Schopenhauer,

Meaning,
and the Arts
(1788-1860)
Schopenhauer – the pessimist
• Response to Hegelian optimism:
reason will reign at the end of
human history. What is real is
reasonable, and the reasonable is
real!
•Schopenhauer formulated his
‘metaphysical pessimism’ in his
major work “The World as Will and
Representation”
• He questions Hegelian (Kantian)
optimism, the future ‘rule of
reason’ or the world itself as being
rational and end-driven
• Schopenhauer saw the gulf between
the world and our ideas as a stormy
abyss that forever frustrates our
idealizations
• He agreed with Kant that the mind
works categorically and mathematically,
but the gap between our conceptions
and the ‘thing-in-itself’ turned
Schopenhauer from Kant’s Rationalism
and mathematical science to the
Upanishads, Buddhism and the delight
of art
• He stood Kant on his head, turning
from the objectivity of reason to the
centrality of will
• Schopenhauer argued that we are,
in essence, a striving (the will)
• He was critical of other
philosophers for focusing on
abstractions of reason and ignoring
love, friendship, sexuality, and
artistic passion, which are central to
our existence
• Replaced objectivity and truth with
meaning and passion. For Kant,
freedom comes from reason. For
Schopenhauer, freedom is only in
terms of the will, found primarily in
the motions of the body and
emotions of the mind (but we
cannot ever full be free from the
will– we ARE the will)
 Being-as-Will
• Schopenhauer criticizes Kantian
doctrine of ‘thing-in-itself’
(noumenal world)
• Reality in itself according to Kant is
unknowable, and we know only
the phenomenal world
• Schopenhauer refuses this very
fundamental aspect of Kant’s
philosophy that influences the
German idealism. According to him
‘thing-in-itself’ is knowable, and it
is known only as the will (music will
help…more to come on that)
• Schopenhauer in 1859
The Metaphysical Will
• Schopenhauer’s concept of will
is very specific: the will is not
the concrete human will, but it
is the all-pervasive Will
• Schopenhauer’s idea of will is
reality itself, it is the world
• If the whole of reality is will, it
is a dynamic movement of will,
not a being, but a becoming
(flux)
• But the movement of will
moves nowhere, because this
metaphysical will is blind and
purposeless (the Ouroboros)
The World is my representation
• Schopenhauer argues that the world
is nothing other than our
representation. The world as we
experience it is not the reality in it
self. It is what we represent it as with
our mind
• He becomes inspired by eastern
philosophy (through Friedrich Mayer,
Orientalist) and believes that the
visible and tangible world is only the
veil of maya. The real reality is the
blind metaphysical Will
• Maya, mother of Guatama Buddha
The One and The Many
• Schopenhauer argued that it is
thought, not will, which breaks
the world into many parts and
causes problems. Underneath
our thoughts, the will of the
world is ONE WILL.
• Science conjures up distinctions,
while ONLY ART reunites us with
the Will as an undivided whole
• Our five senses give us the
impression of plurality. But
reality is in its essence one and
not many. The one is the Will.
The many is maya or illusion
 Suffering – The Essence of Life
• We are the slave of the blind
metaphysical will
• Life is in essence to suffer,
because the will is arbitrary and
purposeless
• Reason is only the instrument of
the will, and our will uses reason
to create an end purpose, but
there is no goal or end in willing,
no purpose (beyond the willing)!
•Schopenhauer thought reason
cannot liberate us
•Overview: School of Life:
Schopenhauer
 Happiness?
Happiness not as something
positive, but as something….
negative?!

• Suffering is something; happiness is nothing. If we feel happy,

we don’t get what’s really going on. This feeling of happiness
comes from the absence of consciousness of our life. We
forget the suffering, then this feeling of happiness comes. But
that is not reality!
• Happiness as an “unethical category”? Why Be Happy When
You Could Be Interesting?
A Way out of Suffering?
There are two ways to alleviate suffering:
1. Aesthetic experience: Music can release us from suffering, but this
way is only temporary
2. Ethical way: through the ethical sympathy with other beings that
suffer like us. Schopenhauer’s ethics is the ethics of compassion
(Kierkegaard’s Ethical Way)
The Problem of Suicide
• Schopenhauer refuses suicide
as a way of release from the
metaphysical will of this life
• If man commits suicide, he
doesn’t free himself from the
will (Camus and the Absurd)
• The very will to commit
suicide is itself the
manifestation of the blind
will!
Art as Salvation (Temporary)
• The will is the deeper reality of all things
(causes suffering)
• The will causes us to impose our own
projections on our everyday experience and
this causes suffering (trapped in our will,
our projection which is subjective reality to
us) BUT….
• Experiencing art enables one to enter an
aesthetic state
• The aesthetic state is a state of
consciousness in which one is free of
suffering by means of having a will-less
(‘objective’) knowledge of the deeper
reality of the world-- the will (we escape
our will to see the world as will; we escape
the many to see the one)
• We experience suffering as a result of our
mind representing the world around from
an egocentric perception
• Our consciousness is in service of the will.
Objects are perceived by individual wills
not in terms of intrinsic objective qualities,
but rather in terms of utility to the
individual will
• Suffering is ultimately caused by the
frustration and conflict that arises from
competition between individual wills
(desires) and the world
• Through art and the aesthetic experience
we can escape the suffering of our ordinary
mental state
• But how can this be? We escape our will to
see to the will? What does he mean?
• It is desirable to transform ones state of everyday consciousness, turning it
away from the desiring will in order to free oneself from constant suffering
• The genius is a rare individual with the capacity to transform his everyday
consciousness in this way for prolonged periods of time
• Art facilitates the transition “from the common knowledge of particular
things [that is, the mental state of ordinary experience] to knowledge of the
Idea [that is, the mental state of aesthetic experience]” (WWR I: 178)

• Immortal Beloved Moonlight Sonata Scene

• Beethoven Heiligenstadt Testament / 'Archduke' Piano Trio 3rd Movement

Op.97 (until 3:00 minutes)
• This ‘liberation’ doesn’t happen with every artwork. It is only great works of art
that Schopenhauer concerns himself with (not the charming). Great art should
allow the non-genius, which is the vast majority of us, to temporarily transform
from the ordinary mental state to that of the aesthetic mental state, which
Schopenhauer calls the “aesthetic method of consideration”
• A genius is one who is able to enter into the aesthetic state for sustained periods of
time and who does not require the aid of a pre-existing artwork in order to
transform his or her mental state

The Life and Times of Frida

Kahlo | PBS America
Hierarchy of the Fine Arts
Lowest to highest ‘value’
1) Architecture and Artistic
Fountainry
2) Landscape gardening
3) Sculpture and Painting (Herder
puts painting below sculpture)
4) Poetry
5) Music
Why is music the highest form
of fine art? “Schopenhauer holds that the experience of
‘absolute’ music (music that does not seek to
imitate the phenomenal world and is
unaccompanied by narrative or text), occurs in
time, but does not involve any of the other
cognitive conditions on experience. Thus,
Schopenhauer believes the experience of music
brings us epistemically closer to the essence of the
world as will—it is as direct an experience of the
will as being thing in itself as is possible for a
human being to have. Absolutely direct experience
of the will is impossible, because it will always be
mediated by time, but in first-personal experience
of volition and the experience of music the thing in
itself is no longer veiled by our other forms of
cognitive conditioning. Thus, these experiences are
epistemically distinctive and metaphysically
significant.” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Music and Time, Music and Thought
 “It does not express this or that individual or particular joy, this or that sorrow or
pain or horror or exaltation or cheerfulness or peace of mind, but rather joy,
sorrow, pain, horror, exaltation, cheerfulness and peace of mind as such in
themselves, abstractly…” (WWR I, 289)
“The close relation that music has to the true nature of all things can explain the
fact that, when music suitable to any scene, action, event, or environment is
played, it seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears to be the
most accurate and distinct commentary on it. Moreover, to the man who gives
himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony, it is as if he saw all the
possible events of life and of the world passing by within himself. Yet if he reflects,
he cannot assert any likeness between that piece of music and the things that
passed through his mind. For music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it
expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world. This is the reason
why music makes every picture, indeed every scene from real life and from the
world, at once appear in enhanced significance, and this is, of course, all the
greater, the more analogous its melody is to the inner spirit of the given
phenomenon. It is due to this that we are able to set a poem to music as a song, or
a perceptive presentation as a pantomime, or both as an opera. Such individual
pictures of human life, set to the universal language of music, are never bound to it
or correspond to it with absolute necessity, but stand to it only in the relation of an
example, chosen at random, to a universal concept.” (WWR I, 262)

Immortal Beloved: Kreutzer Sonata Scene Immortal Beloved: Ode to Joy Scene
 Is Schopenhauer being Fair?
• A History of People Who Have Cried in
Front of Paintings
• Have you been moved as much by
painting, literature, architecture as by
music? What would he think about
movies?
• But doesn’t music seem more personal?
Does Schopenhauer have a point?
• Is he right to have a hierarchy of the arts?
Is music somehow different or better at
moving us than other arts?
•What about pop art? Is that just
charming?
• What about our being moved by
literature?