The value of art for Schopenhauer lies mainly in its power to deliver us from the slavery of the will. In the quiet contemplation of beauty revealed in art, we are delivered from the misery of life. Willing, he maintains, arises from want, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it, but every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one, and both are illusions. No attained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification. It is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive today, that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow.
Without peace no true well-being is possible. But when some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, and knowledge is delivered from the slavery of the will, we have a vision of things free from this relation of the will. We can observe them without personal interest, without subjectivity. Then, all at once, the peace which we are always seeking, but which always fled from us on the path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us. This is the painless state, which Epicurus prized as the highest good, and as the state of the gods. We are then set free from the miserable striving of the will. It is this deliverance that art effects for us, and which is accomplished only by the inner power of the artistic nature. Art frees us from all subjectivity, from the bondage of the will. This freeing of knowledge lifts us out of all the misery of endless desire, as wholly and entirely as do sleep and dreams. Happiness and unhappiness have disappeared. We are no longer individuals. We are only that one eye of the world, which looks out from all knowing creatures, but which can become perfectly free from the service of the will in man alone. Art provides us with a sphere, in which we can escape from all our misery, and can attain to a state of temporary peace and painlessness.
There is a curious affinity between the æsthetic theories of one of the mediæval mystics and those of Schopenhauer. St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the schoolmen, expounded views in the thirteenth century akin in many respects to those set forth by Schopenhauer at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Beauty, he held, is the revelation of reason in sensuous shape, and he proceeds further to say that in the realisation of beauty desire is quieted.
Art is the most joy-giving and the only innocent side of life. It is, says Schopenhauer, in the full significance of the word, the flower of life. The pleasure which we receive from all beauty, the consolation which art affords, enables us to forget the cares of life. This pleasure consists in the contemplation of the Ideas, in the contemplation of the inner truth of life, which reveals to us a drama full of significance. In entering into the state of pure contemplation, our happiness lies in the sense of being lifted, for the time being, above all willing, beyond all wishes and desires. We become freed from ourselves. These moments when, sunk in contemplation and enjoyment of the work of art, we are delivered from the ardent striving of the will, when we seem to rise out of the heavy atmosphere of earth, these moments are the happiest which we ever know.
The arts themselves Schopenhauer arranges according to their subject-matter rather than according to their medium. He places them in very much the same order as that in which Hegel puts them. Architecture, painting and sculpture, poetry and music are each discussed in turn.
Music.—Music is the apex of his whole system of æsthetics. It is placed by itself, outside and above all the other arts. For it is not, like the other arts, a copy of the Ideas, but it is the copy of the will itself. In the main Schopenhauer's treatment of music is mystical. Hegel too gave to music the supreme position among the arts. It was the central romantic art in his system, and the mysterious magical enchantment of music is painted by him with glowing eloquence.
The effect of music, says Schopenhauer, on the inmost nature of man, is powerful beyond that of any of the other arts. For that great and exceedingly noble art stands alone, quite apart from the other arts. In it there is no copy or repetition of any Idea of existence in the world. It is understood by man in his inmost consciousness as a universal language, the distinctness of which surpasses that of the visible world itself. The basis of modern music lies in the numerical relations which underlie sounds. Arithmetical proportions enter into and have some part in the pleasure which we derive from music, as Leibnitz points out, but this does not account for that passionate delight with which we hear the deepest recesses of our nature find expression in sound. If we take the æsthetic effect as a criterion, we must attribute to music a far deeper and more vital significance than that which lies at the basis of the other arts. This is connected with the inmost nature of man and the world. Its representative relation to the world must be very deep, absolutely true, and extraordinarily accurate, because it is understood immediately by everyone. It has the appearance of a certain infallibility, because its form may be reduced to quite definite rules, expressed in numbers, from which it cannot free itself without ceasing to be music. The obscure relation of music to the world has never been made clear.
In order to explain this relation, Schopenhauer says he gave his mind entirely to the impression of music in all its aspects, and then returned to apply his reflections to his system of thought. We know that he had invaluable opportunities of studying music, in its various forms, during the time that he was working out his system at Dresden. He himself practised daily the use of a musical instrument. The result of his investigation is an explanation, which he admits is impossible of proof, because it regards music as the copy of an original, which can never itself be presented directly as idea. But he maintains that in order to assent with full conviction to his theory of the significance of this art, it is only necessary to listen frequently to music, testing the theory at the time, and reflecting constantly upon it.
The other arts represent the Ideas in the particular things, the realities that lie behind the visible world, but music is independent altogether of the world of concrete things. It ignores completely this aspect of life. It could to a certain extent exist even if there was no world at all. Music, then, is not the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the Will itself. That is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself.