MA Dissertation - 'In what sense can music be a direct representation of the will in Schopenhauer's philosophy?'
A critical analysis of Schopenhauer's account of music and it's relation to the Kantian thing-in-itself
Introduction
The line of inquiry I intend to pursue in this dissertation is whether Schopenhauer’s proposal that music is a direct representation of the will in book III of The World as Will and Representation (WWR) is consistent with his overall metaphysics, and, if not, to what extent this actually matters. As the closest humans can come to a full expression of the will as it exists in-itself, there is a great deal that Schopenhauer appears to have invested in music, there are, therefore, many questions that should be asked of it. Firstly, how is music or any art form able to adequately represent the un-representable or un-representational? Secondly, assuming that music does this, how are we to know that it has succeeded if this is the only, or the closest possible, representation we can have of the will? The question here is to do with verifiability, how can we know that music has represented something if we are not certain what it is in itself? Thirdly, what are Schopenhauer’s true intentions in book III? If he believes that he is philosophising at the limits of conceptual thought, then to what extent would he be concerned by these philosophical problems? We may ask, how much of his philosophy at this stage does not rely instead more on the mystical and poetic rather than the strictly logical and rational?
My own position is influenced by Lydia Goehr in her article 'Schopenhauer and the musicians: an inquiry into the sounds of silence and the limits of philosophizing about music' (Jacquette, 1996). like Goehr, I suggest that Schopenhauer's metaphysics of music is deliberately paradoxical as it attempts to express the inexpressible and that this explains the deep well of inspiration that artists and musicians have drawn upon since its inception. However, more critically, and in the final analysis, I wish to suggest that, though he is entitled to the weaker claim that music is a representation of the will as inner bodily volition, Schopenhauer is not entitled to the stronger, mystical claim that music is a representation of the Kantian thing-in-itself and that to make such a claim is to invoke an a priori contradiction. In order to reach this conclusion, I will be following from Christopher Janaway, Bryan Magee and John Atwell in their insistence that a clear distinction be made between the equivocated uses of the term ‘will’ in Schopenhauer’s thought; that is, will as empirical phenomenon and will as Kantian noumenal.
Necessarily, a significant portion of the dissertation will need to be given over to an exegesis of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system. Only then can an analysis of music’s place within it proceed. I will, therefore, be addressing the question in four sections. In §1 I will present Schopenhauer’s conception of the will in book I and II of WWR. In §2, I aim to produce a reconstruction of the arguments in book III in order to approximate what Schopenhauer might mean when he says that music has privileged access to the will in book III of WWR. In §3 I will question to what extent the issues identified with the metaphysics of music are unique to Schopenhauer’s aesthetics and not, in fact, endemic of his system as a whole. And finally, in §4 I will consider to what extent any issues identified with his theory should really be of concern to Schopenhauer and whether it is not the case that he has something else in mind altogether with his conception of music.
§1 Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system
‘The world is my representation…if any truth can be expressed a priori it is this’ (WWR I, 1958, p3). Thus opens Book I of WWR. Indebted to Kant, Schopenhauer maintains that to speak of an empirical world of representation without a subject conditioning it is nonsensical. The world of representation is necessarily intuited by the subject and therefore, ordinary ways of knowing will only tell us of the relations of representations to other representations. These ordinary ways of knowing are ordered according to the principle of sufficient reason by which Schopenhauer means the four principles explaining the causal origin of representational phenomena as prior cause. While we must intuit the world according to causal categories, the world, as a whole, does not have a causal explanation. Every demonstrated truth in representation therefore relies on an undemonstrated one. The grounds of knowledge are the given contingencies of representations. For this reason, all epistemic explanation eventually ends at an impasse as representation only gives us the necessary manner in which the knower must know the world and not that which is behind the representation (ibid, p96). Consequently, both empirical and rational investigation will eventually come up against a ‘qualitas occulta’ (ibid, p125), a hidden quality of the world which is simply a given fact of our experience but cannot be explained any further. For example, the inner necessity of atomic charge cannot be explained further, its facticity is simply a brute fact. The principle of sufficient reason can tell us a great deal about the qualities and relationships inherent in the phenomena, but can never give an explanation for why atomic charge, or the mechanism out of which it emerges exists.
Consequently, the inner nature of all phenomena, the raw datum that enters into our modes of cognition, ‘remain(s)…an eternal secret, something entirely strange and unknown’ (ibid, p97). Nonetheless, we desire to go deeper behind the representation. Is there not a ‘subterranean passage’ (WWR II, p195), a Trojan horse by which we can smuggle ourselves behind the veil of ‘Maya’[1] (ibid, p321) and get beneath the world of appearances and towards the Kantian thing-in itself? The answer would be no, and the fortress walls would remain impregnable, if it were not for the existence of one object which is knowable, not only mediately through representation, but also immediately and from ‘within’. This is our own bodies. Our own body is, representationally, an object like any other, it subsists in time and space and seems to follow causal laws according to the principle of sufficient reason. However, our own bodies are unique because we have ‘double knowledge’ of them. My body is not just an object of perception for me, it is also something that I ‘know’ from within (WWR I, p100). Therefore, the inner mechanism beneath the layer of representation is visible to us in this one unique object among objects. We experience the inner principle of our own bodies not as representation but as intentional volition. Schopenhauer calls this the ‘will’. Therefore, in the voluntary movement of my hand for instance, I am aware, not only of the ‘what’ of physical phenomenon (its external representation) as it appears to my eyes in space and time and according to physical laws, but also the ‘why’ of the phenomenon. This is because I have privileged access to the phenomenon behind the representation, namely my own willing volition. I can, therefore, know directly the in-itself of my own body, that is, its nature behind the external representation as phenomenal object both for me and for others. My own will is an immediate object of knowledge to me, it is not known to me as a representation because it is not spatial (though it is temporal which may be an issue for Schopenhauer’s account and will be explored in more depth in §3) and does not follow the principle of sufficient reason. I can, as it were, will at will, I appear to need no motive or prior cause (ibid, p106). Importantly, the will is not something pre or prior to the physical movements that it manifests in my body; It is the movement and manifestation of my body (ibid, p100). The movement of my hand and my will to move it may be known differently epistemically, however they are, nonetheless, ontologically, the same phenomenon. It is known immediately as thing-in-itself, that is as will, and mediately as representation, that is through perception. Therefore, the whole body is nothing but the objectified will, will that has manifested also as representation.
The will stands outside the ‘principium indivduationis’ (ibid, p113) (the understandings delineation of representation into individual and divided entities, in space and time) and therefore must be one. Consequently, the will as it manifests in my body is the same will manifesting in all bodies. The will cannot be individuated and divided because no possible plurality (reliant as it is on space and time) exists outside of representation. Therefore, I can extrapolate from my understanding of the will as it exists within me to the will as it exists behind all representations; they must share the same qualities. As the will is knowable directly in the inner awareness I have of my own body as motivation to movement, this must be applied equally to all phenomena of the will (ibid, p118). Thus, we must learn from the law of motivation (the fourth principle of sufficient reason) the law of inner significance of causality in the phenomenal world (the first principle of sufficient reason). Thus, all the world has this self-same will as the noumenal foundation behind its phenomenon in representation. This does not mean that inanimate objects such as stones have volition and motivation as humans do; the term ‘will’ is applied to the inner principle behind representations merely because this is what we know this inner principle as immediately in ourselves. This inner principle is only manifested as willed motive in man because man has, as a higher grade of the principle’s manifestation, developed understanding and motive. In man, this inner principle of the world (will) has developed understanding in order to aid his continuation and propagation. Therefore, we experience this principle as willing.
There is a potential issue here. In so far as the will becomes knowable to me it necessarily becomes, to some degree, a representation for me. This relies on a broader understanding of the term representation than Schopenhauer at first suggests. Representation, for Schopenhauer, covers objective phenomena ‘outside’ of me, available to my senses, thus awareness of my inner volition is not representation. However, we may wish to question and thus extend this definition, viewing representation as anything that is cognised by my consciousness whether externally or internally.[2] Subsequently, my will is a representation to me in so far as it is an object of knowledge which presents itself in a subject-object relation to a knowing consciousness. Consequently, assuming that Schopenhauer is serious when he says that he is aiming at discovering the Kantian-thing-in-itself, the will cannot be pure thing in-itself by the very act of it becoming an object of knowledge for a subject. While it is not an empirical representation because it is known as an inner awareness rather than from the senses, it nonetheless remains a cognised object of knowledge for me. Therefore, to what extent can the will, qua-will, be known divorced from a knowing subject? What appears is the threat of a paradox or even an outright a priori contradiction, one that plagued Kant. How can one claim to know anything of the thing-in itself when knowledge of it means it becomes a thing-for me? Christopher Janaway argues that in Volume I of WWR a younger, overly-ambitious and more careless Schopenhauer seems to be staking a claim at the discovery of a pure unfettered Kantian thing-in-itself with the will, believing that he (and he alone) has solved the Kantian puzzle. The suggestion is that there is direct ‘cognitive contact with the thing in itself inside us’ (Janaway, ‘Schopenhauer, a Very Short Introduction’, p40). In Volume II, Janaway argues, Schopenhauer is much more cautious, admitting that even an act of will must be within time and therefore cannot be the thing-in-itself undiluted by all forms of outer intuition. Schopenhauer’s weaker and more mature claim is, then, that the will, though ‘it does not quite appear naked’, has to some extent ‘cast off its veils’ (WWR II, p197). This is, as Janaway correctly points out, troubling. How can we even begin to accurately stake a claim at knowledge of the will as Kantian thing-it-itself if we cannot, by necessity, ever cognize it? We will return to this problem in §3 as the most prominent issue Schopenhauer faces in his account of music as a direct representation of the will.
Despite these issues, Schopenhauer believes he has successfully found the ‘subterranean passage’ (WWR II, p195), to the thing in-itself and uncovered the real, un-represented side to the world: the will. It is a mistake however, to see the world as will and the world as representation as two distinct ontological entities (WWR I, p128).[3] The world as representation is rather the side of the world as will available to perceptual consciousness. Nor does will cause representation. This is because causality is a condition of knowledge, not the world as it exists independent of our knowledge of it. There is, therefore, a monism at work in Schopenhauer’s thought. There is nothing beyond the will and its manifestations in representation. The will, seen through the world of representation in our perceptual understanding, appears to always be moving to fulfil a fixed eternal idea, whether force, plant, animal or man. These are fixed gradations of the will’s objectification. Schopenhauer states ‘these grades are certainly related to individual things as their eternal forms, or as their prototypes’ (WWR I, p130). Schopenhauer believes that he has correctly identified the fixed, repeatable prototypes that Plato understood as eternal ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’ underpinning change and flux in the visible world. These are eternal ideas manifested through the will’s objectification in representation. The will as representation manifests the Platonic ideas in the phenomenal world of representation in differing grades of completeness.
Therefore, universal forces exist as the lowest grade of the will’s objectification. This is matter. Individuality and deviation from the species or Platonic idea are found in higher degrees of the will’s manifestation in representation, particularly in man. The apparent teleological ‘striving’ of the will to fulfil Platonic ideas is at the heart of flux and change in the world as representation. For example, the will within an individual rabbit as it strives to reproduce and repeat the idea of ‘rabbitiness’ upon new matter while also avoiding being annihilated by an individual trying to do the same thing with its idea (a fox). However, in an important sense, this striving is, to some extent, illusory as time and space are pure forms of outer intuition existent only in representation. Change, and thus substance, only exists in the understanding and therefore the Platonic ideas and the strife to fulfil them are only a feature of the will as it is manifested in the world as representation, that is, to animal perceptual consciousness. Nonetheless, the world of representation as the aspect of the world as will available to our senses and understanding, shows a world where ideas are in conflict. Thus the will to live ‘feasts on itself’ and ‘Man is a wolf for man’ (WWR I, p147).
The will, outside of its manifestations in representation, is complete in itself, desiring nothing outside of itself because the will is all that there is. There is no plurality of objects out of which a teleological striving could develop in the world as will. Strife, desire and conflict, are therefore, only features of the side of the will known as representation. The will is thus holistically complete and whole in itself (ibid, p153). Its manifestations as representations, however, operate with blind force, strife and perpetual struggle with no greater purpose or teleology. It is blind and without knowledge until it creates a light for itself in man’s understanding. The will, through the higher grades of its manifestation in both animals and humans has managed to, for expediency of survival and continued willing, develop awareness of itself. Therefore, individual will’s (though, properly speaking, there is no such thing as individuation is a feature of representation only) within organisms may will something in the world as representation, however, that an individual wills as such has no grounds and no reason or purpose (WWR I, p163). There is no greater purpose behind our willing other than the continuation of willing. Willing thus wills only itself. Thus, ‘absence of all aim, of all limits, belongs to the essential nature of the will itself, which is endless striving’ (ibid) and the ‘will must live on itself, since nothing exists besides it’ (WWR I, p154).
This means that human life (as well as, to some extent, all life) is essentially an unhappy phenomenon as it is defined by suffering resulting from desire, satisfaction and eventually boredom and the re-emergence of desire. There is no end to willing and thus happiness is a negative phenomenon, an absence of willing as the object of our will’s’ desires are achieved and therefore, for a time, satiated. However, as willing as such is never fulfilled, only temporarily satisfied, soon after our will is fulfilled, either we will again or boredom ensues (ibid, p164). Uniquely, as humans, our higher understanding makes us unhappier still as we realise this. Thus, we are forever determined to be in thrall to the ‘penal servitude of the will’ (ibid, p196). Ordinary human existence, for the large majority of people, will be a continual oscillation between desire, satisfaction and boredom. This is because the world appears to the vast majority of people, only in relation to his own will. That is, delineated by the principium individuationis and given significance only in relation to his own goals, aims and accordingly: his will. There is no escape from the enthrallment of the will as it underpins every activity of human existence, from hunger and sexual desire to desire for knowledge and social standing. The will, and therefore the life of man, has no higher purpose than this, that is perhaps other than procreation, which itself turns out to be the will’s desire to keep willing in a new object. There is no let-up to this state nor is there any end goal or greater teleology. It is from this revelation that Schopenhauer gains his reputation as the philosopher of pessimism. There are, however, two possible cognitive states which may deliver us from our penal servitude. One, explored in book IV, is asceticism and deliberate mortification of the will. The other, explored in book III, is aesthetic consciousness and above all, music.
[1] ‘Illusion’ in Sanskrit, the world of appearances.
[2] At other times Schopenhauer suggests this broader definition of representation, stating in Vol II - ‘all knowing is essentially a making of representations (WWR II, p196).
[3] This is of course only one interpretation, the second being that the world as will and the world as representation are two distinct ontological entities. I, however, along with Christopher Janaway and Julian Young, believe consistent sense can only be made given the ‘one world’ hypothesis, that will and representation, though they may be known differently epistemically, are the same ontological entity. This is because of Schopenhauer’s continued insistence in book II of a monism of the will for example - ‘The will must live on itself, since nothing exists besides it, (WWR I, p154).
§2 What does Schopenhauer mean when he says that music has privileged access to the will?
In order to arrive at an understanding of how music can have privileged access to the will, we will need to first understand why and how Schopenhauer believes an aesthetic mode of consciousness is superior to the modes already explored. In book II, awareness of the will is felt as bodily volition. An interesting question at this point could be, why is there a need for another account of how the will is accessed? It could be argued that the will is made manifest to us already through our own willing. The answer appears to be that, in ordinary consciousness, according to the principle of sufficient reason, only the will as it is individuated within me is made aware to me; I am aware of the drives and desires of the will only in so far as they are determined according to my interests and my individual desires. In book III Schopenhauer holds out hope for a more profound engagement with the will, not only through my awareness of my own individuated willing, but, via a quieting of this individuation, an awareness of the will as it exists independently of my own individuation.
There is perhaps an equivocation here. The word ‘will’ does much heavy lifting for Schopenhauer but he is not always clear with its use and often employs it in reference to very different things. This is an issue he is directly aware of and addresses in book II, stating that the ‘genus’ (the will behind all phenomenon/the Kantian thing-in-itself) is named after the ‘species’ (the will felt within my own body/the phenomenal will) (ibid, pp110-111). We need to keep this distinction in mind when discussing the aesthetic state. Schopenhauer’s contention appears to be that, by quietening the will as it exists within me as continued striving (phenomenal will), I am able to have greater awareness of the will as it exists behind all phenomena (Kantian thing-in-itself). Thus, the aesthetic disposition affords us a transformation leading us away from the will and simultaneously towards it. There may be an apparent contradiction here, however, it is soon resolved as one remembers the monism at work in Schopenhauer’s thought. The will is in all things and is all things and thus abandoning my own individuated willing is not to abandon the will, but instead to take a step towards embracing it in a larger, less pernicious or more neutral context. This distinction will be explored in more depth in §3.
The aesthetic disposition allows the subject to transcend ordinary consciousness. In our ordinary mode of existence, the world is subject to the principle of sufficient reason and the principium individuationis and thus all things appear in relation to my own individual willing. However, a change in the subject can lead to a change in perception. In aesthetic states, the subject becomes cognizant, not of particularity as it stands in relation to my own will, but of the Platonic ideas as grades of the will’s objectification standing behind this instantiated particularity. My emancipation is, therefore, from a mode of consciousness defined by perception of individual entities to one where the eternal, repeatable ideas of which they are a manifestation are perceived. Because of this, the individual is also transformed and lifted out of ordinary willing existence into a ‘pure will-less subject of knowledge’ (ibid, p195). The state reached is one of objective contemplation rather than subjective willing. Thus, in ascetic contemplation, we are raised to an objective awareness of the ‘whatness’ of a perceived idea behind a particular object. Schopenhauer calls this the objective side of aesthetic enjoyment. Simultaneously, the subject is lifted out of the ‘penal servitude’ (ibid, p196) of his own individual willing and becomes the ‘clear mirror of the inner nature of the world’ (ibid, p186). For the subject, the contemplated object has transcended its relation to other objects in a temporal, spatial and causal matrix and, therefore, standing outside of the principle of sufficient reason which is the servant of the will, the subject has temporarily escaped the demands of his own will. Schopenhauer names this the subjective side of aesthetic enjoyment. Through both processes, the perceiver is no longer separate from the perceived and instead the subject and the object of perception dissolve into one another. As the will in its entirety exists within me just as much as it exists in the aesthetic object, the aesthetic state appears to dissolve the subject/object distinction and instead we have the will aware only of itself. This would make sense of Schopenhauer’s later contentions, that the genius’s skill lies not entirely in direct perception but also in intuitive pre-emption. This is because nature is an incomplete manifestation of the Platonic ideas as grades of the will’s objectification. Through his art, the genius is able to ‘complete’ the ideas by pre-empting what the will intended but failed to bring into fruition in representation. The genius, so to speak, ‘understands natures half-spoken words. He expresses clearly what she merely stammers’ (ibid, p222). That some individuals are able to do this is because the will, in its entirety sits within himself as well as the perceived object.
Schopenhauer sets out a hierarchy of the arts. The more profound arts are those that make ‘visible’ the will at a higher grade of its objectification. The aesthetic mediums which have as their subject the higher grades of the will’s objectivity, that is animal and human life, are primarily sculpture, poetry, drama and tragedy. In these art forms the ‘objective side’ of aesthetic enjoyment is achieved as the aesthetic consciousness dwells upon a more complex Platonic idea as manifestations of the will at a higher grade, that is: man himself. Architecture, hydraulics and horticulture have as their subject the lower grades of the will’s manifestation, that is, natural forces (ibid, p214). Enjoyment here is in the revelation of the interplay and tension between the forces of gravity, rigidity and cohesion as well as fluidity and symmetry. In these art forms, the ‘subjective side’ of aesthetic enjoyment is dominant and thus, rather than from an appreciation of a Platonic idea, the aesthetic enjoyment comes from the individual’s temporary emancipation from his own willing. This is especially true of terrifying natural scenes which evoke feelings of the sublime as they present both the annihilation and therefore insignificance of the individual will and also the sense that the individual, as epistemic subject is the foundation behind all representation. An appreciation of landscape painting see’s the subjective and objective sides in balance as enjoyment comes from the individuals’ will dissolving but also enjoyment of an idea which manifests the will in a higher grade of its objectivity; that is nature (ibid, p218). The objective side becomes more dominant as the higher grades of the will’s manifestation become the focus and Schopenhauer considers animal painting and sculpture. The will of the aesthetic subject is still quietened; however, the enjoyment comes primarily in the aesthetic appreciation of the will in nature manifested as Platonic idea. The subject is ‘occupied with the restlessness and impetuosity of the depicted will’ (ibid, p219). The suggestion then seems to be that in the higher forms of art the quietening of our own willing is less prominent (subjective side). Instead, the enjoyment comes from immersion in the objectified will as a Platonic idea in the object (objective side). This becomes more dominant in historical painting and sculpture as the object of aesthetic appreciation becomes the highest degree of the will’s objectification: man. The idea of man is then revealed further through poetry and finally in tragedy which comes closest to reflecting the will itself as ‘the antagonism of the will with itself’ (ibid, p253).
Schopenhauer argues that music deserves special consideration in his aesthetic hierarchy (ibid, p256). Music expresses a profundity which elevates it above all other art forms. Much like Kant with space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic, Schopenhauer presents both a transcendental argument and an argument from elimination to demonstrate music’s unique position. The argument from elimination asks us to consider what music could possibly be a copy of. So far, the arts have drawn their potency through a process of copying and therefore elucidating ideas as objectifications of the will at its various grades. Tragic poetry may be a ‘copy’ or ‘repetition’ of the will as it is objectified as the Platonic idea of ‘man’ understood through hamartia and ascetic self-denial, and architecture may be ‘copy’ or ‘repetition’ of the will as it is objectified as the Platonic idea of ‘gravity’, ‘cohesion’ or ‘tension’, but what exactly is music a ‘copy’ or ‘repetition’ of? There is, apparently, no sensible equivalent in nature, no idea as objectified will that music could be a copy of. Schopenhauer thus states ‘In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition of an idea of the inner nature of the world’ (ibid). The argument from elimination thus arrives at the will as the only possible representative content of the aesthetic idea expressed through music. This is because, for Schopenhauer, there is no other possible sensible content for music to be a representation of. The only possible candidate seriously considered by Schopenhauer is mathematics. Though not mentioned explicitly, his philosophy necessarily precludes sound as music’s representative content. This is because, just as poetry cannot be reducible to ink, music cannot be reducible to sound. Sound by itself is merely representation (and here is meant representation in the Schopenhauerian sense as phenomenal manifestation of the will). However, art must be a representation of the will objectified not just as phenomenon but as Platonic idea and thus not as audio representation alone. Music is not just sound; it is an arrangement of sounds for which nature has no apparent equivalent. While brush strokes may represent sensory input through the visual field, this cannot be the case for music. This is because there is no sensory input from the audio impressions for which music could be a representative equivalent; music is simply like nothing else on earth and, therefore, appears to be an aesthetic medium without an idea for which it is representing. Similarly, contrary to Leibniz, music is not just a copy of a mathematical idea, that is, relations of sounds to other sounds according to harmonic ratios. This is because, if this was the case, then we would get equal aesthetic enjoyment from solving or examining equations and we do not (ibid). The last candidate in the argument from elimination, which I believe Schopenhauer has not given enough attention to, is emotion. Abstract emotion may be the imitative idea of which music is a copy. I suggest that Schopenhauer does not view it as a candidate because he does nor class emotion as a Platonic idea. This is because, in his rendering, Platonic ideas are intellectual abstractions rather than subjective feelings. However, Schopenhauer states that music elicits emotions disconnected from subjective experience and distils within us their ‘abstract and essential nature’ (ibid, p261). There seems, therefore, to be no good reason not to think of emotions as Platonic ideas and, consequently, there is a possibility for music’s representative content that has not been fully considered. This has the possibility of nullifying the argument from elimination because there is a neglected alternative not fully considered.
Schopenhauer’s transcendental argument asks: What must be the case in order to account for the profundity and deep effect upon us elicited through music? What explains the deep effect of the ‘pulsations of divine music… (which have) … not ceased beating through the centuries of barbarism’? (Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains Vol. 2, p.337, in, Cartwright, 2010, p111). His answer is that this can only be explained because music is a direct copy of the will itself. Music, therefore, short-cuts the aesthetic hierarchy, it is an art form with immediate access to the will without the mediation of the will’s objectification in ideas in representational sensibility. Music is a representation of the will, whereas all other art forms are representations of representations of the will. Thus, the other arts ‘speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence’ (ibid, p257). Again, the rational for this appears to be twofold: 1) If art is imitative, what in the world of representation could music be imitating? The notations, ratios and equations into which music, as a technique, is manifested do not mimic the thing signified as brush strokes in a painting do for example. And 2) How else do we account for the deep and profound universality of music as a language which speaks to the inner being of all humans? Music, therefore, appears to be ‘about’ something else entirely. Music is, therefore, an immediate objectification, not of a Platonic idea, but of the will itself.
While all art has the will as its imitative focus, music’s aesthetic imitation is not mediated through the Platonic ideas. Therefore, there is a parallel between music and the ideas represented in the other art forms: they are ‘about’ the same thing, namely the will. Schopenhauer, therefore, believes that the tones within the orchestral range have direct analogues with respective Platonic ideas expressed through the other arts. Thus, he recognises in the base tones the will manifested in inorganic nature; the foundation and bedrock of the planet and all life is also the foundation and bedrock of harmony. The range of the ripienos from the bass to the melody represent the will at higher grades of its manifestation; those in the higher range represent the ideas manifest in the animal and human kingdom. In the melody, in its ‘modulations and runs’, Schopenhauer ‘recognises’ ‘the intellectual life and endeavour of man’ (ibid, p259). Both express a narrative freedom, a choice to follow a train of free decisions that constitutes a connected holistic story. Melody, therefore, ‘relates the most secret history of the intellectually enlightened will, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will’ (ibid). Both man and melody are defined by striving and then satisfaction followed by renewed striving. The support and foundation behind both man and melody are the lower grades of the will’s manifestation: the deeper supporting bass tones of animal, vegetable and mineral ideas. Importantly, unlike an individual’s willing existence, the melody does not reflect a particular sorrow or a particular joy but sorrow and joy as such, that is, the will itself outside of its manifestation in a particular individual. For this reason, the subjective side of music’s aesthetic enjoyment comes through the quieting of one’s own will as one ‘feels’ the spectrum of human emotion in the melody in abstraction from one’s own will. Music thus acts as the ‘panacea of all our sorrows’ (ibid, p262) and is profoundly revelatory as we ‘feel’ the pathos behind the will outside of its manifestation in our own individuation. For this reason, music ought not to be too involved with words because words and drama particularise and individualise the generalised pathos of the will, which misunderstands music’s transcendent role.[1] Music is, therefore, a universal language in so far as it expresses universal categories under which experiences may be particularised. Music reflects the universal forms of all possible experience in a transcendental and synthetic a priori manner (an insight that Schopenhauer himself failed to make). This explains why music, when played over an appropriate scene appears to disclose the hidden meaning behind the particularised event. Importantly, as the will is ‘within’ the human subject as much as it is ‘without’, music plumbs the depths of the soul and reveals the nature of the will to itself through us. Music is the innermost kernel of the world, stripped of all form (ibid, p263).
[1] No-one, Schopenhauer believes, has stayed clear of this error like Rossini, whose music ‘speaks its own language’ (ibid).
§3 To what extent are the issues faced by Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music unique to his aesthetics and not in fact endemic of his system as a whole?
Having established why it is that Schopenhauer believes that music enjoys its privileged position, I now wish to examine the tenability of such a position alongside his earlier metaphysical assertions in books I and II of WWR and also to consider the scope of any potential criticisms discovered: Do they reveal inconsistencies in his aesthetics alone or, more damagingly, also in his account of the will across his work?
In book III, Schopenhauer states –
‘for as we have said music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon, or, more exactly, of the wills adequate objectivity, but is directly a copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing in itself to every phenomenon’
(WWR I, p262).
Given such an assertion, our focus will be on the following interconnected questions: 1) Has Schopenhauer contradicted himself when he states that music represents the unrepresentable? 2) How would we know that music has successfully represented the will if we do not have any other adequate means of accessing it from which to positively verify such an assertion? 3) Given the success of our contention that Schopenhauer has equivocated on his use of the word will, meaning different things by it at different points in both volume I and volume II, which conception of the will does Schopenhauer believe music is a copy? The broader conclusion of this section will be that the issues faced by Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, namely that music simply cannot be a representation of the Kantian noumenal, is in fact, not a line of criticism unique to book III but is instead an intractable hammer blow to the fundamental contention of his entire philosophical project; that the will as Kantian thing-in-itself can ever be approached, let alone be in any way represented.
The first issue faced is that of the threat of a paradox or even an outright a priori contradiction. As a ‘copy’ of the will, music, like all art forms, must presumably be representational. To say otherwise would be to say that music is the will which is not what Schopenhauer would wish to argue. And yet he states, in his account of music -
‘I recognize…that it is essentially impossible to demonstrate this explanation, for it assumes and establishes a relation of music as a representation to that which of its essence can never be representation, and claims to regard music as the copy of an original that can itself never be directly represented’ (my emphasis) [1]
(WWR I, p257)
How, then, is it possible to represent that which can never be represented? Let us, for the moment, operate under the assumption that the will is, according to Schopenhauer’s stronger claim made in volume I: The Kantian thing-in-itself, the noumenal, divorced as it is from all representation. The threat of a paradox looms here. The will would then be, by necessity, not representational; it is thing-in-itself not capable of representation. And yet, it is maintained, music is a representation of the will. Furthermore, in book II, Schopenhauer claims ‘The thing in-itself, as such, is free from all forms of knowledge, even the most universal, namely that of being object for subject; in other words, it is something entirely different from the representation’ (ibid, p128). This would therefore mean that music, as well as indeed any art form or anything else for that matter (including empirical phenomenon – the world as representation), cannot, by necessity, be a copy of the will: As soon as it lays claim to representation of the will, it has, necessarily, failed. This is not a problem faced by other art forms in the aesthetic hierarchy because the other art forms are not purported to be copies of the will directly but only indirectly as copies of the Platonic ideas. Music, however, is supposed to directly and immediately copy the will. Is this not a contradiction?
A response may be that, rightly or wrongly, Schopenhauer has, in fact, always maintained that the will can be represented and does not believe there is a contradiction here; the will is represented in the phenomenal world of representation revealed to us through ordinary sensory perception. The will is, therefore, represented to us as both epistemic phenomena and aesthetically in music. Consequently, there is, at the very least, no contradiction with his earlier contentions in books I and II because music is merely another means of representing the will. This response neatly fits with Schopenhauer’s own conception of the parallel between music and the world. As is shown with the orchestral hierarchy having its counterpart in the world of representation, the whole phenomenal world of representation has its expression through music and thus ‘We could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will’ (ibid, pp262-3). There may, nonetheless, still be a contradiction inherent in the claim that there can be a representation of the Kantian noumenal, however, this would not be a singular problem faced by Schopenhauer’s account of music but one faced by his wider contentions across all four books. The contradiction would therefore no longer be an internal one between book III and book I and II, but a more global contradiction faced by Schopenhauer’s entire philosophy as such. Therefore, what we seem to have is an inconsistency rather than an internal contradiction: does Schopenhauer believe the will can be represented (by music or by empirical phenomenon)? At some points he seems to be saying ‘yes’ and at others ‘no’. Importantly, however, in the context of this dissertation at least, this is an inconsistency not unique to his account of music. We may, therefore, safely affirm that Schopenhauer has not contradicted any assertions made in books I and II when he maintains that music is a representative copy of the will because his contention here is that the world of empirical ‘representation’ is a representation of the will and, therefore, the will is an entity capable of representation. Having said this, it does draw our attention to a wider inconsistency across his philosophy as a whole: Does Schopenhauer truly believe that the will, as Kantian thing-in-itself, is an entity capable of representation? It would seem that he would need to answer in the affirmative for his system to hold together. However, he seems to be uncertain whether this is at all possible, admitting, in his first introduction of the term ‘will’ in book II- ‘this thing-in-itself (we will retain the Kantian expression as a standing formula) – ...is never object, since all object is its mere appearance of phenomenon’ (ibid, p110). We will return to this problem later in this section.
Our second issue is one of verifiability. Let us, for now, assume that Schopenhauer a) believes the will is an entity truly capable of representation and b) maintains that music is a representation of the will as Kantian thing-in-itself. Can we, even theoretically, assess such a claim? In order to judge its veracity it would be necessary to have direct access to the will independently of our aesthetic access through music. At first glance, this does not appear to be a problem because our first encounter with the will is, in book II, as inner volition ‘felt’ within ourselves. The solution may therefore present itself here. We can verify the claims made about music, that it is a direct copy of the will, by reference to the will as it is ‘felt’ as our body; Our own inner volition is our primary access to the will and therefore we can verify the claim that music is the direct representation of the will by recourse to this. Further problems, however, present themselves if we are to do this. Firstly, Schopenhauer maintains that music is a more profound representation of the will than our own inner volition. This is because our awareness of our inner volition is of our own individuated will; I ‘feel’ the will in relation to my wants and desires. Book III has already established that the aesthetic disposition is superior to this as I am able to access the aesthetic-object, the will, in the case of music, stripped of my own inner striving and desiring. Aesthetic pleasure is afforded in such a way; the pathos of the will is felt without connection to my own individuated striving. There is therefore a problem: if music provides a more direct representation of the will than my own inner willed volition, then how can such a claim itself be verified? Schopenhauer’s response seems to be that we can do this because music appears to have the same inherent structure as willed volition minus the individuation and negativity that comes from ordinary willing. Consequently, music is like willed volition but without the subjective individuation and striving which is a feature of representation. Therefore, music is the will shed of some if its ‘veils’ (WWR II, p197).
However, such an apparent solution in fact paves the way for a deeper and more profound verifiability issue. How can Schopenhauer, across all his philosophy, maintain different gradations of the will’s manifestations and say that some cognitive states provide a greater or lesser copy of the will when we cannot truly know what the will is in itself? To put it another way: which parts of music or inner volitions’ representations of the will belong to the will itself and which are contributions made by the subject cognizing the will? Again, Schopenhauer appears, at times, to be aware of such a difficulty, maintaining that the will in ‘essence can never be representation...and…can itself never be directly represented’ (WWR I, p257). We have arrived then at the very same stumbling block narrowly avoided with the previous critique: How is it possible to represent the unrepresentable? In places in the WWR Schopenhauer appears to concede that the will, the ‘original’ from which music emerges as a copy, cannot be directly represented at all. While in our previous critique we saw that this was not a fatal blow to Schopenhauer’s account of music because our only concern was whether or not it made consistent sense internally alongside books I and II to argue that music could be representational, now this appears a much greater threat. This is because there is a direct issue of verifiability. On what authority can he claim that music is a direct representation of the will when the will is not even theoretically knowable in itself? Are we to then conclude that Schopenhauer’s claims go beyond philosophy and instead are more mystical or poetic in nature? This question will be explored in more depth in section §4.
What may be helpful here is to expose an equivocation I believe Schopenhauer is guilty of in his very use of the word ‘will’. This was mentioned in passing in §1. I believe that, to his credit, Schopenhauer was aware of such an equivocation and indeed draws our attention to it in the second edition of WWR under the heading ‘On the possibility of knowing the thing in-itself’ (WWR II, p191). He is, however, guilty of not giving it enough attention and clarification.[2] The word ‘will’ is being used to refer to two interrelated entities in Schopenhauer’s system. The first use can be identified strongly with the optimism of volume I of WWR: The will is the Kantian thing-in-itself, totally unfettered by representation of any kind. It is the absolute noumenal beyond phenomenal representation. The second, is the will understood as a non-spatial, non-causal (but still temporal) psychological drive and motive ‘felt’ as a bodily volition. In volume I Schopenhauer uses the latter to attempt to access the former. The in-itself of my body means we can access the in-itself behind all phenomena. It may, therefore, appear that there is no equivocation until we recognise that there must be. This is for the following reasons. 1) The will as it is felt within me is within time. Time is a feature of our cognition and therefore is a feature of the world as representation. 2) In so far as the subject claims knowledge of the will, he necessitates that this is not the will as Kantian noumenal absolute because it is cognised as a relative phenomenal representation for him. This is, as already noted in §1, an issue Schopenhauer is aware of, stating that the will felt as bodily volition, though it ‘does not quite appear naked,’ has to some extent ‘cast off its veils’ (WWR II, p197). Because Schopenhauer believes that the aesthetic disposition affords us new knowledge, we, therefore, need to be clear: what is this new knowledge supposed to be of? Thus, it would be prudent to do what he so often neglects to do and clearly separate the two uses of the word ‘will’. Schopenhauer, at times confusingly, uses the language of an upside-down taxonomy in book II, stating -
‘Now, if this thing-in-itself…is to be thought of objectively, then we must borrow its name and concept from an object…but this is precisely mans will…I therefore name the genus after its most important species, the direct knowledge of which lies nearest to us, and leads to the indirect knowledge of all the others’
(WWR I, pp110-111).
Because the will, as it is felt as bodily volition, is the closest we can get to the Kantian thing-in-itself (at least at this point in book II), the name we give for this (will) names the Kantian thing in-itself. Hence, Schopenhauer admits that the species has named the genus. The will, as totally undiluted by human cognition, as pure Kantian thing-in-itself we can call the ‘noumenal will’. Whereas the will as it is knowable within our internal reflection upon our bodies, relative to our own desires and intuitively knowable in time, as the will as the ‘phenomenal will'.[3] Schopenhauer believes that epistemically these two conceptions are different but ontologically they are identical. Their only difference being that the ‘phenomenal will’ is the will as it is felt through my body and thus cognizable by me. The ‘noumenal will’, however, though ostensibly identical, is, necessarily, not directly available to the subject. Because for Schopenhauer aesthetics is epistemic, affording the subject new knowledge, the question for us when it comes to music is, therefore, epistemic: of which of these, the ‘noumenal will’ or the ‘phenomenal will’, does Schopenhauer believe music is representing and thus providing us greater knowledge? Most of Schopenhauer’s contentions about music appear to be that it reflects the ‘phenomenal will’. This is because he speaks of music as mirroring the desire, satisfaction and boredom of human life, of the ‘secret history of the intellectually enlightened will’ (ibid, p259). I therefore see no problem with Schopenhauer maintaining that music is a reflection of the will if the will is to be understood as the ‘phenomenal will’. Such a claim is verifiable: I can verify his contentions concerning music against my psychological phenomenal experience of the will; such a verification appears to confirm that music is a copy of the will. The parallels are indeed striking; both music and my internal willed volition are in time but not in space, are striving and are then fulfilled and then continue striving, are emotional and full of the pathos of satisfaction, longing and despair et cetera. I, therefore, believe that Schopenhauer is right to say that music is a copy of the ‘phenomenal will’. However, the claim that music is a representation of more than this is where he enters murkier and less certain waters. And it is important to note, he does appear to want music to be a representation of the ‘noumenal will’. If this was not the case, it would be difficult to make sense of the aforementioned passage - ‘I recognize...that it is essentially impossible to demonstrate this explanation, for it assumes and establishes a relation of music as a representation to that which of its essence can never be representation’ (ibid, p257). He does not believe it to be impossible to demonstrate that music is a representation of the ‘phenomenal will’ because, as already stated, he attempts this. He appears, therefore, to be making a bolder claim, one that he admits is beyond philosophical demonstration and, therefore, he does not make one: that music is a representation of the ‘noumenal will’: The Kantian thing-in-itself outside of any potential cognition. Philosophy, as an intellectual discipline, operates according to cognitive processes including the principle of sufficient reason and the principium individuationis, and, therefore, cannot adequately demonstrate the truth or falsity of music’s’ relationship to the noumenal; The principle of sufficient reason comprehends the world as representation but not the world as ‘noumenal will’. Therefore, to conclude, in so far as music is a reflection of the will as it is knowable within my body, the ‘phenomenal will’, such a claim as ‘music is a direct copy of the will itself’ makes sense. However, in so far as music is a reflection of the will as it exists outside of all human cognition or representation: the ‘noumenal will’, such a statement as ‘music is a direct copy of the will itself’ is not even theoretically demonstrable, thus Schopenhauer is not entitled to assert this. Furthermore, we might even suggest that music could not even possibly be a representation of the Kantian thing-in-itself because music is cognizable to us and the Kantian thing-in-itself, is, necessarily, beyond cognition. As already stated, this is a significant and potentially fatal criticism, not only of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, but his metaphysics in general. It appears that Schopenhauer will now no longer be entitled to extrapolate from the nature of the ‘phenomenal will’ to the supposed nature of the ‘noumenal will’ in the assertive way in which he wishes to in book II. This has wide reaching ramifications for Schopenhauer’s philosophy, an exploration of which is necessarily precluded by the scope of this project.
[1] Schopenhauer stresses this point further in a letter he wrote to Julius Frauenstadt in 1852, stating that his philosophy ‘teaches what appearance is, and what the thing in itself is. But this is thing in itself only in a relative sense, i.e., in its relation to appearances…But I have never said what the thing in itself is apart from that relation, since I do not know it; but in it, it is the will to life’(Gesammelte Briefe von Arthur Schopenhauer, p291, as translated in Halbfass 1990, p117 in Cross, 2013, p187) (my emphasis).
[2] Interestingly, in his book ‘Schopenhauer’s Encounter with Indian Thought: Representation and Will their Indian Parallel’s’, Stephen Cross argues that Schopenhauer deliberately does not draw more attention to this equivocation and that this is because he is trying to avoid the imminent threat of a conceptual dualism in his concept of the will. (Cross, p185)
[3] Stephen Cross illustrates how there is disagreement in the literature over the extent of Schopenhauer’s awareness of the equivocation on the term ‘will’. Cross states that John Atwell names the distinction ‘natural will’ vs. ‘the will as thing-in-itself’ and believes that Schopenhauer does not do enough to conceptually separate them whereas Bryan Magee, who calls the equivocated uses ‘phenomenal will’ and ‘mystical will’ believed that Schopenhauer was always aware of the difference between the two uses. (Cross, 2013, p258)
§4 To what extent should these considerations concern Schopenhauer and what really is his motive in the third book?
Our conclusions from §3 are, therefore: 1) that in order to make consistent sense, Schopenhauer would have to maintain that music is indeed a direct copy of the will as felt as our own inner drive and volition (the ‘phenomenal will’) and that this is verifiable and subject to philosophical examination and 2) that the claim that music is a copy of the will as it is as Kantian thing-in-itself beyond all possible cognition or representation (the ‘noumenal will’) is simply wrong. This is not only because such claims go beyond the reasonable limits of philosophy but because the will as Kantian thing-in-itself is simply beyond representation and, therefore, any purported representation of it, will, by necessity, be fallacious. The goal of this, the last section, is, then, to consider a) To what extent such a conclusion as this would really be of concern to Schopenhauer and b) Whether or not a strict philosophical project is, in fact, really his goal by the end of book III.
In order to answer these two questions, I will take my cue from Lydia Goehr in her article ‘Schopenhauer and the musicians: an inquiry into the sounds of silence and the limits of philosophizing about music’ (Jacquette, 1996). Goehr argues that a greater illumination of Schopenhauer’s position (or lack thereof) can be afforded through a consideration of silence. Goehr targets two conceptions of silence in book III. The first being the necessary silence which follows from music’s paradoxical attempts at expressing the inexpressible (ibid, p202). The second and connected understanding is a ‘meta or philosophical’ silence (ibid). This is the necessary silence that philosophy must adopt as it approaches music. Much of her first account of silence has been addressed in §3 and so it is to her second account that we turn our attention. Goehr seeks to understand why Schopenhauer’s account of music is so brief. Her reading is that Schopenhauer is perfectly aware that an attempt to elucidate a full and complete description of music’s relationship to the will as Kantian thing-in-itself is necessarily flawed. She believes it is Schopenhauer’s endeavor to instead provide an embryonic and incomplete account in order to point his reader in the direction of a greater, though never complete, understanding of a profound intuitive truth. By necessity, his account must be philosophically nascent because of conceptual thoughts impotency in making inroads into the territory of the Kantian noumenal. To access the ‘noumenal will’, we must, at some point, proceed in ‘conceptual silence’ (ibid, p209). The ineffability of music’s true nature, therefore, necessitates analogical expression; the various sections of the orchestra being likened to the will as it is manifested through nature. However, even such attempts, perhaps because they are analogical, must fall short and the only contention that can be made is that the reader must, in the end, go listen to music. Goehr concludes that Schopenhauer is leaving us with the Wittgensteinian sentiment: ‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent’. Music is therefore, by necessity, protected from rational and empirical philosophical description. It is not polluted by conceptual language nor from the principle of sufficient reason. Goehr states:
‘As the language of the universal Will, music is the pure language of free-subjectivity, feeling, spontaneity, and gesture; it is concept-less, non-intentional, and of pre-linguistic significance. It is protected from base concepts and feelings, common judgments and desires. Not limited by the usual systematic or scientific laws of order and meaning, it succeeds on its own unspoken or unexplained terms in revealing the spiritual meaning of the world. Silence, here, is revelatory, purifying and protective’
(ibid, p217)
Although Goehr’s analysis is attractive because it points towards a broader and more profound Schopenhauerian project, I will fundamentally disagree with her. In answer to our first question, to what extent such a conclusion as ‘music cannot be a direct representation of the ‘noumenal will’ in any meaningful philosophical sense’ would really be of concern to Schopenhauer, I, to an extent, agree with Goehr. The conviction that music is a representation of the ‘noumenal will’ is indeed a paradox and, therefore, ostensibly a problem for Schopenhauer. For Goehr, that such a problem would be of great concern to Schopenhauer does not, by necessity, follow. She seems to argue that he can simultaneously hold that both a paradox has been invoked and that such a paradox is perfectly compatible with his philosophy as a whole. Music, as it expresses the ineffable cannot be fully philosophically understood, and therefore, from the perspective of purely rational investigation, suffused as it is with the principle of sufficient reason and conceptual thinking from the intellect, philosophy will not, and cannot, make sense of such a profundity. In response to our second question, I think there is much that is attractive in this position and that it does make sense of the brevity of Schopenhauer’s account, however, I think it fundamentally flawed. This is because Schopenhauer has not simply invoked a paradox, he has invoked an a priori contradiction; It is an a priori contradiction to state that that which is beyond representation can be represented. I, therefore, agree with Goehr that music’s profundity may be beyond philosophy and point to a deeper intuitive truth, and that it may also, in so far as it is a representation of the ‘phenomenal will’ and thus our inner natures ‘stripped of some of its veils’ (WWR II, p197), be a closer approximation of the ‘noumenal will’. However, by necessity, it cannot be a representation of the inner nature of the world stripped of all its veils because representation in any of its forms, as material phenomenon, Platonic idea, internal volition or as music is a ‘veil’ covering the thing-in-itself.
Surely Schopenhauer was aware of such a contradiction; he is too good a philosopher not to have been.[1] We may, therefore, ask whether or not a strict philosophical project is, in fact, really his goal by the end of book III; I believe that he wishes it to be, but, in reality, it is not. If we are charitable to him, we may like to argue that Schopenhauer, in true Kantian fashion, is neither afraid of admitting the limits of conceptual thought, nor of making experimental skirmishes beyond it. His conception of music may, therefore, be perceived as more akin to the Kantian postulates of practical reason. Like freedom, immortality of the soul and the existence of God, music’s relation to the Kantian noumenal is both of philosophical interest and yet fundamentally beyond the remit of the philosopher. This explains why Schopenhauer’s assessment of music is so fleeting and why he implores his audience to approve his position, not through abstract philosophizing, but intuitively by listening to music. That Schopenhauer believes there is a horizon beyond which conceptual philosophy cannot meaningfully proceed is born out in his own words. In Volume II, he states ‘I have never professed to propound a philosophy that would leave no questions unanswered…There is a limit up to which reflection can penetrate’ – (ibid, p591). As Goehr illustrates with a quote from Hamlet, philosophically, ‘the rest is silence’ (Jacquette, p200).
What then are we to make of Schopenhauer’s meta-philosophical project? It would seem that we are left with a form of mysticism or poetics that is not, strictly speaking, philosophy. That this will be unsatisfactory to many goes without saying. After stating that his account of music’s representation of the will as Kantian thing-in-itself is beyond evidential verifiability, Schopenhauer concludes his remarks with:
Therefore, I can do no more than state here at the end of this third book, devoted mainly to a consideration of the arts, this explanation of the wonderful art of tones which is sufficient for me. I must leave the acceptance or denial of my view to the effect that both music and the whole thought communicated in this work have on each reader. Moreover, I regard it as necessary, in order that a man may assent with genuine conviction to the explanation of the significance of music here to be given, that he should often listen to music with constant reflection on this; and this again requires that he should be already very familiar with the whole thought I expound.
(WWR I, p257)
Similar assertions on the scope and limitations of rational demonstrations for his philosophy are made throughout WWR. When discussing the will in book II, Schopenhauer states that knowledge of the will as one’s own body is ‘knowledge of quite a peculiar nature’ (ibid, p102) whose truth cannot be expressed according to the principle of sufficient reason. He states that he would therefore like to distinguish this truth from any other and call it a ‘Philosophical truth par excellence’ (ibid). As the subject, proceeding philosophically, approaches the ‘noumenal will’, as Kantian thing-in-itself, all individuation and subject-object relations from which and for which a coherent philosophical account could make conceptual sense, begin to dissolve. There is, therefore, a precedent for assertions of a more intuitive rather than philosophical nature. Read in such a light, Schopenhauer’s contentions on music are in keeping with his wider project. Schopenhauer is philosophising at the limits of conceptual thought. Rather than stating what cannot be known as Kant largely did, Schopenhauer is attempting skirmishes into the noumenal. Necessarily, the vehicle for such attempts is not and cannot be philosophy, but is rather a pre-rational intuitive feeling. Thus, any attempts to rationalise such arguments in a philosophical treatise necessarily fail and end with out-right a priori contradictions. None-the-less, Schopenhauer attempts them. This may not be philosophy for some and, subsequently, is relegated to the status of poetics or mysticism. Schopenhauer seems to believe that such attempts are important in so far as, in a Wittgensteinian sense, a proper recognition of a boundary can only make conceptual sense when attempts are made to traverse it. Nonetheless, the impossibility for the Kantian thing-in-itself to be represented at all should, as a philosopher, be a concern for Schopenhauer and he does not do himself any favours by not drawing our attention more to this outright contradiction. What is more, the possibility of such a contradiction is cautioned against in other places in his opus. In his essay from Parerga and Paralipomena: ‘On the antithesis of the thing in itself and appearances’, Schopenhauer warns against philosophy overstepping its remit. If our intellect is ‘abused’ by being used to address questions on the nature of the Kantian noumenal then we risk a position Kant advised us to stay well away from: Like Kant’s antinomies of pure reason, we arrive at ‘metaphysical problems such as those of the origin and purpose, the beginning and end of the world and of ones own self, of the annihilation of this through death or its continued existence in spite of death, of freedom of will, and so forth’ (Essays and Aphorisms, 1970, p59). In WWR Vol I, Schopenhauer is guilty of violating his own injunction or, at the very least of being over-enthusiastic in his youth and then being too stubbornly unwilling to significantly amend his position in subsequent volumes and editions later in life.[2]
[1] Cartwright in his ‘Schopenhauer: a biography’ draws attention to Schopenhauer’s later notebooks where he appears to recognise the contradiction and yet stubbornly holds on to it nonetheless, stating ‘we describe the thing in itself according to what is looks like in the lightest of all husks, and with a name it borrows from that which is by far the most distinct of its appearances’ and yet ‘the will, as we cognize it in ourselves, is not the thing in itself, because it only becomes apparent in individual and successive acts of will; these have time as their form and therefore are already appearance’ (Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, Vol. 3, p40 in Cartwright, 2020, pp394-395)
[2] As already stated, Schopenhauer does consistently draw his readers attention to the paradox of knowing the thing in-itself, particularly in Vol II of WWR. For example, he states ‘Accordingly, a ‘knowledge of things-in-themselves’ in the strictest sense of the word, would be impossible, because where the being-in-itself of things begins, knowledge ceases, and all knowledge primarily and essentially concerns merely phenomena. For it springs from a limitation, by which it is rendered necessary, in order to extend the limits’ (WWR II, p275). Our criticism of him should, therefore, be that he doesn’t consistently work out the ramifications such occasional assertions as these would really hold for his system as a whole.
Conclusion
To conclude, I have endeavoured to show that, within the parameters of both his metaphysics and his aesthetics, Schopenhauer is more than entitled to the claim that music is a representation of the ‘phenomenal will’. Music in its emotive, narrative striving and passion as well as its effect upon us is highly analogous with the will as it is felt as bodily volition, perhaps explaining why it lends itself so well to the kinetic arts of drama and dance. However, that music is a representation of the ‘noumenal will’ as Kantian thing-in-itself is not only a paradox, but also an a priori contradiction and, therefore, such a claim should be a concern for Schopenhauer. Music cannot be a representation of the Kantian noumenal for the same reason that nothing else can be. This is a profound and highly damaging issue which is a critical problem not only for Schopenhauer's metaphysics of music but for his entire system. He admits as such in WWR Vol II, stating ‘all knowing is essentially a making of representations; but my making of representations, just because it is mine, can never be identical with the being-in-itself of the thing outside me’ (WWR II, p196). We may, therefore, be tempted to be generous to Schopenhauer, in so far as we can be, and conclude that music, while not a representation of the Kantian noumenal, leads us to a closer understanding of it. This is because, in so far as music is a representation of the thing-in-itself of our own bodies cast off of some of its ‘veils’, namely space and causation, it is closer to the thing-in-itself and we therefore 'know' the thing-in-itself better. But on closer analysis, we realise that a claim to have arrived at a closer conception of the thing-in-itself is unknowable. Because we cannot represent and therefore know the Kantian thing-in-itself as such, we cannot empirically verify what it may or may not be of itself despite apparently shedding some of its ‘veils’. For this very reason, Schopenhauer has, across his philosophy, failed in his identification of the inner volition of my own body with the Kantian thing in-itself which, by necessity can never be known and, like Casper David Friedrichs’ receding horizons, will always, via necessity, escape us. Some veils may indeed be removed; but does this mean that we can know that we are getting any closer at the thing-in-itself? For all we know, there may be an infinite number of veils. To claim that we know that we are getting closer by removing two of them would, therefore, be to know what it is we are aiming towards, which by necessity, we never will. Therefore, whether the ability to know that which is left of my own inner awareness of my body once spatiality and causality have been removed brings us any closer to the Kantian thing-in-it-self or not will continue to be a pivotal question in Schopenhauer studies; It, however, remains a question for another project. Goehr has correctly drawn our attention to the fact that despite these strictly philosophical questions Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, in its attempt to identify and then cross the limits of conceptual thought, has been and continues to be deeply influential on musicians and artists. However, from a purely philosophical perspective, Schopenhauer’s account of music has largely revealed inconsistencies which are deeply and indelibly entrenched in his system. Philosophically then, Schopenhauer is entitled to only one half of his claim concerning music. Music may be a representation of the ‘phenomenal will’, that is my subjective bodily volition and internal intellectual life, however that it, or anything else for that matter, is a direct representation of the Kantian thing-in-itself, is, unfortunately, an a priori contradiction.
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