First published in 1818, Schopenhauer wrote his seminal The World as Will and Representation, a book that continues to impact me. To understand Schopenhauer, we need to understand one important aspect of the philosophy of Kant, whom Schopenhauer was responding to. Kant thought the world could be divided into two realms, the thing-in-itself (noumenon), and the thing-as-it-appears-to-us (phenomenon). We see the world only through the way our minds represent it to us. The way our minds represent the world to us is a world in space and time. Space and time are not 'out there'; they are forms our minds project onto the 'world-in-itself' in order for us to make sense of and organize our experience. Kant thought there was no way for our minds to pierce through the veil or curtain of phenomenon. The phenomenon is an insurmountable cliff on which we cannot climb and beyond which we cannot see. It is the sole mission of our minds to study and organize phenomenon and leave the noumenon to exist unexplored.
But Schopenhauer denies that the cliff is insurmountable. Agreeing with Kant, Schopenhauer believes that all science can clarify for us is the nature of phenomenon, not noumenon. For the noumenon lies behind, or over and above, the representation, the idea, that which is phenomenon. Dissenting from Kant, Schopenhauer ascribes a particular nature to the noumenon. Yes, it is the thing-in-itself, but it is also more: it is pure, unadulterated, relentless, unstoppable, yearning, desiring, 'willing'. It is 'The Will'. Thus, what science elucidates is our ideas about phenomenon; what lies beyond and behind the idea, our representations, is noumenon, pure willing. We get a brief glimpse of this reality, like a short-lived oasis, when we will bodily movement. But it is only a fleeting revelation.
What Schopenhauer says about the phenomenon rings true. No matter what, the world as we know it comes through the window of our perception, and through that window we become conscious of whatever is perceived. Through this perception, we 'represent' the world to ourselves. This is what Schopenhauer means when he says the world is my idea, or the world is my representation. But based on perception alone, we haven't climbed the cliff, for the cliff is nothing but appearance, not the deepest taproot of reality. We are like the wondering wayfarer who, wanting to enter the castle of reality, walks aimlessly around the moat surrounding the castle, knowing more and more about the outside, but unable to find the way in which the drawbridge can be let down to allow entrance into the inside. What lies behind the walls of the castle, beyond the cliff?
The first we can deduce about the noumenon is that it is without space, time, and causality, categories we impose on the nature of appearances, the world as my idea, the world explained by science. The world as Will is timeless, spaceless, uncaused. But we despair because the world as Will seems to be out of our reach, since what's in our reach seems to be restricted to what our perception can gather. Like I said earlier, this restriction is relieved momentarily when we contemplate our own individual willings. It's wonderful to think about. I look at my hand, and then I move my hand. How mysterious! Mystical! But, you might object, hasn't cognitive science shed light on this, demystified it by outlining all the neural conditions that give rise to movement? Schopenhauer would cry foul, for (remember) science only reveals the nature of the appearance, which isn't the true nature of reality. Thus, in moving my hand, I catch a glimpse of the movement as an appearance (since I perceive it) and as reality (since our wills our one with The Will).
To fully appreciate Schopenhauer's next point, I'd like to focus on a quote from C.S. Lewis:
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.
I equate the desire Lewis is talking about with the individual willings Schopenhauer is talking about. Schopenhauer's next point is that the pure, disinterested contemplation of art is the window through which we can momentarily escape our own willings and merge with The Will, ultimate reality. We lose ourselves in and through art, and through the beauty we see in nature, and through the sublime. We can lose ourselves and have our longings burning with delight through the vision of a mountain range or a crag, a waterfall, a landscape; in works of art, artists communicate through their artistic medium an emotion to an audience. To those who contemplate a work of art, they can attain to pure knowing, certainty, almost the Platonic Form of whatever the work of art is focused on. Art reveals these forms.
Consider the sublime. The sublime, in contrast to the beautiful, presents a danger to human existence or well-being. A pleasurable contemplation of a mountain range from a comfortable and safe perspective at its base is 'the beautiful'. In the midst of a growing swells on a ship in the middle of the sea while an ominous storm cloud hovers and swirls and thunders above is sublime, for it renders our existence a precarious reed and frightens us with its immensity and overpowering nature. Both of these, however, are windows into The Will, since both are art forms. These art forms, though, are not direct routes to the Will, only windows, tools that allow us to organize and insufficiently appreciate varying aspects of what The Will might consist of.
The art form that distinguishes itself from all the other art forms in that it gets us closer to The Will than any other art form is MUSIC. Music reveals the very nature of reality; it is not just a copy of a representation of The Will, a mere window, but a copy of The Will itself. Thus, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata isn't a copy of Beethoven's melancholy, but the nature of melancholy itself, and thus a copy of an aspect of The Will itself. Pearl Jam's Black doesn't ultimately tell us about Vedder's own lost love, but the nature of lost love itself. And it changes you: as Wittgenstein tells:
. . . how a friend describes going to Beethoven’s door and hearing him ‘cursing, howling and singing’ over his new fugue; after a whole hour Beethoven at last came to the door, looking as if he had been fighting the devil, and having eaten nothing for 36 hours because his coo and parlour-maid had run away from his rage. That’s the sort of man to be.
Schopenhauer realizes that this point about music is unverifiable. He knows that we can't have a Mozart symphony and compare it to the The Will itself to verify that the symphany sufficiently copies The Will or not. Schopenhauer postulates his view with the aim of providing a plausible explanation of music's power, and he calls on us to keep his view in mind when listening to music to see if his view can be more plausible than its denial.
We are full of desire, and the momentary fulfillment of particular desires, or the frustration of those desires, end in our unhappiness. Satisfaction of particular desires ends in despair and boredom. The fulfillment of sexual desire with a different woman every night, of excitement in bigger and better thrills, of travel in more remote and exotic locations, of popularity in the gathering up of more and more friends and acquaintances: this kind of life is purely aesthetic and shall end in despair and meaninglessness when once boredom is attained and when the contemplation of our own death shatters all our pretentious striving after satisfying petty desires. But if through art, and especially music, we can see the true nature of reality, there is the possibility of salvation, inevitable escape from suffering: not physical suffering, but spiritual, the kind of suffering that is no longer suffering because it is the portal through which we see and experience The Will; we become one with Him, as a river runs out of a coast into the sea.
In The Will, we not only see that we are One with Him, but One with one another. As Christ Himself said:
I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one. (John 17:11)
And:
I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: (John 17:22)
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