Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Featured:  Illustration: Portrait fantaisiste du marquis de Sade (1866) by H. Biberstein |
Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics flow from his doctrine of the primacy of the Will as the thing in itself, the ground of life and all being; and from his judgment that the Will is evil. Schopenhauer held that art offered a way for people to temporarily escape servitude to the Will, and from the suffering that such servitude entails.
Influence
In proposing that art could offer deliverance from the Will, Schopenhauer elevated art from mere artisanry or decoration, and held that art potentially offered temporary deliverance from the aimless strife of the Will in nature. In effect, Schopenhauer turned art into a substitute religion by offering a doctrine of salvation through aesthetic experiences. Artists were not merely skilled hands; they were priests or prophets of this doctrine. This teaching goes far to explain Schopenhauer's appeal to members of the creative communities over the second half of the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer's doctrine of aesthetics justified artistic work as a matter of highest importance in human society.
Schopenhauer's aesthetics remain influential today, and are perhaps the most lasting part of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Their appeal to later generations of Romantics, and to all schools of bohemianism, is apparent. Wagner sent Schopenhauer a note expressing deep gratitude for Schopenhauer's discussion of music. Schopenhauer's philosophy in general left a deep impression on a number of important writers, especially Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, Stephane Mallarmé, Thomas Mann, and Ivan Turgenev.
Schopenhauer's aesthetics were directly responsible for the rise of the Symbolists and their allied movements, and to the general development of the concept of art for art's sake. It deeply influenced the aesthetics of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose famous opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian is a translation of Schopenhauer's opposition of intellect against will in terms of Greek mythology. When the Marxist critique of capitalism was stirred into the aesthetic stew, Schopenhauer's essentially ascetic view of the purpose of art laid the foundation for the opposition of kitsch versus the avant-garde which is found in theorists such as Clement Greenberg. Contemporary beliefs that artistic creation should not be swayed by financial gains or the demands of patrons or customers, and the belief that the greatest artists are those who create new and entirely unprecedented forms of expression, rather than those who develop already existing forms, all owe a great deal to the influence of Schopenhauer.
