In concluding Schopenhauer’s thoughts on relationship to his vision of ultimate reality as Will – the thing-in-itself for each thing including us, and for everything, i.e. Nature and the Universe – I will extract liberally from his own writings some tasty morsels for the reader’s intellectual palate, with the hope it may lead you to his very readable, even poetic prose.
“Any willing arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one; both are illusions; the one is known to be so, the other not yet.”7
“But when some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, delivers knowledge from the slavery of the will, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all the peace which we were always seeking but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord and it is well with us…the state …as necessary for the knowledge of the Idea, as pure contemplation, as sinking oneself in perception, losing oneself in the object, forgetting all individuality…it is this blessedness of will-less perception… The world as idea alone remains, and the world as will has disappeared.”8
For Schopenhauer the surest way to such a state is the contemplation of art. He tells us that while “science… can never reach a final goal…art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation out of the stream of the world’s course, and has it isolated before it. And this particular thing, which in the stream was a small perishing part, becomes to art the representative of the whole, and equivalent of the endless multitude in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing: the course of time stops; the relations vanish for it; only the essential, the Idea is its object.”9
Schopenhauer’s definition of art is a bit problematic – in some sense he seems to mean anything aesthetic – in fact he starts with human physical beauty and the beauty within Nature. Nonetheless he seems to designate a special place for the created arts in his expansive sense. These include not just the visual arts, but poetry, drama (especially tragedy), perhaps even history, at least as the artist anticipates “by so great a degree of intelligence that he recognizes the Idea in the particular thing, and thus, as it were, understands the half-uttered speech of nature, and articulates clearly what she only stammered forth.”10
However, Schopenhauer reserves his highest regard for music which in his words “is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself, nay, even as Ideas, whose multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of individual things. Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself. Since, however, it is the same will which objectifies itself both in the Ideas and in music, though in quite different ways, there must be, not indeed a direct likeness, but yet a parallel, and analogy, between music and the Ideas whose manifestation in multiplicity and incompleteness is the visible world.”11
So, it seems to me, Schopenhauer is not, in the end, a pessimist, but the opposite. It is in the contemplation of human artistic creation that we encounter and synchronize with the ultimate. I know of no greater advocacy of humanism in all of philosophical literature… I leave you now for a little Mozart!
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7Mann, Thomas (editor), The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer. David McKay Company, Philadelphia, PA, 1939. Pages 106-107.
8Ibid., pages 107-109.
9Ibid., page 102.
10Ibid., page 111 (Schopenhauer’s italics).
11Ibid., page 117 (Schopenhauer’s italics).