Schopenhauer's Methodology in Aesthetics
Schopenhauer’s Methodology in Aesthetics
Schopenhauer departs from the Kantian explanation of the phenomenon of beauty. Although he agrees that his aesthetic experience of the beautiful is the subjective creation rather than the property of the object, he sees the Kantian approach too indirect as the consequence of his main philosophical method, transcendental argument.
Applied to the phenomenon of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant starts with 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, “thoughts 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”, “knowledge of perception” or “feeling”. 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 process of abstraction. Unfortunately, something is inevitably lost in the translation. Thus, Schopenhauer concludes, Kant’s starting point—the aesthetic judgment—is already at once removed from the true aesthetic experience. And since this removal 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.
Aesthetic Experience
Aesthetic experience comes in two main varieties for Schopenhauer, the beautiful and the sublime, and can be had through the perception of both nature and art. 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 genius. There are two jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for any properly aesthetic experience, one subjectiveand and one objective.
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 reason for why it is. 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 perception of the world. In order for the subject to attain such perception, his 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 the 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 the 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 to 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.
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 tranquillity. The experience of aesthetic tranquillity 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 the 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).
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, in 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 the aesthetic experience of nature and art (WWR I, 182).
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 particularising forms of the PSR (most notably, space, time and causality); they are rather universals.
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.
