Arthur Schopenhauer  

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Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher. He is most famous for his work The World as Will and Representation, his most infamous Über die Weiber. Notable ideas include will, fourfold root of reason and pessimism.

Contents

Will and desire

A key aspect of Schopenhauer's thought is the investigation of what makes man less than reasonable. This force he calls "Wille zum Leben" or Will (lit. will-to-life), by which he means the forces driving man, to remain alive and to reproduce, a drive intertwined with desire. This Will is the inner content and the driving force of the world. For Schopenhauer, Will had ontological primacy over the intellect; in other words, desire is understood to be prior to thought, and, in a parallel sense, Will is said to be prior to being.

In attempting to solve or alleviate the fundamental problems of life, Schopenhauer was a rare philosopher who considered philosophy and logic less important (or less effective) than art, certain charitable practices ("loving kindness", in his terms), and certain forms of religious discipline. Schopenhauer concluded that discursive thought (such as philosophy and logic) could neither touch nor transcend the nature of desire — i.e., Will.

Aesthetics

Schopenhauer's aesthetics

This wild and powerful drive to reproduce, however, caused suffering and pain in the world. For Schopenhauer, one way to escape the suffering inherent in a world of Will was through art.

Through art, Schopenhauer thought, the thinking subject could be jarred out of their limited, individual perspective to feel a sense of the universal directly—the "universal" in question, of course, was the will. The contest of personal desire with a world that was, by nature, inimical to its satisfaction is inevitably tragical; therefore, the highest place in art was given to tragedy. Music was also given a special status in Schopenhauer's aesthetics as it did not rely upon the medium of representation to communicate a sense of the universal.

Schopenhauer believed the function of art to be a meditation on the unity of human nature, and an attempt to either demonstrate or directly communicate to the audience a certain existential angst for which most forms of entertainment—including bad art—only provided a distraction. A wide range of authors (from Thomas Hardy to Woody Allen) and artists have been influenced by this system of aesthetics, and in the 20th century this area of Schopenhauer's work garnered more attention and praise than any other.

According to Daniel Albright (2004: p39, n34), "Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself."

Psychology

Schopenhauer was perhaps even more influential in his treatment of man's psychology than he was in the realm of philosophy.

Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed by the tribulations of love, but Schopenhauer addressed it and related concepts forthrightly:

"We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man [love] has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material."

He gave a name to a force within man which he felt had invariably precedence over reason: the Will to Live (Wille zum Leben), defined as an inherent drive within human beings, and indeed all creatures, to stay alive and to reproduce.

Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental, but rather understood it to be an immensely powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world:

"The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it."
"What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation ..."

These ideas foreshadowed and laid the groundwork for Darwin's theory of evolution and Freud's concepts of the libido and the unconscious mind.

Influence and legacy in the arts

Schopenhauer is thought to have influenced the following intellectual figures and schools of thought: Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Charles Darwin, Théodule-Armand Ribot, Ferdinand Tönnies, Eugene O'Neill, Max Horkheimer, C. G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, George Gissing, John N. Gray, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Karl Popper, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Wilhelm Busch, Dylan Thomas, Leo Tolstoy, Emil Cioran, Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, Joseph Campbell, Eduard von Hartmann, Phenomenalism, and Recursionism.



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