August 25, 2010 at 10:54 A.M. A single quotation mark was removed since my previous review. I have corrected that inserted "error." I cannot say how many other writings have been altered or damaged.
June 2, 2010 at 9:08 P.M. This title has been altered in my list at my blog so that it appears out of scale with all other titles. This alteration of this copyright protected page by hackers using NJ government computers cannot be repaired. I will do my best to cope with such harassments. I cannot say what further harm or alterations have been done to my writings today.
April 20, 2009 at 1:23 P.M. I have just corrected "errors" that do not appear in earlier versions of my essay "Nihilists in Disneyworld." Attacks on several essays have resulted in corrections of "errors" that had previously been corrected, numerous times. I will run scans throughout the day.
July 15, 2008 at 6:38 P.M. Please see "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "Bob Menendez Has Not Been Indicted -- Yet!"
Computer attacks this morning have made writing difficult. I will try again. This essay has been corrected in the same ways at least twenty times.
April 22, 2008 at 1:09 P.M. Once more with feeling.
June 25, 2008 at 10:24 A.M. More "errors" inserted and corrected. Please keep your eyes on this essay for alterations of the text. As I post this essay, italics and bold script are still not available. MSN (I am told) has "closed."
I. Introduction.
My subject is a single important essay by Arthur Schopenhauer entitled, "The Metaphysics of Fine Art" in T. Baily Saunders, trans. & ed., "Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer" (New York: A.L. Burt, 1901), at page 279. I shall refer to key sections in the volumes of "The World as Will and Representation," also to Bryan Magee's biography and exposition of Schopenhauer's system only in passing, that is, in order to clarify the arguments set forth in this specific essay, which is about the right length for an Internet commentary. My reading of Rudiger Safranski's scholarly and elegant "Schopenhauer and The Wild Years of Philosophy" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) came too late to improve this essay. Schopenhauer states the fundamental issue in the philosophy of art in these terms:
"How is it possible to take pleasure in something [art] that does not come into any relation with the will?" (p. 279.)
In more contemporary language, this is a way of asking why we derive pleasure from or find meaning in art, although art may have nothing to do with our material or selfish interests? Why is a Rembrandt self-portrait worth millions even if we get nothing "practical" out of it? Why is it appropriate to pay a great actor large sums of money, aside from economic considerations, for what he or she is able to give us? Yes, there are non-economic reasons for a society to value great art. Why is art so valuable, and not just economically, even though art may have nothing to do with our specific daily projects and concerns? The art object does not really "do" anything nor does it have any impact (for most of us) on our ways of earning a living so as to get the material things that we want in life, and yet art matters a great deal to most of us. There is a mystery in the realization that beautiful things are desired in our lives for themselves, despite their lack of material utility. At best, art is purely existential. Art simply "is."
Schopenhauer's answer to this question is that aesthetic pleasure is only possible because there is no relation with the will and its concerns in the contemplation or experience of art, that is, in "the aesthetic experience." We experience art -- unless we are professionally concerned with art -- in a manner that is disengaged from the world. Think of going to a movie and being lost in the story on screen for two hours or disappearing into a great novel. Schopenhauer says:
" ... by the beautiful we mean the essential and original forms of animate and inanimate nature -- in Platonic language, the Ideas; and they can be apprehended only by their essential correlate, a knowing subject free from will; in other words, a pure intelligence without purpose or ends in view. Hence in the act of aesthetic perception the will has absolutely no place in consciousness. But it is the will alone which is the fount of all our sorrows and sufferings, and if it thus vanishes from consciousness, the whole possibility of suffering is taken away." (p. 280.)
What does Schopenhauer mean by this? To answer this question will require some appreciation of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, which builds on Immanuel Kant's Critical philosophy and aesthetics, on Kant's celebrated separation of the sublime from the beautiful, along with the Platonism which inspired it. Today there are also objections of a political or Marxist sort to be examined concerning this highly aristocratic conception of aesthetic delight. I will first offer some biographical information; then I will discuss Kantian metaphysics and epistemology in a very brief way; next I summarize Kantian aesthetics as the foundations for Schopenhauer's view of art; I conclude with some applications of Schopenhauer's ideas to a single aesthetic experience in my life.
Before turning to my discussion of Shopenhauer's essay, it is necessary to deal with the charges brought against him by contemporary feminists and others who have placed Shopenhauer's writings on a list of works deemed "inappropriate" in our enlightened age. My daughter recently came home from her high school history class excoriating Christopher Columbus for "genocide." Despite the nice statue in "Columbus" circle, it seems that admiration for this European explorer -- something that I was taught in school -- is a sign of immorality, until it is pointed out that immorality is only relative, of course. The "School of Resentment" (a term coined by Harold Bloom) regards the European arrival in what became the Americas or the "New World," as a great and unmitigated evil -- except that there is no such thing as evil, naturally, unless we are referring to the actions of White European Males (WEM).
Whatever else she is learning in school, my daughter is absorbing and reacting to this "ideology of resentment." These judgments are taught as historical truths, apparently, placed beyond dispute, by the very people who define themselves as epistemological skeptics and ethical relativists concerning the existence of any truth at all. I continue to find this puzzling. This is the sort ideology of "political correctness" that I find not just puzzling, in fact, but also less than appealing. Not because it is wrong, necessarily, but because it is one-sided and simplistic, excluding alternative perspectives. It suggests the opposite of an intelligent and qualified historian's perspective on the actions of a complex historical figure, one who lived in the fifteenth century, and who is unlikely to be found sharing the values of chi-chi New Yorkers of the twenty-first century. Burning magazines in school because they contain "sexist or exploitative" images of women, for example, is not the best way to teach students the meaning of the First Amendment.
The difficult historical question avoided by a trendy dismissiveness of all "White European Males" is whether this "European Whiteness" makes Columbus a "bad person," whatever this may mean, and (if so) on what basis this judgment is made today, usually by self-professed ethical relativists and so-called opponents of RACISM. Shopenhauer's views of women are worse than unacceptable by our standards today. They are idiotic and offensive at any time. This is not another example of knee-jerk political correctness, but the only possible conclusion of an opponent of militant political correctness. The charges against Schopenhauer are admitted, in other words, but they are deemed irrelevant to what is most interesting about his work for us.
Charged with sexism, Schopenhauer "demurs" -- like New Jersey Chief Justice Stuart Rabner -- and responds that he rejects the values underlying the charge as inappropriate to his century and irrelevant to his understanding of life. I concur in part, even as I dissent in part. Naturally, since Schopenhauer is dead, we will have to "demur" on his behalf.
It may be that what most concerns us about a historical figure -- such as Columbus -- is not whether his values and attitudes to the peoples of the new world that he found in the course of his adventures are "enlightened" by contemporary standards, but whether he played a significant role in altering the historical course of several civilizations. Schopenhauer is worthy of study for his influence on subsequent thinkers, this is entirely apart from the merits of his system. To expect the past to satisfy our standards of value is to ensure disappointment, for it is to fail to see the past at all. First, understand the men and women who lived in a different time and their concerns; second, make your judgments; finally, assess those judgments in historical and cultural terms.
Will posterity conclude that our so-called "political correctness" is also short-sighted and naive? I am sure of it. For the historian, there is the immense condescension of posterity to worry about. Historians should be wary of fashionable conclusions about the past or reductivist views of great historical figures at any time. They should be wary about trendy political opinions. In fact, historians more than most of us should be hesitant about claiming to have understood the past.
Much like Nietzsche -- who was profoundly influenced by Shopenhauer -- Arthur Schopenhauer is an unapologetic misogynist and elitist. I disagree with and reject many of his political opinions and everything that he wrote about women. Please bear this point in mind so that I will not find it necessary to respond to charges of misogyny merely for studying Schopenhauer's writings and learning from them. As ridiculous as such accusations may be, they are increasingly common in our politically charged academic and intellectual environment.
I do not wish to absolve Schopenhauer of post-mortem responsibility for those hateful "sexist" views; nor does the admiration that I feel for some of his writings -- an admiration that is shared by many distinguished scholars and artists, some of whom happen to be women and feminists -- excuse those discredited views. Schopenhauer's idiocy on the subject of women (and I will provide a sample below) does not diminish the validity of his insights concerning knowledge and art, ontology and metaphysics. Schopenhauer may be the foremost Kantian in German idealist philosophy and also a perceptive critic of Kant.
For a brilliant and trenchant criticism as well as exposition of Kant's system by Schopenhauer, see Volume I, "The World as Will and Representation," pp. 415-501. (E.F.J. Payne, trans.) For a comparison that would have horrified Schopenhauer, see Hegel's "Absolute Spirit: Art, Revealed Religion, Philosophy," (1817, 1827, 1830) in Peter C. Hodgson, ed., "G.W.F. Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit" (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp. 137-155; then G.W. F. Hegel, "The Idea of Artistic Beauty or the Ideal" and "The Symbolic Art Form," in Henry Paolucci, trans. & ed., "Hegel on the Arts" (Celaware: Bagehot Council, 1979), pp. 1-23.
"Hence it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female character," Schopenhauer writes, "is that it has no sense of justice. This is mainly due to the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the powers of reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position which nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex." (Schopenhauer, supra, pp. 437-438.)
This is probably the nicest thing that Schopenhauer has to say about women and an impressive display of his own "sense of justice." The foregoing sentence is an example of irony. Schopenhauer's view of men is not much better. Schopenhauer is the great misanthrope and pessimist in the history of Western thought, mean-spirited, sometimes petty and dogmatic, but also one of the most intelligent critics and interpreters of Kant's system, as I say, a highly learned and superb writer, with a sharp mind and keen imagination, anticipating Freud and Nietzsche, influencing everyone from Thomas Hardy to Dylan Thomas and Thomas Mann. Schopenhauer's mastery of English philosophy, including Hume and Berkeley, as well as his admiration for British government and law are crucial in understanding this "Romantic pessimist."
One of Schopenhauer's biographers comments on the philosopher's practice of dining at the same pub every evening where he consumed an identical meal of steak, potatoes and beer. This was only after placing a gold coin next to his plate. Inevitably, Shopenhauer would pick up the gold coin and put it back in his pocket at the end of the meal. When he was asked why he did this, he explained that each day he hoped to hear a single interesting statement from one of the patrons of this establishment. If Schopenhauer ever did overhear a profound or clever remark, then he would leave the gold coin to commemorate the occasion. Despite his many years of daily anticipation, Schopenhauer always left the restaurant with his gold coin still in his pocket. Most people, according to Schopenhauer, "are blockheads."
What follows is what Schopenhauer would probably describe as one "blockhead's" comments on his work.
II. Biography.
Schopenhauer was born in Danzig on February 22, 1788. His father was a great merchant, who was sympathetic to the philosophies of liberty (for the affluent middle class, that is) of the Enlightenment. He was well-read, cultivated, concerned about his son's education. The family moved to Hamburg when Arthur -- who was named for the mythical English king -- was five years-old, after Danzig became part of Poland in 1793.
Schopenhauer's father committed suicide. This was not discussed in accordance with the hypocrisies and conventions of their prudish pre-Victorian society, and the family promptly liquidated his assets and left for foreign parts. Arthur lived and studied in France and also in England. He travelled widely on the European continent during his early years. He was affected by seeing the horrors of the Napoleonic wars, its victims and legacy of suffering. His mother was an eccentric, writing Romantic novels, creating a salon, meeting the likes of Goethe and other intellectuals of the era, creating a number of Hamlet-like issues for the bright young man and philosopher-to-be, who quickly figured out that business and law were not for him.
One commentator says that "though he soon abandoned the mercantile career into which his father had pushed him, it left its mark on Schopenhauer in a certain bluntness of manner, a realistic turn of mind, a knowledge of the world and of men." Like Byron, Schopenhauer and his "mom" had "issues," as they say in California. Professional jealousy may have played a part in their mutual antagonism. There was not enough room for two geniuses (or is it "geniusi"?) in one family. Schopenhauer made it very clear that he was the genius -- and he was right. Schopenhauer did make one lasting and important friendship through his mother, Goethe. During the final twenty-four years of her life, Schopenhauer did not speak to his mother. Neither of them seems to have regretted this state of affairs.
Schopenhauer's doctoral dissertation appeared in 1813, "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason." His quarrels with Hegel and lack of subtlety or diplomacy made a university career impossible. His view of women left him with no significant relationship, unmarried and without children. His masterpiece "The World as Will and Representation" (1844) was mostly ignored. Schopenhauer published the work at his own expense and had to buy back 99% of the copies. World fame and recognition arrived only at the end of his life, when Schopenhauer delighted in it. A volume of essays "Parerga und Paralipomina" ("byproducts and leavings" or "comments and omissions") was published in 1851.
Both Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche were influenced by Schopenhauer, spending many evenings during the years of their friendship discussing the "old man's" works. Schopenhauer was the first of the great philosophers to make substantial use of the Upanishads and Buddhist philosophy in his system. Schopenhauer died in 1860. He once pushed his housekeeper down the stairs of his building and had to pay damages to compensate for her injuries until she died, an occasion which Schopenhauer celebrated with Champagne. Schopenhauer was not a very nice man. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer's work is important -- particularly his aesthetics -- so that his writings (deservedly) continue to receive the respectful attention of scholars. Unlike most German philosophers, Schopenhauer is fun to read and his nastiness can make your day when you're in a foul mood:
"... optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind."
"The World as Will and Representation," trans., E.F.J. Payne, Bk. I, p. 326.
III. Aesthetics: Plato and Kant.
The philosophers who have made the greatest contributions to our understanding of art are Plato and Kant, although aesthetics as a distinct field of philosophical inquiry does not emerge until Baumgarten's work in the eighteenth century. Plato was hostile to art:
"This was because of his mistaken view that works of art are imitations of things and events in the phenomenal world, giving us their appearance without their function; and since the things themselves are mere transient images, works of art are doubly fraudulent in that they are images of images. The aim of every genuine seeker after truth, thought Plato, should be to pierce the veil of phenomena and enter the eternal abstract world [of the forms] beyond it; but the degenerate semblances of art, by their very attractiveness and charm, rivet our attention to the ephemera they represent."
Bryan Magee, "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer" (Oxford: OUP, 1983), p. 174. Compare "The World as Will and Representation," Book I, 530-31; and Book II, 406. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
For Plato, empirical objects in the world of human experience, including people, are mere shadows on the cave wall. They are semblances of the perfect forms perceived through intellectual effort alone. The task of the philosopher is -- to use the metaphor of the cave from "The Republic" -- to exit the cave and see the world in the light of the sun, to perceive the abstract forms freed from the dross of empirical reality. Art is a representation of our perceptions, which themselves are mere representations of perfect forms. Worse, these representations are doubly distracting to the thinker, tying the mind to this imperfect earth when it should be soaring. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")
Since what we know of art is only our mental representations of artistic representations, they prevent us from "seeing" ultimate reality. "Art is the shadow of a shadow," Plato says. It follows that poets and all artists must be banished from the ideal state, according to Plato, so that they will not obstruct our contemplative efforts. Schopenhauer pondered the necessity of doing the same to children, whom he detested with a W.C. Fields-like passion.
Totalitarians are not overly fond of artists, especially poets. Plato (despite his genius) displays a fondness for the kind of totalitarianism that would lead in the twentieth century to National Socialism and Stalinism. These criticisms that we owe, most recently to Karl Popper, have some merit. Yet Plato is a great thinker -- certainly one of the greatest in the history of our civilization -- and it should not be forgotten that the realm of the forms was a way of establishing the reality of the shared perfections or beauties encountered not only in aesthetic experiences, but also in mathematical equations found in the icy realm of abstractions to which the mind alone has access. Thus, mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose comments:
"I imagine that wherever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato's world of mathematical concepts. (Recall that, according to the Platonic viewpoint, mathematical ideas have existence of their own and inhabit an ideal Platonic world, which is accessible via the intellect only ...) When one sees a mathematical truth, one's consciousness breaks through into this world of ideas, and makes direct contact with it ('accessible via the intellect'). I have described this 'seeing' in relation to Godel's theorem, but it is the essence of mathematical understanding."
"The Emperor's New Mind" (Oxford: OUP, 1989), p. 428.
Among roughly contemporary Platonists may be listed George Santayana, Iris Murdoch, George Steiner (to some degree). Kant's focus is somewhat different. Professor Robert C. Solomon has spoken of the Kantian tendency to organize discussions in tripartite divisions. It is certainly true that Kant recognizes the unacceptable schism in his philosophy after the publication of the first two Critiques. Kant understood the need to unify noumenal and phenomenal aspects of reality by means of a third and more inclusive form of apprehension of reality that would complete the Critical philosophy.
Kant also sought to establish a faculty in the aesthetic arena to correspond with understanding in epistemology or practical reason in ethics. Hence, Kant's most important contention in "The Critique of Judgment" is that the faculty of judgment "mediates" between the other two faculties, understanding and practical reasoning. Judgment has both an objective and subjective aspect. This is an insight that is illuminating when we consider seemingly unrelated phenomena, such as adjudication and ethical reasoning, also the theology of belief in the Mystery that is God.
Judgment allows us to see the empirical world as conforming to practical reason and practical reason as adapted to our knowledge of the empirical world. This Kantian principle will have an impact on Hegel's thinking a generation later, also on the philosophies of Schiller and Schopenhauer. For a neglected comparison, see F.H. Bradley's "The General Nature of Judgment," in James W. Allard & Guy Stock, eds., "Writings on Logic and Metaphysics" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 20-21. ("I am talking of the meaning, not the series of symbols ...") The fundamental problem, for Kant, is that:
"According to the 'Antinomy of Taste,' aesthetic judgment seems to be in conflict with itself: it cannot be at the same time 'aesthetic' (an expression of subjective experience) and also a 'judgment' (claiming universal assent). And yet all rational beings, simply in virtue of their rationality, seem disposed to make these judgments. On the one hand, they feel pleasure in an object ... not based on any conceptualization of the object, or on any inquiry into cause, purpose, or constitution. On the other hand, they express their pleasure in the form of a judgment," speaking of beauty 'as if' it were an 'objective quality.' "
Roger Scruton, "Kant" (Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press, 2001), at p. 100.
The next big step in this choreography arrives with Gadamer's aesthetics in the twentieth century and the idea of a "fusion of horizons." The meeting of emotional and cognitive experience in the objectivity of judgment (construction) provides a model for quantum reasoning in terms of interlocking networks defined as elegance or beauty. The solution to the paradozes of quantum mechanics will arrive, I suspect, with a greater appreciation of the need to invert Heisenberg's famous "uncertainty principle" as a principle of contruction explaining not the alteration of an external and pristine natural order by the observer's presence, so much as the "constitution" of variable as well as protean fields in a most dynamic set of empirical realities involved in a dance or romance with consciousness.
The solution to the puzzle of art lies in Kant's "transcendental deduction in aesthetics." We must think of nature as being "purposive without purpose." We must regard aesthetic experience as having a "prescriptive" component. We must think of our pleasure as being made valid by its object. In this way, we demonstrate how aesthetic judgments are possible, that is, the condition for their possibility. Aesthetic judgments abstract from every material or instrumental interest of the observer, who regards art objects not as means to his or her ends but as ends in themselves, although not moral ends. This act of transcendence is conducted while one's energies are directed to the individual object, in a moment of "singular apprehension." It is this energy of transcendence which permits the observer "to play the part of a judge in matters of taste." See "Critique of Judgment," s. 205. See also, Terry Eagleton, "The Death of Desire: Arthur Schopenhauer," in "The Ideology of the Aesthetic" (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 153-172.
I am going to suggest a set of comparisons that may well alarm students and the usual bullies, who will have no idea of what I am saying. I have suggested that the unifying power of the aesthetic faculty may well receive a mathematical expression or scientific conceptual articulation in developing theoretical possibilities in quantum mechanics and spaces. Please read very carefully Stephen Hawking's "Inaugural Lecture at the Royal Society of Science" entitled: "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?" All of Roger Scruton's work is recommended.
"It seems, therefore, that even if we find a unified theory, we may be able to make only statistical predictions. [We must search for the most BEAUTIFUL probable instantiations in terms of multiple options.] We would also have to abandon the view that there is a unique universe that we observe. Instead, we would have to adopt a picture" -- a picture? -- "in which there was an ensemble of all possible universes with some probability distribution. ..." (We will have to "construct as we perceive," freely, in exactly the way that we approach a work of art or another person.)
Stephen Hawking, "Inaugural Lecture," in John Boslough, "Stephen Hawking's Universe" (New York: Avon Books, 1985), p. 134. Compare E.J. Lowe, "Abstract Entities," in "The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 210-228 with Bernard Haisch, "The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind it All" (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2006), pp. 127-149.
O.K., now let's get fancy. Daniel Greenberger said that Einstein insisted: "... if quantum mechanics were correct then the world would be crazy. Einstein was right -- the world is crazy." Amir D. Aczel, "Entaglement" (New York & London: Plume, 2003), pp. 203-234 ("Triple Entaglement"). As Einstein made this statement, Dali was painting his surrealist canvases and Cocteau was creating his films. Both men -- like Beethoven's symphonies and Turner's landscapes in the previous century -- were described as crazy. ("Beauty and the Beast.")
Einstein did not consider the possibility that there is something crazy or bizarre about the extraordinary beauty hidden in all that is ordinary. This beauty is seen only by strange persons who are curiously uninterested in going to the mall on Saturday afternoons. This next comment should be borne in mind when considering my description of a great painting later in this essay. As analyzed by C.D. Broad, "it" -- the antinomy of the "specious present" -- "leads (Mabott shows) to the paradox that the further the act of sensing takes, the shorter the specious present it can apprehend." Errol E. Harris, "The Reality of Time" (New York: SUNY, 1984), p. 84.
How long is "now"? When is "now"? Does duration of the "now" depend on what we are experiencing now? Do these ideas frighten you? We transcend ourselves in a directedness towards the beautiful, forgetting ourselves in the process. The similarity to my discussions of love is striking and not coincidental. (See "Martha Nussbaum on Iris Murdoch's Philosophy of Love.")
Piaget and other scholars (Robert Coles) have noted that the temporal sense of children is centered on the "now" of "play." This suggests that children inhabit, naturally, the temporal space of aesthetic experience or great scientific-mathematical insight, also of the mystical encounter with God. Artists always possess this child-like quality to reinvent reality and great recipients of art are blessed with the same gift. It is also this gift which allows thinkers in the sciences and philosophy to imagine and reason through what is impossible for others to think, or what is "not yet." All art and original philosophical as well as scientific thinking, mathematical genius, is an invitation to "play." ("A Review of the t.v. Show 'Alice.'")
Analogies to creativity in adjudication are available, if not applicable to some distressingly familiar jurisdictions -- like the Garden State -- then in an ideal sense. (See also "Is it rational to believe in God?") I recall an interview with Placido Domingo in which the Spanish tenor spoke of his hope that audiences may be brought to forget their worries and problems, being taken to another level of experience during a great Operatic performance. Mr. Domingo also spoke of his own experience -- in singing one role in particular -- of, literally, forgetting himself entirely and disappearing into the character. This is an example of the power of art. Now think of God. In Kant's words:
"But the necessity which is thought in an aesthetic judgment can only be called exemplary; i.e., a necessity of the assent of all to a judgment which is regarded as the example of a universal rule which we cannot state."
"Critique of Judgment," trans. J.H. Bernard, p. 96.
This Kantian insight led to what would be called the "aesthetic ecstasy" of German Romanticism or what Roger Scruton describes as "the attempt to embody what cannot be thought." Tantric sex explores these same emotions and experiences through erotic-aesthetic-spiritual encounters. Love-making is play. Kant moves from this transcendental deduction in aesthetics to distinguish the beautiful from the sublime in experience, by suggesting that art has the power to make us better, in a moral sense, by directing us to what is higher or more noble. The experience of art is not moral in itself. However, art can guide us to moral wisdom and experience, to achieve a kind of transcendence of our flawed particularity and to the embrace of "otherness."
Is God the "space" where beauty and sublimity meet? Is good entwined with evil in that space? (See "Is this atheism's moment?") Are we invited to share that space in order to be fully human? Let us call such an aesthetic/spiritual space, "love" which involves the choice of "being there," (humanity) "for the other" and constant rejection of evil:
"The beautiful is that which pleases in the mere judgment (and therefore not by the medium of sensation in accordance with a concept of the understanding). It follows at once from this that it must please apart from all interest."
As opposed to:
"The sublime [which] is what pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of sense."
"Critique of Judgment," trans. J.H. Bernard, p. 107 (emphasis added).
Roger Scruton comments upon and explains this distinction as follows:
"Sometimes when we sense the harmony between nature and our faculties, we are impressed by the purposiveness and intelligibility of everything that surrounds us. This is the sentiment of beauty. At other times, overcome by the infinite greatness of the world, we renounce the attempt to understand and control it. This is the sentiment of the sublime. In confronting the sublime, the mind 'is inclined to abandon sensibility.' ..." (Eros?)
"Kant," p. 109.
IV. Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.
Schopenhauer accepts the Kantian division of noumenal and phenomenal, recognizing the impossiblity of knowing the noumenal or Kantian "ding an sich." We see all material objects only from the outside, as appearances to us, except that we also are material bodies. It follows that each of us knows him- or herself not only from the outside, but also from the inside. From within, we know ourselves as "will," that is, as free agents acting in an uncaused manner in the world. This is true even if our behavior is explicable in terms of a chain of empirical causes. We recognize the drive or energy in us towards activity and motivation, a drive that is undetermined.
This energy or drive in all things -- anticipating Darwin and Freud -- Schopenhauer also calls "will." The will is the drive in each of us and all things to realize functions, aims and/or desires, which will always be frustrated to some degree, thus causing the inherent misery in the human condition. Happiness or fulfillment is negative: it is the release from this will:
"To be freed from oneself is what is meant by becoming a pure intelligence [mind]. It consists in forgetfulness of one's own aims and complete absorption in the object of contemplation; so that all we are conscious of is this one object. And since this is a state of mind unattainable by most men, they are, as a rule, unfitted for an objective attitude towards the world; and it is just this [objective attitude] that constitutes the artistic faculty." (p. 280.)
Genuine love-making is self-giving "for" the other -- a gift which is sanctified in every mystical tradition, including gnostic Christianity. This is true regardless of sexual-orientation. Hence, a universal theological basis is available for sanctifying same-sex love with the marriage rite in religious traditions all over the world. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "Is there a gay marriage right?") Only one new "error" is much less than I expected to find. Make that two new "errors" since the foregoing sentence was altered after my previous review of this work. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?")
In the task of achieving this freedom from the desiring ego, which is true freedom, art is very useful. Political analogies to communal enterprises -- like revolutions -- are obvious for those who believe, as I do, that the experience of transcendence is indeed within the grasp of every person, even of atheists (like Schopenhauer) or agnostics (like me). ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")
"But the [representative] nature of art is such that with it one case holds good for a thousand; for by a careful and detailed presentation of a single individual, person or thing, it aims at revealing the idea or genus to which that person or thing belongs." (Schopenhauer, p. 282.)
It is important to bear this point in mind later when considering my personal example of aesthetic experience or in considering my reviews of films. It may be useful to think also of F.H. Bradley's discussion of "concrete universals," derived from Bradley's absorption of Hegel's dialectics, combined with Hume's rigor and Berkeley's imaginative flights. Thomas Merton would point to a crucifix. So would Thomas Aquinas. Americans and Europeans today will think of their own great symbols, while persons in New Jersey will reflect on McDonald's "Golden Arches."
The contemplation of the art object brings us face-to-face with the Idea or "form" of the object, as opposed to the object itself, elevating us beyond the phenomenal level, where we spend most of our lives, desiring, getting and spending. Most art is representative in a direct sense. Hence, we remain fettered to the will and phenomena, but music -- for Schopenhauer -- is the highest art, since it is the least directly representative and most abstract. For Kant, on the other hand, music was the lowest form of art, since it appeals only to the senses. I tend to agree with Schopenhauer on this issue. So would our Jewish friends and Muslims, who point not to a representative art object, but towards the great symbolizing texts of the faiths in which they live. Compare George Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text," in "No Passion Spent" ((New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 304 with Reynold A. Nicholson, "The Mystics of Islam" (London: George Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1914).
"If the reader wishes a direct example of the advantage which intuitive knowledge -- the primary and fundamental kind -- has over abstract thought, as showing that art reveals to us more than we can gain from all the sciences, let him look at a ... human face, full of expressive emotion; and that too whether in nature itself or as presented to us by the mediation of art. How much deeper is the insight gained into the essential character of man, nay, into nature in general, by this sight than by all the words and abstract expressions which may be used to describe it. When a beautiful face beams with laughter, it is as though a fine landscape were suddenly illuminated by a ray of light darting from the clouds." (p. 283.)
We should not be surprised when the greatest artists ...
"... bring some quite ordinary person before us -- not even one that is anything beyond the common -- to delineate him [-- think of a Rembrandt self-portrait or Kate Winslet's portrait of "Ruth Barron" --] with the greatest accuracy, in the endeavor to show him to us in the most minute particularity. For it is only when they are put before us in this way that we can apprehend individual and particular facts of life ..." (Schopenhauer, p. 282.)
It is by seeing others truly, that we see ourselves best. We all share in the same substance underlying physical reality, the same will is in us as exists in objects and other persons. Hence, for Schopenhauer the true basis of ethics is not abstract duty, as with Kant, but compassion based on the recognition of shared identity. What physicists now tell us is the ultimate nature of reality based on research at the subatomic level, Schopenhauer knew from his philosophical speculations. Reality is one and it is shared by all of us. You are not like your neighbor, you are your neighbor. You are made of the same substance and share in the same fate. This comes as a shock to racists. This is gratifying. Those who prefer scientific to idealist philosophical terminology, may wish to substitute the word "energy" for "will" in Schopenhauer's system.
In the artistic encounter we experience a "transcendence" that allows us to detach ourselves from our obsessive mundane concerns in order to grasp this truth of "primal unity," at a visceral level. We both feel and know the truth of art. As recipients of art works, we share a cultural space with the artist and subject. Artist and recipient stand on common ground in the aesthetic moment, thus achieving a kind of spiritual community. May we say the same of love? I like to call this aesthetic/spiritual space the "Forest of Arden." (See my essay on Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" and "Why Philosophy is for Everybody.") Or just experience a good movie. Bryan Magee comments on Schopenhauer's linkage of ethics and aesthetics, Goodness and Beauty, by way of metaphysics:
"Empathy and compassion are made possible, he tells us, by the fact that each of us is, in his inmost nature, at one with the noumenal, and the noumenal is one and undifferentiable [will]; therefore all of us in our deepest nature are one with each other, are undifferentiable from each other. Thus, in my innermost recesses I am not merely similar to other human beings -- it is merely on the surface that similarity appears: at the very bottom, they and I are literally one and the same thing. ... The man who thus acts compassionately is behaving in accordance with the metaphysical realities of the human situation. Morality is practical metaphysics."
"The Philosophy of Schopenhauer," p. 199. (What is that "one and the same thing" of which we are all fragments?)
In Schopenhauer's words:
"Only as phenomena is the individual different from the other things of the world; as noumenon he is the will that appears in everything. [To the good person,] others are not mere masks whose inner nature is different from his. On the contrary, he shows by his way of acting that he recognizes his own inner being, namely the will-to-live as thing-in-itself, in the phenomenon of another [person,] given to him as mere representation. Thus he finds himself again in that phenomenon. ..."
"The World as Will and Representation," Book, I, 282, 370.
"Now" it is possible to apply these ideas to the interpretation of a great work of art.
V. Da Vinci's Mysterious Lady.
In December of 1988, I was in Paris and made the obligatory visit to the Louvre, which was a great joy. There is a limit to what one can see in a day. Selections must be made among masterpieces. I made certain to spend some time before what is probably the most famous painting in Western history: Leonardo Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa." I will not consult biographies or works of art history at this point, because my purpose in this essay is much more personal. I wish to illustrate Schopenhauer's theory by attempting to understand and describe my experience of that painting in light of his aesthetics. I offer a phenomenological-hermeneutic account of my experience of this canvas, which was not under glass when I saw it.
Although Mona Lisa is not a very large canvas and it is (or was) surrounded by a number of other great masterpieces, including two other paintings by Leonardo -- one of them, as I recall, being the astonishing "Madonna of the Rocks" -- the encounter with that mysterious figure is unforgettable for all of those who have stood before her. No reproduction comes close to doing justice to the painting.
I wonder if people in Paris take it for granted that the painting is there and simply ignore its presence? I believe that if I lived in that gorgeous city, I would be in the Louvre every day, looking at that painting. It is beyond words to reproduce such an intimate and personal encounter with a work of genius. I can only try to suggest some of the aspects of the painting that I would urge others to consider: 1) the gender ambiguity at the heart of this masterpiece; 2) the theme of doubleness which characterizes the work; and 3) Da Vinci's blending of erotic and thanatic elements, "moods" of love and death in the emotional tone conveyed, somehow, by the textures and colors. These are all themes that interest me. The only rival to an encounter with Mona Lisa is seeing a good performance of "Hamlet." (See "Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
I am sure that some idiot will complain at this point that I am not spelling Da Vinci's name correctly, after deleting a letter from my text. Actually, "Da Vinci" is an Americanized version of "da Vinci" preferred by many writers, including Dan Brown, who is the author responsible for "The Da Vinci Code." At any rate, I am not alone in detecting these "issues" in Leonardo's work, viewers of the painting, including Walter Pater and Henry James, have had similar experiences. In the spirit of Schopenhauer, I should note that of all the paintings that I have seen, Mona Lisa is the one whose effect is closest to music. Mona Lisa is almost a complete Puccini or Verdi Opera.
As one approaches the figure, one has the uncanny impression of a kind of splitting, or multi-dimensional quality in the painting. There is a recognizable portrait of a young woman, more beautiful than we have come to expect from the reproductions that we all know. Yet there is also, hauntingly, another and more masculine presence in the canvas, standing behind and, as it were, blending into the figure of the smiling woman. This second, masculine figure whose presence is "felt," is both more formidable and frightening, also infinitely, nearly intolerably sad and superhumanly intelligent.
It is as though the painter were looking at you, the viewer of his work from beyond the grave, and judging you for presuming to judge his genius, hinting both at your mortality and at the immortality of his canvas. Da Vinci manages to give a sense of his own soul as being somehow grafted on to that painting, of his ghostly presence as his true signature. Oscar Wilde's "Portrait of Dorian Gray" is a pretty obvious reference, except it is this canvas that does not age. Better is an association of Mona Lisa with Sebastian Melmoth, the name taken by Wilde in his final years of exile that was borrowed from Maturin's book. This painting turns up everywhere in Western culture.
The painting is, only on one level, a portrait of a young woman -- smiling at one of Leonardo's witticisms perhaps -- but also of the painter, whose sadness is almost unbearable, as his fearsome scrutiny of you, the viewer, alarms and disconcerts. It is the viewer of the painting who is being seen, even inspected. It is you, the viewer, who is placed "in" the frame. What is unclear is where the boundaries of this frame are found. It is doubtful whether there is a boundary between work of art and world, between masterpiece and admirer. ("Lost in Jane Austen.")
Is it possible to say the same of any written text, including this one, where we now meet? Perhaps it is more possible to suggest such a blending of subjects when it comes to persons we love. Where does she end so that I begin? This portrait offers a formidable hermeneutic challenge. ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "What you will.")
Leonardo is questioning the subject/object division in this painting. He is making a philosophical point about time and reality as well as death and meaning. Mona Lisa is also -- I don't know how else to say this -- a painting of his mortality and yours through the suggestion of the age and death that awaits both its ostensible subject and you, as against the eternal quality in the mountains and landscapes beyond the sitter and (most importantly) the eternal quality of this painting itself. This painting is Da Vinci's "Hamlet." Admirers of the dreadful "Da Vinci Code" are directed to Dimitri Merejkowski's out-of-print masterpiece, "Leonardo."
Is the sitter turning towards or away from the viewer? Do you turn towards or away from your life? Or your death? Is this the portrait of a person who is primarily masculine or feminine? Is this the portrait of a man or woman? Or is the subject both male and female? Do men and women "see" a different painting when they look at this work? Is the persona captured in pigments and charcoal on canvas recognizable? Is the presence even human? Is this a painting, a mirror, or a window into the mind of the artist? Is this painting of Mona Lisa the first work in the history of cinema? Is this painting a portrait of you? Why are we immediately tempted to compare the Renaissance portrait to Rembrandt's painting of Christ?
There are no answers to these questions, there is only the experience of something almost beyond the human realm, numinous, life-altering, enigmatic. The only analogy available to me is to the literature of mysticism, but also to the accounts of great scientists -- such as Newton -- of identification with the mystery and beauty of nature, most of all, to the sense of vertigo accompanying intense, burning romantic passion as epiphany. ("God is Texting Me!")
One thinks also of the union of male and female in hermetic (from "Hermes") or alchemical mysteries. There is no such discipline as "symbology," but there are "semiotics" and "hermeneutics." Both will be needed to grasp this elusive masterpiece. This may be a good time for New Jersey persons to insert another "error" or otherwise deface this essay.
Divinity transcends the realm of opposites in spiritual unity. Hence, the figure on the cross is the true original for Leonardo's "Vitruvian Man" (usually thought to be a self-portrait of Leonardo), who depicts himself as Christ-figure -- God and man, beyond masculine and feminine, at the center of the cosmic wheel. This is not artistic hubris. It is just the opposite. Naturally, Leonardo saw himself as Christ, as everyman. It is what Jung would call the "Mandala" that serves as true background for Leonardo's most famous drawing, just as the tree under which Buddha sits and the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden become one in the cross. (See Cambell, Zimmer and "'The Fountain': A Movie Review.")
I looked at my watch and realized that I had not moved -- being unaware of myself, as if unconscious -- for almost forty minutes. I was required to move on at that point. I have never fully recovered from that aesthetic experience. These moments had nothing to do with my material life or practical interests. I did not make any money during that time. Yet those forty minutes remain among the most significant aesthetic moments of my life. My experience of that painting helps me to understand what Shopenhauer means by "transcendence" and liberation from the will, along with the ways in which we are altered by art through sharing works with others -- others who have also enjoyed similar experiences, over many years and centuries.
In standing before that painting I was participating in a kind of relationship not only with the painter and his subject, but also with all of those observers moved by this work over centuries and standing where I stood then, where someone must be standing as I type these words. My knowledge or "living" (vivencia) of that masterpiece was an entry into a spiritual community. It is comparable to the experience of contemplating and understanding the meaning of a crucifix. Even a crucifix that is bad art delivers a powerful emotional punch -- at least it does to me.
My experience of Leonardo's painting was, therefore, aesthetic and metaphysical. The lessons learned may be described as ethical and theological. Think of reading the U.S. Constitution. The struggle with the principles in that work involves us, with others, in a community of interpreters participating over centuries in the common project of realizing the aims of OUR American Revolution: freedom and equality, making us subjects in common before the power of the State, the rule of law and not of kings. The U.S. Constitution is to politics, what the Mona Lisa is to painting. What is it that the U.S. Constitution "constitutes"? Who are you as an American? What does it mean for you to be an American? ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
For Schopenhauer, art allows us to develop our sense of compassion, leading to the only possible liberation from the ego and its sufferings in a directedness towards others. For this reason, art yields some of the most significant and prized lessons of life, together with the experience of community and pleasure in the freedom achieved through aesthetic transcendence. Incidentally, if you have not figured this out yet, please realize that -- apart from its political and jurisprudential significance -- the Constitution of the United States of America is a work of literary art.
Only two letters and one word in total deleted from and restored to this essay is excellent. I expected much worse.
VI. Conclusion.
Marxist critics have raised valid points concerning the aristocratic nature of this aesthetic theory. Not everyone will receive the education or opportunity to appreciate such works. This is a reminder of our social responsibility to make education available to more people, so that great art can be as widely appreciated as possible. It is certainly not an undermining of Schopenhauer's theory. Nor should we deprive everyone of a great experience merely because it cannot be enjoyed by all. As for changing society, if art changes individuals, then it will also change societies. I think that great art always transforms people. Part of what I bring with me -- as an ingredient in the cells of my flesh -- is my aesthetic, spiritual and intellectual life that I surrender to another only in loving that person. This is what is meant by conversation or dialectic as "marriage." Dialectic can mean many things.
There is also a link to be recognized between this theory of art and the philosophy of love, as an other-directed emotion, allowing for a transcendence of conditions that are experienced as violative or evil. It should be noted that some thinkers have seen art as just the opposite of Schopenhauer's theory -- in other words, as a kind of violent imposition of will leading, in the German tradition especially, to great horrors. (See the film "Harrison Bergeron" and George Steiner's "The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.")
I am still amazed to discover that -- as with intelligence -- beauty and those capable of creating beautiful things, are detested by a few horribly evil persons who desire to destroy works of beauty or original thought and those who create them. One way of destroying beauty and artists is by enslaving both. Garcia? Colin McGinn, "Ethics, Evil, and Fiction" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 74-81. ("Suppose I desire to cause you pain, so that I get pleasure when my desire is satisfied.")
What I like most about George Steiner's work is his recognition of powers for good and evil in language and ambiguity in all genius. Between the view of art as either a form of healing and transcendence, or an expression of Nietzschean "will to power," I am on the side of art's healing powers and capacity to endure. I believe that Schopenhauer is correct to see an association between aesthetic bliss and moral compassion or goodness, between aesthetic and moral beauty. The best authority to quote in support of this view, given the feminist criticisms against Schopenhauer, is Sapho: "What is beautiful is good and who is good will also soon be beautiful." ("Beauty and the Beast.")
