For those who read Standpoint back-to-front, the keenest general regret of the last year has been the near-total closedown of the arts in Britain – concert halls silent, theatres shut, galleries empty. Life without culture (and restaurants) has seemed bleak indeed. The present tentative return towards normality reminds us that art, like religious observance, makes its full impact through physical presence alone. This sense of deprivation invites the question: what is the point of the arts? Why do some of us devote the greater part of our free time to pursuing them? Art lovers may not value all the arts equally and may not respond to some of them at all, but they sense that, whether they are looking at a picture, attending a play or listening to a symphony, they are essentially engaged in a common activity.
To discover why they bother, we should turn to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Of all the great philosophers, no one analysed the arts – and the reason why human beings need them – with greater insight. He devoted one of the four Books of his principal work to consideration of the topic. It has long been a cliché that when we immerse ourselves in cultural pursuits, we seem to leave the ordinary world behind; Schopenhauer agrees, but he did not invent this unremarkable thought. Of greater interest is to examine the philosophical scaffolding which supports his writing on the arts, and the intellectual journey which he undertook in order to arrive at his conclusions.
The starting-point is the philosophy of transcendental idealism promulgated by Schopenhauer’s predecessor Immanuel Kant. He in turn had been awakened from what he called his “dogmatic slumbers” by reading David Hume, the great adornment of the Scottish Enlightenment. The question Hume provoked was this: how is it that we develop an intellectual understanding of a world that we can only perceive through our senses? Does this understanding arise merely from our sensory experience – empirically? If we see one billiard ball move when another strikes it, do we infer the phenomenon of cause and effect simply from what we see? Kant thought that this could not be right. He reasoned that if humans had recourse only to the evidence of their senses, the world would be incomprehensible – an undifferentiated amalgam of stimuli rushing in upon a mind unequipped, by experience itself, to impose any order on them. Yet the world which we see has order. Kant therefore deduced that there are certain a priori faculties of the intellect which enable it to make sense of the world, among which he identified time, space and causality. These concepts are hard-wired into consciousness, anterior to experience. They are the means by which humans make sense of experience. Indeed they are the conditions for the possibility of experience itself.
It follows that the world as it truly is is not a world of which time, space and causality are part, for these are merely the frame which humans impose to make sense of it. But what then are the conditions of the world as it truly is? Kant drew a distinction between the phenomenal world, as it appears to us, and the noumenal world, which lies behind a veil. An object may appear to exist in space or time, but the object which we perceive is not the object as it truly is. Kant referred to the latter as “the thing in itself”, and by definition, he argued, we can know nothing about it.
Schopenhauer admired Kant (although he often vigorously disagreed with him) and adopted much of the older philosopher’s analysis as a point of departure. The work which contains the fullest exposition of his philosophy is The World as Will and Representation, first published in 1818 though subsequently revised, and enlarged in a companion volume (1844) which is longer than the main text. Despite its forbidding title (not the most opaque in Schopenhauer’s works), its four Books are stylish, brilliant, and, unlike most philosophy, accessible to the non-professional. Full of insights, apt similes and caustic witticisms (often directed at rivals such as Fichte and Hegel), it exhibits a wide span of learning; it is the first work of western philosophy to draw on the scriptures of eastern religions. It addresses questions of epistemology (what do we know and how do we know?), ontology (what is there?), aesthetics and ethics. Schopenhauer is notable too for his influence on many subsequent writers and thinkers – Wagner and Nietzsche to start with but also (outside the German tradition) Melville, Conrad, Proust, Hardy, and the pioneers of quantum physics among others.
The scheme of the work depends upon the “single thought” that the world has two aspects. We can understand it only by considering it both as representation and as will. Schopenhauer uses the term “representation” consistently with Kant. It stands for anything of which the mind is conscious in experience, knowledge or cognition. Humans are subjects who experience objects as ordered, necessarily, by space and time and by the relations of cause and effect. In Book I, Schopenhauer stresses that the subject who perceives and the object that is perceived are opposite sides of the same coin. Neither could exist without the other. The subject has the elusive point of view on the world that we all, as perceiving individuals, experience. As subjects, we are not in the world but on the edge of it; we are beings in whose consciousness objects are present – but without the presence of subjects, there would be no objects (and vice versa). Indian philosophy had long recognised that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms. The world as representation, says Schopenhauer, arises only on the opening of the first observing eye; it did not exist beforehand.
He thus portrays time, space and matter as ontological mirages. Every representation exists only by virtue of its connection to some other representation. This accords with the relational theory of quantum physics discussed in Carlo Rovelli’s most recent book Helgoland. It is also the ancient view that we find in Heraclitus (“everything flows”) and in Plato’s account of objects as eternally becoming but never being. In Hindu terms, Schopenhauer writes, “it is Māyā, the veil of deception that covers the eyes of mortals and let them see a world that cannot be described as either being or not being: for it is like a dream; like sunlight reflected on sand that a distant traveller mistakes for water; or like a discarded rope that the traveller thinks is a snake.” Pindar wrote that man is the dream of a shadow; Prospero expressed the same thought more famously. Schopenhauer quotes both.
To the subject, even his own body is a representation. If I consider my own foot, it appears no different (philosophically and perceptually at least) from anyone else’s. However, at this point Schopenhauer, unlike previous philosophers, identifies the body as a means by which to enter a world beyond representation – thus taking a path which Kant had supposed to be barred from enquiry. For my body is not merely an object in the world like others; it is capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and these feelings are unmediatedly, authentically known to me, with no possibility of error. I cannot suppose myself to be in discomfort when I am not. The sensation of pain, for example, ineluctably moves my body away from it. This is something different from our cognition of representations, about which we can be and often are mistaken. Whatever this other entity is, being distinct from representation it is necessarily outside space and time, although its effects manifest themselves in space and time as the constructs by which we interpret the world.
Schopenhauer originally headed Book II with a quotation from Goethe’s Faust, in which the hero resolves to discover the innermost essence of the world. For it is not enough to know that we have representations. We want to know whether the world is simply an insubstantial dream or whether these representations signify anything more. If so, what could that be? Whatever it is, it must be wholly different from representation. Schopenhauer, who was not short on self-confidence, thought that he alone had the key to the mystery. Anticipating Kafka, he described philosophers before him as being “like someone who walks around a castle, looking in vain for an entrance and occasionally sketching the façade.”
If the enquirer himself were nothing more than “a pure subject of cognition (a winged cherub’s head without a body)”, the answer to this question would be unknowable. But the body provides the vital clue, for our consciousness of our own bodies is not merely as representations, but in terms which are “unriddled”. Since the body recoils from pain, it must be that the body seen from within possesses motives, and the explanation of those motives is will. This will does not cause the body to move; the body’s movement is a manifestation of the will: “an action of the body is nothing but an objectified act of will”. Indeed, Schopenhauer argues that I cannot imagine my will without my body; they are essentially one, and he called this a “philosophical truth par excellence”.
Having proved to his own satisfaction that the body stands before us simultaneously as representation and will, Schopenhauer proceeds to argue that the whole world of objects can be understood in the same way. What I experience as true of my body, other people experience as true of theirs. This applies not merely to other humans, but also animals, plants and – why not? – even inanimate, inorganic substances and forces. Each is driven by the will, which moreover (not being something which we perceive within the envelope of space and time) is itself outside them. Thus, he concludes, the inner essence of all representations is will. Kant was defeatist and wrong to suppose that the “thing in itself” behind appearances was unknowable: it is the will. Moreover, the thing in itself is a single will that moves everything in the world. The fact that we see individuated objects and people around us is merely a feature of our contingent world of appearances, through the multiplying effects of time, space and matter (which is the combination of the other two). The will itself is not an object, since an object is merely the correlative of a subject, but each appearance is an “objectivation” of the will. Our carefully built houses, and the snail’s naturally constructed shell, are both objectivations of the same will.
Schopenhauer explains the multiplicity of perceived objects in the world by referring to “different levels” of the objectivation of the will. This is an awkward section of his analysis, made more so by his unexpected recruitment of Plato’s Ideas – the archetypes which stand behind the shadow images that humans perceive – as corresponding to the different levels of the will’s objectivation. The lowest level is seen in the universal forces of nature, such as gravity; then comes vegetable and animal life; human beings are at the highest level. All strivings and forces in nature are manifestations of the will: electrical poles strive to unite; plants consume inanimate substances; animals eat plants or each other, and so on. As cognitive beings, we observe these processes in terms of appearances, but (unlike objects in the world of representations), the will exists unalterably, and would do so whether we perceived it or not. Indeed the will is groundless; it can have no purpose or aim.
Schopenhauer may already have raised eyebrows in proposing a philosophical system which treats the whole of the observed world as simply aspects of a single postulate. (One cannot call it a force, since all forces are themselves derived from the will; nor does the will cause things to happen, since causality is part of the way in which we see the world, not part of the world as it truly is). However, he points out that his philosophy of will is not so distant from the teaching of Christian fathers like St Augustine who saw the striving of animals, trees, stones and waves as emanations of the single force of love; and that the duality of the world which he proposes (will and representation) also echoes the Chinese, who from ancient times preached the complementarity of yin and yang. Although he would deny this, the power of his vision is perhaps to be understood more in poetic, than in strictly philosophical terms.
The will’s striving is inherently blind but, as manifested in the world of appearances, there is an inescapable conflict between different levels of the objectivation of the will. Schopenhauer quotes Bacon: “a serpent can become a dragon only by devouring a serpent”. There is no victory without struggle and, in a typical bravura passage, Schopenhauer shows off his deep, proto-Darwinian understanding of natural science by painting a picture of conflict in the animal kingdom – a struggle over space, time and matter. “All crowd round, greedy to emerge and tear matter away from the others so that they can each reveal their own Idea”. Wasps lay their eggs in the bodies of other insects’ larvae; the first thing the hatching brood does is to destroy the larvae as they emerge. The young hydra grows out of the old one like a branch, but while the two are still connected they fight for prey, even to the point of tearing it out of one another’s mouths. The Australian bulldog ant provides an extreme case (Schopenhauer relates with barely concealed glee): when cut in half, the tail and the head begin to fight; the head attacks the tail with its teeth and the tail defends itself by stinging the head.
Blind will thus operates at ever higher levels of objectivation, through fundamental forces, inorganic matter and plants, until animals with cognition – and finally humans – emerge. At just this point, Schopenhauer explains with a breath-taking coup de main, the world as representation steps forth in one fell swoop; the will has lit a light for itself, and the multifarious world as we see it comes into existence. Through our cognition we become subjects, and the world of individuated objects comes into existence. The magic lantern projects many images, but there remains a single flame – the will.
Since the will operates outside the sphere of causation and has no goal or boundary, it follows that the strivings of all its appearances can never be satisfied. In the concluding sections of Book II, Schopenhauer unfurls the pessimistic vision for which he remains famous. “Eternal becoming, endless flux belong to the revelation of the essence of the will.” Our desires always delude us into believing that their fulfilment is the final goal of willing, but as soon as they are attained they are forgotten, grow antiquated and are laid aside as vanished delusions. We are lucky enough when there is still something left to desire and strive after, to carry on the game of constantly passing from desire to satisfaction and thence to new desire, a game whose rapid course is called happiness and slow course is suffering, so that the game might not come to an end, showing itself to be a fearful, life-destroying boredom, a wearied longing without a definite object, a deadening languor.
Having taken us down into the depths, and incidentally provided a prescient description of lockdown, Schopenhauer in Book III adopts a more positive tone, circling back to the world as representation. It is here that, viewed through the prism of Plato’s Ideas, he turns his attention to the arts and what they mean for us. The Ideas are not subject to multiplication or change and cannot themselves fall within our cognitive sphere. Though not representations, they are individuated in representations; they themselves are different levels (“steps in a ladder”) of the objectivation of the will. Schopenhauer argues that Kant’s thing in itself and Plato’s Idea – “two great, obscure paradoxes of the two greatest philosophers of the West” – are connected. Both exist outside space and time, and are to be distinguished from all appearances. For Schopenhauer, the archetypal Idea (manifested in matter) is the metaphysical link between the representations that we perceive and the will which we do not. “Time is merely the scattered and dismembered perspective that an individual being has of the Ideas that are outside time and therefore eternal”.
In the ordinary case, our cognition is a reflection of the objectivation of the will and is therefore in the service of the will. What, however, if cognition were able to free itself from that service? In that case, the mind would become what Schopenhauer calls “the pure, will-less subject of cognition” and could contemplate the object presented to it aside from its inter-connections with any other object. It is important to emphasise that this elevated state has nothing to do with reason and abstract thought; it is concerned purely with the impact of sensory perceptions on the mind. Reason deals in concepts, and for Schopenhauer concepts are the antithesis of Ideas. Moreover, art never thrives by reference to concepts, which are artistically barren. Thus, for example, an allegorical painting may be excellent, but it is not the allegory (a concept) which makes it so; it is fine despite the allegory, which is irrelevant to its status as art.
While contemplation of nature is also capable of creating the same feelings, as it were accidentally, the role of the genius in art is to create works whose purpose and effect are entirely to communicate the Ideas. If we imagine becoming engrossed – letting the whole of our consciousness be filled with peace – in contemplation of a landscape (real or painted), if we lose ourselves in the object completely, we forget our individuality and exist only as a pure subject. Moreover, we cease to see the object as a separate thing in time and space, but rather as the Idea, the eternal form. Instead of being caught up with the contingencies of the world of representations, we become free of pain and servitude. The subject becomes united with the object; and each is the will. As the Upanishad says: “I am all these creations taken together, and there is no other being beside me”; and Schopenhauer here (as elsewhere) quotes the profound Sanskrit verse: “Tat tvam asi” – “Thou art that”. In this state, a sunset confers as much joy whether viewed from a palace or a prison. Schopenhauer takes the case of 17th-century Dutch art, which is apparently insignificant in its subject-matter, but excites a quiet, distinctive emotion because it holds fast the constantly changing world in enduring images of individual objects that nevertheless represent the whole. (Similar too is the meaning of Eliot’s line: “You are the music, while the music lasts”.)
For Schopenhauer, the arts are to be distinguished from mathematics and science, which are concerned with the connections and relations of the world of representations. Art exists independent of all relations; it “repeats the eternal Ideas grasped through pure contemplation”. Whereas science pursues the restless movement of time, space and causality, art is always at its goal because it wrests the object of its contemplation out from the current of worldly affairs; it stops the flow of time. Borrowing an image from Goethe, Schopenhauer describes the scientific world-view as the countless, violently moving drops of the waterfall, whereas art is the rainbow which rests peacefully on the top of the raging tumult.
Some flavour of the clarity and power of Schopenhauer’s writing is conveyed by his summary of the existence from which redemptive artistic contemplation emerges. “All willing springs from need, and thus from lack, and thus from suffering. Fulfilment brings this to an end, but for every wish that is fulfilled, at least ten remain denied. Moreover desire lasts a long time and demands go on for ever; fulfilment is brief and sparsely meted out. Even the final satisfaction itself is only illusory: the fulfilled wish quickly gives way to a new one. The former is known to be a mistake, the latter is not yet acknowledged as one. No achieved object of willing gives lasting satisfaction; rather it is only ever like the alms thrown to a beggar that spares his life today so that his agony can be prolonged until tomorrow. So the subject of willing remains on the revolving wheel of Ixion, keeps drawing water from the sieve of the Danaïds, is the eternally yearning Tantalus. But when something lifts us out of the endless stream of willing and tears cognition away from its slavery to the will, for that moment we are freed from the terrible pressure of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing, the wheel of Ixion stands still.”
Many have not embraced Schopenhauer’s pessimistic Weltanschauung. A careful shave with Occam’s razor would moreover show that his deployment of Plato’s Ideas is not only suspect but ultimately superfluous. Indeed in the case of music (to which he accords a special metaphysical status), they are dispensed with altogether, for music is to be understood as a direct copy of the will itself. Even so, Schopenhauer’s explanation of what the arts do for us and why is convincing. They can induce a state of ecstasy – a word which etymologically confirms his account: we stand outside ourselves, whether we are immersed in a drama or admiring a sculpture. The experience of art, unrelated to the concerns which accompany our daily lives, seems truly to offer us a different order of existence. No more sustained account of why this is so has ever been offered by a philosopher. Yet even this is not the true goal of The World as Will and Representation, for in the final Book IV (which deserves an essay to itself) he moves beyond aesthetics to a deeply serious ethic of renunciation and compassion which is at the heart of his influence on subsequent writers and thinkers. So if, as may happen again, we are forced to spend time drawing on our own resources and separated from physical participation in the arts, we can at least, by reading Schopenhauer, understand why it is that we feel the lack of what we have so badly missed.