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Schopenhauer on the Values of Aesthetic Experience

The Southern Journal of (2007) Vol. XLV

Schopenhauer on the Values of Aesthetic Experience Bart Vandenabeele Ghent University (Belgium)

Abstract

In this , I argue that Schopenhauer’s view of the aesthetic feelings of the beautiful and the shows how a “dialectical” interpre- tation that homogenizes both aesthetic and reduces the discrepancy between both to merely quantitative differences is flawed. My critical analysis reveals a number of important tensions in both Schopenhauer’s own aesthetic —which does not ultimately succeed in “merging” ’s and Kant’s approaches—and the interpretation that unjustly reduces the value of aesthetic experience to a merely preliminary stage of ethical will-less salvation.

Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile that it is the function of art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded.

Oscar Wilde The as

In the traditional interpretation of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, the thought prevails that aesthetic is rooted in the subject’s release from the claws of the blind will and that such a (negative) feeling of forms a preparation to the

Bart Vandenabeele is Professor of and Philosophy of Art at Ghent University (Belgium). He is the author and editor of several books in aesthetics, philosophy of art, and philosophy of . He has published several contributions in books and international journals on aesthetics, the of philosophy, and the philosophy of in English, German, Portuguese, and Dutch. He has been a Visiting Professor at Missouri Western University and Stellenbosch University (South Africa), and he is the editor of A Companion to Schopenhauer (forthcoming from Blackwell).

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permanent ethical deliverance from willing, which according to Schopenhauer is the goal of the truly ethical and ascetic life. Thus Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is often reduced to a merely preliminary stage of a metaphysical . I want to begin by challenging that view. Of course, such a “dialectical” interpretation1 has a certain plausibility, and Schopenhauer frequently supports it himself. Yet a case can be made for saying that there is much more in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics than getting prepared for an ascetic ethics. Schopenhauer’s account of the positive character of aesthetic pleasure and the specific significance of the feeling of the sublime necessitates a more subtle and antireductive inter- pretation of his aesthetics. If we do not ignore the importance of aesthetic pleasure and if we investigate the specific variants of it, several interesting tensions will be revealed that are too often overlooked in the dialectical interpretation. But we cannot get a clear view on the theme of aesthetic pleasure and its different variants unless we pay enough atten- tion to the most important epistemological question of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics: how can we obtain insight into the essence of things?2 Only afterwards can we ask the question about the specificity of aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful and the sublime. Here I shall discuss a number of problems with the dominant dialectical interpretation and also shed light on several tensions in Schopenhauer’s own account. After an analysis of the positive character of aesthetic pleasure and the significance of the feeling of the beautiful, I shall try to show that there is an important ambivalence in Schopenhauer’s analysis of the sublime. On the one hand, he considers the sublime as some kind of intense feeling of and even sketches examples of transitions from the beautiful to the sublime; on the hand, in his more Kantian inspired analysis, the sublime is claimed to be qualitatively different from the feeling of the beautiful. What can still be felt as a brief promise of unity and (or even happiness) in the feeling of the beautiful will be exposed as illusory in the shrill “mixture” of pleasure and pain that is the feeling of the sublime. Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime perhaps functions as an aporetic hinge in his philosophy, which (despite Schopenhauer’s own hopes) excludes an easy transition to an ethics of will-less resignation. But before seeking to discover the significance of the sublime, let us make a few remarks of a more general nature.3

1. Aesthetic Insight

Schopenhauer argues that the empirical phenomena have a dark side: “something” withdraws itself from our empirical , which can only be perceived in the inner sensations

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of our own body. When our body moves, our movements are accompanied by a sensation of these bodily movements and what drives them. The object of this sensation is what Schopen- hauer calls the individual will. The body is the border between the world of our will and the world of our representations. The entwinement of will and that is announced in the title of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, finds its most intimate entanglement in the body. Therefore, Schopenhauer often calls the body the immediate object or immediate (Objektität) of the will, because we have an interior affective sensation of our own body that is not a spatially ordered representation.4 This affective “under- standing”—the sensations of pain or lust, for instance—is immediate, since it is of a purely temporal nature and not spatially or causally determined.5 This double knowledge that we have of our own body offers insight into its activities and its movements on the basis of motives. We do not possess that kind of knowledge of other real objects.6 Schopenhauer’s metaphysical hypothesis is that the whole of reality is ultimately nothing less than the perceivable manifes- tation of a blind and irrational will. Since, as an individual, one is tied to and and because one has to consider the core of reality as a nonempirically perceivable, unconscious, and irrational will, an empirical individual cannot possibly have immediate knowledge of the will. The will is the imperceptible core of the phenomena, just as one’s bodily movements are the perceptible exponents of one’s imperceptible acts of will.

Every true act of his will is also at once and inevitably a movement of his body;… The action of the body is nothing but the act of will objectified, i.e., translated into perception.7 (WWR I, 100)

So a peculiar route is needed that offers transcendental insight into that which will always be hidden from an empirical point of view. This route develops through aesthetic perception or intui- tion (Anschauung). Aesthetic has a cognitive importance in Schopenhauer’s philosophy: it makes possible that one gains insight into something that cannot be made intelligible through empirical or logical concepts. Aesthetic perception offers a remarkable kind of understanding or insight that cannot be translated into determinate concepts. This aesthetic intuition should not merely be identified with a distant, mystical intuition of some esoteric object. Schopenhauer explicitly situates the mystical in the domain of and ethics, and it is closely connected with resignation (Quietismus) and asceticism (Askesis).8 Aesthetic perception is a peculiar way of experiencing things whereby the cognitive capacities function in a nonordinary way.9 An aesthetic experience consists of two inseparable consti- tuent parts: the spectator’s self-consciousness, not as individual

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but as pure, will-less subject of knowing, and the object, not as a separate particular object, but as (Platonic) .10 The first component stresses the disinterestedness of all aesthetic perception:11

When, however, an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises us out of the endless stream of willing, and snatches knowl- edge from the thraldom of the will, the attention is now no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will. Thus it considers things without interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively.… Then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us on that first path of willing, comes to us of its own accord, and all is well with us [uns ist völlig wohl]. (WWR I, 196)

Moreover, Schopenhauer adds, “we are entirely satisfied by the impression of a only when it leaves behind something that, in spite of all our reflection on it, we cannot bring down to the distinctness of a ” (WWR II, 409). The transition to a clearly defined concept is in Schopenhauer’s view obviously a degradation. An aesthetic intuition does not in any way contribute to conceptual knowledge but isolates the perceived object from its merely empirical and practical connections by perceiving it as an ideal object. This kind of perception is particularly the work of the and is a liberation from the limitations of the principle of sufficient that dominates logical reasoning. Crucial to a proper understanding of what Schopenhauer exactly means with aesthetic intuition is the important distinc- tion between concept and Idea. Schopenhauer often insists that Idea and concept are miles apart.

The concept is abstract, discursive, wholly undetermined within its sphere, determined only by its limits, attainable and intelligible only to him who has the faculty of reason, communicable by words with- out further assistance, entirely exhausted by its definition. The Idea, on the other hand, definable perhaps as the adequate representative of the concept, is absolutely perceptive [anschaulich], and although representing an infinite number of individual things, is yet thoroughly definite. It is never known by the individual as such.… (WWR I, 233–34)

Despite the important epistemic role of will-less contemplation, there can be no doubt that in aesthetic intuition one perceives an Idea and not a concept. The intuition of an Idea provides no abstract knowledge. A. L. Cothey aptly calls this aesthetic activity “perceptual contemplation.”12 When one intuits an Idea, perceiving a particular object does not end: one gains insight into the Idea in and through the perception of a particular

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phenomenon.13 Schopenhauer strongly insists on this difference between concepts and . Ideas can only appeal to someone who has elevated himself above all individual desiring and has become a pure subject of knowing. Schopenhauer’s fierce attack on allegorical and didactic art raises questions concerning the status of the (Platonic) Ideas in his theory.14 That the theory of the (Platonic) Ideas has been introduced ad hoc, as Bryan Magee maintains,15 is definitely incorrect. On the one hand, Schopenhauer regularly repeats that he offers the only correct interpretation of Plato’s theory of Ideas, but, on the other hand, Schopenhauer’s theory diverges from Plato on several crucial points. Schopenhauer often points this out himself.16 He describes the Ideas as the moulds, wherein the chaotic primal will gathers itself before dispersing into the countless phenomena that make up the world as representation. Concepts are unities that can be collected by means of the abstracting capacity of reason. Ideas are unities that have fallen into plurality by virtue of the forms of time and space of our intuitive apprehension (intuitive Apprehension).17 They are, as it were, the “deep grammar” by means of which the thing-in-itself expresses itself in the surface structures of the phenomenal appearances. Apart from this insertion into a metaphysics of will, there are several other problems with Schopenhauer’s Platonism,18 but I won’t go into this here. I do want to emphasize some remarkable similarities with the so-called aesthetic Ideas that Kant mentions in the Critique of Judgment (especially in § 49 and § 57). Kant’s theory of aesthetic Ideas was probably an impetus for the role of the Ideas in Schopenhauer’s own theory,19 but a thorough comparison of both is still lacking in the litera- ture. Just as in Kant, the Ideas are related to the capacity of imagination and are entities that cannot possibly be determined conceptually. They form the hardly presentable limit of what can be perceived through the senses: they transcend perceptual experience and can only be “presented” through aesthetic apprai- sal or creation. They are living organisms, developing themselves, and are endowed with generative force and develop new repre- sentations in him who has grasped these ideas—representations that are “new as regards the concept of the same name.”20 Kant uses the aesthetic Ideas in the same sense: they are inexhaustible, develop all kinds of extra representations (Nebenvorstellungen), and impart to the a momentum (Schwung).21 The aesthetic Ideas prompt much thinking but cannot be grasped in words or concepts.22 More technically formulated: they are unexpoundable and not indemonstrable as rational Ideas.23 The constant oscillation between Kant and Plato makes an unequivocal interpretation of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics extremely difficult. It warns us against an all too simple and naïve reading, which ignores the subtle ruptures and tensions in Schopenhauer’s account. I shall argue, first, that—despite

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Schopenhauer’s own remarks—aesthetic pleasure cannot be reduced to a negative pleasure brought about by the feeling of liberation from willing, and second—again contrary to several of Schopenhauer’s own comments—that there are some elements in his treatment of the sublime that cannot be reconciled with his idea that the aesthetic experience is a kind of proto-ethical experience of will-less bliss that would ultimately result in the kind of mystic rapture that an ascetic or a saint may experience.

2. Positive Pleasure

Schopenhauer often stresses the negative character of pleasure: “pain, suffering that includes all want, privation, need, in fact every wish or , is that which is positive and directly felt and experienced. On the other hand, the nature of satisfaction, enjoyment, and happiness consists solely in the removal of a privation, the stilling of a pain; and so these have a negative effect” (BM, 146). It stands to reason that the nature of aesthetic pleasure, which is aroused when perceiving a Platonic Idea, is also negative. This means that it liberates us from the unrest, the pain and suffering that accompany our needs and . Thus aesthetic pleasure has something anaesthetic about it: aesthetic contemplation soothes the suffering and numbs the pain that accompanies the daily grind that is tormented by the will.24 As I have noted above, Schopenhauer argues that aesthetic perception consists of two inextricably connected parts: the knowledge of the object as an Idea and self-consciousness, not as an individual, but as a pure, will-less subject of knowledge.25 This, however, does not yet mean that aesthetic pleasure wells up from two different sources or that there are two different sorts of aesthetic pleasure, but only that two conditions need to be fulfilled for aesthetic pleasure to occur. Schopenhauer goes one step further, though, and suggests a more complicated picture:

Moreover, we shall see that the pleasure [Wohlgefallen] produced by contemplation of the beautiful arises from those two constituent parts, sometimes more from the one than from the other, according to what the object of aesthetic contemplation may be. (WWR I, 256; italics in the original)

As Guyer remarks, this suggests that the contemplation of the Idea is not just the occasion for a of will-lessness and serenity, which is pleasurable because it releases me from the pain and suffering that accompany willing, but that the con- templation of the (Platonic) Idea as such is itself a source of pleasure, which is to a certain extent independent from the nega- tive pleasure that is connected with the feeling of liberation from the torments of the will.26

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In section 42 of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer returns to the positive component when he writes that “the source of aesthetic enjoyment will lie sometimes rather in the apprehension of the known Idea, sometimes rather in the bliss and peace of mind of pure knowledge free from all willing, and thus from all individuality and the pain that results therefrom” (WWR I, 212). This does not only point out that there are two distinct sources of pleasure, which can be present in different degrees in aesthetic contemplation, but also shows that the pleasure sometimes originates from the contem- plation of the Idea and sometimes from the blissful serenity experienced through the liberation from the claws of willing. This claim makes sense only if the two sources of pleasure—although they always occur together—can to a certain extent generate pleasure independently from one another. Hence two different forms of pleasure need to be distinguished that can be called positive and negative on the basis of their etiology.27 There are two forms of pleasure that are not necessarily phenomeno- logically distinguishable but can be etiologically characterized as two distinct components of the complex (aesthetic) experi- ence that Schopenhauer wants to describe. Schopenhauer’s hierarchy of lower and higher aesthetic art forms is partly based on this etiological differentiation of aesthetic forms of pleasure. Natural beauty and the “lower” art forms are connected with the negative pleasure, with the feeling of relief at the liberation from the urges of the will. But a num- ber of aesthetic objects are more highly valued because they generate the positive pleasure that is interwoven with the dis- interested contemplation of an Idea and the specific use of the cognitive capacities: “if animals and beings are the object of aesthetic contemplation or presentation, the enjoyment will consist rather in the objective apprehension of these Ideas that are the most distinct revelations of the will” (WWR I, 212). This remark even intimates that being released from the will, and hence from suffering, is not the most crucial merit of aesthe- tic intuition. The higher one climbs on the hierarchical ladder of aesthetic forms, the more important the intrinsic pleasure of contemplation becomes. Thus aesthetic pleasure cannot and should not be reduced to a passive enjoyment of relief from pain and suffering. Schopenhauer’s philosophy rightly acknowledges the fact that certain cognitively significant experiences can be intrinsically pleasurable, while at the same time they free us from the pains that accompany certain other experiences.28

3. Variants of Aesthetic Pleasure

Schopenhauer’s account of the feeling of the sublime provides a second important element that casts doubt on the “propaedeutic” character of aesthetic experience (with a complete resignation

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or Verneinung of willing as its ultimate goal). The development of the notion of the sublime is inspired by Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime. Schopenhauer had an enormous admiration for Kant’s analysis of the sublime and calls it

by far the most excellent thing in the Critique of Aesthetic Judge- ment.… It is incomparably more successful than that of the beautiful, and gives not only, as that does, the general method of investigation, but also a part of the right way to it, so much that, although it does not provide the real solution to the problem, it nevertheless touches on it very closely. (WWR I, 532)

Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime is embedded in an ontology of an irrational will, which is not the case in Kant; this has often obscured the remarkable parallels between the two . Section 39 of The World as Will and Representation offers an excellent account of the most relevant differences between the beautiful and the sublime. Schopenhauer considers the difference between the two feelings in the context of the active/passive dichotomy. Natural beauty is in Schopenhauer’s view the typical example of how something (e.g., a tulip, a landscape in South France, etc.) can fairly easily bring us into a state of pure will- less contemplation. This transition into pure perception occurs most easily

when the objects accommodate themselves to it, in other words, when by their manifold and at the same time definite and distinct form they easily become representative of their Ideas, in which beauty, in the objective sense, consists. Above all, natural beauty has this , and even the most stolid and apathetic person obtains therefrom at least a fleeting, aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, it is remarkable how the plant world in particular invites one to aesthetic contemplation, and as it were, obtrudes itself thereon [zur ästhetischen Betrachtung auffordert und sich gleichsam derselben aufdringt]. (WWR I, 200–201)

Schopenhauer connects this capacity of the world of plants to bring someone effortlessly into a state of pure aesthetic contem- plation explicitly with the feeling of the beautiful. Despite, or perhaps because of his pessimistic world view, the idea of pure harmonious subjectivity is never far away. In 1812, while in Berlin, the young Schopenhauer had already labeled aesthetic consciousness as the “better consciousness” (das bessere Bewusstsein) (see HN I, 27). It offers an alternative to individual empirical consciousness, which is in the service of the will and thus is always accompanied by pain and unrest. The feeling of the beautiful contains the promise to be freed from this thraldom of willing and suffering. Just as the feeling of the beautiful—

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pure —in Kant, beauty is a feeling of pure serenity and harmony. Contrary to ordinary consciousness, aesthetic con- sciousness is not determined by any individual interest or determinate concept. In the beautiful, one feels the promise of will-less unity and purity. This is a blissful state that can be compared with so-called ataraxia, the balanced peaceful state that Epicurus praised as the highest good and as the state of the gods. The predicate “beautiful” is not applied to an object but only to the pure “objectivity” of aesthetic consciousness (see WWR I, 197). This pure feeling of harmonious will-lessness and serenity should not be confused with the so-called resignation or quietening of the will, which is not aesthetic at all. The conscious soothing of the will or the “holy” resignation of desire is definitely a way out of life or at least an effort to escape from its pains. It is also an effort to be fully freed from oneself. Aesthetic contemplation, on the other hand, does not neces- sarily imply any effort to escape from life and does not merely have the function of “quieter of the will”—a function it clearly does have in “the saint who has attained resignation”; aesthetic contemplation is “only an occasional consolation” (see WWR I, 267) in life. When the desires are tamed in the holy ascetic, when the will is sublated (aufgehoben),29 there is no possibility for an aesthetic feeling to occur anymore. The ascetic struggles to be released from willing, whereas the aesthetic spectator feels consolation in life. James D. Chansky remarks that, if one can speak of aims in connection with the aesthetic, one has to conclude that “the aims of aesthetics and of asceticism are not merely different but really quite opposed.”30 Bluntly ascribing this view to Schopenhauer is hasty, but it remains true that, for Schopenhauer, in the experience of beauty, willing has not completely been put to rest; hence, one has not definitively escaped from the unrest and torments of existence. There is only the felt “promise” of such complete liberation and pure serenity:31 it is as if I am freed from suffering, but in reality I am not. The beautiful is the sensation of blissful peace and utmost happiness, but only temporarily, since it is ultimately bound up with the contingent response to an object. Contrary to what, for example, J. E. Atwell and R. Malter argue,32 pleasure in the beautiful is a much richer experience than feeling relief from the pains of willing and desiring. It is also the discovery of what makes my existence possible. We aesthetically gain insight into the foundations of the world, that is, the Platonic Ideas, which are nothing less than the direct objectifications of metaphysical will. This experience is no mystical bliss that enlightens the spiritual eye of a super- sensible beholder, but an aesthetic attitude, that is, a state in which the mind is nonconceptually conscious of the purity of its feeling and perception. When a work of art tells us, “Look, this

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is life!” as Schopenhauer writes, this implies that it communi- cates for perception what the whole of reality ultimately is: the dynamic evolvement or emanation of a blind and irrational will.33 Yet this peculiar contemplative insight can only be experienced as a promise of blissfulness. In the beautiful one feels immediately and momentarily what one could have been, if one weren’t the willing and needy individual that one really is. But this “moment” hardly seems to last: the art work’s answer “is thus a fleeting image, not a permanent universal knowledge” (WWR II, 406). Before one realizes it completely, one is again subjected to the blind and dark urge that permeates the whole world. All of a sudden one is the willing individual again that is interested in the concrete existence of the perceived object. The feeling of the beautiful is only one of the variants of aesthetic feelings that Schopenhauer discusses. The feeling of the sublime is another important variant of the aesthetic experience. It is to Schopenhauer’s analysis of this feeling that we now turn.

4. The Specificity of the Sublime

Like Kant, Schopenhauer clearly distinguishes the feeling of the sublime from the feeling of the beautiful. It is definitely not a “sub-class” of the beautiful, as Bryan Magee34 thinks. The sublime is connected with an immense and conscious effort on the part of the subject.

With the sublime, that state of pure knowing is obtained first of all by a conscious and violent tearing away from the relations of the same object to the will which are recognized as unfavourable, by a free exaltation, accompanied by consciousness, beyond the will and the knowledge related to it. (WWR I, 202)

The specificity of the feeling of the sublime consists in the con- scious and brutal effort demanded of the subject to cast aside the ordinary connections of the will and to explicitly maintain (beharren) the exalted state of mind. The exaltation is not an easily reached victory of the subject of pure perception over the empirical willing individual, but a state of utter tension, which does not only have to be won with consciousness but also maintained. In the beautiful, the state of pure contemplation will be reached and maintained without much struggle. It is to Schopenhauer’s merit that he acknowledges the distinction between the active and passive variants of the aesthetic feelings and develops them as crucial distinctions in his theory. Yet the sublime feeling is a very complex matter, which cannot just be characterized on the basis of the criterion active/ passive. In section 39 of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer rather dramatically provides an overview of a number of gradual transitions from the beautiful to the sublime

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that bring to light several subtle and important distinctions and degrees of the sublime (see WWR I, 203–207). When, for instance in the depth of winter, the setting sun illuminates the masses of stone of a building without warming, then this can move us into the state of pure aesthetic contemplication. Since this mood is accompanied by a weak recollection of the lack of warmth of the rays of sunlight and since they are not life enhancing, a certain transcending of the will and a slight challenge (leise Aufforder- ung) to persist in pure knowledge are required. This is nothing more than the faintest trace (schwächste Anhauch) of the sublime (see WWR I, 203). But when one finds oneself in a deserted area, with trees and plants in a completely motionless air, with- out animals, without people, without moving water masses and utter silence, it will take much more effort to protect oneself against the threatening feeling of and to disinter- estedly contemplate the scene. Schopenhauer calls this an instance of the sublime in a low degree, which will get more intense when one imagines the same region without plants, only with bare rocks. In that case the will does not find anything to satisfy itself and really panics because of the total absence of the organic life that is indispensable for the subsistence of the individual. The desert becomes frightening, and our mood becomes more tragic. It clearly takes more effort to wrest oneself from the interests of willing, but if one succeeds in persisting in the state of pure contemplation, one distinctly becomes aware of the sublime.35 Schopenhauer often seems to hesitate between an empirical and a transcendental approach: other crucial passages point out that the sublime feeling not just quantitatively but funda- mentally and, as in Kant, qualitatively differs from the feeling of the beautiful. One of the most important characteristics of the clearest examples of the sublime is the fact that it is “accompanied by a constant recollection of the will, yet not of a single individual willing, such as fear or desire, but of human willing in general, in so far as it is expressed universally through its objectivity, the human body” (WWR I, 202). The word “constant” (einer steten Erinnerung) is especially important here: the will remains permanently present in consciousness. This remains the case as long as the sublime feeling is there, that is, as long as the state of violent tension is maintained. The sublime, which can occur in different degrees, is thus typically distinguished from the beautiful by the permanent and unre- mitting recollection of the human will and human body, whose traces remain present in the mind as displeasure, and as long as the sublime feeling persists. Schopenhauer never really explains the status of this recol- lection, but he does argue that it is not a recollection of indi- vidual willing, fear or desire. It is recollection of human willing in general, for “if a real single act of will were to enter con-

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sciousness through actual personal affliction and danger from the object, the individual will, thus actually affected, would at once gain the upper hand. The peace of contemplation would become impossible, the impression of the sublime would be lost” (WWR I, 202). If real personal anxiety occurred, we would not contemplate the threatening or overwhelming scene but try to save ourselves. Any recollection of individual willing, any direct affection, would cause anxiety and fatally annihilate the feeling of the sublime. When the individual will is touched, one ends up in the contrary of the sublime: the charming or attractive (das Reizende), which is not aesthetic at all (see WWR I, 207). In the charming, the mind is completely passive: a merely sensual pleasure (Genuss) and not liking (Wohlgefallen) or joy (Freude). The attractive “draws the beholder down from pure contempla- tion” that is necessary for aesthetic intuition and thus “no longer remains pure subject of knowing, but becomes the needy and dependent subject of willing” (WWR I, 207). Contrary to the attractive, the sublime is a purely aesthetic feeling. But it is an aesthetic feeling that, unlike the beautiful, is still accompanied by a permanent recollection of the human will. What could this mean? Real anxiety may not occur because this would give rise to a strong individual concern on the side of the subject. But, contrary to Kant, who claims that “we cannot pass judgment at all on the sublime in nature if we are afraid” (KUK, § 28, p. 120),36 Schopenhauer surprisingly takes real threat into consideration in the sublime (see HN II, 289; cf. KUK, § 28). The (will of the) subject is really frightened and even threatened, and the subject is clearly conscious of the hostile and violent nature of the object. Yet we do not run away. We do not experience any affec- tive response that is irreconcilable with a truly aesthetic con- templation.

Nature in tempestuous motion; semi-darkness through threatening black thunder-clouds; immense, bare, overhanging cliffs shutting out the view by their interlacing; rushing, foaming masses of water; complete desert; the wail of the wind sweeping through the ravines. Our dependence, our struggle with hostile nature, our will that is broken in this, now appear clearly before our eyes. Yet as long as personal affliction does not gain the upper hand, but we remain in aesthetic contemplation, the pure subject of knowing through this struggle of nature.… (WWR I, 204)

One of the crucial aspects of a sublime response seems to be a sort of dissociation or de-realization of our personal affects or the individual emotional response. This explains why Kant too calls the enthusiasm of the spectators (but not the agitators) of the expressly a sublime affect.37 The distant spectators cannot be suspected of any empirical interest: this

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guarantees the pure aesthetic nature of their feeling.38 In the sublime, it is possible to take disinterested pleasure in what is most cruel or life-threatening. But the recollection of the will remains vividly present in the mind. One feels threatened or anxious, but one experiences these feelings impersonally. What one feels does not seem to belong to one’s own personal world of emotions. One becomes, as it were, a subject without a self—as Oscar Wilde writes in The Critic as Artist: “I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourn- ing over that were not my own.”39 Certain elements in Schopenhauer’s work suggest that the author’s central concern would be the triumph of pure knowing over willing. Schopenhauer often connects the sublime with the sense of elevation or exaltation from a passive subject that is submitted to the will to a pure subject that actively and spon- taneously contemplates the ideal essences of the will. Yet the sublime feeling is far more specific: it is not just a feeling that is accompanied by an elevation of the subject over the empirical will—such an elevation also takes place in the beautiful—but an aesthetic experience that gives rise to an awareness of the double nature of our consciousness (Duplizität seines Bewusst- seins).40 In this sense there can be no continuity from the beautiful to the sublime: the extremely beautiful is not neces- sarily a weak trace of the sublime. The beautiful is a serene and harmonious feeling. The sublime is violent and paradoxical. When it becomes possible, through an extreme effort, to experi- ence the overwhelming or hostile object as threatening as well as pleasurable, the sublime clearly occurs. Schopenhauer writes:

Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual, as the feeble phe- nomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can annihilate, helpless against powerful nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in face of stupendous forces; and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing, who as the condition of every object is the supporter of this whole world.… This is the full impression of the sublime. Here it is caused by the sight of a power beyond all comparison superior to the individual, and threatening him with annihilation. (WWR I, 204–205)

This passage reveals that the feeling of the sublime is a real experience of contrast—not merely a triumphant conquering of the will, let alone “a contraction of the vastness of being into the content of the consciousness of the noumenal self” and “a movement of cosmic egoism,” as Julian Young41 holds. The experience of contrast (“Simultaneously he feels himself …”) testifies to an irremovable tension or fissure in our Gemüt. This irremovable and paradoxical tension between willing and knowing, which characterizes our subjectivity—this continuous oscillation between empirical desires and pure contemplation—

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can be experienced in different degrees but can never be defini- tively put to rest. The sublime (das Erhabene) is the aesthetic feeling of elevation (Erhebung) above empirical individuality, but this violent exaltation will never be really felt as complete sublimity (Erhabenheit): the will cannot be tamed definitively (Velle non discitur).42 One may have this impression in the sublime, but it will always be an illusory impression: the sublime is an ambivalent feeling of pleasure and pain at the same time. Contrary to the beautiful, which could still promise complete and pure harmony, the sublime is the clearest possible experi- ence of the unbridgeable gap between willing and contemplating that characterizes human subjectivity. That we can actually enjoy this aesthetically is perhaps the real “miracle par excellence.”43

Notes

1 For this dominant interpretation, see e.g., D. W. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); A. Philonenko, Une philosophie de la tragédie (Paris: Vrin, 1980); T. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), and also (though to a lesser extent) B. Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996). 2 In this essay I shall disregard Schopenhauer’s theory of , which by-passes the Platonic Ideas. But see my The Blossom of Life: Aesthetics and Ethics in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, forthcoming. 3 I use the following abbreviations in this essay: WWR I, II The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publica- tions, 1966) FR The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. E. F. J. Payne (La Salle: Open Court, 1997) PP I, II , 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) HN I, II, III, IV, V Der handschriftliche Nachlass, 5 Bäude, ed. A. Hübscher (Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1975–1996) BM On the Basis of , trans. E. F. J. Payne, with an introduction by David E. Cartwright (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995) 4 For a detailed comparative of the body in Schopenhauer and Fichte, see H. Schöndorf, Der Leib im Denken Schopenhauers und Fichtes (München: Johannes Berchmans, 1982). The term immediate object (unmittelbares Objekt), which Schopenhauer will hardly use after 1813, also appears in Schelling and Fichte. On the body as Objektität des Willens, see WWR I, § 20–21, § 48, § 60, and WWR II, ch. 41. 5 WWR I, 101: “Every true, genuine, immediate act of the will is also at once and directly a manifest act of the body; and correspon- dingly, on the other hand, every impression [Einwirkung] on the body is also at once and directly an impression on the will.”

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6 See WWR I, § 19. 7 The will is not a function of the intellect. On the contrary, the intellect (and its physical manifestation: the brain) is a function of the will. The intellect is in fact tertiary: it presupposes the organism and the organism presupposes the will. See also WWR II, 278: “Far from being the absolutely first thing (as Fichte taught, for example), it is at bottom tertiary, since it presupposes the organism, and the organism presupposes the will.” 8 See WWR II, 613: “Quietism, i.e., the giving up of all willing, asceticism, i.e., intentional mortification of one’s own will, and mysticism, i.e., consciousness of the identity of one’s own inner being with that of all things, or with the kernel of the world, stand in the closest connection.” 9 G. Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics. An Analytic Approach (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 25: “Schopenhauer retains from Kant only the notion of cognitive faculties functioning in a nonordinary way.” That this would be the only notion he retains from Kant is highly questionable. 10 See WWR I, 195: “In the aesthetic way of perceiving we have found two inseparable constituent parts: namely, knowledge of the object not as individual thing, but as Platonic Idea, in other words, as persistent form of this whole species of things; and the self-conscious- ness of the knower, not as individual, but as pure, will-less subject of knowledge.” 11 See my “On the Notion of ‘Disinterestedness’: Kant, Lyotard, and Schopenhauer,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 705–20. 12 A. L. Cothey, The Nature of Art (London: Routledge, 1990), 75. 13 P. Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 206: “awareness and comprehension of the Idea in and through the individual phenomena of everyday experience.” 14 For his attack on , see WWR I, 237–42, and WWR II, 422– 23. 15 See B. Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 239: “In the first edition of The World as Will and Repre- sentation Platonic Ideas are not introduced until three-quarters of the way through Schopenhauer’s exposition of his epistemology and ontology—where-upon they suddenly, disconcertingly, claim a pivotal function in the entire explanatory framework. I cannot help suspecting that they were introduced ad hoc at this point and then got out of hand.” The Platonic Ideas already occur in the earliest notes Schopen- hauer made. See HN I, 11, 30, 56, 76, 117, 131, 132, 200, etc. See also FR § 39, footnote 4, p. 206. 16 See e.g., WWR I, 209–12, and WWR I, 233. 17 WWR I, 234–35: “The Idea is the unity that has fallen into plurality by virtue of the temporal and spatial form of our intuitive apprehension. The concept, on the other hand, is the unity once more produced out of plurality by means of abstraction through our faculty of reason; the latter can be described as unitas post rem, and the former as unitas ante rem.” 18 There is a vast amount of on Schopenhauer’s Platonism. To name but a few interesting sources: James D. Chansky, “Schopen- hauer and Platonic Ideas: A Groundwork for an Aesthetic Metaphysics,” in E. von der Luft, ed., Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of his 200th Birthday (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 67–81; C. Foster,

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“Ideas and Imagination. Schopenhauer on the Proper Foundation of Art,” in C. Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 213–51; P. Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 203–19; P. Guyer, “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics,” in D. Jacquette, ed., Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 109–32 [reprinted in P. Guyer, Values of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 265– 88]; D. W. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer, 103–22; H. Hein, “Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 4 (1966): 133–44; C. Janaway, Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 61–70; Y. Kamata, “Platonische Idee und die anschauliche Welt bei Schopenhauer,” Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 70 (1989): 84–93; Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, 165–69 and 239–40; S. G. Neeley, “Schopenhauer and the Platonic Ideas: A Reconsideration,” Idealistic Studies 30 (2000): 121–48; C. Rosset, L’esthétique de Schopenhauer (Paris: P.U.F., 1969), 33–39; T. G. Taylor, “Platonic Ideas, Aesthetic Experience, and the Revolution of Schopenhauer’s Great Contra- diction,” International Studies in Philosophy 19 (1987): 43–53; F. C. White, “Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas,” in B. Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, forthcoming); J. Young, “The Standpoint of Eternity: Schopenhauer on Art,” Kant- Studien 78 (1987): 424–41; J. Young, Willing and Unwilling. A Study in the Philosophy of (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 92–95. 19 Paul Guyer also suggests this in “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics,” 131, note 9. [Values of Beauty, 265–88, see also note 9.] 20 WWR I, 235: “The Idea, on the other hand, develops in him who has grasped it representations that are new as regards the concept of the same name; it is like a living organism, developing itself and endowed with generative force, which brings forth that which was not previously put into it.” 21 See below in section 4 on the specificity of the sublime. 22 See I. Kant, Critique of Judgment [KUK], translated, with an introduction, by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), § 49, p. 182: “and by an aesthetic idea I mean a presentation of the imagi- nation which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no determinate concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it.” 23 See KUK, § 57, Comment I, p. 215: “I think we may call aesthetic ideas unexpoundable presentations of the imagination, and rational ideas indemonstrable concepts of reason.” 24 See Guyer, “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthe- tics,” 109: “But such a purely negative account of the of such an elevated form of cognition seems disappointing, and to treat aesthe- tic experience as indeed nothing but an anaesthetic.” 25 See WWR I, 195–96. For the following, see also Guyer, “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics.” 26 See Guyer, “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics,” 125. This positive pleasure is naturally only to some degree independent from the demands of the will, for both are inextricably bound up with each other. 27 See Guyer, “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthe-

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tics,” 126. 28 See Guyer, “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthe- tics,” 110. 29 Schopenhauer remarkably often uses the Hegelian term “aufheben” in this context. 30 Chansky, “Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas: A Groundwork for an Aesthetic Metaphysics,” 77, n. 1. 31 This is reminiscent of the sort of promise mentioned in the dialogue between a painter and a poet in William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Act V, scene 1: “Poet. What have you now to present unto him? / Pain. Nothing at this time but my visitation; only I will promise him an excellent piece. / Poet. I must serve him so too, tell him of an intent that’s coming toward him / Pain. Good at the best. Promising is the very air o’ th’ time; it opens the eyes of expectation. Performance is ever the duller for his act, and but in the plainer and simpler kind of people the deed of saying is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable; performance is a kind of will or testament which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it.” (Quoted from W. Shakespeare, The Complete Works, A New Edition, edited with an Introduction and Glossary by Peter Alexander [London/Glasgow: Collins, 1992 (1951)], 946.) Schopenhauer immensely admired Shakespeare. Sören Kierkegaard (as Nikolaus Notabene) also quotes this fragment in the volume Forord (1844); see Vorworte [Prefaces], in Gesammelte Werke, Abt. 11/12, München, 1991, p. 43. 32 J. E. Atwell, “Art as Liberation,” 82; R. Malter, Der eine Gedanke: Hinführung zur Philosophie Arthur Schopenhauers (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 62. 33 See WWR II, 406: “Thus for perception, every work of art answers that question, every , every statue, every poem, every scene on the stage.… Thus all the other arts together hold before the questioner an image or picture of perception and say: ‘Look here; this is life!’” 34 Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, 164: “And he goes on to use the Kantian term ‘the sublime’ for a sub-class of the beautiful.” 35 See WWR I, 204: “The exaltation to pure knowledge comes about with a more decided emancipation from the interest of the will, and by our persisting in the state of pure knowledge, the feeling of the sublime distinctly appears.” 36 See also KUK, 121: “we must find ourselves safe in order to feel this exciting liking, so that (as it might seem), since the danger is not genuine, the sublimity of our intellectual ability might also not be genuine.” 37 KUK, § 29, General Comment, 132: “Yet enthusiasm is sublime aesthetically, because it is a straining of our forces by ideas that impart to the mind a momentum [welche dem Gemüthe einen Schwung geben] whose effects are mightier and more permanent than are those of an impulse produced by presentations of sense.” 38 See J.-F. Lyotard, Le différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 241. See also J.-F. Lyotard, L’enthousiasme. La critique kantienne de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 1986), esp. ch. 3. 49 O. Wilde, “The Critic as Artist. A Dialogue in Two Parts,” Collected Works (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 823. 50 See WWR I, 204: “Then in the unmoved beholder of this scene the twofold nature of his consciousness reaches the highest distinctness. Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual … and he also feels

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himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing.” 41 J. Young, “Death and Transfiguration: Kant, Schopenhauer and Heidegger on the Sublime,” Inquiry 48 (2005): 140. Young even (unjustly) contends on the same page that Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime “illustrates clearly the egoistic—or, more exactly, solipsistic— character of Schopenhauer’s thought.” 42 This is a phrase of Seneca (Epistulae, 81 14), often quoted by Schopenhauer. 43 For a more detailed analysis of aesthetic experience, also in connection with other art genres, see my The Blossom of Life, forth- coming, and also my “Schopenhauer’s View of Aesthetic Experience,” in B. Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, forthcoming).

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