representation is the cause of the other. The world as represented by us and the world as it is in itself (Will) are, one might say,two sides of the same coin.
While the sort of double-aspect view just described is accurate as far as it goes, Schopenhauer’s picture is slightly more complicated than this. The world as we experience it consists of objectifications of Will. In speaking of objects, Schopenhauer does not mean only material objects (trees, pianos, tables, and so on). All objects of thought – everything that can be thought about – is for him an object. Indeed, for him the distinction between subject and object is of great importance. (I = the thinking subject vs. the object = what I think about) He distinguishes between two different kinds or grades of objects: 1) timeless patterns or archetypes; in other words, objects that are abstract, universal, and non-spatio-temporal, and 2) individual things that exist in space and time. Once this distinction is made, three distinct metaphysical levels emerge. On the top level, reality still equals Will, but below that are objects of the abstract,non-spatio-temporal sort, and then at the lowest level are particular things. The objects in the middle level are basically Plato’s Forms; Schopenhauer refers to them as “direct objectifications of the Will,”and “immediate objectifications of the Will.” So Schopenhauer agrees with Plato that abstract concepts are more real than particulars, but he disagrees with Plato as to whether these Forms are the ultimate reality.
Individual objects are in a sense not real, and Schopenhauer, following Kant, thinks that we human beings are responsible for conceiving of the world in terms of them. Put bluntly, the view is thatwe construct the world in terms of particulars in causal relations with each other so as to understand and explain it. In other words, the world of appearances is a product of our own sense-making activities. Our representations are the cause of the fragmentation of Will, as we experience the world as a sphere of individual things causally interacting with each other. But given the nature of Will, this fragmentation is not a good thing. The world as it appears to us is a realm of struggle, strife and stress. Once objectified and individuated (by us), Will turns violently against itself. From endless wars to the struggle to get a job, stresses and strains big and small, the phenomenal world is the scene of conflict, frustration, pain and disappointment. Daily life “is suffering.” (For this reason, Schopenhauer is often called the “philosopher of pessimism.”)
However, aesthetic perception is for Schopenhauer one of the most important ways of gaining a respite from the grim world of our own making. One of his leading ideas is that in aesthetic contemplation we become like the object contemplated. As a result, we lose our own individuality and become “the clear mirror of the object.” His other important assumption is that in aesthetic experience we experience not just the particular objects represented, but timeless patters (Platonic Forms). Consider a (good) painting or sculpture of an apple tree, for instance. By aesthetically perceivingthe tree we perceive not only a particular apple tree, but the archetype of all apple trees. In a sense, we thus experience every apple tree that was, is, or will be.[1] But since the object of our aesthetic contemplation is in this way universal - a Platonic Form - the experience of art thus puts us in a will-less and timeless state. Through the experience of art, we transcend the suffering of the phenomenal world and become - even if only temporarily – something better than our striving, suffering phenomenal selves. As he puts it:
If thus the object has to such an extent passed out of all relation to the will, then that which is so known is no longer the particular thing as such; but it is the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objectivity of the will at this grade; and, therefore, he who is sunk in this perception is no longer individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself; but he is pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge. (p. 231)
Music, however, is “cut off” from the rest of the arts. It doesnot just communicate Platonic Forms by means of representing particular things; it is not a copy or imitation of the (phenomenal) world in the way the other arts are. Rather, it is on the same metaphysical level with the Forms themselves. The “other arts speak only of shadows, but [music] speaks of the thing itself.” (p. 333) It is in effect a direct copy of Will. “We could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied Will.” As the highest grades of Will’s objectivity are the Forms, which transcend particular things, music also transcends the particular. It is not about anything, nor does it represent anything. Its universality is in a way like that of mathematics - purely formal and yet applicable to all experience.
Perhaps extravagantly, Schopenhauer tries to show various structural analogies between music and the physical world. The point of these analogies is to show that just as the Forms are intimately manifested in the world, music is closely related to the world as well. He compares bass (low) notes to “unorganized nature, the mass of the planet.” Intervals of tones on a scale are comparable to definite species in nature (i.e., the way creatures come in different kinds). Melodies display intentional connection from beginning to end and are thus analogous to intellectual life. But while the Forms are knowable through reason, the essences music communicates are further towards the subjective side of experience. Music speaks in the language of feeling. As such, it conveys the “quintessence” of emotional life; not this or that particular and definite joy, this or that sorrow, but joy and sorrow themselves. It does this without thereby (necessarily) producing those emotions in us. (Thus, Kivy is accurate in saying that for Schopenhauer, the emotions are in a sense in the music itself, not merely the causal result of it.)
1. How about the claim that in aesthetic appreciation we lose ourselves? Is there any reason to think that this is particularly true of music?
2. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is about a Danish Prince, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is a painting of a particular woman, and yet as I put it above, Schopenhauer thinks that (pure) music is not about anything. Is he right about this?
3. We can recast one of Schopenhauer’s main points this way: music reveals reality to us better than sense perception. Call this his “revelatory” thesis. Is the revelatory thesis true?
[1] Robert Wicks, “Arthur Schopenhauer,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed online.