Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860)

-Arthur Schopenhauer has been dubbed the artist’s philosopher on account of the
inspiration his aesthetics has provided to artists of all stripes.
-He is also known as the philosopher of pessimism, as he articulated a worldview that
challenges the value of existence.
-He is also known as the first German philosopher to incorporate Eastern thought into
his writings.
-He is among the first 19th century philosophers to contend that at its core, the universe is not
a rational place.

About Schopenhauer’s Life

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788 in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland)
to a prosperous merchant, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, and his much younger wife,
Johanna. From an early age, Arthur wanted to pursue the life of a scholar. Rather than
force him into his own career, Heinrich offered a proposition to Arthur: He could either
accompany his parents on a tour of Europe, after which time he would apprentice with a
merchant, or he could attend a gymnasium in preparation for attending university.
Arthur chose the former option, and his witnessing firsthand on this trip the profound
suffering of the poor helped shape his pessimistic philosophical worldview. Arthur
matriculated to the University of Göttingen in 1809, where he enrolled in the study of
medicine. In his third semester at Göttingen, Arthur decided to dedicate himself to the
study of philosophy, for in his words: “Life is an unpleasant business… I have resolved to
spend mine reflecting on it.” Schopenhauer studied philosophy under the tutelage of
Gottlieb Ernst Schultz, whose major work was a critical commentary of Kant’s system of
transcendental idealism. Schultz insisted that Schopenhauer begin his study of
philosophy by reading the works of Immanuel Kant and Plato, the two thinkers who
became the most influential philosophers in the development of his own mature
thought. Inspired by Plato and Kant, both of whom regarded the world as being more
amenable to reason, Schopenhauer developed their philosophies into an instinct-recognizing
and ultimately ascetic outlook, emphasizing that in the face of a world filled with endless
strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires for the sake of achieving a more tranquil
frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence. During his time in Dresden,
Schopenhauer dedicated himself to completing his philosophical system, a system that
combined Kant’s transcendental idealism with Schopenhauer’s original insight that the
will is the thing-in-itself. He published his major work that expounded this system, The
World as Will and Representation, in December of 1818 (with a publication date of 1819).
To Schopenhauer’s chagrin, the book made no impression on the public. The following
decade was perhaps Schopenhauer’s darkest and least productive. Not only did he suffer
from the lack of recognition that his groundbreaking philosophy received, but he also
suffered from a variety illness. In 1831, Schopenhauer fled Berlin because of a cholera
epidemic (an epidemic that later took the life of Hegel) and settled in Frankfurt am
Main, where he remained for the rest of his life. In Frankfurt, he again became
productive, publishing a number of works that expounded various points in his
philosophical system. He published On the Will in Nature in 1836, which explained how
new developments in the physical sciences served as confirmation of his theory of the
will. In 1839, he received public recognition for the first time, a prize awarded by the
Norwegian Academy, on his essay, On the Freedom of the Human Will. In 1851,
Schopenhauer published a lengthy and lively set of philosophical reflections
entitled Parerga and Paralipomena (appendices and omissions, from the Greek), and within
a couple of years, he began to receive the philosophical recognition for which he had long
hoped. The recognition was stimulated by a favorable review of his philosophy published in
1853 without signature in the influential Westminster Review, which at the time was under
the editorial guidance of George Eliot. A year after the third edition of The World as Will
and Representation appeared with further revisions in 1859, Schopenhauer died peacefully
on September 21, 1860, in his apartment in Frankfurt at Schöne Aussicht 16. He was 72.
After his death, Julius Frauenstädt (1813–1879) published new editions of most of
Schopenhauer’s works, with the first complete edition (six volumes) appearing in 1873. In
the 20th century, the editorial work on Schopenhauer’s manuscripts was carried forth in
authoritative depth by Arthur Hübscher (1897–1985).

(Arthur Schopenhauer deserves to be remembered today for the insights contained in his
great work: The world as will and representations which is one of his greatest contribution to
Philosophy.)

(Under this book is about Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and epistemology)

The World as Will and Representation

ii. The Ideas and Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics
Schopenhauer argues that space and time, which are the principles of individuation, are
foreign to the thing-in-itself, for they are the modes of our cognition. For us, the will
expresses itself in a variety of individuated beings, but the will in itself is an undivided
unity. It is the same force at work in our own willing, in the movements of animals, of
plants and of inorganic bodies.

Yet, if the world is composed of undifferentiated willing, why does this force manifest
itself in such a vast variety of ways? Schopenhauer’s reply is that the will is objectified in
a hierarchy of beings. At its lowest grade, we see the will objectified in natural forces,
and at its highest grade the will is objectified in the species of human being. The
phenomena of higher grades of the will are produced by conflicts occurring between
different phenomena of the lower grades of the will, and in the phenomenon of the
higher Idea, the lower grades are subsumed. For instance, the laws of chemistry and
gravity continue to operate in animals, although such lower grades cannot explain fully
their movements. Although Schopenhauer explains the grades of the will in terms of
development, he insists that the gradations did not develop over time, for such an
understanding would assume that time exists independently of our cognitive faculties.
Thus in all natural beings we see the will expressing itself in its various objectifications.
Schopenhauer identifies these objectifications with the Platonic Ideas for a number of
reasons. They are outside of space and time, related to individual beings as their
prototypes, and ontologically prior to the individual beings that correspond to them.

Although the laws of nature presuppose the Ideas, we cannot intuit the Ideas simply by
observing the activities of nature, and this is due to the relation of the will to our
representations. The will is the thing in itself, but our experience of the will, our
representations, are constituted by our form of cognition, the principle of sufficient
reason. The principle of sufficient reason produces the world of representation as a
nexus of spatio-temporal, causally related entities. Therefore, Schopenhauer’s
metaphysical system seems to preclude our having access to the Ideas as they are in
themselves, or in a way that transcends this spatio-temporal causally related framework.

However, Schopenhauer asserts that there is a kind of knowing that is free from the
principle of sufficient reason. To have knowledge that is not conditioned by our forms of
cognition would be an impossibility for Kant. Schopenhauer makes such knowledge
possible by distinguishing the conditions of knowing, namely, the principle of sufficient
reason, from the condition for objectivity in general. To be an object for a subject is a
condition of objects that is more basic than the principle of sufficient reason for
Schopenhauer. Since the principle of sufficient reason allows us to experience objects as
particulars existing in space and time with a causal relation to other things, to have an
experience of an object solely insofar as it presents itself to a subject, apart from the
principle of sufficient reason, is to experience an object that is neither spatio-temporal
nor in a causal relation to other objects. Such objects are the Ideas, and the kind of
cognition involved in perceiving them is aesthetic contemplation, for perception of the
Ideas is the experience of the beautiful.
Schopenhauer argues that the ability to transcend the everyday point of view and regard
objects of nature aesthetically is not available to most human beings. Rather, the ability
to regard nature aesthetically is the hallmark of the genius, and Schopenhauer describes
the content of art through an examination of genius. The genius, claims Schopenhauer,
is one who has been given by nature a superfluity of intellect over will. For
Schopenhauer, the intellect is designed to serve the will. Since in living organisms, the
will manifests itself as the drive for self-preservation, the intellect serves individual
organisms by regulating their relations with the external world in order to secure their
self-preservation. Because the intellect is designed to be entirely in service of the will, it
slumbers, to use Schopenhauer’s colorful metaphor, unless the will awakens it and sets
it in motion. Therefore, ordinary knowledge always concerns the relations, laid down by
the principle of sufficient reason, of objects in terms of the demands of the will.

Although the intellect exists only to serve the will, in certain humans the intellect
accorded by nature is so disproportionately large, it far exceeds the amount needed to
serve the will. In such individuals, the intellect can break free of the will and act
independently. A person with such an intellect is a genius (only men can have such a
capability according to Schopenhauer), and this will-free activity is aesthetic
contemplation or creation. The genius is thus distinguished by his ability to engage in
will-less contemplation of the Ideas for a sustained period of time, which allows him to
repeat what he has apprehended by creating a work of art. In producing a work of art,
the genius makes the beautiful accessible for the non-genius as well. Whereas non-
geniuses cannot intuit the Ideas in nature, they can intuit them in a work of art, for the
artist replicates nature in the artwork in such a manner that the viewer is capable of
viewing it disinterestedly, that is, freed from her own willing, as an Idea.

Schopenhauer states that aesthetic contemplation is characterized by objectivity. The

intellect in its normal functioning is in the service of the will. As such, our normal
perception is always tainted by our subjective strivings. The aesthetic point of view,
since it is freed from such strivings, is more objective than any other ways of regarding
an object. Art does not transport the viewer to an imaginary or even ideal realm. Rather
it affords the opportunity to view life without the distorting influence of his own will.

Schopenhauer’s Methodology in Aesthetics

As with his philosophy as a whole, Schopenhauer takes his point of departure in aesthetics
from Kant, praising him for deepening the subjective turn in philosophical aesthetics and
thereby putting it on the right path (WWR I, Appendix, 560–61. Note: page references to vol.
I refer to the Cambridge edition translation; references to vol. II to the Payne transl.). Like
Kant, he held that the phenomenon of beauty would only be illuminated through a careful
scrutiny of its effects on the subject, rather than by proceeding in the pre-Kantian objectivist
fashion, searching out the properties of objects—such as smoothness, delicacy and smallness
—which putatively give rise to the feeling of the beautiful. But the subjective turn is as far as
Kant’s aesthetic-methodological merit extends, according to Schopenhauer: it is too indirect,
due to Kant’s primary method in philosophy, the transcendental argument.
Applied to the phenomenon of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant starts
from an analysis of the judgments that the subject makes about the objects of experience,
e.g., “this rose is beautiful.” After offering an analysis of the logic of such aesthetic
judgments—that they are based on feeling, more particularly on a feeling of disinterested
pleasure, but that they also claim universal subjective validity—Kant then searches for the a
priori conditions for the possibility of making judgments that have this logical form.
By contrast, Schopenhauer does not believe that the aesthetician should start from the
aesthetic judgment, but rather from immediate aesthetic experience, before the subject
attempts to formulate judgments about that experience (WWR I, 530–531). The advocacy of
this focus, rather than Kant’s focus on judgments, has to do with the ways in which
Schopenhauer departs from Kant’s epistemology. Very briefly, the key issue has to do with
the status of non-conceptual knowledge. As Kant famously held, “[t]houghts without content
are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A50–51/B74–75). Schopenhauer adheres
to the first clause, but holds that there is indeed what today philosophers might call “non-
conceptual content,” and what he referred to variously as “intuitive cognition” [intuitive
Erkenntniß], “knowledge of perception” [anschauliche Erkenntniß] or “feeling” [das Gefühl].
This cognition allows us—and many non-human animals—to navigate and operate in the
world to a great extent without concepts. Furthermore, for Schopenhauer, this is the kind of
knowledge we gain, par excellence, through aesthetic experiences of nature and art; but this
knowledge is not or at least not-yet conceptual, though it is a knowledge of the “Platonic
Ideas” or essential features of the phenomenal world (
In order to preserve for ourselves or to communicate “intuitive knowledge” to others, we
may try to show it or say it. If one is an artist, one might show such knowledge by attempting
to embody it in a work of art. But for non-artists, trying to ‘say’ this knowledge means
attempting to capture it propositionally, and in so doing, for Schopenhauer,
we translate intuitive into conceptual knowledge by a process of abstraction. Unfortunately,
something is inevitably lost in the translation. Thus, Schopenhauer concludes, Kant’s starting
point—the aesthetic judgment—is already at one remove from true aesthetic experience. And
since this remove is not innocuous, insofar as the judgment does not faithfully transmit the
richness of the experience, the aesthetic judgment constitutes the wrong focus for aesthetic
theorizing.
Fundamentally, however, the gap between aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgments
yields an essential difficulty for aesthetic theories since these are necessarily formulated
propositionally, and therefore cannot entirely capture the richness of immediate, first-
personal aesthetic experience. To his credit, Schopenhauer is quite frank about the
methodological limits of aesthetic theorizing, especially in the case of music (WWR I,
section 52; see also Goehr 1998; and section 5.2.5 below). Nonetheless, he ventures forth to
offer just such a theory in the hopes that through it he may convince the reader of the
“importance and high value of art (which are seldom sufficiently recognized)” (WWR I, 294)
and to help the reader enter a psychological space where she herself can gain the deep
insights afforded by nature and the fine arts.
3. Aesthetic Experience
Aesthetic experience comes in two main varieties for Schopenhauer, the beautiful and the
sublime, and can be had through perception of both nature and art. Although 18 th century
aesthetics also included the “picturesque,” this drops out as a separate category in both Kant
and Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theories.
Nearly all human beings, he holds, are capable of aesthetic experience, otherwise they would
be “absolutely insensitive to beauty and sublimity—in fact these words would be
meaningless for them” (WWR I, 218). Notwithstanding this nearly universally shared
capacity for aesthetic experience, Schopenhauer remarks that it is enjoyed only occasionally
by the majority of people and is enjoyed in a very sustained manner and to a high degree
only by the genius. There are two jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for any properly
aesthetic experience, one subjective and one objective.

3.1 Subjective side

Ordinary cognition, according to Schopenhauer, is bound up with the individual’s will, that
is to say, with one’s generally egoistic strivings, and is subordinate to the four forms of the
“principle of sufficient reason” (PSR), the principle which holds that nothing is without a
reason for why it is (FR, §5). The PSR is Schopenhauer’s formulation of the ways in which
human beings cognitively condition the world of representation. It includes space, time and
causality, as well as psychological, logical and mathematical forms of explanation.
By contrast, aesthetic experience consists in the subject’s achieving will-less [willenlos]
perception of the world. In order for the subject to attain such perception, her intellect must
cease viewing things in the ordinary way—relationally and ultimately in relation to one’s
will—she must “stop considering the Where, When, Why and Wherefore of things but
simply and exclusively consider the What” (WWR I, 201). In other words, will-less
perception is perception of objects simply for the understanding of what they are essentially,
in and for themselves, and without regard to the actual or possible relationships those
phenomenal objects have to the striving self.
Schopenhauer characterizes the subject who has aesthetic experience as the “pure subject of
cognition.” It is “pure” in the sense that the subject’s intellect is not operating in the service
of the will to life during aesthetic experience, though this subject is still embodied—for
without embodiment, without the senses, a subject would not perceive at all (WWR I, 198).
Thus, while the pure subject of cognition is free temporarily from the service of the
individual will, it is nonetheless still identical with the embodied subject of willing. The
freedom of the intellect from the service to the individual will constitutes a sort of acting ‘out
of character’. Exactly how the intellect can cease to serve the individual will remains murky,
however. (More on this at 4.5; for a detailed account of role of freedom in Schopenhauer’s
aesthetic theory, see Neill and Shapshay 2012.)
Similar to the notion of disinterested pleasure in Kant, in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics the
subjective side of aesthetic experience involves the will-less pleasure of tranquility. The
experience of aesthetic tranquility stands in stark contrast with ordinary willing. All willing,
according to Schopenhauer, involves suffering, insofar as it originates from need and
deficiency. Satisfaction, when it is achieved affords a fleeting joy and yields fairly quickly to
painful boredom, which is tantamount to a deficiency, and which starts the entire process
anew. Given this grim account of willing, it is not surprising that Schopenhauer describes
aesthetic experience in truly rapturous terms as “the painless state that Epicurus prized as the
highest good and the state of the gods,” and as “the Sabbath of the penal servitude of
willing” when the “wheel of Ixion stands still” (WWR I, 220).

3.2 Objective side

The objective side of aesthetic experience is necessarily correlated and occurs
simultaneously with aesthetic will-lessness: It is the perception of what Schopenhauer terms
the “Platonic Ideas.” The will qua thing in itself, on Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, objectifies
itself at particular grades; the Ideas correspond to these grades of objectification. The Idea in
each particular thing is that which is enduring and essential in it (WWR I, 206) and can only
be intuited in aesthetic experience of nature and art (WWR I, 182).
The ontological status and the coherence of the Ideas within Schopenhauer’s metaphysics
has been a bone of contention for commentators (see Hamlyn 1980, Chapter 6; Young 1987,
2005; Atwell 1995). The problem is this: On Schopenhauer’s account there are only two
aspects of the world, first, the world as will (the thing in itself or “will”); and, second, the
world as representation. The Ideas, however, fit neatly into neither aspect. On the one hand,
the Ideas seem to belong to the world as will: In virtue of their being the “immediate and
therefore adequate objecthood of the thing in itself” (WWR I, 197) the Ideas are independent
of the cognitive conditions of time, space and causality (WWR I, 204). Yet, unlike the
will qua thing in itself, the Ideas may be directly perceived by a subject, and thus are more
akin to representations. In contrast to ordinary representations, however, the Ideas revealed
in the phenomenal object have not yet entered into the particularlizing forms of the PSR
(most notably, space, time and causality), they are rather universals.
A further difficulty for the tenability of the Ideas in Schopenhauer’s system is the fact that he
often refers to Ideas in the plural. For Schopenhauer, space and time are the principium
individuationis; but since the Ideas are independent of space and time, it is not clear how
they can be individuated at all. One option for understanding the place of the Ideas in his
system would be to see them as playing the role of an epistemic rather than metaphysical
bridge between the one will and the many phenomena. This helps to explain their
individuated status as follows: In a suggestive metaphor, Schopenhauer likens the Ideas to
“steps on the ladder of the objectivation of that one will, of the true thing in itself” (WWR I,
198); if one understands the “ladder”—the ensemble of Ideas—as part of the world as
representation, then each Idea—each “step” on the ladder—is a universal perceived in
various particular spatiotemporal objects. The Ideas then are the essential features of objects
or states of affairs that human beings may perceive when their attention is focussed squarely
on the ‘what’ rather than on the ‘why’ or ‘wherefore’ of phenomena. It should be noted,
however, that the Ideas are not abstracted by the subject as are concepts on Schopenhauer’s
view, but are, rather, perceived directly in them. In sum, the Ideas seem to make the most
sense within his system as “abstract objects”—objects that are not spatiotemporal, which do
not stand in causal relationship with anything, and which have not been abstracted like a
concept, but rather, are the real, objective, essential aspects of the world as representation as
perceived by a will-less subject (WWR I, 234, 236). The crucial role that they play in
Schopenhauer’s system is that they are the objects of all aesthetic experience—both of the
artist and spectator—and their perception constitutes insight into the essential nature of the
phenomenal world.