Schopenhauer Cocktail Hour Part I
Three Artists Tackle the Gloomy Philosopher of Art
The following podcast transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. To listen to the episode on Versecraft, click here!
Elijah: Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to a very special episode of Versecraft. I’m here in Evanston, Illinois, with my good friend Cameron Clark...
Cameron: Hello, Versecraft people!
Elijah: Cameron is on Substack at Minor Tiresias, and he is also the Poetry Editor at Literary Matters, and a co-host of the SLEERICKETS podcast with mutual friend Matthew Buckley Smith. I’m also here with Ethan McGuire…
Ethan: Hello!
Elijah: And Ethan is here from The Flummoxed Substack, and is also an editor over at New Verse Review and Tar River Review. Both are also very good poets as well. A very good gathering to talk about, of all things, a philosopher, not a poet. We’re here to talk about Arthur Schopenhauer, who is an old philosophical flame of mine, one of the most formative philosophers on my way of thinking, though I probably have a little bit more of an ambivalent view of him now than I once did, which I talked about on the Versecraft AMA. But Schopenhauer is relevant not only because both my friends Ethan and Cameron are very into Nietzsche, who was a very passionate student of Schopenhauer– who later rebelled against his teacher, his sort of Freudian father figure– but Schopenhauer was also probably the single most influential philosopher on the development of the arts in the 19th century. His views on music especially were absolutely seminal. He is probably considered the greatest philosopher of music to exist, and is certainly the most influential philosopher of music. He also had very interesting views on the other arts: poetry, architecture, the pictorial arts, et cetera And we are here to talk about some of that today.
We all read a selection of his essays from Volume 2 of The World as Will and Representation. Sort of like Walt Whitman with Leaves of Grass or Baudelaire with The Flowers of Evil, Schopenhauer put nearly all of his efforts into one massive book, The World as Will and Representation, wherein he maps out his metaphysics, his ethics, his aesthetics, his entire vision of the world. We are looking at some essays from Volume 2, which is largely composed of appendices to what he outlines in his main argument. The essays in question are: “Isolated Remarks on Natural Beauty,” “On the Inner Nature of Art,” “On the Aesthetics of Architecture,” “Isolated Remarks on the Aesthetics of the Plastic and Pictorial Arts,” “On the Aesthetics of Poetry,” “On History,” and “On the Metaphysics of Music.”
Before we get into that, I’ll give a little bit of background on Schopenhauer. He was a philosopher following in the wake of Kant, whom I’ve talked a little bit about on the show before. One of the most famous legacies of Kant is that he made a distinction between phenomena– what we can see, hear, feel and touch, everything that we can sense is around us and consider “the world,”-- and noumena, which is what actually exists independent of our sense perceptions. Kant notoriously said that we could know the phenomena of our world, but we could never truly know the noumena, because our mental apparatus was only equipped to process sensory information and digest it and analyze it in a particular way, which does not allow us to penetrate to the inner depths of the world.
We often use the phrase rose-tinted glasses, right? You can think of the rose-tinted glasses we are wearing as our consciousness, our mental apparatus. We’re always viewing the world through that mental apparatus. We’re always distorting it to fit or to render through our very limited mortal machinery. And so we can never get a full, objective glimpse of reality in itself. Of course, what follows from this is that we will never be able to get an authoritative grasp on metaphysics. So Kant says we should essentially give up the quest for ontology, for metaphysics, for what actually exists, and focus more on what we can know and how we can know it, which is the domain of epistemology. So he creates an epistemological turn in philosophy which proved both extremely influential and extremely disturbing to the people that followed him.
Many of the philosophers who followed him were coming in on a Romantic wave in the history of ideas, and wanted to challenge Kant. They wanted to try to find some way of piercing through the veil of perception to reach the noumenal world, and Schopenhauer was one of these philosophers who was responding to Kant. He builds his philosophical system on top of Kant, and also on top of Plato. In many ways, you could say that Schopenhauer is a Platonist. He identifies the “phenomena” of Kant very closely with the material world of Plato, and Kant’s “noumena,” the world in itself, with Plato’s world of forms. There is indeed a parallel duality between Plato and Kant in their metaphysics here. Schopenhauer adopts a similar duality, but he makes a duality between the world as “Will”-- which is the world-in-itself, Kant’s noumena– and the world as “Representation.” What he means by this is that the world-in-itself is pure desire. This is his way of enabling us to get in touch with the world-in-itself. Just as Descartes says, “I think, therefore I am,” Schopenhauer says, “If we look within ourselves, consciousness is the one thing we can be sure exists in the world, and at the base of our consciousness is desire, the will to live. That will to live is the most essential thing we can possibly know about reality, even if we doubt everything about our senses, and so that will to live which consciousness exposes us to is our window into a fundamental quality of the universe. Moreover, everything that we see is a representation that the will makes to itself.” He’s following in the Pantheist footsteps not only of Plato’s descendant Plotinus, but also his reading in Eastern religion and philosophy, in what he called “Brahmanism”--Hinduism– and Buddhism.
That’s another major legacy of Schopenhauer– he maps Buddhism onto Kantianism. He merges the two. In Buddhism, there is a distinction between maya, which is the world of illusion that we can identify with Kant’s phenomena or Schopenhauer’s world of representation, and Nirvana, awareness of the true nature of things, which Schopenhauer would identify with the will. Similar to the Buddha, Schopenhauer believed that desire, which for him was at the root of all things, causes suffering, and that the more we can alienate ourselves from this Will, the better off we will be.
However, this is where his famous Pessimism comes in– for him, the Will is essential to the very nature of the cosmos. Unlike the Buddha, he does not believe the Will can ever be entirely escaped. It is something that we are made of and that we are hitched to, and so the best that we can do is try to attain some sort of temporary solace from the will. His pessimism comes in both because he believes that the Will is ultimately inescapable and causes us suffering, that life consists largely of suffering, and also that we should be world-denying. The more we deny the world, the more we deny desire, the more serene we can be and the less attached to Will, suffering, et cetera.
Art comes in because Schopenhauer believes that art is one of the greatest ways that we can reveal the Ideal to ourselves, and thereby extricate ourselves from the material world to focus solely on the contemplation of ideas separated from ourselves. We normally live our lives enmeshed in the world, enmeshed in the world of desire. But with art, we can experience the world vicariously and understand it separately from ourselves. Schopenhauer believed that music, because music is non representational, is an auditory perception of pure form. Music is the highest of the arts because we have gone beyond all representation and are able to contemplate the Will in itself: the general drama of desire and lack of fulfillment, the move towards fulfillment, achievement of fulfillment, and falling back into desire. We can observe that spiritual process in and of itself in music. Schopenhauer was, unsurprisingly, extremely influential on musicians and composers– Wagner was a disciple of his, and wrote much of his music in response to Schopenhauer’s ideas. As I said before, Nietzsche was quite a disciple of Schopenhauer before he moved on to his own rebellious philosophy. It’s essential to know some Schopenhauer if you’re going to understand the trajectory of the 19th century, especially when considering early Modernism with the Symbolists, of whom we will say more later, and subsequently into 20th century Modernism and the world that we have today.
So, let’s begin with Schopenhauer’s “Isolated Remarks on Natural Beauty.” This is a very short essay. It’s basically Schopenhauer talking about why and how it is that we view things like beautiful landscapes, sunsets, the ocean. I know one of the short passages that struck all of us was where he says,
