(Schopenhauer’s monumental theory of art has its proper place in the Magnificent Shadows section, to be posted later, while here, only one particular aspect of it is being touched upon, and rather tangentially at that. Therefore if the reader wishes to get an idea of my general understanding and evaluation of Schopenhauer’s theory of art, this is not the place to be looking for it.)
No philosophical discussion of art can pretend to be exhaustive without involving Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art in it. Actually, two great philosophers had particularly strong theories concerning art. In Plato’s philosophy, art is trashed. He recommends banishing all great writers and artists from his Politeia and in the Philebus Dialogue derisively notes that “If arithmetic, measurement and the weighing of things be taken away from any art, that which remains will not be much.”
Here is my principal grievance against Plato as a philosopher: that he does not take art seriously enough and thus his legacy to subsequent philosophers is badly flawed. Considering that it was not without a reason that Alfred North Whitehead once described all Western philosophy as merely "a series of footnotes to Plato," the overall effect of Plato’s anti-aesthetic prejudice on Western philosophy had to be indeed devastating.
Schopenhauer, on the other hand, involves himself with the question of art so intimately, that his definitive philosophical masterpiece Die Welt wie Wille und Vorstellung becomes unthinkable without seeing art as its centerpiece. In effect, Schopenhauer here comes the closest among all non-Russian thinkers to seeing art as the ultimate medium of self-expression, which, in his philosophy, is identical with the self-expression of the Will. (This aspect of Russian philosophical affinity, directly via the conception of Art, and indirectly via the conception of the Will, with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, is an intriguing subject, which I will want to explore further in the later stages of my work.)
Now, after this essential preamble, let us get down, in a fairly sketchy form, to the central question of this entry, as determined by its title, of subjects, objects, subjectivity, objectivity, and such. The subject at hand is obviously too large for one entry, and we are at best surfing its wave here.
Objectivity means that the focus is with the object, minimizing the subject. Subjectivity means maximizing the subject, at the expense of the object. However, objectivity totally depends on the subject, because it also always arises in the subject’s perception.
The world, no matter what George Berkeley says, is an independent reality, but, as such, it is unknowable. Only as a shadow of its independent reality does the world become knowable to us. It is not directly as the world that we perceive it, but only as the eye that sees the world, the hand that touches it, etc.
According to Schopenhauer, the world for each individual, is his or her idea of it. Reality in the ordinary sense is unknowable, since what is knowable is only the order of appearances. This whole external world is simply a construction of the intellect, and the intellect is simply the instrument in the service of that inner reality, which each of us experiences as the desire which we are aware of, in our own body, in our physical tensions, in our unconscious strivings, in our will.
Those who believe that reality is indeed knowable and “objective,” are the followers and the users, feeding themselves from the plates of the great artists and original thinkers. These users only imagine that what they pretend to be knowable is the true reality, whereas it is not the objective reality of nature and of the universe but only the sum total of several subjective realities, as represented by the ideas of the creators.
Oddly enough, it is the original thinker himself, who is much more predisposed to accept the unknowability of true reality, ignoramus et ignorabimus, than the little parasite who lives off him and off others like him, because the original thinker deals with that mysterious reality directly, while his follower does it indirectly, through the perception of his host…
“The world is my idea,” such is the opening line of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus. Translating this into my own philosophical language, each original thinker is a creator in his own right (this is far more accurate than to call him, say, a re-creator) of his own personal world, the latter being his own personal idea of the world as such. Having received the munificent license of “creator,” the laws of truth in fiction immediately start to apply to it. (The fixed set of founding hypotheses becomes the truth of created fiction, while the stigma of a lie can only apply to any misconstruction or misapplication of the original hypotheses.)
“That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.” In my idiom, the subject is the author, the creator, and Schopenhauer’s definition above applies to the author of fiction with smooth perfection.
According to Schopenhauer, there is no cause-effect relationship, and there can never be one, between the subject and the object, but only between the immediate object, such as our own body, and object indirectly known. Thus, the controversy about the reality of the external world, (in which dogmatism and skepticism oppose each other) is foolish. Dogmatism may present itself either as realism, with the object as the cause, or as idealism, which, in Fichte, reduces the object to an effect. Skepticism, then, is successful in attacking them both, since, in truth, there is no such connection whatsoever, under the principle of sufficient reason, between the subject and the object.
(I will be returning to this discussion at a later time.)
No philosophical discussion of art can pretend to be exhaustive without involving Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art in it. Actually, two great philosophers had particularly strong theories concerning art. In Plato’s philosophy, art is trashed. He recommends banishing all great writers and artists from his Politeia and in the Philebus Dialogue derisively notes that “If arithmetic, measurement and the weighing of things be taken away from any art, that which remains will not be much.”
Here is my principal grievance against Plato as a philosopher: that he does not take art seriously enough and thus his legacy to subsequent philosophers is badly flawed. Considering that it was not without a reason that Alfred North Whitehead once described all Western philosophy as merely "a series of footnotes to Plato," the overall effect of Plato’s anti-aesthetic prejudice on Western philosophy had to be indeed devastating.
Schopenhauer, on the other hand, involves himself with the question of art so intimately, that his definitive philosophical masterpiece Die Welt wie Wille und Vorstellung becomes unthinkable without seeing art as its centerpiece. In effect, Schopenhauer here comes the closest among all non-Russian thinkers to seeing art as the ultimate medium of self-expression, which, in his philosophy, is identical with the self-expression of the Will. (This aspect of Russian philosophical affinity, directly via the conception of Art, and indirectly via the conception of the Will, with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, is an intriguing subject, which I will want to explore further in the later stages of my work.)
Now, after this essential preamble, let us get down, in a fairly sketchy form, to the central question of this entry, as determined by its title, of subjects, objects, subjectivity, objectivity, and such. The subject at hand is obviously too large for one entry, and we are at best surfing its wave here.
Objectivity means that the focus is with the object, minimizing the subject. Subjectivity means maximizing the subject, at the expense of the object. However, objectivity totally depends on the subject, because it also always arises in the subject’s perception.
The world, no matter what George Berkeley says, is an independent reality, but, as such, it is unknowable. Only as a shadow of its independent reality does the world become knowable to us. It is not directly as the world that we perceive it, but only as the eye that sees the world, the hand that touches it, etc.
According to Schopenhauer, the world for each individual, is his or her idea of it. Reality in the ordinary sense is unknowable, since what is knowable is only the order of appearances. This whole external world is simply a construction of the intellect, and the intellect is simply the instrument in the service of that inner reality, which each of us experiences as the desire which we are aware of, in our own body, in our physical tensions, in our unconscious strivings, in our will.
Those who believe that reality is indeed knowable and “objective,” are the followers and the users, feeding themselves from the plates of the great artists and original thinkers. These users only imagine that what they pretend to be knowable is the true reality, whereas it is not the objective reality of nature and of the universe but only the sum total of several subjective realities, as represented by the ideas of the creators.
Oddly enough, it is the original thinker himself, who is much more predisposed to accept the unknowability of true reality, ignoramus et ignorabimus, than the little parasite who lives off him and off others like him, because the original thinker deals with that mysterious reality directly, while his follower does it indirectly, through the perception of his host…
“The world is my idea,” such is the opening line of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus. Translating this into my own philosophical language, each original thinker is a creator in his own right (this is far more accurate than to call him, say, a re-creator) of his own personal world, the latter being his own personal idea of the world as such. Having received the munificent license of “creator,” the laws of truth in fiction immediately start to apply to it. (The fixed set of founding hypotheses becomes the truth of created fiction, while the stigma of a lie can only apply to any misconstruction or misapplication of the original hypotheses.)
“That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.” In my idiom, the subject is the author, the creator, and Schopenhauer’s definition above applies to the author of fiction with smooth perfection.
According to Schopenhauer, there is no cause-effect relationship, and there can never be one, between the subject and the object, but only between the immediate object, such as our own body, and object indirectly known. Thus, the controversy about the reality of the external world, (in which dogmatism and skepticism oppose each other) is foolish. Dogmatism may present itself either as realism, with the object as the cause, or as idealism, which, in Fichte, reduces the object to an effect. Skepticism, then, is successful in attacking them both, since, in truth, there is no such connection whatsoever, under the principle of sufficient reason, between the subject and the object.
(I will be returning to this discussion at a later time.)
No comments:
Post a Comment