Schopenhauer

by Margrieta Beer

Painting and Sculpture.—Filling an intermediate position between architecture and music come painting and sculpture. These arts represent more complex grades of the will than architecture, and therefore convey the truth of life with deeper insight. They too are concerned with the Ideas, and symbolise the inner reality of outward things and events. Lowest in the scale of the various kinds of painting come the painting of landscape and of still life, in which the subjective side of æsthetic pleasure is predominant. Our satisfaction consists less in the vision and comprehension of the Ideas than in the state of mind aroused. We receive a reflected sense of the deep spiritual peace and absolute silence of the will, which are necessary in order to enter so completely into the character of these lifeless objects. It would be impossible to bring the modern art of landscape painting, with its revolt against a purely objective representation of nature, into line with this analysis of Schopenhauer's.

Next in the scale comes the painting and sculpture of animals, and then follows the plastic representation of the human form. The artist expresses in marble or paint that beauty of form which nature has failed to complete, and which has to be disentangled from the obscuring cloud of trivial and accidental details. In virtue of this anticipation through art, it is possible for us to recognise beauty when nature by a rare chance does achieve a masterpiece. Human beauty is the fullest objectification of the will at the highest grade which is known. It is expressed through form. In sculpture, beauty and grace are the principal qualities. The special character of the mind, represented by expression, is the peculiar sphere of painting. Historical painting aims at beauty, grace, and character. The inward significance of an action, which is the depth of insight into the Idea which it reveals, must be brought to light. Only the inward significance concerns art, the outward belongs to history. The countless scenes and events which make up the life of men are important enough to be the object of art, for by their rich variety they unfold the many-sided Idea of humanity.

No event of human life is excluded from painting. The painters of the Dutch school, for example, are great artists, not only in virtue of their technical skill, but because they have seized the inner significance of the things and actions they have depicted. They have real depth of insight into reality. What is peculiarly significant is not the individual, nor the particular event, but that which is universal in the individual.

Schopenhauer held that the highest achievements of the art of painting were reached by the Italian painters of the early Renaissance, especially by Raphael and Correggio. We see in them, says Schopenhauer, a complete grasp of the Ideas, and thus the whole nature of life and the world. In them we find the spirit of complete resignation, which is the inmost spirit of early Christianity, as well as of Indian philosophy. There are portrayed the surrender of all volition, the suppression of the will. In this way these great artists expressed the highest wisdom, which is the summit of all art.

Poetry.—Poetry too represents the ideal in individual creations. Its aim, like the other arts, is the revelation of the Ideas. The poet must understand how to draw the abstract and universal out of the concrete and individual, by the manner in which he combines them. The universality of every concept must be narrowed more and more, until we reach the concrete image, for the poet must express the universal in concrete form. The whole of nature can be represented in the medium of poetry. The extent of its province is boundless. Thoughts and emotions, however, are its peculiar province, and here no other art can compete with it. That which has significance in itself, and not in its relations, the real unfolding of the Idea, is found definitely and distinctly in poetry. More genuine inner truth is to be found in poetry than in history. The poet's knowledge is intuitive, and by its means he shows us in the mirror of his mind the Idea, pure and distinct, bringing to the consciousness of others that which they feel and do. In the epic, the poem of romance, and the tragedy, selected characters are placed in those circumstances in which all their special qualities unfold themselves, and the depths of the human heart are revealed, and become visible in significant actions.

Tragedy is the summit of poetic art. Here the unspeakable pain, the wail of humanity, the triumph of evil, the mastery of chance is unfolded before us. It is one and the same will that appears throughout. Knowledge reaches the point at which it is no longer deceived by the veil of Mâyâ, the web of illusion. Thus the noblest men, after long conflict and suffering, at last renounce for ever the ends they have so eagerly pursued. The heroes and heroines of tragedy die, purified by suffering, after the will to live is dead. The true import of tragedy is that the hero expiates, not his own individual sins, but the crime of existence itself. Tragedy, then, presents the highest grade of the objectification of the will, in conflict with itself, on a scale of grandeur and awful impressiveness. The greatest poetry is symbolic in this deepest sense.

Goethe may be considered one of the greatest symbolists among poets. Every event in life was symbolic for him. It expressed something more universal, more extensive, more profound. The concrete image, the whole full-blooded individual was always clearly before his mind, but beyond that he saw and realised something more universal, from which it necessarily and inevitably springs. He saw that the truth of nature does not lie on the surface, but in a deeper unity, which the penetrative insight of the artist alone can grasp.

In the system of Schopenhauer, then, art acquires almost the character of a religion. It becomes the means by which the ultimate essence, the soul of whatever exists, is disengaged from the world of matter. And "in this dutiful waiting upon every symbol, by which the soul of things can be made visible, art at last attains liberty. In speaking to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, it becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual."

There is a deep significance in the historical fact, that the birth of religion is interwoven invariably with that of the origin of art. Aristotle connects closely the rise of various forms of poetry with religious celebrations. Art and religion were born simultaneously, and have always been closely related in the history of mankind.