The Sublime in Schopenhauer's Philosophy

Bart Vandenabeele

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137358691
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

The Sublime in Schopenhauer's Philosophy transforms our understanding of Schopenhauer's aesthetics and anthropology. Vandenabeele seeks ultimately to rework Schopenhauer's theory into a viable form so as to establish the sublime as a distinctive aesthetic category with a broader existential and metaphysical significance.

Part I

Aesthetic Contemplation

1

Pessimism, Aesthetic Experience, and Genius

The purpose of the present book is to develop and modify Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime so as to establish the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with a broader existential and metaphysical significance. The first part of this book offers the necessary preliminaries in order to develop Schopenhauer’s theory in a more fruitful way, and this first chapter provides the broader philosophical context in which his theory is to be interpreted.

First, then, I will assess Schopenhauer’s notoriously pessimistic outlook on man and world and show how, in particular, his pessimism is rooted in his metaphysical and anthropological concept of ‘will’. According to Schopenhauer, suffering is inevitable, not because of what we do but because of what we essentially are. The only way to escape from suffering is by transcending and ultimately even abolishing will altogether. Further, this chapter discusses the main flaws of his pessimistic account and argues that his idea of aesthetic, will-less contemplation is bound up not only with his pessimistic view on humankind but also, more importantly, with his overly Platonic doctrine of aesthetic contemplation and artistic creativity.

The inevitability of suffering

Schopenhauer’s theory of aesthetic experience is a haven of peace in the midst of Schopenhauer’s bleak philosophy. For the central thought of Schopenhauer’s view on man and world is hardly reassuring: man and world are permeated by blind, cruel, and restless energy, which Schopenhauer calls ‘will’, and in human beings this blind, aimless will manifests itself in restless striving and in desires that can never be fulfilled completely and permanently, and which turn life into sheer hell. Since our desires can never be permanently satisfied, we constantly find ourselves in a state of discontent. For, on Schopenhauer’s account, suffering is due to ‘the will’s hindrance through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal’; suffering is a permeating and necessary feature of life, and happiness implies ‘the will’s attainment of its temporary goal’ – satisfaction is thus never permanent (WWR I, 309; 313–314).

Desiring and striving result from a sense of being dissatisfied with our current state at a certain moment – from a lack, which we try to remove. As Schopenhauer argues, ‘every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its craving, set a final goal to its demands, and fill the bottomless pit of its heart’ (WWR II, 573). We move from craving to satisfaction, and to craving again. And when a desire has been satisfied, we may also get bored, which is again a state that we experience as unpleasurable, because we have the feeling that nothing interests us any longer, whilst we none the less still feel the urge to desire and satisfy desires. Moreover, satisfying all our desires once and for all is simply impossible.

The essence of human beings is, what Schopenhauer calls, will to life (Wille zum Leben). This is not to be confused with the more common will to live. For Schopenhauer claims that our real self is a willing self, we are will to life, it is the common essence of us all. This means that life is the unchosen goal of our will – we simply must will, desire, and strive for objects to satisfy our wants. And either we do not succeed in satisfying our desires and experience the pain of being dissatisfied, or we do succeed and then experience in the pleasure of satisfaction also the urge to strive for other objects, so that we soon become bored.

Ordinary human life is characterised by unreflective affirmation of the will to life, and thus of one’s bodily needs (see WWR I, 327). However, if we grasp and somehow succeed in accepting that we are nothing but an insignificant manifestation of the will to life, we may develop an unconcern for misery, suffering, and even death, which may enable us to face our own death without fear and knowingly affirm the will to life:

A man who ... found satisfaction in life and took perfect delight in it; who desired, in spite of calm deliberation, that the course of his life as he had hitherto experienced it should be of endless duration or of constant recurrence; and whose courage to face life was so great that, in return for life’s pleasures, he would willingly and gladly put up with all the hardships and miseries to which it is subject; such a man would stand ‘with firm, strong bones on the well-grounded, enduring earth’, and would have nothing to fear. ... Many men would occupy the standpoint here set forth, if their knowledge kept pace with their willing, in other words if they were in a position ... to become clearly and distinctly themselves. This is for knowledge the viewpoint of the complete affirmation of the will to life [Bejahung des Willens zum Leben]. (WWR I, 283–285)

Someone who really loves life, who desires to repeat his life ad infinitum, would be able to overcome his fear of death.¹ Most of us, however, are not ‘strong-boned’ enough to affirm life in this conscious, deliberate way, and live our lives in the service of the will, and hence we miss the consoling effect that a more deliberate affirmation of will to life and a clearer insight into the insignificance of one’s own death as individual may produce. In ordinary ‘willing’ life permanent happiness is unattainable. There is no absolute satisfaction, and that explains why human beings are incorrigibly restless. No particular achieved happiness can remove all our wants, and none can endure for long – and yet we pursue happiness as if it could be both permanent and all-resolving (WWR II, 573; PP I, 407). Moreover, only pain can be experienced positively. Pleasure is, Schopenhauer contends, always merely negative: it is merely the cessation of suffering and the liberation from pain (see BM, § 16). Permanent happiness would imply permanent satisfaction of our desires – which is impossible. Hence, even the reflectively affirmative individual, who is indifferent to his own death, still lacks something fundamental – the ultimately redeeming insight that ‘constant suffering is essential to all life’ (WWR I, 283).

Now, according to Schopenhauer, suffering is essential to life because living implies willing, and willing in its turn implies suffering: hence, life implies suffering. This line of thought offers the foundation of Schopenhauer’s notorious pessimism, which culminates in his view that life and world lack purpose, and his doctrine of the denial of the will to life, which involves complete ‘self-denial or self-renunciation’ (PP II, 258–259; WWR II, 606).² And, although Schopenhauer does not actually recommend denying the will, for that would really be pointless because the will itself is free, he is certain to have found a state superior to affirming the will – a state in which our Samsaric willing is quietened and completely vanishes, and which offers the only possible ‘true salvation (Heil)’ and ‘deliverance (Erlösung) from life and suffering’ (WWR I, 397).

Schopenhauer’s pessimism

How does Schopenhauer arrive at such a pessimistic conclusion? His argument can be briefly spelled out as follows:³

i.		our unchanging essence is willing;
ii.		our will can never be satisfied permanently;
iii.		our willing is, and gives rise to, suffering;
iv.		suffering is meaningless;
v.		our existence as individual being is meaningless;
vi.		it would have been better if we had never existed.^4

In parallel fashion, Schopenhauer arrives at a similar conclusion with regard to the world as a whole, namely that it would have been better if the world had never existed. Yet, as noted above, Schopenhauer does consider a way out of this predicament, for salvation is possible, namely by giving up the existence that we know and turning against the particular manifestation of will to life found in ourselves; thus by turning against our body, and our own individuality. This pessimistic, or perhaps rather ‘nihilistic’, route to salvation involves the ‘extinction’ (Nirvana) of our will (WWR II, 508), and this means that the motives that ordinarily stimulate our will lose their force.⁵ Willing becomes not-willing; velle (affirmation of willing) turns into nolle (denial of willing). What once seemed so interesting, captivating, and important now appears totally meaningless to us. It no longer concerns us, for ‘we have stepped into another world, so to speak, where everything that moves our will, and thus violently agitates us, no longer exists’ (WWR I, 197). Motives, Schopenhauer suggests, have become ‘quieters’ (Quietive): our knowledge of the wretched nature of life and world sedates our willing and ‘produces resignation’ (WWR I, 253). The paradoxical result is that the will to life no longer wills life, and produces the state in which our true salvation consists: permanent nothingness. We are, then, no longer enslaved willing individuals, enamoured in illusions; we have become pure absolute knowers, who see with clarity the true nature of the world.

It needs to be emphasised, however, that Schopenhauer never explicitly recommends the denial of the will, for willing is what we essentially and unchangeably are, and we cannot deliberately stop willing. As human individuals, we cannot intend not to will, for the will to life is ‘the real self’, it is what we really are (WWR II, 606). The transformation into a will-less state cannot be an act of our will, but is produced, suggests Schopenhauer, by knowledge.⁶ We are not free to bring about this superior state. Schopenhauer claims that a state in which willing is abolished is superior to affirming the will, but we cannot deliberately achieve this superior state.

Our knowledge of the world’s wretchedness does not offer us reasons to give up willing, but may produce the complete denial of willing by weakening the effect of motives upon our will. In this respect it is striking that Schopenhauer describes the deliberate effort to break one’s will as asceticism, a way of life characterised by sobriety, fasting, and self-chastisement (see WWR I, 392). An ascetic hardly ever achieves a state of complete resignation, however, only the resigned saint, who is liberated from his will and suffering through the work of mercy. The ascetic’s obsessive struggle with the urges of his will has become an aim in itself, and is therefore bound to fail. Moreover, Schopenhauer maintains that ‘we must not imagine that, after the denial of the will to life has once appeared through knowledge that has become a quieter of the will, such denial no longer wavers or falters ... On the contrary, it must always be achieved afresh by constant struggle’ (WWR I, 391).

However, we should not confuse Schopenhauer’s ‘complete resignation’ with a (stoic) effort to tolerate misfortunes and frustrations in an unmoved, undisturbed way. Although Schopenhauer recognises stoicism as a valuable contribution to ethics, his own ideal of complete denial of the will is very different from stoic ataraxia or apatheia. First of all, on Schopenhauer’s account, reason is not a means to achieve this ideal of nullifying suffering. Further, stoicism’s ideal of peace of mind is based on accepting that some things are impossible to attain, and we therefore stop striving for them. For instance, for a long time we were striving to become a great painter and we have finally come to realise that this is beyond our possibilities and we acquiesce in this by giving up this ideal, which ends our suffering. Schopenhauer means something far more radical than this with the denial of willing. Denying our will is not just giving up a certain desire, because (for instance) we have realised that it is useless or harmful to us. We do not merely have to succeed in quitting smoking – that would be a stoic way of avoiding suffering by renouncing the satisfaction of our desire to smoke. Complete resignation in the Schopenhauerian sense involves giving up not smoking but our will-to-smoke. Denying our will-to-smoke is not giving up striving for objects (in casu cigarettes) that satisfy our desire but renouncing our desire to smoke itself. Someone who has ‘quit smoking’, but still longs for a cigarette after each meal has not managed to negate his will-to-smoke. On the contrary, he will have to resist his temptation to light a cigarette again and again. He is still struggling with his will. And although Schopenhauer concedes, as noted above, that complete resignation is perhaps never final, the denial of the will definitely widely differs from stoic renouncing the satisfaction of our desires. Put differently, negating our will implies not only that we become indifferent to the satisfaction of our desires, but the complete elimination of our willing. It is indeed, as Chris Janaway aptly puts it, ‘what we are that is the problem’.⁷ And, since what we are is will, the only possible resolution is to abolish our willing and thus reach a state of complete self-renunciation.

Such a radical transformation from willing (velle) to not-willing (nolle) – through which we come to recognise that our individual existence is a mistake and leads to the abolition of the willing self – squares with what Christian mystics call ‘the effect of grace’:

Since ... that self-elimination of the will comes from knowledge, but all knowledge and insight as such are independent of free choice, that denial of willing, that entrance into freedom, is not to be forcibly arrived at by intention or design, but comes from the innermost relation of knowing and willing in man; hence it comes suddenly, as if flying in from without. Therefore, the Church call...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Aesthetic Contemplation
• Part II  The Beautiful and the Sublime
• Part III  Values of the Sublime
• Bibliography
• Index