CHAPTER 16 Schopenhauer: Art as Disinterestedness and Knowledge of Reality

1 The World as Appearance and the Will as Its Irrational Essence

The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) has had a great influence on philosophers, even if they did not completely accept his metaphysics, as well as on artists, poets and writers, and it is still present in today’s culture. His poetic gift in writing prose and his sensibility for art and poetry made of Schopenhauer the most influential thinker for many writers and poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Schopenhauer rebutted Hegel and turned back to Kant . He considered ori- ental philosophies like Hinduism and Buddhism and took inspiration from them. Hegel thought that the absolute is rationality and that it is conceivable by means of reason. By contrast, Schopenhauer was convinced that the abso- lute is irrational: it is nothing but a blind, infinite, impersonal and irrational “will.” Schopenhauer considered Hegel an idiot: how could he affirm that real- ity is rationality? If we consider our body, we notice that we strive always for something. For the first time in the history of Western philosophy, a philoso- pher considered consistently and deeply the implication of the body. We are not only a mind. We also have a body, though philosophers have considered mainly the spirit. We feel that our body wants or desires things. Our essence is the desire or will for something, and desire, as the Buddha said, means suffer- ing. If we reach what we desire, then we get bored; that is to say that we suf- fer again, and we start striving for something else. Our life is like a pendulum swinging between desire and boredom, between suffering and more suffering. “Happiness and well-being consist simply in the quick transition from wish to satisfaction and from satisfaction to a new wish.”1 The reason for this is the “will” considered as the metaphysical principle of reality. Nature is determined by causality; natural things appear by means of the intuitions of space and time, as Kant said. Nature is the Kantian phe- nomenon, or “representation.” But behind the appearance or representation of nature lies the essence of nature, the noumenon, or “the thing in itself,” and this is the will. The will has nothing to do with causality, space and time, and there- fore it is irrational, blind, infinite, impersonal and ubiquitous; it is absolute and it strives for its own survival without a reason and without an end.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004409231_016 Schopenhauer 105

The will is the thing in itself, and the world is nothing but appearance caused by the will. We are “representations,” too, so we are nothing but parts of the unique will, though each of us believes that he possesses a separate and individual will. Still, we could not have any knowledge of the will by means of reason; we could not even notice it at all if we did not have our body, by means of which we experience the will as abiding desire and irrational striving. For the first time in Western philosophy, our body is considered as a condition of philosophizing. This is the metaphysical background of Schopenhauer ’s aesthetics and it is necessary to consider it in order to understand the great importance of art in his philosophical system. Can we stop the activity of the irrational will? Yes, says Schopenhauer, for a while, in the aesthetic experience.

2 The Emancipatory Power of Art

Beauty is the essence of the work of art. When we have an aesthetic experience, we do not contemplate an object in the material reality of time and space, in the connection of causes and effects which constitutes the material nature, which Schopenhauer considers as a mere representation. When we have an experience of beauty , we do not desire to possess that beauty. In the contem- plation of a thing of beauty we watch the “idea” of a thing. In his aesthetics Schopenhauer proposes a Neo-Platonic hierarchy of reality.2 The idea is the first objectivity of the will: Schopenhauer ’s ideas are derived from Plato ’s forms: they are models or archetypes of natural things. Ideas are beyond space and time, so they are unique and eternal, and they are not involved in natural causality. Ideas cannot be any object of willing for which we could strive. In the aesthetic experience we “look” at these ideas, and in such disinterested contemplation our will is suspended. For a while we do not desire anymore and we do not suffer, we are no longer stuck in the connection of causality. Ideas are between the will (as noumenon or essence of reality) and the rep- resentation (or delusion, our everyday delusive world). Schopenhauer ’s aes- thetics is based on the assumption that in the experience of a work of art we contemplate the universal (idea) and not the particular (individual thing). Art in general is concerned with universals so art is a true metaphysical activity.

In the aesthetical mode of contemplation we have found two inseparable constituent parts – the knowledge of the object, not as individual thing but as Platonic Idea, that is, as the enduring form of this whole species of