Schopenhauer

by Margrieta Beer

The common mortal, he says, that manufacture of nature, which she produces by the thousand every day, is not capable of observation that is wholly disinterested in every sense. He can turn his attention to things only so far as they have some relation to his will, however indirect it may be. This is why he is so soon done with everything, with works of art, objects of natural beauty, and everywhere with all that is truly significant in the various scenes of life. He does not linger in the pursuit of beauty, but seeks only to gain his own way in life. On the consideration of the significance of life as a whole, he wastes no time. The artist, on the other hand, strives to understand the inner nature of everything. His faculty of vision is to him the sum which reveals the world.

In spite of his contempt for the majority of men, Schopenhauer has to admit that the faculty of perceiving the Idea, the inner reality, must exist in nearly all men, in a smaller and different degree, otherwise they would be just as incapable of enjoying works of art as of producing them. They would have no susceptibility to beauty, nor to sublimity. All men, therefore, who are capable of æsthetic pleasure at all, must be capable to some extent of knowing the Idea in things, and in responding to the call of beauty, of transcending their personality for the moment.

Æsthetic pleasure is the same whether it is evoked by a work of art or by the contemplation of nature, for the Idea remains unchanged and the same. The work of art is only a means of making permanent the vision in which this pleasure consists. The artist does not add "the gleam, the light that never was on sea or land," but his vision is more finely attuned to the reality than that of ordinary men. He makes permanent in the various media of art "the consecration and the poet's dream." His work acts as a communicating spark from mind to mind.

In one of Carlyle's most suggestive passages, he insists on the spiritual and symbolic nature of the work of art, in words that echo curiously the thought of Schopenhauer. "In all true works of art," he says, "thou wilt discern eternity looking through time, the godlike rendered visible ... a hierarch therefore, and pontiff of the world will we call him, the poet and inspired maker, who Prometheus-like can shape new symbols, and bring new fire from heaven to fix it there."

That the Idea, the true reality behind appearance, is revealed with so much more force and clearness in the productions of art than directly in nature is due to the power of the artist to abstract the pure Idea, the reality, from the actual and the accidental, omitting all disturbing, non-essential qualities. He disentangles that which is real and essential from the confused mass presented in experience. The artist lets us see the real world through his eyes. That he has these eyes, that he knows the inner nature of things, apart from all their relations, is the gift of genius. This gift is inborn, and cannot be acquired. But that the artist is able to lend us this gift, and let us see through his eyes, is acquired. This is the technical side of his art.

Primarily, then, the genius is the artist. Scientific genius finds no place in Schopenhauer's scheme. Statesmen are of very different fibre. Their intellect retains a practical tendency, and is concerned with the choice of the best means to practical ends, remaining therefore in the service of the will. The eminent man, who is fitted for great achievement in the practical sphere of life, is so because objects rouse his will in a strong degree, and spur him on to the investigation of their relations. His intellect, therefore, has grown up in close connection with his will.

Talent is limited to detecting the relations which exist between individual phenomena, whereas genius rises to a vision of the universal in the individual. The genius has a vision of another and a deeper world, because he sees more profoundly into the world which lies before him. "To compare useful people with men of genius is like comparing building stone with diamonds." Mere men of talent come always at the right time, for they are called forth by the needs of their own age. The genius, on the other hand, comes into his age like a comet, whose eccentric course is foreign to its well-regulated order. Genius appears only as a perfectly isolated exception.

Schopenhauer never states definitely that a philosopher may be a genius, but he always seems to assume that he himself belongs to the heavenly company. He gives a detailed description of the genius, even to his physical appearance. With his usual habit of generalising from his own particular case, he endows the genius with many of his own personal characteristics, even to his dislike of mathematics.

The Platonic theory of Ideas was the basis on which Schopenhauer built his philosophy of art. But Plato's own theory of the function of art differed fundamentally from that of Schopenhauer, and it is interesting to compare the two views. To Plato it seemed that art was concerned with the imitation of things as they seem, not as they really are; with the objects of sense perception and not with the Ideas. The artist mutates the illusory appearances of concrete things. Consequently the work of art is still further removed from true reality, from the Idea, than is the thing of experience. It is a copy of a copy. This led him to the statement that works of art are thrice removed from the truth. They can be produced easily without any knowledge of the truth, for they are concerned only with appearances, and not with the reality that lies behind appearances. Hence Plato's rejection of art. In his system it is not art, but philosophy that gives a direct revelation of truth. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, maintains that it is not the concrete object of experience, but the reality itself which lies behind that object, with which the artist is supremely concerned. The artist alone among men has the capacity of vision to see and grasp the truth of this reality. Such capacity of vision is reserved by Plato for philosophers, those whom he calls "lovers of the vision of truth."

In his earlier works, Plato approximates far more closely to Schopenhauer's theory. He speaks there of the poet as "a light and winged and holy thing. There is no invention in him until he has been inspired.... Beautiful poems are not human or the work of man, but divine and the work of God. The poets are only the interpreters of the gods, by whom they are severally possessed."