Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Sandra Shapshay*Indiana University Bloomington

Abstract

This essay focuses on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics and philosophy of art, areas of his philosophywhich have attracted the most philosophical attention in recent years. After discussing the subjec-tive and objective aspects of aesthetic experience on his account, I shall offer interpretations ofSchopenhauer’s theory of the sublime and solution to the problem of tragedy. In addition, I shalltouch upon the liveliest interpretive debates concerning his aesthetic theory: the intelligibility ofthe ‘‘Platonic Ideas’’ as the objects of aesthetic experience and the very possibility of aestheticexperience within Schopenhauer’s system. Another aim of this essay is to suggest how some ofSchopenhauer’s aesthetic doctrines may be interpreted in a less metaphysically extravagant way.When understood in this manner, contemporary aestheticians might be inclined to take a closerlook at Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory and philosophy of art, for it is distinctive in the traditionof Western philosophical aesthetics in its attempt to highlight and balance the hedonic and cogni-tive importance of aesthetic experiences; in its sensitivity both to the aesthetic experience ofnature as well as of art; in the high value placed on the experience of music (a higher value thanafforded by any previous aesthetic theory); and in the innovative solution to the problem oftragedy it offers.

1. Introduction

Schopenhauer’s philosophy as a whole enjoyed a great influence on fin de siecle 19th andearly 20th century Western culture. The most influential facets of his philosophy were,first, his attempt to refine and complete transcendental idealism through the identificationof the Kantian thing in itself with ‘‘will’’ (conceived as a non-teleological and thus‘‘blind’’ striving). Second, his doctrine of pessimism – the inference from the tremendousand unredeemed suffering of living creatures to the worthlessness of life – presented apressing philosophical problem for Nietzsche and later existentialist philosophers. Third,unlike most philosophers of his time who concentrated on human beings qua cognizers,Schopenhauer focused on the phenomenon of embodiment and the centrality of feelingand desire in human life. And finally, he offered an aesthetic theory that gave art, andamong the arts, music – especially non-programmatic, purely instrumental music–excep-tionally high cognitive significance.

Although no significant school of ‘‘Schopenhauerianism’’ ever formed, these facets ofSchopenhauer’s thought resonated deeply with philosophers, literary writers and compos-ers such as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud, Wagner, Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg,Hardy, Mann, Rilke, Proust, Tolstoy and Borges, to name just a few (for Schopenhauer’sintellectual biography see Safranski; Cartwright).

No wonder that, surely Schopenhauer was a favorite among composers, for heaccorded music an exceptional status among the arts. Unlike the other arts, music wasnot seen by him as representational of anything in the phenomenal world; rather, he heldthat it offered a ‘‘copy of the will itself’’ (WWR I: 257) and expressed the inner striving

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of the world of representation including human emotions stripped of motive and context.This account continued to influence the development of the philosophy of music intothe 20th century, as evidenced by Susanne Langer’s theory of musical symbolism (Langer;see also Alperson; Magee, especially chapter 17; and Goehr, 1998 for his influence onWagner). Capturing his stature in the philosophy of music, Lydia Goehr writes thatSchopenhauer ‘‘has become to musical aesthetics what Beethoven has become to classicalmusic itself – a central reference point in a range of historically momentous debates’’(Goehr, 1996: 200).

Outside of the philosophy of music, however, philosophers have paid less attention tohis thought. With the recent renaissance of studies on Nietzsche in the Anglo-Americanphilosophical world, there has begun a similar renaissance in thinking about Nietzsche’sself-proclaimed ‘‘educator’’ (see Nietzsche, 1997 [orig. 1874]; Janaway 1999). It is one ofthe aims of this brief essay to urge contemporary aestheticians take a closer look at Scho-penhauer’s aesthetic theory and philosophy of art. Aestheticians might be skeptical of thissuggestion, however, as Schopenhauer’s theory is intertwined with a questionable meta-physics, questionable because apparently paradoxical: On the one hand, Schopenhauerholds that we are ignorant of things as they are in themselves, but then, on the otherhand, he states that the in-itself of the world just is will, to which we have nearly directfirst-person access, and of which we therefore cannot be ignorant. Further complicatingthis problem for utilizing Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is the fact that his philosophy formssomething of an organic whole. Indeed, Schopenhauer saw all of the parts of his philoso-phy as mutually presupposing:

Metaphysics of nature, metaphysics of morals, and metaphysics of the beautiful mutually presup-pose one another, and only when they are connected do they complete the explanation of thetrue nature of things and of existence generally (OBM: 41).

But I hope to sketch here, a couple of ways in which insights from his aesthetic theorymay be fruitfully reconceived apart from their metaphysical underpinnings. After giving abrief overview of the main facets of Schopenhauer’s account of aesthetic experience, forreasons of space, I will focus on just two of those features of his aesthetic theory which Ibelieve are most promising for thinking through issues in contemporary aesthetics: histheory of the sublime and his multi-faceted solution to the paradox of tragedy.

2. Aesthetic Experience – Subjective and Objective Sides

Schopenhauer follows in the 18th century tradition of understanding aesthetic experienceas disinterested, that is, as a form of engagement in the world in which one attends to andtakes pleasure in an object for its own sake rather than for the sake of bodily gratification,pragmatic concerns, or moral interests. In Schopenhauer’s formulation of this notion, aes-thetic perception is ‘‘will-less’’ [willenlos] and constitutes a unique, somewhat rare, andsignificant kind of respite from our normal, everyday perception, that is, perceptionwhich is will-full. Here he describes will-less, experience of the beautiful:

Raised up by the power of the mind, we relinquish the ordinary way of considering things,and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason merelytheir relations to one another, whose final goal is always the relation to our own will. Thus weno longer consider the where, the when, the why and the whither of things, but simply andsolely the what. … We lose ourselves entirely in this object … in other words, we forget ourindividuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object… (WWR I: 178)

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When the human individual ‘‘loses’’ herself in aesthetic contemplation of an object –which could be a natural object, a work of art, or anything at all really (WWR I: 178) –she enjoys a holiday from the generally painful pressures of willing. Schopenhauercharacterizes ordinary human life as a constant servitude to willing, by virtue of a drivecommon to all living things, which he terms the ‘‘will to life’’ [Wille zum Leben]. Inhuman beings, the ‘‘will to life’’ takes the shape of the drive to maintain one’s existenceby securing the necessities of bodily survival, to procreate, and to seek happiness andmeaning in one’s life. According to Schopenhauer’s empirical observations, the striving ofhuman beings to meet these will-driven desires is generally painful, for all desire involvesa painful deficiency of some sort. Satisfaction of a desire, though pleasurable, comes to usinfrequently and is fleeting. Unfortunately, satisfaction when it comes at all leads fairlyquickly to boredom (which is painful), and which starts the entire process of desire anew.The cycle of willing goes on until we die; then our remains may be incorporated intosomething else which might live, strive, suffer, etc.

With the background of this rather depressing account of willing, it makes good sensewhy Schopenhauer would describe the will-less state of aesthetic perception in rapturousterms:

When, however, an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises us out of the endlessstream of willing, and snatches knowledge from the thralldom of the will, the attention is nowno longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation tothe will… Then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us on that first path ofwilling, comes to us of its own accord, and all is well with us. It is the painless state, prized byEpicurus as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for that moment we are deliveredfrom the miserable pressure of the will. We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of will-ing; the wheel of Ixion stands still (WWR I: 196).

By virtue of the contrast between everyday life and episodes of aesthetic contemplation,Schopenhauer describes the pleasure of everything beautiful as ‘‘the most delightful, andthe only innocent, side of life’’ and art as a ‘‘consolation’’ and ‘‘the flower of life’’(WWR I: 266). Aesthetic will-lessness also constitutes, for Schopenhauer, an experienceanalogous to the ascetic experience of the saint who, in resigning him or herself from thewill to live altogether, achieves a mystical ‘‘salvation’’ from the world entirely (see Wicks2008, chapter 10).

Stressing the Platonic influence on Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory in general, Christo-pher Janaway has traced his 1818 account of aesthetic will-lessness to his earlier Platonicnotion of ‘‘the better consciousness,’’ an ‘‘extra-empirical revelatory consciousness’’(Janaway 1998). By appealing to the revelatory nature of aesthetic will-lessness or ‘‘tran-quility’’ in Janaway’s terms, Schopenhauer offers a Platonic rejoinder, that is, a rejoinderin cognitive terms, to Plato’s devaluation of the arts. Further, Janaway holds that the‘‘truly unifying notion in Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory is that of tranquil, will-lesscontemplation’’ (Janaway 1998: 58). Below, with respect to Schopenhauer’s theory of thesublime, I shall suggest that in addition to the ‘‘tranquility’’ experienced in all aestheticexperiences, there is a phenomenologically distinct pleasure of ‘‘exaltation’’ in Schopen-hauer’s aesthetics, a pleasure experienced in high degrees of sublime experience.

In addition to this subjective side of aesthetic experience, there is a second and related,objective side. In every case but for music, this objective side of aesthetic experience con-sists in the ‘‘intuitive apprehension of the Platonic Idea’’ (WWR I: 199). A discussion ofthe function of the Ideas in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics brings us to the heart of his tran-scendental-idealist metaphysics. As mentioned above, in Book II of The World as Will and

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Representation Schopenhauer identifies, via a rather complicated argument, the Kantianthing in itself with ‘‘will’’ (see Young, 1987; Janaway 1989, 1999; Atwell; Cartwright,2001; DeCian and Segala; Shapshay, 2008; Wicks chapters 5 & 6; Jacquette, for compet-ing interpretations). The will objectifies itself at particular grades and the ideas correspondto these grades of objectification. They are the essential features of phenomena ‘‘if knownthrough perception’’ (WWR I: 182). With respect to the ideas perceived in aestheticcontemplation of clouds, for instance, Schopenhauer writes:

When clouds move, the figures they form are not essential, but indifferent to them. But that aselastic vapour they are pressed together, driven off, spread out, and torn apart by the force ofthe wind, this is their nature, this is the essence of the forces that are objectified in them, this isthe Idea. (WWR I: 182)

Like concepts, the Ideas are universals; but unlike concepts, on Schopenhauer’s view, theIdeas are not derived from the operations of the mind to abstract the essential from phe-nomena. Rather, Ideas are directly perceived, but are only perceivable in aesthetic experi-ence, when one attends to the ‘‘what’’ of an object rather than to the relations thatobject may have, however proximately or remotely, to the willing, striving self. Thus,the Ideas are perceptible only when the intellect of a subject temporarily ceases to operatein the service of the will to life.

One of the thorniest areas in Schopenhauer scholarship has been the attempt to makesense of the ontological status of the Ideas (see Hamlyn, chapter 6 for a good statementof the problem). This endeavor is complicated by the fact that Schopenhauer can beinterpreted both as a metaphysical monist (the world of representation is ultimately noth-ing but will) and as a metaphysical dualist (there are two worlds: a world as representationand a world as will). At times, Schopenhauer writes as though the Ideas constitute a thirdontological level between will and representation. In virtue of the Ideas being the mostimmediate ‘‘objectification’’ of the will, Schopenhauer holds that the Ideas share some ofthe characteristics of the will – they are timeless and changeless. These are characteristicsof the will qua thing in itself, for Schopenhauer, because following Kant, he understandsspatiotemporal form to be exclusively subjective (though shared by all human beings andso not subjective to an individual), and thus as a property only of the world as representa-tion (Shapshay, 2011). Space and time are for Schopenhauer the principium individuationisand thus Kantian ‘‘things in themselves’’ properly collapse into unindividuated ‘‘thing initself’’: Lacking in spatiotemporal form, it lies ‘‘outside’’ of individuation altogether. Yet,insofar as the Ideas are objects of perception (by the artist and by the subject of aestheticexperience in general), this places them squarely in the world of representation.

Janaway, Young, and Atwell have attempted to make good sense of the Ideas in Scho-penhauer’s system. Janaway encourages us to interpret the Ideas as timeless, unchanging,natural kinds: ‘‘there are not only horses, but the species horse, not only pools andfountains but the repeatable molecular structure H2O’’ (Janaway, 1994: 62). This viewcorresponds well to Schopenhauer’s realism about Ideas as well as his characterization ofthem as ‘‘the definite species, or the original unchanging forms and properties of all natu-ral bodies’’ (WWR I: 169). But a problem with this interpretation is that Schopenhauercharacterizes the notion of a ‘‘species’’ as the ‘‘empirical correlative of the Idea,’’ in con-trast to the ‘‘Idea [which] is really eternal’’ (WWR II: 365).

Atwell and Young both interpret the Ideas as part of the world as representation. ForAtwell, the Ideas are phenomenal objects but which are not identical with ordinaryobjects of perception. Rather, they are objects composed of the essential features inempirical objects (Atwell, 1995: 146). The objects which fit this description are works of



art or the intuitive representations in the artist’s mind that may later be expressed as art.Young, by contrast, holds that Ideas are not ontologically distinct from ordinary percep-tual objects; they are rather these same objects perceived from the disinterested aestheticstandpoint: ‘‘the important thing to notice is that perceiving an Idea (water) is a matter ofperceiving an ordinary object (the brook) with one’s attention focused on the essential,and away from the inessential aspects’’ (Young, 1987: 93). Another key differencebetween Young and Atwell’s interpretations rests on the role of the artist in perceivingthe essential features of an object. For Atwell, the artist is necessary for perception of anIdea, whereas Young’s interpretation allows an ordinary person to perceive an Idea innature. I favor Young’s view insofar as Schopenhauer does believe that ordinary peoplemay perceive Ideas in nature (though this occurs somewhat rarely). Both of these inter-pretations have the advantage of putting the Ideas into the world of representation, whichis the only place they can consistently occupy in his system and where Schopenhauerclearly places them in the following passage:

[a Platonic Idea] is necessarily object, something known, a representation, and precisely, butonly, in this respect is it different from the thing-in-itself. It has laid aside merely the subordi-nate forms of the phenomenon, all of which we include under the principle of sufficient reason;or rather it has not yet entered into them. But it has retained the first and most universal form,namely that of the representation in general, that of being object for a subject (WWR I: 175).

So the Ideas are part of the world of representation, but the part that is perceived withless conative distortion. In sum, I believe we should gloss Schopenhauer’s Ideas as, basi-cally, the perceptions of phenomenal objects wherein only the essential features of theseobjects are present to mind. The perceptions of the essential features of phenomena aregreatly facilitated by the artist, but are available to the ordinary person as well. This read-ing deflates the Ideas metaphysically, and does not allow them to perform a bridgingfunction between the one (will) and the many (phenomena). But ultimately, it is notclear why this work would need to be done by the Ideas in his system rather than by theindividuating, schematizing functions of the intellect.

Schopenhauer utilizes his theory of Ideas in constructing a hierarchy of the fine arts.On the lower end of the hierarchy, he places the arts whose proper function is to bringto clearer perception the Ideas pertaining to natural materials and physical forces. Archi-tecture, brings to clearer perception the Ideas of ‘‘gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness …and light’’ as well as Ideas of the specific materials utilized, e.g. stone or wood (WWR I:214). The Ideas of artistic hydraulics or the ‘‘artistic arrangement of water’’ are ‘‘fluidity,formlessness, maximum mobility and transparency’’ (WWR I: 217); and those of land-scape architecture involve the plant world or ‘‘vegetable nature.’’1

The movement up the hierarchy to sculpture, painting and poetry (the latter of whichincludes also song and drama), tracks the increasing complexity and completeness of theobjectifications of the will – at particular grades – which are made perceptible by thoseart forms. For example, the Idea of humankind, is higher that than of a carrot, for Scho-penhauer, insofar as the material and vegetative aspects of the carrot are included in theIdea of human being, which additionally contains agency, knowledge and self-knowledge.The aforementioned arts (clustered around architecture) express the objectifications of thewill in mere material forms, forces, and in the plant world; sculpture treats the grace andbeauty of living beings; poetry is able to treat the Ideas in the whole of nature, but itsgreatest subject, according to Schopenhauer, is the Idea of the human being ‘‘in the con-nected series of his efforts and actions’’ along with his ‘‘accompanying thoughts and emo-tions’’ (WWR I: 244). At the summit of poetic art is tragedy, which treats the ‘‘terrible



side of life’’ and makes perceptible truths about the conflict of human beings amongthemselves. Schopenhauer sees the Ideas in tragedy as expressing the most ethically signif-icant self-knowledge. I will return to Schopenhauer’s theory of tragedy in what follows.

Standing apart from this hierarchy altogether is music, by which Schopenhauer meansespecially non-programmatic, Classical ⁄Romantic music without a text, or what has cometo be called ‘‘absolute music.’’ Such music has a much greater power on subjects and isexperienced as more significant than the other arts because, Schopenhauer holds, musicoffers a copy of the will qua thing in itself, whereas the other arts offer copies of theIdeas:

All possible efforts, stirrings, and manifestations of the will, all the events that occur within manhimself and are included by the reasoning faculty in the wide, negative concept of feeling, canbe expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mereform without the material, always only according to the in-itself, not to the phenomenon, as itwere the innermost soul of the phenomenon without the body (WWR I: 262).

For Schopenhauer, music expresses universal human emotions and strivings shorn of anyparticular context in the phenomenal world. Like first-personal volitional insight – thebasis on which Schopenhauer identifies the world in itself with ‘‘will’’ – absolute music isexperienced only in time, without the mediation of other forms of cognitive conditioningsuch as space and causality. It thus affords, for Schopenhauer, the closest access we canhave into the nature of the in itself of the world. And this itself is a source of the most‘‘profound pleasure’’ – a pleasure from seeing the ‘‘deepest recesses of our nature findexpression’’ (WWR I: 256).

To recap, there are two aspects to aesthetic experience on Schopenhauer’s account:First, the subjective side, the state of tranquil and will-less contemplation, and second, theobjective side, the perception of the Platonic Ideas. These are jointly necessary and suffi-cient components of all aesthetic experience, with one key exception: the experience ofmusic, which differs only in its objective side insofar as the listener does not perceive Ideasbut rather the will itself, albeit through the condition of time.

3. How is Aesthetic Experience Even Possible?

In addition to the longstanding critical problem of the ontological status of the Ideas,another major interpretive issue has been articulated and addressed by Hamlyn (1980:109–110), Neymeyr (1996) and Neill (2008), namely, how is aesthetic experience evenpossible on Schopenhauer’s metaphysical story? In brief, the problem is that Schopenhauerviews the intellect as springing originally from and operating as a servant to the will tolife. But in aesthetic experience the intellect breaks free from this servitude; how can itdo so within Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will? Further complicating this matter is thefact that Schopenhauer’s philosophy of nature advocates the view that nature does noth-ing in vain. If this is the case, then the freeing of the intellect it seems cannot result fromsome accident of nature or, to put anachronistically, from a ‘‘non-adaptive side conse-quence’’ or ‘‘spandrel’’ of evolution (Gould, 1997). Neill’s solution to the problem of thevery possibility of aesthetic experience on Schopenhauer’s system is to see the humanintellect in aesthetic contemplation as continuing to serve the needs of will – but will quathing in itself rather than an individual human being’s will to life. On this solution, aes-thetic contemplation serves the needs of the will qua thing in itself to know itself. ThisHegelian-style view of Schopenhauer’s notion of will as seeking to gain self-knowledge isshared by Atwell (1995: 31) and enjoys some textual support (Neill, 2008: 188–9; see



also, WWR I: 180, 184). Neymeyr has also argued for a similar solution but criticizes itinsofar as it renders the aesthetic autonomy of the human subject into something illusory.

Ultimately, I find this Hegelian-style solution to be at odds with the profoundly anti-Hegelian spirit of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Although some commentators (Wicks,2008; Cartwright, 2010) have come to believe that Schopenhauer’s transcendental ideal-ism bears important similarities to Hegelian metaphysics, others (Young, 1987, 2005;Shapshay, 2008, 2011) interpret Schopenhauer as one of the first neo-Kantians in anintellectual climate dominated by absolute idealism. When Schopenhauer is careful, herefrains from ascribing motives of any sort to the will qua thing in itself as this wouldamount to predicating a form of explanation deriving from the Principle of SufficientReason (PSR) – Schopenhauer’s equivalent for Kant’s categories of the understanding–tothe in-itself of the world, and this is something he repeatedly faults Kant for doing(WWR I, Appendix). Thus I favor the ‘‘spandrel’’ view of how aesthetic experience ispossible in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Further, I do not believe that the ‘‘nature doesnothing in vain’’ claim is inconsistent with the ‘‘spandrel’’ view. For it may be the casethat the human intellect evolved in complexity via natural selection because it helped topromote the aims of the organism and species, but it also just so happens that a complexbrain was now capable of having aesthetic experience, which may, in fact, not promotethe needs of the organism or species at all (perhaps quite the contrary). My view also hassome textual support insofar as Schopenhauer sees the genius as enjoying a ‘‘superfluity’’of intellect:

For genius to appear in an individual, it is as if a measure of the power of knowledge must havefallen to his lot far exceeding that required for the service of an individual will; and this super-fluity of knowledge having become free, now becomes the subject purified of will, the clearmirror of the inner nature of the world (WWR I: 186).

While I admit that there is textual evidence to support both interpretations, I believe my‘‘spandrel’’ interpretation is preferable since it has the virtue of not violating Schopen-hauer’s own fundamental injunction on applying modes of explanation of the PSR to thein-itself of the world. Schopenhauer holds that these modes of explanation are exclusivelyways in which human beings cognitively condition the world of experience; thus, inquir-ing into and ascribing motives to the thing in itself amounts to an application of theseconditions beyond the sphere in which they can have sense at all. Further, the spandrelinterpretation gives substance to the notion of the aesthetic autonomy of the subject,since it is the subject’s own intellect which breaks free from the servitude to the individ-ual will to live, though this autonomy comes about through a ‘‘by-product’’ of evolu-tion.

4. Schopenhauer’s Theory of the Sublime

How best to interpret Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime has recently been the objectof some scholarly debate. Vandenabeele understands Schopenhauer’s theory as close toBurke’s (Vandenabeele: 94–5). As described earlier, Janaway has argued for the view thatSchopenhauer was predominantly influenced by Plato in his theory of both the beautifuland the sublime (Janaway 1998). Young and Wicks suggest a Kantian influence (Young,1987: 100, 1992: 14–5; Wicks 2008: 105), but they do not offer a sustained analysis ofwhat precisely Schopenhauer adopted and where he departed from the Kantian account.I hold that Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime should be seen as a transformation of



rather than as a radical departure from Kant’s theory of the sublime (Shapshay, forthcom-ing). In what follows, I will briefly motivate my interpretation.

Schopenhauer introduces his discussion of the sublime as ‘‘only a special modification’’(WWR I: 209) of the subjective side of aesthetic experience. In the case of the feeling ofthe beautiful, say, in the visual experience of a cherry blossom, the flower as it wereinvites one to aesthetic contemplation (WWR I: 201) insofar as it is an object which liesbetween those which are hostile and those which are ‘‘agreeable’’ to the will. On eitherpole (hostility or attraction to the individual’s will) the will-less contemplation of theobject is more difficult to achieve because a person may be moved either to flee from theobject or to use it to gratify one’s bodily desires. The objects of aesthetic contemplationin the feeling of the sublime, e.g. a storm at sea or the starry heavens at night, lie at theantipathetic end of the spectrum: they bear a

hostile relation to the human will in general, as manifested in its objectivity, the human body.They may be opposed to it; they may threaten it by their might that eliminates all resistance, ortheir immeasurable greatness may reduce it to nought (WWR I: 201).

In broad strokes, sublime pleasure, on Schopenhauer’s account, results when a person isable to achieve calm, contemplation of an object despite the fact that it is an object thatappears threatening to the person’s bodily or psychological well-being. Sublime experi-ence results when a person first acknowledges the vastness or the fearsomeness of theobject, but nonetheless disregards the threat posed to him or herself and instead contemplatesthe Ideas in it despite the potential or actual threat (WWR I: 201).

Thus far, it might sound as though the pleasure arising in the experience of the sub-lime coincides with that of the beautiful – tranquility in will-less contemplation – andthat the main difference in the experience lies in the etiology of this contemplation. Infact, there are two major phenomenological differences between the beautiful and thesublime on Schopenhauer’s account: First, the beautiful is characterized by a loss of self-consciousness whereas the sublime is characterized by two moments of self-consciousness; sec-ond, while the beautiful is wholly pleasurable, the sublime is mixed with pain.

In the self-consciousness that remains in the experience of the beautiful, the fact thatone’s perception is no longer in the service of the individual’s will is not itself present tomind. By contrast, in his description of the experience of the sublime, Schopenhaueralludes to a second-order consciousness of having been liberated from the will and itscares; this second-order consciousness is accompanied by the feeling of ‘‘exaltation’’[Erhebung] above the will [uber den Willen]:

… with the sublime, that state of pure knowing is obtained first of all by a conscious [bewußtes]and violent tearing away from the relations of the same object to the will which are recognizedas unfavourable, by a free exaltation, accompanied by consciousness, beyond the will and theknowledge related to it. This exaltation must not only be won with consciousness, but also bemaintained, and it is therefore accompanied by a constant recollection of the will, yet not of asingle individual willing, such as fear or desire, but of human willing in general, in so far as it isexpressed universally through its objectivity, the human body (WWR I: 202).

There are three distinct moments elaborated in this description of sublime experience,two of which involve self-consciousness. First, the subject is conscious that she isviolently tearing herself away from the threatening relationship of the object to herindividual will. Second, after having achieved this liberation, she enjoys the will-less con-templation involved in experiences of the beautiful. However, in order for the experienceto remain one of the sublime rather than transferring over into that of the beautiful, the



subject must additionally be conscious of being exalted above the pressures of the individ-ual will, i.e. she must remain conscious that she has overcome the promptings of the indi-vidual will. By contrast to other commentators, I interpret this feeling of exaltation asphenomenologically distinct from that of tranquility in the beautiful and as involving apronounced echo of Kant’s notion that one gains a felt recognition of one’s moral auton-omy in sublime experience, though Schopenhauer’s understanding of autonomy is moreakin to the power of stoic detachment than Kant’s rational self-legislation. Finally, theconsciousness of having been liberated needs to be maintained by a continuous ‘‘recollec-tion of the will’’ (Shapshay, forthcoming).

A general difficulty for Schopenhauer’s aesthetics arises with respect to this lastmoment, namely, that this state of exaltation must be maintained by a ‘‘continual recol-lection’’ of the will. If it is recollection of the individual’s own will, then this would betantamount to anxiety and would destroy the will-lessness necessary for having aestheticexperience at all. So the question then arises, how there can be a constant recollection ofthe will that does not overturn truly aesthetic experience of the sublime by replacing itwith actual fear?

Schopenhauer resolves this problem by making a distinction between the recollectionof the individual will and the recollection of human willing in general [das menschlicheWollen uberhaupt]. In order to persist in sublime experience the subject must not switchover to an experience of the beautiful by losing self-consciousness of one’s liberation fromthe will. Additionally, in order to persist in sublime experience one must not becomepersonally anxious or afraid, for personal emotions are anti-aesthetic. To pull off this bal-ancing act, the subject needs to be continually reminded that the object experienced assublime is a threatening kind of object to humankind in general. Perceptually understand-ing the Ideas in phenomena such as raging storms serves to keep that thought present tomind. So long as the subject attends only to the relationship between these Ideas andhumankind rather than to herself personally, and she manages to persist in contemplationof those Ideas while feeling self-consciously elevated over her individual will, she willremain in an experience of the sublime (for a clear analysis of this solution see Neill,forthcoming).

This general move enables Schopenhauer to resolve a similar problem with respect tohis theory of music: How is it that a subject may experience emotion without lapsinginto a non-aesthetic state? The answer Schopenhauer adverts to here as well is that theemotions felt are not personal emotions, that is, emotions in relation to a person’s ownwilling; rather, the subject feels universal human emotions in a manner divorced from aperson’s ordinary motivational systems.

5. Schopenhauer’s Solution to the Problem of Tragedy

For reasons of space, I must confine myself to just one further issue in Schopenhauer’saesthetics and philosophy of art: What is Schopenhauer’s ‘‘solution’’ to the traditionalproblem of tragedy, namely, the puzzle of why people who do not enjoy scenes of terri-ble suffering in real life enjoy them in tragic drama? Tanner notes that Schopenhauerdoes not address this traditional problem of tragedy (Tanner: 40; cited in Neill, 2003).Indeed, in volume I of WWR, Schopenhauer does not directly address the question ofwhence the pleasure in tragedy, though he does so in WWR volume II (433ff.). Defend-ing Schopenhauer on this apparent oversight, Neill has argued that Schopenhauer did notrespond to the Humean formulation of the problem because he did not hold the hedonictheory of motivation and value which drives Hume’s formulation of the problem.



Further, Neill argues that Schopenhauer offers a novel solution to the problem of tragedyin that he implicitly denies that we take any peculiar pleasure at all in tragedy (beyond thetranquility of will-lessness common to all aesthetic experiences on the theory). Instead,Schopenhauer usefully separates the question of the pleasure of tragedy from its value, andthus does a service to aesthetic theorizing about tragedy because there is something ratherinappropriate in any case about characterizing the appeal and value of tragedy as consist-ing in pleasure.

Neill’s account importantly highlights a distinctive feature of Schopenhauer’s solution:it places much of the value of tragedy in the insights it affords, rather than the pleasure itbrings. But I believe that this interpretation is incomplete, for, as Schopenhauer sees itthere really is a distinctive kind of pleasure in tragedy: namely, sublime exaltation: ‘‘[o]urpleasure [unser Gefallen] in the tragedy belongs not to the feeling of the beautiful, but tothat of the sublime; it is, in fact, the highest degree of this feeling’’ (WWR II: 433).While Schopenhauer does separate the question of the pleasure of tragedy from its value,he also gives an account of tragic pleasure by way of his theory of the sublime. Further,the sublime pleasure of tragedy combines with its cognitive value to yield the highestvalue of tragedy which is ethical: Insofar as the subject recognizes the important Ideas intragedy in a manner combined with sublime exaltation, this allows the subject to face the‘‘terrible side of life’’ with a sense of one’s power to do something in response to suffer-ing. For Schopenhauer, the effect of an experience of tragic drama ought morally speak-ing to be resignation from the world. Denial of the will to life embodies the highestethical stance one may take toward the world, for Schopenhauer, though one might takethe ingredients of Schopenhauer’s solution to the problem of tragedy, and draw a morelife-affirming conclusion, as did Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy.

6. Conclusion

As I have endeavored to show with respect to Schopenhauer’s theory of Ideas, some ofthe most metaphysically worrisome parts of Schopenhauer’s philosophy may be glossed inways which allow for wider acceptability of his views. Further, many of the key elementsof his theory: the notion of aesthetic experience as disinterested; the cognitive significanceof aesthetic experiences; the view of the sublime as a phenomenologically complex oscil-lation between pain and pleasure; and the notion that anything at all may be experiencedaesthetically are still widely shared (though by no means uncontested) notions in contem-porary aesthetics (see for instance Carlson: 38–47). Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory is alsoquite distinctive in the tradition of Western philosophical aesthetics in its attempt tohighlight the hedonic and cognitive importance of aesthetic experiences; in its sensitivityto the aesthetic experience both of nature and art; in the high value placed on the experi-ence of music (a higher value afforded by any previous aesthetic theory); and in the inno-vative solution to the problem of tragedy it offers.

Short Biography

Sandra Shapshay is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University Blooming-ton. Her research focuses on 18th–19th century German philosophy, especially the aes-thetic theories of Kant and Schopenhauer. She has authored papers in these areas for theEuropean Journal of Philosophy, Kantian Review, and Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie.Currently she is working on an article to be co-authored with Alex Neill on aestheticand moral freedom in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. She is also pursuing several projects in



contemporary aesthetics on a theory of the ‘‘environmental sublime’’ and on a Schopen-hauerian solution to the problem of tragedy. She has received several grants from theDeutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), has held a fellowship from the Poyn-ter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions, and was awarded a LaneCooper Dissertation Fellowship from Columbia University, where she earned her PhD inPhilosophy.

Notes

* Correspondence: Department of Philosophy, Indiana University Bloomington, 1033 East, 3rd St., Bloomington,IN 47405, USA. Email: [email protected].

1 As an aside, the range of fine arts with which Schopenhauer deals is quite remarkable, and he evinces a sensitiveappreciation for nearly all of the fine arts of his day, except for dance. Had he lived longer, one can surmise that hewould have grappled seriously with the purpose and nature of photography and film.

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Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art