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The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy

Also by Bart Vandenabeele

A COMPANION TO SCHOPENHAUER ( editor )

GABRIËLLA CLEUREN Brave New Old Worlds ( with Gabriëlla Cleuren and Ann Smets )

HISTORIES OF THE SUBLIME ( edited with Christophe Madelein and Jürgen Pieters )

SEDUCTION, COMMUNITY, SPEECH ( edited with Frank Brisard and Michael Meeuwis )

The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy Bart Vandenabeele Ghent University, Belgium

© Bart Vandenabeele 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vandenabeele, Bart. The sublime in Schopenhauer’s philosophy / Bart Vandenabeele, Ghent University, Belgium.

pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–1–137–35868–41. Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788–1860. 2. Sublime, The. I. Title.

B3149.A4V36 20151119.85092—dc23 2015018346

To Veerle, Sarah, and Eline, who have raised a tent of shelter

vii

Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Abbreviations and References to Works by Schopenhauer x

Introduction 1

Part I Aesthetic Contemplation

1 Pessimism, Aesthetic Experience, and Genius 15

2 Sensory Perception and Aesthetic Contemplation 33

Part II The Beautiful and the Sublime

3 The Aesthetics of the Beautiful 59

4 The Aesthetics of the Sublime 83

5 A Psychological Alternative to Schopenhauer’s Theory of the Sublime 128

Part III Values of the Sublime

6 Tragedy, Ethics, and the Sublime 145

7 The Existential and Metaphysical Value of the Sublime 163

Bibliography 179

Index 187

viii

Acknowledgements

This study is the result of many years of reflection on Schopenhauer’s philosophy and the topic of the sublime. A large part of it was written in splendid isolation, during a period of research leave granted by the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University. The work towards what eventually became this book began some 20 years ago. Over the years I have greatly benefited from numerous questions, comments, and suggestions, and much encouragement on the part of friends, colleagues, students, and audiences all over the world, and I wish to thank all of them.

Some parts of this book started life elsewhere. The following published articles and chapters contain material in common with parts of the book, sometimes substantially revised: ‘Schopenhauer on Aesthetic Contemplation’, in Oliver Hallich and Matthias Kossler, eds, Arthur Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung , Klassiker Auslegen, Band 42 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 101–118; ‘Schopenhauer on Aesthetic Understanding and the Values of Art’, European Journal of Philosophy 16, 2008, 194–210, reprinted under the same title in Alex Neill and Christopher Janaway, eds, Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 41–57; ‘Schopenhauer on Empirical and Aesthetic Perception and Cognition’, in Alan Schrift and Tomas Nenon, eds, History of Continental Philosophy (8 vols.), Volume 1: Kant, Kantianism, and Idealism (Durham/Chicago: Acumen Press/University of Chicago Press), 2010, 187–210; ‘Beauty, Disinterested Pleasure, and Pure Contemplation: Schopenhauer’s Response to Kant’, Schopenhauer- Jahrbuch 93, 2013, 241–256; ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness in Kant and Schopenhauer’, Estetika: Central European Journal of Aesthetics 5, 2012, 45–70.

I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to reprint and rework material that has already appeared in their pages. I also wish to thank the editors at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Esme Chapman and Brendan George, for their very helpful suggestions and the reviewers for their acute comments.

I have benefited immensely from discussion with Chris Janaway (whose publications stimulated me to start studying Schopenhauer’s thought a long time ago), Daniel Came, Paul Crowther, Paul Guyer, Matthias Kossler, Simon May, Alex Neill, Sandy Shapshay, and Günter

Acknowledgements ix

Zöller. Without the insights from our conversations and their writings, my thinking would be seriously impoverished. I would also like to thank and remember the late Patricia De Martelaere, whose generous support of my work still means very much to me.

Special thanks are owed to the Carmelite friars at Ghent and to Bea and Kristien for their kindness and hospitality, and to my brother, Stijn, for the numerous chats and his invaluable moral support. To my wife, the irreplaceable Veerle Rotsaert, and our sweet daughters, Sarah and Eline, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude. Without their love, the present book would never even have materialised. I wholeheartedly dedicate this book to Veerle and to Sarah and Eline, the sublime Vandenabeele sisters.

x

Abbreviations and References to Works by Schopenhauer

BM: On the Basis of Morality FR: The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason FW: On the Freedom of the Will , in The Two Fundamental

Problems of Ethics HN I–V: Der handschriftliche Nachlass , vols 1–5 MR I–IV: Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes PP I, II: Parerga and Paralipomena , vols 1 and 2 WWR I, II: The World as Will and Representation , vols 1 and 2

Unless otherwise specified, the number immediately following the work’s abbreviation gives a volume and page reference to the work listed here. With the exception of the Nachlass , the page number refers to a page in the relevant English translation, as listed in the Bibliography. Quotations from The World as Will and Representation are based on E.F.J. Payne’s translation. I have modified this translation where it seemed appropriate, and I have also consulted the Cambridge University Press translation of the first volume of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus , edited by Christopher Janaway.

1

The concept of the sublime has fallen out of favour. Over the last decades, the topic of the sublime has been sadly neglected by analytical philoso-phers and shamefully abused by poststructuralist thinkers. Many Anglo-American philosophers have judged the sublime to be an outmoded concept with nothing more than historical significance, whilst many poststructuralist approaches have turned it into a concept which is only vaguely reminiscent of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orig-inal, and have used it merely to fit their postmodernist agenda, thus tarnishing its universal aesthetic value. The present book argues that a return to and revision of Arthur Schopenhauer’s subtle and highly-sophisticated theory of the sublime offers an invaluable contribution to a much-needed re-appraisal of this important aesthetic concept.

In eighteenth-century aesthetics, the concept of beauty occupied centre stage, yet the sublime received much attention from philosophers such as Joseph Addison, John Baillie, Alexander Gerard, Edmund Burke, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Friedrich Schiller, David Hume, Moses Mendelssohn, and Immanuel Kant. Although the sublime has become intimately associated with romanticism, and featured prominently in romantic art and literature, in nineteenth-century philosophy interest in it started to decrease. 1 One of the main reasons for this is probably Hegel’s unfortunate demotion of nature and the sublime in his influen-tial Lectures on Aesthetics (delivered 1817–1829, posthumously published in 1835), which focus on the idea of artistic beauty. Hegel’s aesthetics not only considerably undermines the importance of nature and sensory cognition in general, but also (unjustly) reduces the sublime to a most primitive, defective aesthetic concept and art form.

Unlike Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer rightly considers the aesthetic contemplation of nature, including its turbulent and distressing elements,

Introduction

2 The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy

to be of great significance. Devoting aesthetic attention to nature is indeed distinctive of our species and prompts us to explore and value the world in which we live. The experience of the sublime is contrasted with the beautiful, which invites us to tranquil contemplation of nature’s varied qualities. Unlike beautiful natural objects, sublime phenomena such as erupting volcanoes, thundering waterfalls, huge mountains, and dizzying ravines are experienced as disturbing and threatening. 2 Our initial reaction to such objects and environments is often one of uneasi-ness and even fear, and we desire to take flight. But, somehow – the details of which will be explored in the present book – we can also become fascinated by such phenomena and struggle to persevere in aesthetically contemplating and enjoying their roughness, jaggedness, and wildness.

Schopenhauer and the sublime in nature

Schopenhauer insists that the experience of the sublime involves struggle and is both humiliating and uplifting. Yet, unlike his great pred-ecessor Kant, he argues that the sublime is not the object of a reflecting judgment but a distinct kind of aesthetic experience , necessarily fused with sensory elements. The sublime is tightly connected to our affec-tive , embodied and finite nature. Engaging with vast or mighty natural objects makes us aware of our frailty and insignificance in comparison to such objects, and we are bewildered by their presence, causing (as Mendelssohn aptly calls it) a ‘sweet shudder’. 3

Two varieties of the experience of the sublime can be distinguished: the mathematical and the dynamical sublime. The former relates to vast objects, the latter to powerful ones. Although Schopenhauer adopts this basically Kantian distinction, he considerably changes its meaning and scope. 4 According to Kant, mathematically as well as dynamically sublime objects put us in touch with our moral capacities, and judging such objects is ultimately grounded in our rational and moral self. 5 The sublime purportedly reveals our ability to withstand the immensity of nature, to affirm ourselves against it, and to re-affirm our capacity for rational freedom. The mathematical variety involves objects of great size, such as deep ravines and vast deserts, which push our senses and imagination to the very limits of their powers, whereas the dynamical sublime relates to powerful natural phenomena, such as devastating hurricanes, violent volcanoes, and lofty waterfalls, which (according to Kant) awakens ‘a feeling that we have self-sufficient reason’, reveals the superior power of practical reason, and eventually prepares us for moral conduct ( CJ , § 27, 5:257–258; 268). 6

Introduction 3

Even though Schopenhauer’s account is, as we shall see, clearly influ-enced by Kant’s theory of the sublime, it parts company with it in a number of important ways, which have all too often been sadly ignored. Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime shirks Kant’s strong emphasis on the self-regarding, moral character of the experience, and also avoids references to such transcendental capacities as reason and imagina-tion, which obviously play a dominant part in Kant’s more cognitivist account. For Schopenhauer, sublime nature does not reveal ‘the idea of humanity in our subject’ and ‘respect for our own vocation’, as Kant nevertheless argues in the Critique of Judgment (§ 27, 5:527). Whereas, for Kant, in the sublime our mind uses and even abuses nature to express reason’s might, on Schopenhauer’s more plausible account, the feeling of the sublime manifests, first and foremost, our physical and metaphysical insignificance in comparison to mighty powers of nature. The kind of aesthetic apprehension which Schopenhauer has in mind is neither based on conceptual reasoning nor on scientific knowledge, but on pure, will-less perception . The sublime is first and foremost an aesthetic experience, and is far less human-centred than Kant’s analysis suggests, as it takes us out of ourselves and beyond ordinary human capacities. Schopenhauer’s analysis intimates – contra Kant – that the experience of the sublime involves transcending not merely the bounds of individuality but also of rationality , and, in this respect, prefigures Nietzsche’s re-interpretation of the sublime as an essentially Dionysian experience.

Compared to Kant’s, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime is also more clearly relational : it focuses upon the object which causes aesthetic delight, and the content of the experience does not so much involve ourselves as cognitive and moral subjects but rather nature itself and its exhilarating power . It is nature that is sublime, not us. Instead of inducing self-reflection, the sublime draws us out of ourselves and enables an aesthetic appraisal of wild nature and our complex existential relation to it. Pace Kant, we do not merely admire sublime objects; they fascinate us and adjust our attitude towards them and to the world as a whole. They offer a perspective-switch, allowing us to embrace the painful emotions they commonly incite. This actually gives the lie to those who, like Nietzsche, consider Schopenhauer’s aesthetics as ‘hostile to life’, as merely offering a bridge towards asceticism, resignation, and the abolition of the will to life. 7 On the contrary, the Schopenhauerian sublime affords a unique aesthetic way to confront suffering and, instead of suppressing it, to transform it into something with which one can live .


For Schopenhauer, the wildness of nature, even ‘every little spot entirely uncultivated and wild ... left free to nature herself, however small it may be, if only man’s paws would leave it alone’, has more value than nature which has been subdued by man, as in French gardens, ‘where only the will of the possessor is mirrored’ (WWR II, 404; 405). The sublime in nature, moreover, allows us to take pleasure in the aware-ness of our ultimate identity with a greater reality: we are fascinated by tsunamis not in spite of, but because of their overwhelming power.

Whereas, on Kant’s view, the sublime reveals our distinction from nature, and chiefly concerns the awe-inspiring character of our capacity for moral freedom and our superiority over nature’s power, for Schopenhauer, the sublime allows us to identify with that which engulfs us. 8 The immensity of nature does not offer merely a glimpse of freedom from desire and inclination, but rather a closer grasp of what our true place as embodied, vulnerable human beings is in the world as a whole.

I will be arguing, then, that – despite its shortcomings – Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime thus offers a more plausible model of sublime experience than his predecessors. I will spell this out in great detail in the following chapters. But it might be helpful to summarise here the main differences between Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s theories. Schopenhauer’s theory surpasses Kant’s in at least four important ways. First, his account is more explicitly object-directed and less human-centred than his pred-ecessor’s, for Schopenhauer’s main focus is the relational character of the experience and its deep redeeming potential. Secondly, Schopenhauer’s approach avoids any kind of moralisation of the sublime and rightly focuses on the purely aesthetic character of this type of experience. Thirdly, Schopenhauer offers a more plausible psychological account of what an experience of the sublime involves for embodied creatures like ourselves, who are aware of their frailty and mortality. Fourthly, Schopenhauer’s identification model of the sublime offers a more adequate resolution to the paradox of the sublime, by offering a more plausible explanation of why we enjoy and seek out sublime objects and experiences. I shall thus be arguing that, instead of merely ‘transforming’ Kant’s account, Schopenhauer offers a genuine, and far more plausible, alternative to it. 9 I will provide arguments for all these hypotheses and discuss the merits and flaws of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime throughout the remainder of this book. Before turning to the details of the structure of the present book, I will now briefly introduce some of the basic concepts of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, focussing on the vital distinction between the beautiful and the sublime.

Introduction 5

The charming, the beautiful, and the sublime

Contrary to the agreeable (or disagreeable) sensations that a Turkish massage, a glass of French wine, a Belgian chocolate, or Italian lemon ice cream can offer us, we cannot reduce enjoying beauty and sublimity to sensations that objects offer us when they satisfy our desires. Obviously, we can desire to be surrounded by beautiful things, and beauty and sublimity inspire our desire. Beautiful people, in particular, can arouse our erotic desires and make us yearn for their actual presence. Our atti-tude towards beautiful and sublime objects can be compared to the way in which one admires statues of gods and saints: they are placed on a pedestal and their awesome presence humbles and renders us diffident. Agreeable things charm, but they are ultimately nothing but commodi-ties that we use to satisfy all kinds of (physical) needs. The pleasure they offer us coincides with the satisfaction of our desire to consume or use them.

It can hardly be a coincidence, then, that Schopenhauer, who possessed much more delicate aesthetic sensitivity than Kant, does not consider the beautiful but the charming (or the alluring, das Reizende ) as the true opposite of the sublime (see WWR I, 207–208). Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer does not offer any moral grounds to distinguish the beau-tiful from the sublime. Both are purely aesthetic qualities and there is merely a gradual distinction between them.

Whilst Kant characterises the sublime as an aesthetic emotion that reveals the superiority of our moral, rational nature, Schopenhauer considers the sublime as a struggle between our longing for pure contem-plation and our desire to satisfy immediately our personal needs. We are confronted with ‘our dependence, our struggle with hostile nature’ as well as with ‘a certain transcending of the interest of the will ... a slight challenge to abide in pure knowledge, to turn away from all willing’ (WWR I, 204; 203). The deepest impression of the sublime is caused by a power that is incomparably superior to the individual and threatens to destroy it:

mountainous waves rise and fall, are dashed violently against steep cliffs, and shoot their spray high into the air. The storm howls, the sea roars, the lightning flashes from black clouds, and thunder-claps drown the noise of storm and sea. Then in the unmoved beholder of this scene the twofold nature of his consciousness reaches the highest distinctness. Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual, as the feeble phenomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces


can annihilate, helpless against powerful nature, dependent, aban-doned to chance, a vanishing nothing in face of stupendous forces; and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing, who as the condition of every object is the supporter of this whole world ... This is the full impression of the sublime. (WWR I, 204–205)

Sublime objects are overwhelming and threatening, yet we do not experience all overwhelming and threatening objects as sublime. Schopenhauer rightly stresses the deeply ambivalent nature of the sublime: it humbles and exalts, it is disturbing and serene, distressing and joyful. As in the beautiful, I feel elevated above my individuality, and that offers me considerable peace, but (unlike an experience of the beautiful) I also experience the insignificance and fragility of my empir-ical, embodied self. 10

However, the conflict between the individual will and the desire for pure contemplation is not resolved to the benefit of reason, for the willing self is the ‘real self’ and is not so easily dispensed with. In the sublime, we become aware that ‘the vastness of the world, which previ-ously disturbed our peace of mind, now rests within us’ (WWR I, 205). Just as in the presence of beautiful objects, in the sublime we experi-ence ourselves as, what Schopenhauer calls, ‘pure subject of knowing’. 11 However, the exalted state of consciousness will be obtained only ‘by a conscious and violent tearing away’ from the pain and fear the threat-ening object brings about. Moreover, and this is crucial to understand the true nature of the Schopenhauerian sublime, the ‘exaltation must not only be won with consciousness, but also be maintained, and it is there-fore accompanied by a constant recollection of the will’ (WWR I, 202).

What can this mean? A thorough interpretation of this complex expe-rience will be postponed until Chapter 4, and I will now provide merely a few preliminary thoughts on this. First, the intensity of the experience of the sublime is irrevocably tied up with our awareness that the eleva-tion above the will is unstable and we, therefore, feel restless. The more intensely we sense that our serenity is being threatened by the ‘nega-tive’ emotions the object procures, the further we are removed from the cheerfulness and peace of pure beauty and the more fiercely we experi-ence the feeling of the sublime. In this respect, Schopenhauer’s analysis is quite close to those offered by British thinkers such as John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and perhaps especially Edmund Burke, who charac-terises the sublime as ‘a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror’. 12

Secondly, Schopenhauer holds that, unlike the beautiful, the expe-rience of the sublime necessarily remains tied to being aware that

Introduction 7

the object is hostile or threatening. We are able to contemplate the dangerous hurricane or daunting canyon, but this does not entail disre-garding the threatening character of the object. On the contrary, unlike experiences of ‘easy beauty’, the experience of the sublime is essentially accompanied by, what Schopenhauer calls, ‘a permanent recollection of the will’. Despite our contemplative state, we remain aware of the threat posed by the phenomenon or object: we realise, through painful feeling, that we are an insignificant being that could be harmed or even destroyed in a second by the object which we perceive. This, at least in part, explains the peculiar experience of tension that essentially charac-terises the feeling of the sublime: turning away from the experience of threat and giving myself up entirely to contemplation is never realised definitively. Again and again, the awareness of the hostile character of the object to any human being threatens to slide back into a feeling of personal anxiety, because we sense that the object might damage or even annihilate me . 13

Hence, what is characteristic of a sublime experience is an ongoing change of perspective, or even struggle between my personal view of the threatening nature of the considered object, which is deeply disturbing, and the universal standpoint from which we contemplate the object aesthetically, which provides tranquillity and joy. The sublime demands no less than to sacrifice our self-centredness. Thus, we sense the contrast between the anxiety that we experience as an embodied individual and the sheer joy felt as pure aesthetic subject.

Now, what radically distinguishes an experience of the sublime from the beautiful is that we feel that the elevation above our willing self is never stable since it is connected with an awareness of the object’s poten-tial to damage and perhaps even destroy us. My bodily nature cannot be dispensed with; I remain tied to the ‘willing’ being that I essentially am. This is supposed to explain, to some extent, why the experience of the sublime typically affords a kind of ‘mixed’ pleasure, in which humili-ation and elevation, uneasiness and tranquillity, distress and delight are entwined. Joy and suffering are indeed bound up together and even seem to depend upon one another.

I will be arguing, then, that Schopenhauer is better capable of explaining the fundamental precariousness of the sublime than Kant, and of giving due attention to the sense of horror which distinguishes the sublime from the beautiful, and offering it the privileged status that it deserves in the domain of pure aesthetic experience. Schopenhauer rightly suggests that the value of the sublime is intrinsically related to its peculiar affective quality. For we enjoy and value sublime objects and environments not in spite of but because of the fact that they threaten


human flourishing and yield painful affects. 14 The characteristically ‘mixed’ pleasure that sublime experiences afford is neither the revolting excitement of (for instance) spectators of public executions nor the wonder of scientific discovery, but contemplative joy derived from over-whelming natural objects, which owe their genuine appeal not to some voyeuristic satisfaction or cognitive apprehension, but to their unfath-omable power and noble grandeur. 15

In the present study, then, Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory is expounded and revised so that it engages with and (I hope) aids in solving problems in contemporary aesthetics. In particular, I will high-light the importance of Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime in terms of its psychological, existential, and metaphysical significance.

The book is organised, more specifically, as follows. It consists of three parts. The first part comprises Chapters 1 and 2, and centres on Schopenhauer’s theory of aesthetic contemplation and its relation to his metaphysics and epistemology. Chapter 1 considers the pessimistic nature of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, its emphasis on the problem of suffering in life, and its relation to his aesthetic theory, more specifically, his account of aesthetic pleasure and artistic creativity. It discusses the Platonic motivation of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics: its persistent search for something more real than the ever-changing realm of phenomena, namely ‘better consciousness’ and timeless Ideas, which artists and aesthetic spectators can mirror in a state of painless, will-less tranquillity and through which they can transcend personal suffering.

Chapter 2 focuses on a much overlooked topic in Schopenhauer scholarship: Schopenhauer’s theory of sensory perception. The complex arguments with which Schopenhauer attempts to establish a natural-ised revision of Kant’s epistemology and a ‘hierarchy of the senses’ are expounded and criticised in detail. Empirical cognition is then contrasted with aesthetic perception and cognition. It is argued that, even though Schopenhauer’s appeal to Platonic Ideas to account for the value of art and aesthetic contemplation is superfluous, his theory of aesthetic perception surpasses Kant’s analysis of aesthetic pleasure in a number of important ways.

Part II consists of three chapters, which explore and revise Schopenhauer’s account of the two most prominent types of aesthetic experience: the beautiful and the sublime. Chapter 3 is devoted to showing how Schopenhauer transforms Kant’s theory of disinterested pleasure into an aesthetic attitude theory. Not only does Schopenhauer adapt this Kantian notion to his own metaphysical purposes, he also changes its scope considerably by applying it not merely to the pleasure

Introduction 9

on which a judgment of beauty is based (as was the case in Kant) but also to the mental state of the contemplating subject. Schopenhauer fails to prove, however, that the contemplative state of ‘will-lessness’, as he describes it, is required in all varieties of the experience of beauty.

Given the influence of Kant on Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime, a considerable part of Chapter 4 is devoted to Kant’s analysis of the mathematical and dynamic varieties of the judgment about the sublime in nature. Kant offers a sophisticated philosophical under-standing of the concept, strongly emphasising its moral foundation and significance. The main aim of this chapter is, however, devoted to arguing that Kant’s analysis of the mathematical and dynamical varie-ties of the sublime is deeply flawed, and that Schopenhauer’s account is in many important ways superior to his predecessor’s. Unlike Kant, and despite its shortcomings, Schopenhauer’s profoundly relational account succeeds in rehabilitating the purely aesthetic credentials of the sublime, by attaching rightful importance to the sensory, existential, and affective nature and significance of this kind of aesthetic experience. In spite of its vital merits as an aesthetic analysis, however, Schopenhauer’s theory stands in need of substantial extension and revision.

In Chapter 5, therefore, I shall develop a revisionary account of Schopenhauer’s doctrine, based upon recent insights and hypoth-eses in neuropsychology and philosophy of mind. Drawing on recent research concerning simulating brain activity and imaginative identi-fication, I offer an alternative psychological account, which centres on low-level simulation of and empathy with aesthetic objects, and which provides, I hope, a more viable explanation of sublime pleasure than Schopenhauer’s theory does.

In the third and final part of this book, Chapters 6 and 7 address two topics which establish its relevance for contemporary philosophy of value. The general aim of Chapter 6 is to show that Schopenhauer’s account of tragedy in terms of sublimity is marred by its focus on the ethical value of ‘denying will to life’ ( Verneinung des Willens zum Leben ), which not only affects its purely aesthetic and a fortiori its sublime char-acter but also unfortunately downplays the genuinely affirmative poten-tial of sublime experiences.

In Chapter 7, the final chapter of the book, I consider some of the more general philosophical implications of the experience of the sublime. By using and modifying some of Schopenhauer’s basic observations, this chapter seeks to develop the sublime into a viable aesthetic concept with a broader metaphysical significance. By humbling and simultaneously exalting us, the sublime may enable us (or so I shall argue) to embrace pain


and suffering, to affirm that which is larger than us and larger than life, and radically adjust our attitude towards ourselves and the world – thus pointing to the path towards the sacred. The experience of the sublime shows that suffering is not a pointless aspect of life, to be eschewed at all costs – but a necessary part of a meaningful, redemptive whole.

Notes

1 . For an excellent overview of several important accounts of the sublime in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, including Schopenhauer’s, see Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 9–114.

2 . Apart from the discussion on tragedy in Chapter 6, I will stay clear of the intricate issue of whether art can be sublime. Schopenhauer does mention a few artistic examples, such as the Egyptian pyramids, St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and the dome of St Paul’s in London, but discussing this issue prop-erly would require a whole new book. Although the concept of the sublime was originally rhetorical and stylistic, it came to lose these foundations and natural examples have become paradigmatic. For attempts to develop (neo-Kantian) accounts of the sublime in art, see Kirk Pillow, Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Robert Wicks, ‘Kant on Fine Art: Sublimity Shaped by Beauty’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, 1995, 189–193, and Bart Vandenabeele, ‘Kant, the Mannerist and the Matterist Sublime’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 49, 2015, 31–49. For interesting arguments why artworks cannot be sublime, see Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 117–147.

3 . See Moses Mendelssohn, ‘On the Sublime and the Naïve in the Fine Sciences’ (1758), in Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195.

4 . Actually, the distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime goes back to similar distinctions made by other thinkers before Kant, such as Alexander Gerard, Moses Mendelssohn, and also Alexander Baumgarten, who distinguishes between the sublime of natural and moral magnitude. See also Paul Guyer, ‘The German Sublime after Kant’, in Timothy M. Costelloe, ed., The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 102–103.

5 . Kant’s examples of sublime objects include objects that can be both mathemati-cally and dynamically sublime. See Robert R. Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 67.

6 . Chapter 4 offers a detailed account of Kant’s theory of the sublime and discusses its merits and many flaws. Unless otherwise indicated, references to Kant are to his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). References are to the respective volume and page numbers of the Akademie-Ausgabe, as listed in the Bibliography. Translations are my own, but they are based on Critique of Judgment , trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). I have also consulted Critique of the Power of Judgment , edited by Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Introduction 11

7 . I offer a detailed discussion of Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s differing views on the sublime in my ‘Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 37, 2003, 90–106. For a more recon-ciliatory account, see Chapter 7.

8 . Friedrich Schiller’s important account of the sublime, which is heavily influenced by Kant, stresses the feeling of independence from our sensuous nature. This aspect of the sublime is obviously also central to Schopenhauer’s account, but unlike Kant and Schiller, Schopenhauer rightly insists that this does not entail discovering the independence and superiority of a rational self. For Schiller’s thoughts on the sublime, see his essays ‘On the Sublime’ and ‘Concerning the Sublime’ in Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, eds, Essays (New York: Continuum, 1993), 22–44 and 70–85 respectively. For a detailed analysis of Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime and its relation to Kant, see Chapter 4 of the present book.

9 . Sandra Shapshay has argued that Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime ought to be considered ‘as a transformation of rather than as a real departure from the Kantian explanation’ (italics in the original). See Sandra Shapshay, ‘Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian Sublime’, in Richard Aquila, ed., Kantian Review 17, 2012, 479. Throughout the remainder of the present book, it will become obvious that I believe this to be a gross distortion of Schopenhauer’s aims.

10 . And, hence, of my will, for ‘my body and my will are one’ (WWR I, 102). 11 . This clearly has a Kantian ring to it, but it is also reminiscent of pre-Kantian

empiricist theories, such as those of Alexander Gerard, Lord Kames, Archibald Alison, and Dugald Stewart, which stress that the sublime challenges us to take in immensity or vastness and that the pleasure associated with it makes us aware of our own ‘lofty’ capacities.

12 . See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful , ed., J.T. Boulton (New York: Routledge, 2008), 134. For a discussion of Burke’s physiological theory of the sublime, see: Paul Crowther, ‘The Existential Sublime: From Burke’s Aesthetics to the Socio-Political’, in Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 115–133; Vanessa Ryan, ‘The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason’, Journal of the History of Ideas 62, 2001, 265–279; and Richard Shusterman, ‘Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime’, British Journal of Aesthetics 45, 2005, 323–341. See also Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 98.

13 . See Alex Neill, ‘Schopenhauer on Tragedy and the Sublime’, in Bart Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 206–218; Bart Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer on Aesthetic Understanding and the Values of Art’, European Journal of Philosophy 16, 2008, 194–210, and Bart Vandenabeele, ‘Aesthetic Solidarity “after” Kant and Lyotard’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 42, 2008, 17–30.

14 . That sublime objects and environments are not conducive to human flour-ishing and survival is also paramount, because it renders an explanation of their aesthetic appeal in evolutionary terms highly implausible.

15 . As Emily Brady suggests in her book on the sublime, ‘scientific knowledge can enable us to understand many things greater than ourselves, such as the


Milky Way, but nevertheless a feeling of the ungraspable may remain; that feeling is part of the metaphysical aspect of the sublime experience which goes along with being overwhelmed’ (italics in the original). See Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 197. For more on the environmental signifi-cance of the sublime, see the final chapter of that book. I discuss the exis-tential and metaphysical values of the experience of the sublime in the final chapter of the present book.

Part I

Aesthetic Contemplation

15

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 pessi-mistic account and argues that his idea of aesthetic, will-less contempla-tion 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

1 Pessimism, Aesthetic Experience, and Genius


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 neces-sary 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 uncon-cern 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

Pessimism, Aesthetic Experience, and Genius 17

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 indi-vidual 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 happi-ness 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 posi-tively. 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 point-less 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 explic-itly recommends the denial of the will, for willing is what we essen-tially 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 transforma-tion 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 main-tains 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 resigna-tion’ with a (stoic) effort to tolerate misfortunes and frustrations in an unmoved, undisturbed way. Although Schopenhauer recognises stoi-cism 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 resigna-tion 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 exist-ence 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 rela-tion of knowing and willing in man; hence it comes suddenly, as if flying in from without. Therefore, the Church calls it the effect of grace ... the effect of the quieter is ultimately an act of the freedom of the will. In consequence of such an effect of grace, man’s whole inner nature is fundamentally changed and reversed, so that he no longer wills anything of all that he previously willed so intensely; thus a new man, so to speak, takes the place of the old. (WWR I, 404)

The self-elimination of the will, which brings about a complete ‘abne-gatio sui ipsius’ and, as it were, a ‘new birth’ originates from intuitive insight into the inevitability of suffering, and not from rational consid-erations. It is rather some sort of conversion or regeneration, which he describes as ‘the abolition of the character’, through which our will to life is switched off. The effect of this ‘grace’ is immediate: we do not try to extinguish our response to motives, but the trying part of us surren-ders completely and becomes disabled by our insight into the ubiquity of suffering and the delusion of individual existence. 8 This metaphysical insight directly touches, tranquillises, and extinguishes our will to life. This insight does not offer merely an escape from the dominance of willing – as is the case (as we shall see) in aesthetic contemplation – but involves the elimination of the willing self altogether, hence, complete self-denial, which essentially involves reaching a state in which we ulti-mately become indifferent to our own well-being. We ‘see through’ the


principium individuationis to the world of the thing-in-itself. There are, however, several problems with Schopenhauer’s account of the self-abolishment of will.

Flaws in Schopenhauer’s pessimistic account

One of the problems is that a direct influence of such deep insights will not necessarily produce indifference to our strivings and desires. That we start losing interest in active living because of having arrived at the insight that misfortune and suffering are inevitable in life, does not necessarily imply that we will become indifferent to our desires. As noted above, complete resignation does not merely involve no longer striving for certain objects to satisfy our desires. Starving oneself, as the ascetic does, does not automatically lead toward his being indifferent to his feeling hungry, although he may be fully convinced that suffering is necessary to all life. On Schopenhauer’s account, the thought that suffering is inevitable somehow creates a certain kind of indifference to it – but that will not necessarily always be the case.

As said, Schopenhauer is convinced that a permanent state of happi-ness is unachievable to us, since happiness coincides with satisfying our desires and satisfaction is only temporary: new desires will crop up that demand to be satisfied, leading to new frustrations, and so on. Moreover, possession of one’s desired object takes away its charm (see WWR II, 540). Because of this peculiar view of the inevitability of unhappiness, Schopenhauer resorts to an ethics of resignation. However, his pessi-mistic view of human happiness gives rise to several questions. 9

First of all, we may ask whether human happiness always necessarily coincides with the pleasure we take in satisfying our desires. Couldn’t something (or someone) make us happy, even though it does not contin-ually offer us pleasure? To give some examples, someone can perfectly maintain that he is happy when running a marathon, although he is suffering tremendously when doing this. And can’t we be perfectly happy in a relationship, even though our dearest gets on our nerves from time to time? Identifying happiness with pleasure, and the thought that true happiness involves being in a state of permanent pleasure, is hardly convincing. For we enjoy not merely satisfying our desires, but also our overcoming certain (often self-imposed) challenges, resistances, or hindrances.

A second worry concerns Schopenhauer’s association of desire with a lack and his belief that our awareness of an unsatisfied desire is neces-sarily painful. Is it not rather often the case that we feel pleasure not


merely when a desire is satisfied but also when looking forward to the moment that our desire will be satisfied? For instance, the pleasure we sense at the thought that, next week, we will finally make that trip we have saved for over such a long time? Looking forward to the trip is not so much frustrating as rather exciting. Contra Schopenhauer, even states of unfulfilled desires do not necessarily imply suffering.

A third worry is that Schopenhauer’s hedonic view of happiness is misguided. Schopenhauer seems to suppose that everything that is, even to the slightest, mingled with suffering is necessarily worthless and that, when we make up the balance of life and notice that there is more pain than pleasure, then nothing else is right but renouncing life and willing. 10 To Schopenhauer, the absence of pain appears to be an end in itself. This is characteristic of his (flawed) hedonism: if everything that is valuable in life ultimately coincides with the absence of suffering and the pres-ence of pleasure, then everything which involves pain and suffering is doomed to be worthless. Yet are painful experiences – such as practising sports, creating an artwork, coming to terms with one’s shortcomings, and so on – really necessarily without any value? Are pleasurable experi-ences the only possible values in life? Cannot certain activities or experi-ences have intrinsic value(s), which cannot be reduced to the arousal of pleasure? And if, as Schopenhauer argues, we never actually feel pleasure but only the cessation of pain, does it not follow, then, that everything will ultimately be worthless, even the fulfilment of our desires, which we supposedly experience merely negatively?

Yet Schopenhauer assumes that suffering is inevitable and that the value of existence is a function of the amount of pleasure and suffering in it. The only hope there might be, is that understanding this will cleanse and even redeem us, and thus gain access to a wholly different exist-ence, which Buddhists, Hindus, and Christians have all characterised in their own way and which will liberate us from our suffering and willing. Schopenhauer’s radical resolution to suffering involves no less than abol-ishing our ‘real self’. That this could be the only genuine alternative to total despair may well be Schopenhauer’s most pessimistic thought.

Such a morose view of life and man could make one believe that Schopenhauer recommends ending life as soon as possible by committing suicide. Nothing could be further from the truth. For Schopenhauer actually points out that ending your life does not solve the problem of suffering: you yourself are no longer there, but this does not end suffering in the world. On the contrary even, the person committing suicide is really someone who robs himself of life because he ultimately wills life but not its sorrows. He is fond of life


but wants to get rid of his own (miserable) life circumstances. The suicide presupposes (wrongly, in Schopenhauer’s view) that existence becomes valuable only by striving for goals and fulfilling desires. In a certain sense, Schopenhauer’s pessimism reaches its uncanny culmi-nation (or low point) in his diagnosis of suicide as a failed attempt to overcome suffering. The suicidal person does not manage to stop willing, and that is why he stops living. His ‘mistake’ is thus that he does not recognise that his life conditions are not responsible for his pain and suffering, but that pain and suffering are essential to life as such and pervade every individual manifestation of the will to life. Suicidal persons expect too much from life: they will life so desper-ately that they will the cessation of their own individual existence. He or she wills life, but cannot accept the specific deplorable conditions of his or her individual existence, and hence desires to end it.

The only true solution that Schopenhauer offers is, as we have seen, no less radical. Those who eventually succeed in accepting Schopenhauer’s truth, that the reason why we suffer is in what we ultimately are, namely willing individuals, will have to acknowledge that the only way really to escape suffering is somehow in overcoming this limited individual standpoint. If we succeed in this, Schopenhauer argues, we become a pure subject of knowing and obtain the valuable insight that everything is ultimately one and the same will, and that, as long as we remain willing individuals, happiness will pass us by. Hence, we shall have to treasure those privileged moments in which our will is suspended or abolished. Paradoxically, only by suspending our own egoistic cravings, which causes our pain and suffering, can we continue to live in a meta-physically ‘right’ way. For only be denying our own will can we start living as pure subjects that identify with and continue to affirm the metaphysical will to life itself. To stop identifying with our own inter-ests, needs, and passions, and to devote our attention to the unique way in which an object presents itself to us may be an exquisite, preliminary step towards such a privileged peaceful state: this is what happens in aesthetic contemplation.

Aesthetic contemplation and Platonic Ideas

One of Schopenhauer’s key thoughts is that perceiving something aesthetically presupposes that our merely personal interests in it are suspended and we focus exclusively on the way in which the object – a natural phenomenon, artefact, or artwork – presents itself to us . Whilst we spend the largest part of our lives looking for objects that can


satisfy our desires, the beauty of a landscape, novel, string quartet, or painting creates the opportunity to admire the unique way in which things present themselves to us. On such occasions, Schopenhauer says, ‘we relinquish the ordinary way of considering things, and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of suffi-cient reason merely their relations to one another, whose final goal is always the relation to our own will. Thus we no longer consider the where, the when, the what, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what ’ (WWR I, § 34, 178). When enjoying the beauty of Mozart’s Requiem , for instance, our attention is not focused on some interest or use the music may have for us, but exclusively on the performance of that particular Requiem as such. My aesthetic interest is, as Kant said, itself disinterested. It may be compared to the way in which we are interested in a person that we deeply love: if I look tenderly at this person, because he or she might offer me a job, for instance, this is hardly a case of disinterested love. In that case this person could be easily replaced by another, who could serve my interest as well. However, when I truly love someone, I am interested only in this unique, irreplaceable person. No other person would ‘do just as well’.

Schopenhauer thus characterises aesthetic interest as a state of consciousness that is not disturbed by self-interest and loses itself entirely in the present object. He overstates his case here: for, surely, not every aesthetic contemplation demands that ‘we forget our individ-uality, our will, and continue to exist as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object’ (WWR I, 178). None the less, Schopenhauer’s contention that pure aesthetic feelings cannot be reduced to satisfying our desires remains plausible. Even though most forms of aesthetic pleasure might ultimately never be wholly unconditional, since they fulfil our need for security and harmony, there still remains a difference between the way in which we consider objects in daily life that enable us to fulfil our needs, desires, and wants and the way in which we engage aesthetically with objects, that is, when we no longer consider them as mere means for us but as ‘ends in themselves’.

Far less convincing is Schopenhauer’s view that losing ourselves in aesthetic contemplation results in no longer attending to the individual object, but getting to know its Platonic Idea, that is, its eternal, universal essence. Schopenhauer is adamant that both subject and object then ‘no longer stand in the stream of time and all other relations. It is then all the same whether we see the setting sun from a prison or from a palace’ (WWR I, 197).


If we take Schopenhauer’s thought literally, then it is just nonsen-sical. To admire something aesthetically does not imply at all that I no longer perceive the particular, unique features of it. On the contrary, my aesthetic interest is attached solely to the specific, ‘singular’ proper-ties of a certain object. Enjoying this particular sunrise in Cape Town does not guarantee my enjoying another sunset as much. Or, to take an example from Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Aesthetics to clarify this: I am listening to a Beethoven string quartet; my friend Jill enters my room, starts playing another CD by, say, Haydn, telling me to ‘try this instead, this will do as well’. 11 Jill obviously doesn’t understand a thing about the peculiarity of my interest. She wrongly presupposes that my aesthetic interest for the Beethoven quartet will be satisfied by any other piece. If I merely wanted to listen to some music to relax a bit, then Jill would have been right: work by Haydn (or by Mozart, Schubert, Leonard Cohen, and so on) could have helped me to relax, just as taking a bike ride or a nice warm bath could. However, my interest for this specific Beethoven quartet is purely aesthetic and it is exclusively devoted to this specific quartet in itself. It is thus irreplaceable. As Schopenhauer justly contends, my attentiveness is directed wholly towards this object , and not towards any personal advantage, use, or therapeutic effect it may offer. My attention is completely devoted to the way in which this very object presents itself to me.

From this it does not follow, however, that – as Schopenhauer never-theless suggests (WWR I, 197) – I no longer consider the object in its singularity but as an instance of the Platonic Idea of its species. The example Schopenhauer himself gives, that of Dutch still life paintings, which ‘set up a lasting monument of ... spiritual peace’, is telling (ibid.). Contrary to what Schopenhauer seems to suggest, such paintings are not primarily concerned with an objective characterisation of timeless universals, but with a detailed study of individual objects, environments, and situations that seem, on the surface, banal. The goal of the painter is not to yield insight into timeless essences of flowers, food, or cutlery, but (amongst other things) to draw our attention to the specific, partic-ular features of things that we usually fail to consider appropriately. What matters is being attentive to the striking singularity of objects for their own sake, and not to eternal, timeless Ideas. Since a Platonic Idea, which is a representation which ‘has laid aside merely the subordinate forms of the phenomenon, all of which we include under the prin-ciple of sufficient reason’, is, in Schopenhauer’s view, the sole proper object of aesthetic contemplation, the import of the singularity of indi-vidual objects to aesthetic contemplation is sadly ignored. Instead, he


one-sidedly focuses upon ‘the most adequate objecthood possible of the will’, that is to say, idealised representations that surpass the ‘opacity’ of particular things which can only be apprehended through the ‘subordi-nate forms’ of the principle of sufficient reason (WWR I, 175).

Schopenhauer interestingly adds that an Idea ‘develops in him who has grasped it representations that are new as regards the concept of the same name’ (WWR I, 235) – which is clearly reminiscent of Kant’s defi-nition of the aesthetic idea in the Critique of Judgment as ‘a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which ... no determinate concept can be adequate’ (§ 49, 5:314). 12 Yet, contra Kant, Schopenhauer sets up a contrast between ordinary cognition, which is imperfect for being subordinate to the will and the forms of the prin-ciple of sufficient reason, and aesthetic cognition which is ‘pure’ and ‘unclouded’, that is to say, yields clear insight into the ‘grades of objec-tification of that one will, of the true thing-in-itself’, thus into Platonic Forms or Ideas (WWR I, § 32, 175). 13

A more charitable way to interpret Schopenhauer’s views, however, is to take his Platonic considerations not as literal and focus upon the phenomenology of aesthetic consciousness which he offers. We need not interpret Schopenhauer’s view of aesthetic experience too meta-physically then, and can take it rather as a psychological theory.

As said, Schopenhauer characterises the fundamental elements of aesthetic contemplation in Platonic terms. Perceiving an object aestheti-cally implies the apprehension of timeless Platonic Ideas. Schopenhauer follows Plato in arguing that Ideas exist in reality. They are not concepts, but the most adequate manifestations (or ‘objectifications’, as he calls them) of the thing-in-itself, the will. 14 They are universal essences of nature awaiting discovery, and conceptual thinking is not able to grasp them. They can only be apprehended through imaginative perception, the ability to ‘see through’ the imperfect phenomena and grasp the inner essences of things. This is perhaps unnecessarily misleading, for in aesthetic contemplation one’s attention is not necessarily devoted to universal forms, of which the particular objects are incomplete manifes-tations. On the contrary, as said earlier, one attends to the object in its singularity: I contemplate this object – this sunset, this still life painting, this piano concerto, and so on – as such and merely for its own sake. If we succeed in this, our perception is no longer governed by our will, that is, our desires, urges, and needs. Appreciating something aestheti-cally implies that I no longer consider the object as something that can serve my individual needs and interests. The individual object will not therefore disappear from my consciousness, but it is in and through my


intense attentiveness to it that a universal meaning may be discovered. Inspired by Plato and Kant, Schopenhauer rightly suggests that aesthetic values, and especially beauty, do not express merely personal prefer-ences but invest objects with a peculiar significance. Beauty challenges us to capture and assess the exceptional meaning an object has for us. We do not have to agree with Schopenhauer that we perceive Platonic Ideas in aesthetic contemplation to understand that aesthetic values are inextricably entwined with the peculiar meaning of things – things that challenge us to explore and deepen our lives in their light.

Schopenhauer also exaggerates, when he advances that we lose ourselves completely in the object that we perceive (see WWR I, 178–179; I, 185–186). Surely, not every aesthetically valuable appreciation implies the radical self-loss which Schopenhauer seems to have in mind. Nor will every aesthetic appraisal be accompanied by an awareness of time-lessness. Nevertheless aesthetic contemplation requires us, as it were, to devote ourselves wholly to the object as such and to become temporarily immune to our surroundings: only the sonnet, the painting, or the film as such interests us, and it does this for its own sake. We stop consid-ering the causal connections the object has with other objects or other personal interests. During aesthetic contemplation we are not interested in ourselves but in the very object before us. This sense of ‘self-loss’, which Schopenhauer nevertheless heavily emphasises, cannot be a sufficient condition for having an aesthetic experience. Aesthetic expe-rience does require that we temporarily cast aside our self-interest and, as it were, surrender to the object. Temporarily suspending our interests, needs, and desires does not, however, preclude us from returning to our individual interests, experiences, and emotions in aesthetic contempla-tion. Surely, claiming that in aesthetic contemplation our perception is completely detached from our will and ‘that the consciousness of our own selves vanishes’ (WWR II, 368) is an overstatement.

Now, Schopenhauer’s attempt to undermine Plato’s critique of the illu-sory nature of art, by pointing out that art does offer insight into eternal timeless universals, is – as said – hardly plausible as a general charac-terisation of the value of art and beauty. None the less, Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the cognitive value of art, that is, the knowledge and insights works of art may yield, is hugely important. For one of the reasons why we value works of art, such as Shakespeare’s King Lear , Flaubert’s Madame Bovary , and Munch’s Scream , is that they offer us captivating and valuable insights into human relations and emotions. Those usually differ considerably, however, from the kind of knowledge we gain from science and philosophy. Philosophers and scientists offer


propositional knowledge: one can formulate it as propositions that express what is the case (e.g., as ‘A is B’). Yet the insights works of art yield are usually tied up with specific experiences that cannot be reduced to propositions. And even though some artworks express experiences that can be formulated as propositions, artworks still connect with, for instance, the peculiar, non-propositional way in which someone expe-riences certain emotions or ideas. The existential fear that the Munch painting depicts, has been conveyed through propositions by philoso-phers such as Kierkegaard and Sartre, but Munch shows us none the less in a unique, non-propositional way what it is to be overwhelmed by such an emotion. The painting’s expression enables us to gain insight into the emotion of fear; or, rather, into what it is like to experience such an emotion. 15 Schopenhauer thus rightly insists that art can have cognitive value. Less convincing, though, is the Platonic way in which he aims to respond to Plato’s worries about the damaging effects of art. Schopenhauer rightly establishes that artistic knowledge is non-propo-sitional – Platonic Ideas are not concepts – but he passes over the close relation between expression and the expressed, the depicted and the depiction, as well as the fact that artworks do not necessarily convey timeless universals. The disturbing knowledge we acquire through the psychotic main character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) does not (merely) reveal eternal Ideas but crucial aspects of certain pathologies, on the basis of which we gain insight into the darker aspects of the human mind and the suffocating atmosphere that characterises several parent-child relationships. Instead of offering immediate access to time-less essences, many works of art yield experiential knowledge of histori-cally situated events, characters, views, and emotions. This does not preclude valuing works of art because of the universal truths about man and world which they convey. However, an aesthetic experience is not merely cognitive.

Will-lessness, objectivity, and genius

According to Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience is characterised by the contemplating subject’s awareness of an allegedly pleasurable state of ‘will-lessness’. In aesthetic contemplation the will no longer dominates us, so that we can perceive things ‘objectively’. Schopenhauer describes the state of will-lessness as a state of bliss, in which we seem to become an eye of the world ( Weltauge ) that loses itself completely in the object under contemplation. This temporary self-loss involves a transition from a state of willing, desiring, and needy individuality to a state of


pure objective knowledge. 16 The specific aesthetic pleasure that I thus experience originates from two sources. First of all, I realise that my will no longer dominates me: I feel liberated from the burden of willing – this is the ‘negative’ aspect of aesthetic pleasure. Furthermore, I take pleasure in the insight into the essence of the perceived object – this is a form of ‘positive’ (cognitive) pleasure, which is not reducible to the feeling of liberation from the pain or suffering the will causes. This latter form of pleasure indeed originates from the ‘objective’ knowledge of the timeless Idea that the object instantiates:

Knowledge of the beautiful always supposes, simultaneously and inseparably, a pure knowing subject and a known Idea as object. But yet the source of aesthetic enjoyment will lie sometimes rather in the apprehension of the known Idea, sometimes rather in the bliss and peace of mind of pure knowledge free from all willing, and thus from all individuality and the pain that results therefrom. (WWR I, 212)

Several commentators discover remnants from Kant’s aesthetics in ‘the bliss and peace of mind ... free from all willing’, for this clearly reminds of Kantian disinterested judgment. Nietzsche and Heidegger, amongst others, have linked Schopenhauer’s aesthetics of will-lessness with Kant’s emphasis upon the disinterested nature of aesthetic pleasure and judgment. The relation between Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is, however, as we shall see, much more complicated than has often been assumed. 17

Simplifying hugely, Schopenhauer’s characterisation of aesthetic experience could be summarised as ‘will-less contemplation of timeless Ideas’. Schopenhauer describes the subject of aesthetic contemplation as a ‘pure mirror’ of the world (see WWR II, 367 and passim ). This does not apply merely to the aesthetic spectator but also to the artist, which Schopenhauer refers to as the ‘genius’. The genius stands for something impersonal, not an individual being that has merely personal relations but ‘a pure intellect that as such belongs to the whole of mankind’, and that ‘has become unfaithful to its destiny’, which is the service of the will (WWR II, 390; 386). For, unlike ordinary people, artists are able to remain in a state of pure will-less contemplation and to leave entirely out of sight their own interests, willing, and aims, and ‘to remain pure knowing subject , the clear eye of the world; and this not merely for moments, but with the necessary continuity and conscious thought’ which enables them to express their insights into artworks (WWR I, 185–186). Geniuses have an unnatural capacity for heightened perception: they see with


more detail, intensity, and accuracy, which allows them to create imagi-native artworks that relay timeless universal Ideas. The genius also has the capacity to distract from the immediate connections between things and ‘express clearly what nature merely stammers’ (WWR I, 222).

As one commentator has emphasised, the genius’s power to tear away cognition from the service of the will – his ‘thoughtful awareness’, Besonnenheit – has a paradoxical role to fulfil in both the apprehension of the timeless essence of things and the execution of the artwork (see WWR I,178; 195; WWR II, 384–388). 18 For it is hard to understand how thoughtful awareness could offer both an escape from willing, which allows for pure aesthetic contemplation, and the purposeful, hence will-driven activity of conveying the perception of timeless Ideas through a work of art. In order to weaken this paradox, Schopenhauer also stresses the importance of the artist’s imaginative capacities ( Phantasie , as he calls it) to account for the activity of expressing – instead of merely conveying – the perceived Ideas in a work of art. Schopenhauer is surely right to refrain from reducing artworks to mere replicas of universal essences, and to put great emphasis on the expressive function of imagi-nation , which allows artists to see in things not merely ‘what nature has actually formed, but what she endeavoured to form, yet failed to bring about’ and ‘to complete, arrange, amplify, fix, retain, and repeat at pleasure all the significant pictures of life ... . On this rests the high value of imagination as an indispensable instrument of genius’ (WWR I, 86; WWR II, 379). The paradoxical foundations of Schopenhauer’s view of aesthetic contemplation none the less remain intact: whilst the imagi-native execution of a work of art, where the purpose is to express time-less perceptions through particular representations, cannot take place without the activity of will, and is hence subordinate to the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, genius still consists in a decided predomi-nance of pure knowing over willing, that is, the capacity to neglect knowl-edge according to the principle of sufficient reason, in order to grasp the inner essences of things. And this ability, in its turn, presupposes ‘that purely objective frame of mind’, which allows becoming ‘a clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of percep-tion’ (WWR I, 178–179). Hence, both the artist and the lover of natural beauty and art are ultimately spectators that are capable of momentarily transcending their limited individual point of view. Summarisingly put, in Schopenhauer’s view, in aesthetic contemplation awareness of the


object is intensified to such an extent that consciousness of my own self disappears, which offers a release from the pressures of the will and I ‘continue to exist only as pure subject’ (WWR I, 178). 19

It is to the several important ways in which pure, aesthetic percep-tion differs from ordinary, will-driven perception that I now turn, in the following chapter of this study.

Notes

1 . In the passage just quoted, Schopenhauer writes that ‘the course of his life ... should be of endless duration or of constant recurrence ’ (italics added). The German original has ‘immer neuer Wiederkehr’, which seems to have inspired Nietzsche’s famous doctrine of eternal recurrence. See Christopher Janaway, Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 91. See also Ken Gemes and Christopher Janaway, ‘Life-Denial and Life-Affirmation: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on Pessimism and Asceticism’, in Bart Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 284.

2 . See also WWR I, 326–327; I, 362; I, 390; I, 398; I, 404–405; II, 239. 3 . For a more elaborate summary of Schopenhauer’s argument, see Gemes and

Janaway, ‘Life-Denial versus Life-Affirmation’, 287–288. 4 . See WWR II, 605: ‘In fact, nothing else can be stated as the aim of our exist-

ence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist’. 5 . Matthias Kossler argues against a ‘nihilistic’ reading of Schopenhauer’s

doctrine of the denial of the will in ‘Schopenhauers Soteriologie’, in Oliver Hallich and Matthias Kossler, eds, Arthur Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 189. Interestingly, Kossler contends that Schopenhauer really attempted to offer an antidote against the nihilism that he saw arising with the dominance of the modern scientific world view. Indeed, it is hard to deny Schopenhauer’s concern with salvation. Actually, the problem is not that he (rightly) fought against ‘unscrupulous optimism’, but that the only kind of genuine salvation he acknowledges is overly gloomy, as it involves radically renouncing the will to life.

6 . Bernard Reginster argues that ‘the elusiveness of fulfilment is to be blamed on the world around us, rather than on the nature of our own will. But it is hard to see how this knowledge could induce us to renounce this will itself, rather than merely its pursuits in a world inhospitable to them: for there is nothing wrong with our will, in the final analysis, but there is something wrong with the world.’ See Bernard Reginster, ‘Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner’, in Bart Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 356. Reginster’s opposition between will and world is hardly convincing, however, since for Schopenhauer the world is will. The world is the manifestation (or ‘mirror’) of the will in (or as) representation, and the will is constantly tempted to manifest itself in or as the world of repre-sentation. Therefore, it seems to me that Schopenhauer consistently blames the inevitability of unhappiness on the ‘inner conflict’ of the will (see WWR I, 397), and reserves the term ‘summum bonum’ (albeit metaphorically) for ‘the complete self-effacement and denial of the will’ (WWR I, 362).


7 . Christopher Janaway, ‘Schopenhauer’s Pessimism’, in Christopher Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 339.

8 . See Gemes and Janaway, ‘Life-Denial versus Life-Affirmation’, 286. See also Roger Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 129.

9 . For a more detailed critique of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, see Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche , trans. Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), espe-cially chapter 4.

10 . In fact, Schopenhauer appears to hold that the slightest occurrence of any suffering at all invalidates the world, for ‘it is quite superfluous to dispute whether there is more good or evil in the world; for the mere existence of evil decides the matter, since evil can never be wiped off, and consequently can never be balanced, by the good that exists along with or after it’ (WWR II, 576).

11 . See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 235: ‘If I admire a minuet, I can’t say: “Take another. It does the same thing”.’ See also Roger Scruton, Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 20.

12 . Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Kant are taken from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). I have modified this translation where it seemed appropriate. I have also made use of Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment , ed., Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

13 . For a more extended analysis of the distinction between ordinary and aesthetic perception, see Chapter 2 of the present book.

14 . Concepts, Schopenhauer argues, may be useful in life and science but are ‘eternally barren and unproductive in art’ (WWR I, 235).

15 . See Matthew Kieran, Revealing Art (New York: Routledge, 2005), 112–120. 16 . See Bart Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer and the Objectivity of Art’, in

Bart Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 219–233.

17 . See Chapters 3 and 4 of the present study. 18 . See Matthias Kossler, ‘The Artist as Subject of Pure Cognition’, in Vandenabeele,

ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer , 201–202. 19 . Whilst Schopenhauer’s view that in aesthetic experience I give full attention

to the object for its own sake is thus clearly reminiscent of Kantian disinter-estedness, there are considerable differences between both approaches. See Chapter 3 for a more expanded comparison of Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s accounts of aesthetic disinterestedness and beauty.

33

As has been pointed out in the previous chapter, Schopenhauer contends that the whole organic and inorganic world is ultimately governed by an insatiable, blind will. Life as a whole is purposeless: there is no ultimate goal or meaning, for the will is only interested in manifesting itself in (or as ) a myriad of phenomena which we call the ‘world’ or ‘life’. Human life too is nothing but an insignificant product or ‘objectivation’ of a blind, unconscious will, and because our life is determined by willing (i.e. by needs, affects, urges, and desires) and willing is characterised by lack, our life is essentially full of misery and suffering. We are constantly yearning for objects that can satisfy our needs and desires and once we have finally found a way to satisfy one desire, another one crops up and we become restless willing subjects once again, and so on in an endless whirlpool of willing, suffering, momentary satisfaction, boredom, willing again, and so on. Life is not a good thing. The only way, Schopenhauer argues, to escape from these torments of willing is by ‘seeing the world aright’, as Wittgenstein would have it, that is to say, by acknowledging the pointlessness and insignificance of our own willing existence, and ultimately by giving up willing as such – which in fact really means abandoning our own individuality, our own willing selves – which is momentarily possible in aesthetic experiences of beauty and sublimity, and permanently achievable only in the exceptional ethical practices of detachment, mysticism, and asceticism, in which the will to life is even-tually denied and sheer nothingness is embraced – either through harsh suffering or through sainthood.

In this chapter, however, I set out to examine a perhaps somewhat lesser known part of his philosophy, namely his theory of sensory perception and cognition, and explore its connection with his account of aesthetic contemplation. I first expound Schopenhauer’s theories of

2 Sensory Perception and Aesthetic Contemplation


the ‘intellectual’ character of intuitive perception and the hierarchy of the senses, and argue that his analysis of the role of the understanding in perception may be closer to Kant’s than he conceded, but drasti-cally transforms Kant’s transcendental conception of perception and understanding into a more plausible account of sensory perception and empirical cognition. I then contrast this with his account of aesthetic perception and cognition ( ästhetische Anschauung und Erkenntnis ), in which the brain operates detached from our will and offers pure, will-less pleasure. Finally, I argue that Schopenhauer transforms Plato’s idealism into a theory of aesthetic perception and cognition, which rightly claims that aesthetic value is entwined with the value of human cognition.

Perception and understanding

The gist of Schopenhauer’s account of perception is that all intuitive perception ( Anschauung ) is intellectual, that is to say, only through the understanding’s application of the concepts of time, space, and causality can the world ‘stand out as perception extended in space, varying in respect of form, persisting through all time as regards matter’ (WWR I, 12; see also WWR II, 19). The senses alone do not suffice to offer percep-tion, since they ‘furnish nothing but the raw material, and this the understanding first of all works up into the objective grasp and appre-hension of a corporeal world governed by laws, and does so by means of the simple forms ... space, time, and causality. Accordingly, our daily empirical intuitive perception is intellectual ’ (FR, 78). He emphasises none the less that this ‘operation of the understanding ... is not discursive or reflective, nor does it take place in abstracto by means of concepts or words; on the contrary, it is intuitive and quite immediate’ (ibid.).

Schopenhauer uses this view of the ‘intellectual’ nature of perception to argue for the ideality of the perceived world. Schopenhauer proclaims himself to be a true follower of Kant’s transcendental idealism from the first sentence of his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation : ‘The world is my representation.’ Many people have taken this to mean: ‘something does not exist unless it is mental.’ However, this is not what Schopenhauer intends. 1 Schopenhauer’s basic idea is that there is ‘no object without a subject and no subject without an object’. In the first paragraph of The World as Will and Representation , he writes that there is no truth more certain than the truth which states that the whole world is merely an object in relation to a subject. 2 The subject is clearly the ‘supporter of the world, the universal condition of all that appears, of all objects, and it is always presupposed; for whatever exists, exists only for

Sensory Perception and Aesthetic Contemplation 35

the subject’ (WWR I, 5). The subject does not belong to the world, but is, as Kant and Wittgenstein argue, on the edge of the world, and can never become an object of consciousness itself. Like Hume, Schopenhauer suggests that the subject can never be encountered in the world, and praises Descartes, Berkeley, and especially Kant, as the first thinkers to acknowledge the crucial importance of the subject as the unknowable ‘limit’ of the world. 3

He distinguishes his position from scepticism, realism (which he calls ‘dogmatic’), and idealism. Fichte held that the non-ego must be derived from the ego, ‘as the web from the spider’ (WWR I, 33). Whereas Fichte’s idealism ‘makes the object the effect of the subject’ (WWR I, 13), Schopenhauer argues that subject and object necessarily presuppose one another: they are ‘correlative’. 4 Subject and object are not related to each other as cause and effect. The law of causality applies only within the world of representations and objects, and cannot be applied to explain the relation between an object and a subject. Fichte’s idealism unjustly turns the object into the effect ( Wirkung ) of the subject. This is unaccept-able for Schopenhauer, because representation is essentially bipolar, and subject and object imply one other a priori . Schopenhauer (unconvinc-ingly) argues that the world existing as object only exists as represen-tation. 5 The subject-object correlation is presupposed in all cognition, and therefore also in causal knowledge based on the understanding’s principle of sufficient reason:

the perceived world in space and time, proclaiming itself as nothing but causality, is perfectly real, and is absolutely what it appears to be; it appears wholly and without reserve as representation, hanging together according to the law of causality. This is its empirical reality. On the other hand, all causality is only in the understanding and for the understanding. The entire actual, i.e., active, world is therefore always conditioned as such by the understanding, and without this is nothing. ... The whole world of objects is and remains representation, and is for this reason wholly and for ever conditioned by the subject; in other words, it has transcendental ideality. But it is not on that account falsehood or illusion; it presents itself as what it is, as repre-sentation, and indeed as a series of representations, whose common bond is the principle of sufficient reason. (WWR I, 14–15)

Unfortunately, instead of providing arguments, he seems to take this (basically Kantian) position for granted, and confines himself to arguing, against the sceptic, that objects of perception causally interact on us, and


that this causal action exhausts their (empirical) being. As Schopenhauer puts it in the passage just quoted: ‘the perceived world in space and time, proclaiming itself as nothing but causality, is perfectly real, and is absolutely what it appears to be; it appears wholly and without reserve as representation, hanging together according to the law of causality.’ Schopenhauer maintains that complete causal knowledge of objects (of perception) is possible, and that this is all there is to be known about such objects: there is no essence, substrate or whatever ‘underlying’ them – at least not in the world as representation. The phenomenal world is ultimately nothing less than a series of perceptual objects, insofar as they causally act upon us. Thus because the idea of causal agency and the concept of causality is furnished by the understanding, perception is always the product of the understanding, although it is obviously trig-gered by sensations.

Even more worrisome is that he does not merely fail to supply a convincing argument for his transcendental idealism, but also regularly identifies the world as representation with a dream, which seems to lead him to precisely the kind of (Fichtean) idealism he absolutely wanted to avoid. In these passages, Schopenhauer is especially inspired by Plato, Calderon de la Barca, and Shakespeare: waking and dreaming are like pages of one and the same book. 6 Although Schopenhauer tends to describe life as ‘a long dream’, by no means does he deny the existence or reality of the empirical world. 7 Rather than maintaining that the whole of existence is really a dream, Schopenhauer points out that there is no sufficient criterion which enables us absolutely to distinguish dream from reality, except for the empirical fact of waking up. 8 His Kantian-inspired transcendental idealism, which assumes that the epistemic capacities of the subject determine the structure of the phenomenal world, is compatible with empirical realism. Just as in Kant, transcen-dental ideality is combined with the epistemic authenticity of empirical reality. As Schopenhauer puts it in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation : ‘In spite of all transcendental ideality, the objec-tive world retains empirical reality. It is true that the object is not the thing-in-itself; but as empirical object it is real. It is true that space is only in my head; but empirically, my head is in space’ (WWR II, 19).

Schopenhauer agrees with Kant that experience is dependent on the nature of the cognitive faculties and that the world of all actual and potential experience is dependent on the knowing subject, such that the world cannot exist by itself independently of the cognising subject. Schopenhauer calls the theory of realism, which claims that our experi-ence is a perfect copy of the world in itself, an ‘empty castle in the air’,


in which serious philosophers cannot have any faith. 9 That the objec-tive world, the world of objects, would exist independently even if there were no subjects seems prima facie acceptable; however, it is only think-able in abstracto. As soon as one tries to imagine such a world, one ends up in the paradoxical view that what one is imagining is precisely the opposite of what one intends, that is a world free from an imagining subject. 10

Schopenhauer’s arguments are not really very convincing, though: he is right to hold that the representation of a world free from a subject presupposes a subject – for it presupposes my own imagining mind – but not that the independent existence of a world does too. Schopenhauer unjustly relies on the (Berkeleyan) thought that what we can experience can exist only in relation to our experiencing of it.

Schopenhauer does not, however, simply endorse Kant’s famous state-ment that ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’. Although he praises Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic , 11 he is very critical of the way in which Kant deals with intuitive perception. This becomes quite clear from the following crucial excerpt, in which he comments on Kant’s theory of knowledge:

‘Our knowledge’, he says, ‘has two sources, receptivity of impres-sions and spontaneity of concepts: the former is the capacity of receiving representations; the latter is the capacity for knowing an object [ Gegenstand ] through these representations. Through the first an object is given to us, through the second it is thought.’ This is false, for according to this the impression , for which alone we have mere receptivity, which therefore comes from without and alone is really ‘ given ,’ would be already a representation , in fact even an object . But it is nothing more than a mere sensation in the sense-organ, and only by the application of the understanding (i.e. of the law of causality), and of the forms of perception, of space and time, does our intellect convert this mere sensation into a representation. (WWR I, 438–439)

Schopenhauer aims to show that Kant starts with an empirical intuition that is given to us without telling us how this is possible, and without clarifying how exactly the thought that a certain intuition is given can be united with Kant’s Transcendental Logic , which treats the under-standing as the unifying factor of our intuitive perceptions (see WWR I, 437–451). Schopenhauer also takes offence at Kant’s rather confused usage of terms, such as Anschauung , Perzeption , and Wahrnehmung . While he is definitely right to criticise Kant’s vague and occasionally even


ambiguous use of terms like this (see, for instance, the use of the term ‘Perzeption’ in Critique of Pure Reason , A 320/B 376–377), Schopenhauer himself none the less frequently uses the concepts ‘perception’ and ‘intuition’ interchangeably (see, for instance, FR, § 21), and also obvi-ously underestimates Kant’s explicit recognition of the role of under-standing in transforming sensation into perception. Kant further divides objective perception into intuition, which is always immediate, and concept, which is always mediate. Yet, from this, Schopenhauer wrongly concludes that, on Kant’s account, this must imply that the understanding (with its categories) has no crucial role to play in the constitution of perceptual objects.

Schopenhauer characterises the activity of the understanding as phenomenologically ‘immediate’ instead of inferential (or ‘discursive’, as he usually calls it) (see FR, 78; WWR I, 12). The understanding connects subjective sensations ( Empfindungen ) with an external cause. His essay On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason offers a subtle and detailed account of the distinct functions of the understanding. In the case of visual perception, for instance, the understanding makes sure that the visual image, which is basically an affection of the retina, is first reversed; then it is converted to only one perception, further broadened to three dimensions, and, finally, correctly situated in time and space. The most important task of the understanding is to ensure that the subjectively and successively experienced perceptions are held to be the effect of an external cause. This occurs on the basis of the sole category that Schopenhauer retains from Kant’s complex system of the twelve a priori categories, namely causality:

According to Kant’s own and correct discovery, the law of causality is known to us a priori , and is consequently a function of our intellect, and is therefore of subjective origin. ... Therefore the whole of empir-ical intuition thoroughly remains on a subjective ground and basis as a mere happening in us, and nothing from it that is completely different and independent can be brought in as a thing-in-itself, or demonstrated to be a necessary presupposition. (WWR I, 436)

On the basis of the a priori category of space, this affect or sensation in the organism is ascribed to a cause that lies outside the organism. Thus a world of objects is created by the activity of the understanding through the application of the a priori categories of time, space, and causality. The understanding creates a world of objects with the aid of the raw mate-rials which the senses provide. Thus, thanks to this – psychologically


‘immediate’ – activity of the understanding, a world of objects, situated in space-time emerges:

This operation of the understanding ... is not discursive or reflec-tive ... on the contrary, it is intuitive and quite immediate. For only by this operation and consequently in the understanding and for the understanding does the real, objective, corporeal world, filling space in three dimensions, present itself [ stellt sich dar ]; and then it proceeds, according to the same law of causality, to change in time and move in space. Accordingly, the understanding itself has first to create the objective world, for this cannot just step into our heads from without, already cut and dried, through the senses and open-ings of their organs. (FR, 78)

However complex this process may be, it none the less evolves uncon-sciously . The understanding does not have a merely synthetic func-tion that brings together various sense impressions in an image or a bundle of sensations. Intuitive perception is a process, whereby the understanding makes sure that affects or sensations are connected with their respective external causes, so that we become conscious of a world of objects. Phenomenologically, we perceive the objects ‘imme-diately’, that is, without being conscious of the complex activity of the understanding’s supplying the category of causality. After all, many empirical experiments point out that, for instance, what we see is a reversal of the image that the rays of light deliver to the retina. For example, were seeing merely the subjective sensation of the rays of light on the retina, we would have the impression that objects are turned upside down.

Although Schopenhauer’s account of perception and the role of the understanding is quite illuminating, the following critical remarks are in place. First, Schopenhauer unjustly identifies the (subjective) sensations with the physiological elements that he offers to explain their origin and nature. This move is far from evident and ultimately circular. Although the physiological aspects of his theory are interesting, Schopenhauer never actually makes clear how it is possible, for instance, that the mani-fold of the light’s affections upon the retina can provide anything like an ‘image’. To conclude on the basis of the inadequacy of the sensory image that the activity of the understanding – which Schopenhauer identifies physiologically with the brain – is necessary, offers no solid argument against epistemological theories that do not appeal to the constitu-tive role of the understanding, but only a methodological detour with


respect to Kant’s transcendental approach. As Paul Guyer has persua-sively argued, Kant’s transcendental method has now been refined and supplemented by a phenomenological method. 12 Schopenhauer’s claim that sense impressions, considered physiologically, do not correspond with the objective intuition of a world of physical objects, is not an argument for the a priori activity of the understanding, but may as well reveal the deficiencies of such a physiological approach. For that matter, it is important to note that Schopenhauer presupposes that the images in the retina would be those that the physiological subject receives. This cannot be the case, since these ‘double images’ ( Doppelbilder ), which, moreover, are ‘turned upside-down’, are available only to the scientists carrying out the research on visual perception but not to ordinarily perceiving subjects.

Furthermore, the physiological and optical theories that set out to explain what happens when rays of light pass through the eye’s lens do not imply that one perceives upside down images in one manner or another that one must consequently invert. The physiological issue ‘how can we see’ cannot as easily be identified with the epistemological issue concerning the nature of specific abilities and achievements important for the execution of a specific activity, namely seeing, as Schopenhauer seems to suppose.

Finally, how can perceptual objects both be a construct of the subject and provide the causal ground for this subject-related activity? There seems to be a whiff of paradox here again, which can perhaps only be weakened if:

i. the naturalising tendency of this epistemology is abandoned, though Schopenhauer is clearly not inclined to do this; or

ii. one accepts that the physical objects that provide the ‘raw’ material for objective intuitions are fundamentally different from the intui-tions constructed on the basis of sensory perception; or

iii. one is prepared to carry through a complete naturalisation of the power of cognition and dispense with a priori structures altogether.

Schopenhauer would probably answer rather bluntly that the assump-tion of an empirical reality external to the subject is clearly ‘an empty castle in the air’, which serious philosophers cannot rely on (see above). Through its physiological facets Schopenhauer’s theory provides a meritorious supplement to Kant’s epistemology, but the strength of his naturalistic arguments is undermined by persistently defending the transcendental ideality of the world as representation. 13


The senses

Since he believes that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason gives too much attention to pure intuition and abstract judgment and reasoning, Schopenhauer wants to offer a more detailed account of intuitive perception and the role that the senses play in this activity. It is to Schopenhauer’s credit that he develops several interesting physiological hypotheses in connection with sense perception. Without fully admit-ting it, Schopenhauer’s account is clearly inspired by Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and attempts to integrate these more psychological and physiological ideas into his own philosophy of the will. Before broaching his fascinating account of aesthetic perception, we shall first examine his hierarchy of the senses, which is remarkably close to the one Kant expounds in the Anthropology . Here, we shall focus on the senses which Schopenhauer considers to be the ‘most noble’ of all: hearing and sight.

The sense of hearing

Schopenhauer was extremely sensitive to noise, and contends that the less noise one can stand, the more intellectually gifted one is. The amount of noise we can bear is inversely proportionate with intelli-gence. Schopenhauer says that, ‘therefore, when I hear dogs barking unchecked for hours in the courtyard of a house, I know what to think of the mental powers of the inhabitants’ (WWR II, 30).

The relation between intellectual talent and the inability to bear noise – which he perceives in Goethe, Jean Paul, 14 and Kant – is not merely anecdotally interesting. In the first place, this is evident in the pains Schopenhauer takes to corroborate this view with scientific arguments:

[T]he sensation of hearing does not originate in the labyrinth or in the cochlea, but only deep down in the brain where the two auditory nerves meet, through which the impression becomes single. But this is where the pons Varolii encloses the medulla oblongata , and thus at the absolutely lethal spot, by injury to which any animal is instantly killed, and from which the auditory nerve has only a short course to the labyrinth, the seat of the acoustic perception. It is just because its source is here, in this dangerous place, from which all movement of limbs also arises, that we start at a sudden bang. This does not occur at all with a sudden illumination, e.g., a flash of lightning. ... From this origin of the auditory nerve is also explained the great disturbance


that the power of thought suffers through sounds. Because of this disturbance, thinking minds, and people of great intellect generally, are without exception absolutely incapable of enduring any noise. (WWR II, 29)

Schopenhauer spares no effort to corroborate his philosophical ideas through scientific insights. Much less effort does he take to inform the reader about the rather peculiar position that hearing occupies in his account. On the one hand, hearing is, along with sight, the noblest sense; on the other, unlike sight and touch, hearing is not capable of creating an objective intuition with the aid of the understanding. Moreover, hearing is the sense of language and of reason, the faculty of abstract reasoning, and it distracts great minds very easily from their noble art of thinking. 15 This is rather puzzling, and the confusion is only enhanced by Schopenhauer’s assertion that ‘tones can excite pain imme-diately, and can also be directly agreeable sensuously without reference to harmony or melody’ (WWR I, 200). Yet being immediately pleasant or unpleasant is the criterion by which smell and taste are branded as merely subjective senses. Why would this ‘sense of reason’ still be called objective and even ‘noble’, if it immediately brings an affective response along with it?

The sense of sight

Together with Goethe, Schopenhauer carried out important scientific experiments on visual perception and colour, and he even wrote an intriguing but little read work on that theme: On Vision and Colours . In his theory of knowledge, but also in his aesthetics and his ethics, sight and intuition play an incredibly important part. Schopenhauer is without doubt a philosopher of the eye: not only the eye in the biological sense, but also of the mind’s eye. Moreover, visual metaphors abound in his discourse. Metaphors and other figures of speech connected with the eye, with mirrors and mirroring, with images and imaging, with intui-tion and (in)sight, are a true obsession.

Schopenhauer does not, however, offer a consistent and unproblem-atic account of the nature of visual perception. Seeing is sharply distin-guished from the rest of the senses, because the eye, in contrast to the other organs, is not directly connected with the will. In this sense, sight is the aesthetic organ par excellence, because it can be affected without this affection being experienced immediately as pleasant or unpleasant, as is the case in the ‘pure’ pleasure experienced by the sight of beautiful colours:


The wholly immediate, unreflective, yet also inexpressible, pleasure that is excited in us by the impression of colours ... as for example, in stained glass windows, and even more by means of clouds and the reflection at sunset – this pleasure, I say, ultimately rests on the fact that in the easiest manner, in a manner that is almost physically neces-sary, the whole of our interest is here won for knowledge without any excitement of our will. We thus enter into the state of pure knowing, although in the main this consists in this case in a mere sensation of the retina’s affection. But as this sensation is in itself wholly free from pain or pleasure, it is without any direct excitement of the will, and thus belongs to pure knowledge. (WWR II, 375)

Schopenhauer holds that visual perception is the easiest way to be able to experience purely aesthetic pleasure, which is – as we shall see – of a peculiar kind, since it is experienced without the will being stirred, that is, without affect . Unlike the other senses, and by its specific direct sensory activity alone, sight is incapable of calling up a pleasurable or non-pleasurable sensation in the organ; it has no direct connection with the will. 16 Neither hearing nor touch, nor smell or taste, taken in themselves, seem capable of such a neutral affection, for they are too intimately connected with the will to be able to be affected without producing an affect , that is, a sensation of pleasure or displeasure. Apart from the disturbing paradoxes involved in this view, phenomeno-logically speaking, Schopenhauer also suddenly seems unaware of the common experience of the especially painful and unpleasant feeling caused by, for example driving out of a dark tunnel directly into blazing sunlight. However, to Schopenhauer’s defence, one might argue that what Schopenhauer here describes as a neutral affection of the eye, is a possible but not a necessary result of the activity of our eyes. Seeing something may be neutral, in the sense that it is not pleasurable or painful, but that is not necessarily so. On the other hand, one might wonder whether, at least, the sense of hearing might not also be capable of producing the pure aesthetic pleasure that Schopenhauer describes, for instance, when listening to beautiful music.

The philosophically more serious predicament is how to distinguish sight in this manner from the other senses. The privileged position that he clearly ascribes to seeing is contradicted by a remark concerning touch in comparison with hearing:

In the case of hearing, this is different: tones can excite pain immedi-ately, and can also be directly agreeable sensuously without reference


to harmony or melody. Touch, as being one with the feeling of the whole body, is still more subject to this direct influence on the will; and yet there is a touch devoid of pain and pleasure . (WWR I, 199–200; italics added)

In light of the above efforts to sharply distinguish the qualities of sight from the other senses, this is, to say the least, surprising. Here the sense of touch, which is so closely related to the feeling of one’s own body, seems as equally able to produce the kind of affectively neutral percep-tion, which seemed at first sight to be the privilege of the sense of sight. Schopenhauer considers sight and touch as the only truly objective senses because they are the only senses that are alleged to be able to create an objective intuition of the external world with the help of the understanding. This is not only confusing, as it threatens to disturb his hierarchy of the senses and especially seems to underestimate the sense of hearing discussed above, but also because an unprecedented privilege is attached to the transcendental form of space. Moreover, it is hardly clear why and how the activity of touching something, which is inti-mately connected to the experience of one’s whole body, can be genu-inely neutral, and it is even untenable in the case of the sense of sight (cf. the example of harsh sunlight). 17 Thus there is a striking ambiguity in Schopenhauer’s use of the term ‘objective’: now he uses it in the sense of ‘being capable of realising an objective intuition, that is, perception of an external object’ and then it can also mean something altogether different, namely ‘not immediately connected to an affective stirring of the will’. To be able to properly ground his distinction between the value and the function of the sense, Schopenhauer would need to provide arguments for the idea that both senses of the term ‘objective’ imply one another, which he does not.

Two final worries must be addressed. First, in the Fourfold Root we read that ‘perceptions of sight ultimately refer to touch, and sight can be regarded as an imperfect touch extending to a distance and making use of the rays of light as long feelers [ Taststangen ]’ (FR, 81). Schopenhauer does not shy away from disturbing his own hierarchy of the senses. The activity of seeing is considered as a kind of touching, which uses the rays of light as feelers . If this is so, one might wonder how the sense of sight can still maintain its privileged position of being the only (or at least the ideal) sense capable of producing pure, will-less, aesthetic perception.

Moreover, Schopenhauer maintains that visual perception occurs subconsciously and is thereby inevitably accompanied by two system-atic forms of ‘deceit’ ( Täuschungen ). These are most strongly present in


seeing. The first is the illusion of immediacy (time), and the second is the illusion of proximity (space). The first is arguably grounded in the fact that visual perception hardly needs time to take place or that there seems no time lapse between the stimulation of the eye and the experi-ence of the perceived object. According to Schopenhauer this applies exclusively to seeing; because in the dark, for instance, one must touch an object for a long time before one perceives what kind of object one has before oneself. Seeing occurs ‘directly’ or ‘immediately’, Schopenhauer says, since

the unconsciousness with which the transition from the sensation to its cause is brought about really occurs only with perception in the narrowest sense, with vision or sight . On the other hand, with every other perception or apprehension of the senses the transition occurs with more or less clear consciousness; thus in the case of apprehen-sion through the four coarser senses, the reality of the transition can be directly observed as a fact. (WWR II, 23)

Is Schopenhauer’s claim that only sight falls prey to this illusion of immediacy correct? When one feels a pain in the index finger of one’s left hand from the sting of an insect, then one localises this pain imme-diately in the index finger of one’s left hand, although here too quite a considerable physiological route will have been followed, for the pain cannot be localised without the intervention of the nervous and cere-bral system. Although the place where one feels the pain is certainly the index finger on one’s left hand, still, one would not feel pain if the nerves of the finger were blocked, even though the insect had definitely stung the finger. 18 There are also people that feel pain in limbs they no longer have. We can also still see objects that are no longer there, such as stars that were extinguished long before we were even born, but that we are nevertheless still able to perceive. Although the star that one perceives seems directly present, and although one has the feeling that one has direct contact with it, this perception remains the same whether or not this same star is actually still ‘there’. 19 This occurs in every (visual) perception, even that of the lamp on my desk: the lamp itself seems to be ‘out there’ – just as the stars that I see when I am now looking out of my window, but the perceived lamp can only occur through the activity of the eyes and the understanding (the brain). Even the ‘starry heaven above me’ is ultimately nothing but a brain phenomenon. 20

For Schopenhauer, this ‘illusion ... that the sensation itself gives us the objects directly’ thus originates from the ‘perfection’ of the eye and


the ‘exclusively rectilinear action of the light’. 21 Schopenhauer justly emphasises the immediacy of visual perception, but one might again object that this is not the exclusive privilege of the sense of sight. Thus, for instance, the same can be said about the sense of touch, although it does seem harder in the case of olfactory perception. The pleasant stimulation caused by the perfume of someone passing by can make someone realise immediately that it is Acqua di Giò she smells, just as one could see on the basis of the shape of a bottle lacking a label that it is a bottle of Acqua di Giò . Yet that is not the kind of immediacy Schopenhauer refers to. What he wants to make clear is that there is no conscious inferential step made from the sensation ( Empfindung ) of the bottle through my eye to the objective intuition ( Anschauung ) of the specific bottle, whereas this does occur in the case of someone’s stimulated nasal organ, even if only through the activity of sniffing: someone’s olfactory system is stimulated by a certain odour, which one finds pleasant or unpleasant, and to which one consciously attaches the property ‘perfume, specifically, Acqua di Giò ’. In a certain sense, the illusion of immediacy, which is strongest in visual perception, is also the most deceitful.

Schopenhauer’s position does not escape a certain circularity here: the epistemic importance of the understanding is derived from the complexity of the most significant type of sense, namely vision, which is itself explained solely on the basis of the operation of understanding. Yet Schopenhauer’s theory undoubtedly has the merit of supplementing Kant’s theory of knowledge with a gripping account of how percep-tion occurs and what the specific roles of the senses are. It is, therefore, surprising that this rich conception of empirical cognition and percep-tion plays such a dispensable part in his discussion of aesthetic conscious-ness, to which we now turn.

Aesthetic perception and cognition

Schopenhauer holds that the intellect, which he identifies physiologi-cally with the brain, is an instrument or tool of the will. The will has created brains to help organisms survive. As I have argued above, empir-ical cognition of the world is always within the forms of space, time, and causality imposed by the subject. Following Hume instead of Kant this time, Schopenhauer holds that the subject’s intellectual imposition of space, time, and causality on experience is driven by human needs, interests, and affects. The intellect is governed by the will: it is merely the will’s tool. 22


Again following Hume, Schopenhauer thus contends that one’s intel-lect can be and often is disturbed by the will, that is, by affects, urges, needs, inclinations, and passions:

In our enemies we see nothing but shortcomings, in our favourites nothing but merits and good points, and even their defects seem amiable to us. ... What is opposed to our party, our plan, our wish, or our hope often cannot possibly be grasped and comprehended by us, whereas it is clear to the eyes of everyone else; on the other hand, what is favourable to these leaps to our eyes from afar. What opposes the heart is not admitted by the head. ... Thus is our intellect daily befooled and corrupted by the deceptions of inclination and liking. (WWR II, 217–218)

The will affects our judgments and clouds our thoughts, and our intel-lect always functions in the service of the will. Everything that takes place without the intellect – an organism’s procreation, development, and preservation; the healing of wounds; the critical stage that brings about salvation during an illness; the instinctive skills of animals; and so on – turns out infinitely better than what happens with the help of the intellect. 23 Thus Schopenhauer distances himself completely from the ‘ancient and universal error’ of the Western tradition, which reveres intellect and reason as the most perfect hallmark of humanity. 24 For Schopenhauer, however, the intellect is ‘at bottom tertiary, since it presupposes the organism, and the organism presupposes the will’ (WWR II, 278).

Still, Schopenhauer believes that cognition which is not in the service of the will remains possible. Schopenhauer calls this kind of cognition aesthetic , for it occurs when we are touched by the beauty (or sublimity) of an object: a landscape, a sunset, a painting, a poem, and so on. Aesthetic perception entails that one becomes conscious of oneself as a pure, will-less, timeless subject of knowledge . 25 In aesthetic consciousness, the ‘real self’ – that is, the self as willing – appears to have vanished and has been replaced, as it were, by a ‘better’ or ‘higher’ consciousness. This ‘consists in knowledge turning away entirely from our own will, and thus leaving entirely out of sight the precious pledge entrusted to it, and considering things as though they could never in any way concern the will. For only thus does knowledge become the pure mirror of the objec-tive inner nature of things’ (WWR II, 367). I lose myself entirely in the perceived object, and the ordinary rules about experience and knowl-edge need no longer apply. 26 ‘Everything is beautiful only so long as it


does not concern us’ (WWR II, 374), that is, it does not concern our ‘real self’, for in aesthetic contemplation our willing self has been discarded. The ordinary operations of our perceptual and cognitive faculties are suspended and we reach a superior state of mind.

We usually discern the objects around us by means of (empirical) concepts: this is how we ordinarily perceive external objects and become empirically aware of the world. Aesthetic consciousness or awareness is superior, for we enter a state of unusual tranquillity, in which individual striving, suffering, desiring, and worrying no longer occur. The sight of the aesthetically pleasing object makes us ‘objective’, Schopenhauer says, ‘that is to say, in contemplating it we are no longer conscious of ourselves as individuals, but as pure, will-less subjects of knowing’ (WWR I, 209; see also WWR I, 195 and passim ). This height-ened, ‘objective’ state of consciousness discards the embodied, willing self, alleviates suffering, and liberates us from the pressures of willing and from (what Plato calls) our ‘desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense’ caused by the fact that we are embodied creatures ( Phaedo 66 a–b). 27

Nevertheless, even though Schopenhauer’s idea of the ‘better consciousness’ is obviously reminiscent of Plato’s pure knowledge of the soul, there are striking differences in their analyses of the nature of beauty and aesthetic experience. For Plato, an experience of beauty is a festive celebration of Being: it is to feel alive . 28 Plato holds that beauty ultimately satisfies eros , whereas Schopenhauer provides a quite different account of the aesthetic experience. 29 Instead of soothing the will by satisfying it, aesthetic perception is purified of all willing, that is, of our interests, passions, affects, and needs. Aesthetic experience cannot occur without an awareness of the disappearance of the willing self, and ‘with it its suffering and sorrow’ (WWR II, 371). Thus a will-less, aesthetic experience is by definition pleasurable, for it only occurs when the sufferings, caused by the will, disappear from consciousness. Aesthetic perception offers no fulfilment of our personal desires, but is detached from our desires, and therefore offers freedom from the thraldom of our endless willing, striving and, by implication, our suffering. Hence, the aesthetic state of mind cheers and comforts, as our will is momentarily stilled:

The storm of passions, the pressure of desire and fear, and all the miseries of willing are then at once calmed and appeased in a marvel-lous way. For at the moment when, torn from the will, we have given ourselves up to pure, will-less knowing, 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)

Schopenhauer does not, however, consider aesthetic perception merely as a heightened state of awareness, but also as a superior kind of cognition : ‘we have given ourselves up to pure, will-less knowing ’, and ‘the colour and form of things stand out in their true and full significance’ (WWR II, 373; italics added). Aesthetic experience has no mere therapeutic value, but also a high cognitive value. Since ordinary empirical cognition is always guided and even determined by personal needs, emotions, appe-tites, and interests – in short, by our will – it is, Schopenhauer holds, necessarily inferior to cognition that occurs independent of them. Ordinary people are usually confined to the inferior, distorted kind of knowledge. By contrast, it is a sign of ‘the gift of genius ’ to be able to attain (and maintain) the superior state of dispassionate, ‘pure percep-tion’ and cognition:

the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to lose oneself in perception, to remove from the service of the will the knowledge that originally existed only for this service ... the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and conse-quently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject , the clear eye of the world. (WWR I, 185–186)

This kind of superior cognition, freed from the will’s urges, auto-matically implies that we ‘relinquish the ordinary way of considering things ... and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contem-plation’ of the object, and ‘continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object’ (WWR I, 178). Yet it also yields knowledge of what the object truly is: aesthetic consciousness is not merely an escape from the torments of willing and, hence, suffering, but also (and perhaps more importantly) an insight into what things really are. As Schopenhauer puts it, ‘we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what ’ (WWR I, 178). Aesthetic, will-less perception – which Schopenhauer identifies with Spinoza’s notion of knowledge ‘sub aeternitatis specie’, that is, from the standpoint of eternity – offers insight into the timeless kernel of things, that is, the universal essences of the perceived objects, beyond mere appearance. Schopenhauer calls these eternal essences the (Platonic) Ideas, the ‘eternal forms’ behind the mere appearances


of common empirical cognition. Although Schopenhauer here clearly moves beyond Kant’s analysis of aesthetic disinterestedness, and adopts the more Platonic vision of knowledge of eternal forms or Ideas, identi-fying Schopenhauer’s conception of the Ideas with the Platonic original may be too hasty.

Two considerations seem to stand in the way of identifying Schopenhauer’s Ideas with their Platonic counterparts. First, whereas Plato held that knowledge of the eternal forms of things involves concep-tual thought and ratiocination, Schopenhauer maintains that reason is an instrument of the will that helps us survive as living organisms in the natural world. For Schopenhauer, the timeless Ideas are not known through abstract reasoning, but in and through perception ( Anschauung ) of natural objects or works of art, combined with an idealising act of our imagination. Whereas ‘the common, ordinary man ... can direct his attention to things only in so far as they have some relation to his will’, and ‘always demands only knowledge of the relations, the abstract concept of the thing is sufficient’; in aesthetic cognition, however, one ‘strives to grasp the Idea of each thing, not its relation to other things’ (WWR I, 187–188). Thus the Ideas – that is, the alleged objects of aesthetic cognition – are known by a peculiar type of imaginative perception , which does not involve any concepts at all. This statement clearly echoes Kant’s opinion that a pure aesthetic judgment cannot be based on (determinate) concepts, but also radically departs from Kant, for Schopenhauer claims that an aesthetic experience is first and fore-most a kind of objective insight , whereas Kant argues that it is based on a reflecting judgment, which is grounded in a disinterested feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and does not contribute to cognition at all. 30 Although the gap between Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s aesthetics may not be as big as some commentators suggest, 31 Schopenhauer’s discus-sion of the will-less, timeless state of consciousness – which is purport-edly the essence of the aesthetic attitude – is definitely more Platonic than Kantian. Still, as noted above, Schopenhauer’s so-called (Platonic) Ideas appear less Platonic than Schopenhauer is prepared to admit.

A further worry about a hasty identification of Plato’s and Schopenhauer’s theories of Ideas is that, for Plato, the Ideas are not merely the eternal universals behind the mere empirical appearances of things, but also the ontological foundation of the whole world, whereas in Schopenhauer’s view, the Ideas are situated metaphysically ‘between’ the thing-in-itself (the will) and the empirical appearances. The Ideas are not the fundamental components of reality, but the most adequate objectifications or manifestations of the one ultimate essence of the


world, namely will. Schopenhauer argues that, since the categories of space and time, and the understanding or intellect (operating according to the principle of sufficient reason), ground and even ‘construct’ the world as representation, this world is divided into numerous distinct objects, and is therefore characterised by plurality. Those categories do not apply to the thing-in-itself, which belongs to the noumenal world, hence (Schopenhauer argues) the thing-in-itself cannot be characterised by plurality. Schopenhauer reasons as follows:

i. the categories of space, time and the categories of the under-standing – the principle of sufficient reason – create the objectiveworld (the world as representation);

ii. the world as representation therefore consists of multiple represen-tations or different objects;

iii. the principle of sufficient reason is limited to the world asrepresentation;

iv. the principle of sufficient reason does not apply to the thing-in-itself (the noumenon);

v. the thing-in-itself beyond all phenomena cannot be characterisedby multiplicity;

vi. the Ideas are characterised by multiplicity; vii. the Ideas cannot be the noumenal thing-in-itself.

These claims face a number of problems, not least because they are further enmeshed in Schopenhauer’s basic metaphysical view that the thing-in-itself is the will, which automatically implies that the will ought to remain unknowable, and Schopenhauer does not (always) recognise this. 32 Moreover, his analysis of empirical perception is combined with and, I would add, unnecessarily clouded by his semi-Platonic account of the Ideas, which he argues to be the adequate objec-tivations (or manifestations) of the metaphysical will. Schopenhauer seems rather confused when he contends that the Platonic Ideas reveal the antagonistic nature of the metaphysical will, which they express by struggling to conquer their spot in the universe and by fighting the other Ideas to be able to manifest themselves as clearly as possible in the empirical world.

For the purposes of his aesthetics, however, it is quite unnecessary to think that the Platonic Ideas are the adequate manifestations of the thing-in-itself. Instead, what might ground aesthetic cognition is the idea that, though we are confronted with empirical objects, it is possible to view those empirical objects in a way that transcends their merely


empirical characteristics. The thought would then be that aesthetic cognition requires an impersonal ‘universal standpoint’ through which not only the perceived object but also the self or ‘I’ is viewed, as it were, from nowhere. The individual object does not vanish, but is – as Robert Wicks aptly puts it – ‘perceived in light of its universal significance’. 33 How this universal point of view is to be attained by creatures whose nature is essentially willing , which inclines them to perceive, think, and judge from their own egocentric (and even egoistic) viewpoint, remains none the less puzzling. 34 The doctrine about the Platonic Ideas is rather extravagant and may even be superfluous, but to dismiss it does not automatically dispense with an aesthetics founded upon will-less contemplation and ‘objective’ cognition.

Schopenhauer’s analysis of the role of the understanding in percep-tion may be closer to Kant’s than he conceded, yet his subtle analysis of the role of the senses, expounded above, none the less offers a more plausible and scientifically corroborated account than Kant’s transcen-dental conception of perception and understanding.

Schopenhauer also makes a radically un-Kantian move, when he suggests that the intellect is driven by human willing. The understanding is no mere transcendental faculty, but a so-called natural phenomenon: the cerebral system helps the organism survive and express (and fulfil) its desires, needs, and wishes. The brain helps the will appear in the phenomenal world. In aesthetic perception, however, the cerebral system gives up, as it were, this subservient role and now operates detached from the will. This will-less, aesthetic cognition is pleasurable, not merely because it offers relief from the sufferings that inescapably trouble the ‘willing self’, but also because it procures a heightened state of aware-ness that transcends ordinary cognition of the phenomenal world and, moreover, generates a deeper insight into the timeless universals behind the mere appearances of things. Thus Schopenhauer not only moves beyond Kant’s transcendental epistemology, transforming it into an illu-minating account of the value of sensory perception, but also surpasses Kant’s aesthetics of beauty and sublimity. Such, at least, is my belief, and in the following chapters I will try to justify it.

Notes

1 . Nevertheless, this misconception has had serious consequences for the recep-tion of Schopenhauer’s thinking, especially in Anglo-American philosophy in the early years of the twentieth century, which was particularly squared off against the idealism studied in British universities up until the end of the


nineteenth century. (B. Russell and G.E. Moore were both schooled in the Hegelian tradition, a tradition which they later repudiated.) The fate to which Fichte, Schelling, and also Schopenhauer fell probably had much to do with the dislike of any form of idealism. It is quite ironic that Schopenhauer was lumped in with his arch-enemy, Hegel. See Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 436: ‘The possibility of rejecting Fichte, Schelling and Hegel while preserving a view of Kant and Schopenhauer as two of the greatest philosophers of all time (which of course was Schopenhauer’s own view of the matter) seems at that period to have occurred to very few people.’

2 . WWR I, 3: ‘Therefore no truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, namely that everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation.’

3 . In fact, Schopenhauer is disparaging towards Kant’s doctrine of the transcen-dental unity of apperception, which he believes ultimately to be an empty assertion. Schopenhauer actually holds that ‘the subject knows itself only as a willing being, not as a knowing one’ (FR, 208). For extended discussion, see Christopher Janaway, Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 117–139.

4 . See Johannes Volkelt, Arthur Schopenhauer: Seine Persönlichkeit, seine Lehre, sein Glaube (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1910), 89–101.

5 . As Janaway justly points out, even if we grant that something can be an object, only if there is a subject, and that ‘it is true then that books and tables can be objects for a subject only if there is a subject’, it does not follow ‘that books and tables exist only as representations’. See Janaway, Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy , 141.

6 . WWR I, 18: ‘Life and dreams are leaves of one and the same book. The system-atic reading is real life, but when the actual reading hour (the day) has come to an end, and we have the period of recreation, we often continue idly to thumb over the leaves, and turn to a page here or there without method or connection. We sometimes turn up a page we have already read, at others one still unknown to us, but always from the same book’.

7 . See WWR I, 16. Schopenhauer arguably offers a sound hypothesis since he merely wishes to point out that there cannot be a logical refutation of the presupposition that the whole of life is a dream. For a similar line of reasoning, see Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 10: ‘There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream, in which we ourselves create all the objects that come before us. But although this is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that it is true; and it is, in fact, a less simple hypoth-esis, viewed as a means of accounting for the facts of our own life, than the common-sense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us, whose action on us causes our sensations’.

8 . WWR I, 17: ‘The only certain criterion for distinguishing dream from reality is in fact none other than the wholly empirical one of waking, by which the causal connection between the dreamed events and those of waking life is at any rate positively and palpably broken off’.


9 . See WWR II, 5: ‘philosophy is essentially idealistic. Realism, which commends itself to the crude understanding by appearing to be founded on fact, starts precisely from an arbitrary assumption, and is in consequence an empty castle in the air, since it skips or denies the first fact of all, namely that all we know lies within consciousness’.

10 . See WWR II, 5: ‘If accordingly we attempt to imagine an objective world without a knowing subject , then we become aware that what we are imagining at that moment is in truth the opposite of what we intended, namely nothing but just the process in the intellect of a knowing being who perceives an objec-tive world, that is to say, precisely that which we had sought to exclude’.

11 . See especially WWR I, 437: ‘The Transcendental Aesthetic is a work of such merit that it alone would be sufficient to immortalize the name of Kant’.

12 . See Paul Guyer, ‘Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Methods of Philosophy’, in Christopher Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 93–137, and his ‘Perception and Understanding: Schopenhauer, Reid, and Kant’, in Bart Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 25–42, to which I am indebted.

13 . Or so Ernst Cassirer claims. See Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit , Volume III (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971), 433: ‘Not the world, but the emergence of subjective eyesight in the world is the fact which he truly describes and for which he sets out to find a hypothetical interpretation. The merit of his doctrine lies in the preparation of physiological optics; but the price paid for this achievement in natural sciences is that it has yielded an arbitrarily narrow and limited characterisation of the critical theory’s pure concept of a priority’ (my translation).

14 . Jean Paul was born as Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), a belletrist renowned for his Vorschule der Ästhetik . Schopenhauer refers to him quite frequently.

15 . WWR II, 28: ‘Sight is an active, hearing a passive sense. Therefore, sounds affect our mind in a disturbing and hostile manner, the more so indeed, the more active and developed the mind. They can destroy all ideas, and instantly shatter the power of thought’. Reason is the abstract power of thinking that receives what the understanding and the senses deliver, and is thus bound to the perceiving ear. Reason transforms empirical intuitions into abstract concepts.

16 . See WWR I, 199: ‘For sight, unlike the affections of the other senses, is in itself, directly, and by its sensuous effect, quite incapable of pleasantness or unpleasantness of sensation in the organ; in other words, it has no direct connection with the will. Only perception arising in the understanding can have such a connection, which then lies in the relation of the object to the will’.

17 . This can be contrasted with Schopenhauer’s remarks about the especially favourable effect of sunlight on the aesthetic quality of buildings.

18 . Schopenhauer seems clearly aware of this phenomenon. See WWR II, 25: ‘Moreover, the apparent immediacy of perception, resting on its entirely intellectual nature, by virtue of which, as Euler says, we apprehend the things themselves as lying outside us, has an analogy in the way in which we


feel the parts of our own body, especially when they experience pain, as is generally the case as soon as we feel them’.

19 . Bertrand Russell offers the example of our perception of the sun. The sun that I see at this moment is the sun of about eight minutes ago. See Russell, The Problems of Philosophy , 16–17: ‘it takes about eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach us; thus, when we see the sun we are seeing the sun of eight minutes ago. So far as our sense-data afford evidence as to the physical sun they afford evidence as to the physical sun of eight minutes ago; if the physical sun had ceased to exist within the last eight minutes, that would make no difference to the sense-data which we call “seeing the sun”’.

20 . See, for instance, WWR II, 3, 24, 47, 286, 403. 21 . See WWR II, 23–24: ‘The fact that in the case of seeing the transition from

the effect to the cause occurs quite unconsciously, and thus the illusion arises that this kind of perception is perfectly direct and consists only in the sensation of sense ... – this fact is due partly to the great perfection of the organ, and partly to the exclusively rectilinear action of light. In virtue of this action, the impression itself leads to the place of the cause, and as the eye has the capacity of experiencing most delicately and at a glance all the nuances of light, shade, colour, and outline, as well as the data by which the understanding estimates distance, the operation of the understanding, in the case of impressions on this sense, takes place with a rapidity and certainty that no more allow it to enter consciousness than they allow spelling to do so in the case of reading. In this way, therefore, the illusion arises that the sensation itself gives us the objects directly’.

22 . For the intellect as an instrument or tool ( Werkzeug ) of the will, see WWR I, 292; II, 205, 214, 215, 220, 225, 229, 398, and 641.

23 . See WWR II, 269: ‘If the intellect were not of a secondary nature, ... then everything that takes place without it, in other words, without the interven-tion of the representations, such, for example, as generation, procreation, the development and preservation of the organism, the healing of wounds, the restoration or vicarious repair of mutilated parts, the salutary crisis in diseases, the works of animal mechanical skill, and the activity of instinct in general, would not turn out so infinitely better and more perfect than what takes place with the aid of the intellect, namely all the conscious and intended achievements and works of men. Such works and achievements, when compared with those others, are mere botching and bungling’.

24 . See WWR II, 199: ‘The remarkable phenomenon that in this fundamental and essential point all philosophers have erred, in fact have completely reversed the truth, might be partly explained, especially in the case of the philosophers of the Christian era, from the fact that all of them aimed at presenting man as differing as widely as possible from the animal. Yet, they felt vaguely that the difference between the two was to be found in the intel-lect and not in the will’.

25 . On the pure will-less subject of knowledge, see especially WWR II, 367–375. 26 . WWR I, 178: ‘we ... devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink

ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object’. See also WWR I, 185: ‘Only through the


pure contemplation described above, which becomes absorbed entirely in the object, are the Ideas comprehended’. See also WWR I, 185–186: ‘Genius is ... the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject , the clear eye of the world’.

27 . Plato, ‘Phaedo’, in The Last Days of Socrates , trans. Hugh Tredennick (London: Penguin, 1969), 111.

28 . In this respect , Kant’s analysis of beauty, with its emphasis on the feeling of life ( Lebensgefühl ) of the subject, is closer to Plato’s than Schopenhauer’s. See CJ , § 1, 5: 204.

29 . See Bart Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer on Aesthetic Understanding and the Values of Art’, 194–198, for a more extended account of the differences between Plato’s and Schopenhauer’s views of the experience of beauty.

30 . See CJ , § 3, 5: 206: ‘the presentation is referred solely to the subject and is not used for cognition at all, not even for that by which the subject cognises himself’. See also, CJ , ‘First Introduction’, 20: 222–223.

31 . See, for example, Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 194: ‘The vision behind Schopenhauer’s theory of aesthetic experience is Platonic, not Kantian.’

32 . An exception can be found in WWR II, 198, where he concedes that ‘being known of itself contradicts being-in-itself’.

33 . Robert Wicks, Schopenhauer (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 98. 34 . See Bart Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer and the Objectivity of Art’, 219–233.

Part II

The Beautiful and the Sublime

59

In On the Genealogy of Morality , Friedrich Nietzsche deplores that ‘Schopenhauer made use of the Kantian version of the aesthetic problem’, and ‘could not break free of the spell of Kant’s definition’ of beauty as disinterested pleasure. 1 However, even though Nietzsche rightly emphasises that Schopenhauer will incorporate Kant’s notion of disinterestedness into his own aesthetic theory, Schopenhauer also fundamentally transforms Kant’s Analytic of the beautiful into a highly original aesthetic attitude theory 2 and focuses on the cogni-tive and ethical values of aesthetic perception instead of on the logic of aesthetic judgment . Schopenhauer holds that the purely disinterested, objective stance is inextricably connected with knowledge of, what he calls, Platonic Ideas and is hence cognitively valuable. This heightened state of awareness is pleasurable not only because it frees us from the thraldom of the will, but also because it yields genuine cognition of ‘the purely objective inner nature of things, namely the Ideas appearing in them’ (WWR I, 369). 3

In the first part of the chapter, then, I critically discuss Kant’s theory of disinterestedness. I pay particular attention to rectifying a common misconception of this notion, and discuss some significant problems with Kant’s usage of the criterion of disinterestedness to distinguish between the beautiful and the agreeable. I further attempt to show that, although Kant insists that aesthetic judgments are essentially non-cognitive, the disinterestedness of aesthetic pleasure is ultimately grounded in heightened cognitive activity, essentially involving the mutual quickening of the faculties of understanding and imagination.

In the second section of this chapter, I argue that Schopenhauer transforms Kant’s logical analysis of aesthetic judgment into a novel

3 The Aesthetics of the Beautiful


psychological account of aesthetic contemplation, gives up Kant’s concern with the transcendental conditions of the reflecting judgment, and focuses on a peculiar, ‘will-less’ mode of attention to objects. It will be argued that Schopenhauer none the less retains two extremely crucial aspects of Kant’s analysis of beauty: first, the idea that the pleasure of beauty cannot be based on the satisfaction of some personal desire or inclination and, secondly, that aesthetic experience is ultimately based on the stimulation of our cognitive powers, that is, what Schopenhauer calls the ‘intellect’. For Kant, too, suggests that, although our application of the predicate ‘beautiful’ be independent of the subsumption of the object under any determinate concept – a requirement, moreover, with which Schopenhauer concurs – it still leaves room for the imagination and the understanding to play ‘beyond’ what is regulated by determinate concepts. On Schopenhauer’s account, aesthetic pleasure is equally the result of the cognitive freedom and expansion that the will-less attitude affords. Schopenhauer thus transforms the Kantian transcendental analysis of beauty in terms of ‘non-conceptual reflection ’ into a psychological theory of beauty in terms of ‘non-conceptual cognition ’. And whereas, for Kant, disinterested pleasure is grounded in the ‘free harmonious play’ of our cognitive powers but is not itself a form of cognition, on Schopenhauer’s view, beauty does somehow offer us (non-conceptual) insight and under-standing, which adds to the pleasure of the aesthetic experience.

Thus, according to both Kant and Schopenhauer, or so I argue, a beautiful object conveys a primordial sense of non-conceptual unity and coherence and yields a degree of harmony that cannot be reduced to the discursively rigid unity offered by conceptual knowledge. And, even though Schopenhauer’s idealistic version of aesthetic perception fails to accommodate for several valuable ways in which artworks can convey ideas, thoughts, and emotions, his account of aesthetic contemplation in terms of will-lessness and objectivity is still rich in psychological insight and surpasses Kant’s in many interesting ways. Questioning his Platonic metaphysics does not invalidate his aesthetic theory altogether, which discloses fundamental truths about the aesthetic mode of consid-ering objects, enabling us to become alive to the world’s most significant features.

Disinterested pleasure (Kant)

Kant agrees with the empiricists that, ‘ gratification and pain are always ultimately corporeal ... because life without the feeling of the corporeal

The Aesthetics of the Beautiful 61

organ is merely consciousness of one’s own existence, but not a feeling of well- or ill-being’ ( CJ , ‘General Comment’, 5:277), but he wholly rejects the empiricist assimilation of pleasure in the beautiful to merely agree-able sensation. We value beauty not just because of our own private or ‘egoistic’ interests (‘General Comment’, 5:278), and nor because – as, for example, Edmund Burke holds – beauty stimulates our social passions, such as love. We experience and appreciate beauty as a priori share-able with others who possess similar discriminatory and judgmental capacities.

How does Kant distinguish between the feelings of the beautiful and the agreeable? Agreeable sensations are subjective responses, which depend upon our personal preferences and aversions. Pleasure in the agreeable is therefore, Kant argues, ‘interested’, whereas pleasure in the beautiful is not. In section 2 of the Critique of Judgment , Kant writes that ‘the satisfaction that we combine with the representation of the exist-ence of an object is called interest. Hence such a satisfaction always has at the same time a relation to the faculty of desire, either as its determining ground or else as necessarily interconnected with its deter-mining ground’ (§ 2, 5:204). In his insightful paper on ‘Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable’, Nick Zangwill attempts to clarify this as follows: ‘if a pleasure is an “interest”, in Kant’s sense, it means that it bears an inti-mate relation to a desire (that is to say, a concern with real existence). An “interest” is a pleasure that has some kind of necessary connection with desire. A pleasure is “disinterested” if it has no such necessary connection with desire.’ 4 It is worth noting that Kant’s conception of interest is broader than the idea of self-interest that Kant’s reference to the capacity of desire ( Begehrungsvermögen ) seems to suggest; thus, pleasures in the good – moral pleasures – are as ‘interested’ as pleasures in the agreeable, for they presuppose that the object is judged according to external standards of utility or in relation to ends that are external to it. Kant actually uses the term ‘interest’ throughout his writings in at least five distinct senses: 5

i. pleasure in the object’s existence; ii. rational or sensory desire , the satisfaction of which is pleasant; iii. self-interest: direct promotion of one’s preservation, welfare, or

happiness; iv. that by which reason becomes practical or determines the will: the

attempt to achieve a moral or prudential end; v. active interaction or engagement with an object.


Corresponding to these five senses of interest, the senses of disinterest-edness are the following: 6

i. not taking pleasure in the object’s existence; ii. not having a rational or sensory desire;

iii. not directly promoting one’s preservation, welfare, or happiness; iv. not attempting to achieve a moral or prudential end; v. not being partial. 7

This should suffice to see that the Kantian topics of interest and disin-terestedness are extremely complex, and unfortunately Kant does not always clearly distinguish between the different senses of interest and disinterestedness he employs. Here we shall focus on Kant’s idea of aesthetic disinterestedness, and more specifically still, on his analysis of judgments of beauty, hence leaving aside the question of the sublime’s disinterestedness. 8

Kant contends that our pleasure in the agreeable depends upon the real existence of the object which occasions it (i.e., the ‘appearance’ of agreeableness is not sufficient to afford us pleasure). In the case of pure judgments of taste, however, ‘it is readily seen that to say that the object is beautiful and to prove that I have taste what matters is what I make of this representation in myself, not how I depend on the existence of the object’ ( CJ , § 2, 5:205). Thus any particular interest in what kind of object it is, whether or not it is relevant to our aims, wants, or desires, even whether it is real or not, are not required for our aesthetic judging and enjoying the object. And because pure aesthetic judging is solely grounded in the object’s singular appearance and not in any further personal interests, the pleasure it affords can be characterised as genu-inely disinterested.

Two things must be specially noted here: first, disinterestedness is an aspect of the pleasure on which a pure judgment of taste is based, and secondly, the disinterested quality of the pleasure is a logical (and not a psychological) requirement of pure judgments of taste, which argu-ably enables us to distinguish them from judgments of the agreeable and the good. It may, of course, be that some intellectual, sensual, and moral considerations supervene upon our aesthetic judging and liking. But this psychological fact is not an argument against Kant’s analysis. On the contrary, those considerations may well be psychologi-cally involved in our aesthetic judging, but Kant’s point is the logical one that such elements are not necessary preconditions of aesthetic ‘liking’ ( Wohlgefallen ) and judgment. And while disinterestedness may


sometimes take on a psychological character, since (as Kant suggests) ‘a judgment of taste is merely contemplative’ (§ 5, 5:209), it can still be validly claimed that the above-mentioned psychological factors are not necessary requirements of pure judgments of beauty.

Now, Kant further complicates matters by insisting not only that our pleasure in beautiful objects cannot originate from any interest, but also, and more importantly, that our pleasure in the beautiful does not create any interest in the object either. Agreeable objects, say Belgian chocolates, that cause pleasure merely because of their sensible proper-ties, are said to ‘gratify’ ( vergnügen ) someone. More specifically, when I enjoy eating a Belgian chocolate, ‘I am not granting mere approval: the agreeable produces an inclination’ and ‘arouses a desire for objects of the same kind’ (§ 3, 5:207). Kant, moreover, adds that ‘all interest presup-poses a need or gives rise to one; and, because interest is the basis that determines approval, it makes the judgment about the object un-free’ (§ 5, 5:210). 9 Hence, the basic difference between the agreeable and the beautiful must be that the agreeable gives rise to a desire for similar objects, whereas the feeling of the beautiful does not.

To make sense of this, we must recall that Kant contends that, unlike the beautiful, pleasure in the agreeable is connected with the existence of the object that caused the agreeable sensation in the first place – that is, the first sense of disinterestedness mentioned above. Thus Kant plau-sibly argues that, if the satisfaction caused by the object leads to a desire for more similar objects (e.g., more Belgian chocolates), then this implies that the initial satisfaction was connected with the existence of the first object. 10 For how else could it produce this desire (or inclination) for more objects that are thought to be similar?

This contrast between the pleasures in the agreeable and the beau-tiful raises a number of worries. First, how plausible is Kant’s claim that pleasures in the agreeable are necessarily productive of desire for more similar objects? Not all pleasures in the agreeable provoke the desire for more objects of the same kind. Put more concretely, as Nick Zangwill asks, ‘what about the last piece of chocolate that we enjoy before we have had enough? ... The sight of yet more chocolate can soon come to disgust one. It seems that the last pleasurable piece of chocolate does not provoke a desire for more of the same’. 11 Thus, although Kant may be right that many kinds of agreeable sensations are ‘more-ish’ or produc-tively interested, not all pleasures in the agreeable are.

There is a second possible objection to Kant’s distinction, viz. that Kant, as Paul Guyer notes, instead of distinguishing between kinds of pleasure, merely supplies ‘a distinction between feelings of pleasure and


all other kinds of sensation’. 12 However, Kant’s view of pleasure may be more complicated than Guyer allows. 13 By defining pleasure as feeling instead of sensation, Kant is not merely saying that pleasure is some peculiar kind of sensation, that is, a subjective sensation ‘ which cannot become an element of cognition at all ’ (‘Introduction’, 5:189), since it does not refer to objects. The subjective nature of Kant’s notion of feeling is much more profound than that. Rachel Zuckert rightly suggests that ‘pleasure is, on Kant’s definition, a representation with intentional content, which comprises other representations understood to be modifications of the subject (i.e., are themselves not [solely] referred to objects)’. 14 Kant characterises pleasure in the Critique of Judgment as the ‘consciousness of the causality of a representation with respect to the state of the subject, for maintaining it in that state’ (§ 10, 5:220), and in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View , he claims that ‘what directly (through sense) urges me to leave my state (to go out of it) is disagreeable to me – it causes me pain; just as what drives me to maintain my state (to remain in it) is agreeable to me, I enjoy it’ ( Anthropology , 7:231; italics in the original). 15

Thus, pace Guyer, Kant does not agree with the empiricists, who maintain that pleasure is a kind of primitive idea or raw sensation, but contends that pleasure is a feeling about something, or more accurately, about the continuation of the feeling or the mental state. 16 Pleasure in eating Belgian chocolates would then be the awareness or ‘the feeling that the representation of chocolate is “causing” one to stay in the state of having that representation (of the taste of chocolate)’. 17 Pleasure is thus intimately connected with our ‘feeling of life’ (§ 1, 5:204; ‘General Comment’, 5:277), that is., with enjoying the state one finds oneself in when (for instance) experiencing the sensible properties of an object. Thus, on this view, Kant does not consider pleasure a mere ‘raw feel’, as Paul Guyer, along with numerous other commentators, claims. Pleasure does not need to be referred to objects via empirical concepts or judg-ments, but is necessarily characterised by intentionality, that is, ‘about-ness’: it ‘is about’ a subject’s mental state. Therefore, it is aptly called ‘subjective’ by Kant, even though it is not a sensation, but ‘a second-order, reflexive state with respect both to other mental states and to the position of those states in time, the form of inner sense’. 18 We do not experience pleasure primarily as the separate effect of something, but we take pleasure in something (ibid.), for example, in drinking a glass of Chablis, in eating oysters, in sinking into a hot bath, and so on.

For Kant, an interest entails taking pleasure in the actual existence of the object. At first sight, this might seem to obscure the difference


between pleasure in the beautiful and the agreeable. It seems as if Kant claims that the agreeable produces an interest in (or desire for) further experiences of the same sort, whereas the beautiful does not, and this (to say the least) seems highly implausible. Yet, while Kant does hold that any pleasure will tend towards maintaining itself, the tendency to prolong itself is not an interest in Kant’s sense. By emphasising that the agreeable is connected with an interest in objects of the same kind, whereas the beautiful is not, Kant intimates that the former provokes not a desire for more similar experiences, but for more objects of the same kind, that is, objects that will offer such (agreeable) experiences, whereas the pleasure in the beautiful is wholly disinterested, since it may (and usually will) urge us to maintain in the specific state of aesthetic pleasure we find ourselves in, but does not necessarily stimulate a desire for the actual existence of the object, since our pleasure in a beautiful object stems from the contemplation of the object’s form alone and is grounded in the free but harmonious ‘play’ of imagination and under-standing (see below).

In any case, despite the fact that bodily pleasures such as a sexual orgasm or tasting absinthe may seem to suggest otherwise, Kant suggests that pleasures are not free floating sensations but reflexive, second-order feelings . Contrary also to his earlier view defended in the Critique of Practical Reason , in the Critique of Judgment he will claim that not all pleasures are sensations or, more accurately, sensory pleasures are, pace the empiricists, not the only kind of pleasure – although he does retain the view that when pleasures are ‘sensations’ (pleasures in the agree-able or ‘enjoyments’ as he sometimes calls them), then they are ‘the same in kind, differing only in degree’. 19 Of course, he agrees with the empiricists that sensory pleasure is a kind of pleasure, but repudiates their privileging of sensory (or bodily) pleasure – the sensuous pleasure we take in enjoying a cognac or a hot shower – as a model for all other kinds of pleasure. Hence, Kant maintains that pleasure in the agreeable is only a sub-class of pleasure; this is the kind of sensory pleasures that we share with animals (see § 5, 5:210). Thus, there is no reason to privi-lege agreeable sensations over other kinds of pleasure.

As we saw earlier, Kant rashly claims that all pleasures in the agreeable are productively interested, that is, arouse the desire for more objects of the same kind. ‘Sated’ pleasures, though, such as orgasms, do not – at least not immediately – provoke the desire for more similar pleas-ures. 20 Yet what about Kant’s insistence that pleasure in the beautiful is devoid of interest, that is, is only related to the subject’s feeling of life ( Lebensgefühl ), and is completely independent of the existence of


the object? Kant argues that pure aesthetic pleasure is directed to the representation of the object, as opposed to the connection between the subject and the existence of the object. For pure aesthetic judgment, a representation of the object is all that is required, whereas in an ‘inter-ested’ response to an object, its actual existence will be involved. In a rather amusing note, taken from his Reflexionen from the mid-1770s, Kant furnishes examples of the sorts of interest in existence that must be excluded from the pure aesthetic appreciation:

Taste shows itself if one does not choose merely on account of useful-ness . Therefore, a porcelain button is more beautiful than a silver one. The beauty of lace consists in the fact that it does not last long. Clothes are therefore chosen of delicate colours, because they are perishable. Flowers have their beauty in their perishability. Nature has given the least beauty to that which is enjoyable because it nour-ishes: cows, bees, swine, sheep; to that which refreshes in enjoyment, somewhat more: fruit; that which smells nice, more: and that which can merely please the eye, the most. (R 868, 15:382)

According to Guyer, ‘this passage misinterprets the requirements of disin-terestedness’, as it not merely separates taste from practical dependence, but in fact ‘proposes an actual conflict between beauty and practicality’. 21 Technically speaking, Guyer is right. Disinterested contemplation does not necessarily imply an asymmetry of beauty and practicality: a kind of syncretism of both remains possible. Yet Kant only points out that there is quite often a real conflict between taste and usefulness, or beauty and practicality, which can serve as a corroborating fact about the disin-terestedness of the pure judgment of taste. The inverse relationship between beauty and usefulness is not a necessary consequence of the judgment’s disinterestedness, although this does not subsequently rule out the possibility of an actual conflict between both either.

Although, as we have seen, disinterestedness is first and foremost a logical requirement of judgments of beauty and does not primarily refer to any specific aspect of a mental state, Kant does develop some psycho-logical aspects of the way in which we experience and enjoy beauty. The disinterestedness of pure judgments of taste will, first, be related to what Kant calls the feeling of life of the subject – which is why Kant calls the pleasure in the beautiful Wohlgefallen (‘liking’) and not Vergnügen (‘gratification’). Secondly, and more importantly, Kant contrasts pure beauty with the ‘graceful, lovely, enchanting, enjoyable, and so on’, arguing that judgments of pure beauty are ‘independent from charm


and emotion’ (§ 13, 5:223) and that our pleasure in beautiful objects is not due to a mere physiological response to an object’s qualities but arises from ‘a state of a free play of the faculties of cognition’ (§ 9, 5:217). Kant further insists that our aesthetic judging ‘of the representation through which the object is given, precedes the pleasure in it, and is the ground of this pleasure in the harmony of the faculties of cognition’, and he adds that ‘on that universality of the subjective conditions of the judging of objects alone is this universal subjective validity of liking, which we combine with the representation of the object that we call beautiful, grounded’ (§ 9, 5:218). I shall not go into all the intricacies that commentators have addressed in connection with the arguments Kant provides to ground his distinction between merely agreeable sensa-tions and genuine feelings (and judgments) of beauty. It should now be clear, however, that Kant’s insistence on the logical requirement of disinterestedness ultimately and fundamentally depends upon his epis-temology. More specifically, because disinterested aesthetic pleasure ‘is not grounded in any concept ... , no other consciousness of it is possible except through sensation of the effect that consists in the facilitated play of both powers of the mind (imagination and understanding), enli-vened through mutual agreement’ (§ 9, 5:219).

Thus Kant’s notion of aesthetic disinterestedness cannot be properly understood without reference to the reflective activity from which it arises: that our judgment is a genuine judgment of beauty can only be found out if we are able to retrieve the epistemic basis of the feeling of pleasure we experience and upon which we base our judgment. Only if the pleasure is not merely a personal physiological response to external stimuli but can be attributed correctly to the purposeful play of our cognitive capacities can it be inferred that our judgment is a pure judg-ment of taste. That Kant remains extremely vague about the method and outcome of such an introspective investigation is unfortunate, but is not our primary concern here. 22 Far more crucial is that the disinter-ested character of the pleasure on which our aesthetic judgment is based ultimately depends upon the object’s potential to stimulate our cogni-tive faculties, thereby enabling us to recognise the object or, more specif-ically, the object’s form as purposive in relation to ‘cognition generally’. That is to say, while beauty can only be consciously recognised through the pleasure we feel in it, this pleasure itself is ultimately grounded in heightened purposeful cognitive activity, involving the mutual quick-ening of understanding and imagination.

Only now can we genuinely grasp Kant’s insistence on the disinterested-ness of pure aesthetic pleasure: it is not based on any desire for the object


as such, yet it is clearly not conceivable without its being grounded in an unusually lively and purposeful co-operation of the cognitive powers (or, what Kant calls, the recognition of the formal purposiveness of our pleasure). Our aesthetic judgment is, as Paul Crowther puts it, ‘teleolog-ical in a subjective sense. On the one hand, the judgment has “formal finality” is so far as beautiful configuration appears as if it has been created for the express purpose of stimulating cognitive exploration; on the other hand, the free harmonious interaction of understanding and imagination which it brings about is “subjectively final” in relation to cognition generally. This means that in renewing cognition’s structural basis, it can be regarded as teleologically significant in relation to the attainment of knowledge – even though it is not, in itself, a claim to knowledge’. 23 Unfortunately, because Kant essentially confines himself to showing that our pleasure in the beautiful differs from the agreeable and the good, which are clearly connected with interest, he leaves us with no convincing independent argument that pleasure in the beau-tiful is actually disinterested. By no means does the fact that the pleasure in the beautiful is different from the agreeable and the good, which are definitely connected with interest, entail that the pleasure in the beau-tiful is disinterested. Thus, instead of offering us a convincing account of the disinterestedness of aesthetic pleasure, he leaves us with the quite controversial idea that pleasure in the beautiful does not originate from nor create any interest. It is hard to see, however, why this should be so. For, after all, appreciating beauty does give rise to all sorts of interests – one may desire to own the artwork one finds beautiful or to make love to the woman one finds beautiful or develop a religious interest on the basis of one’s aesthetic pleasure in nature. Kant was surely aware of this, and whereas he may still be right that all those kinds of interests (be they intellectual, moral, or sensual) which we may develop as a result of enjoying beauty cannot provide the necessary determining ground of pure judgments of taste, most of our judgments of beauty are not pure but are mingled with other interests – they are cases, as Kant would urge, of ‘dependent beauty’.

Now from this (all too brief) survey, and before turning to Schopenhauer’s account of disinterestedness, it should be clear that Kant’s idea of aesthetic disinterestedness (in the beautiful) does not presuppose any kind of aesthetic attitude theory – although it may perhaps not be irreconcilable with such a theory. For, instead of devel-oping the idea that judging beauty requires a detachment from the object or from one’s own desires, Kant claims that appreciating beauty involves the reflecting activity of our cognitive faculties on the (form


of) the judged object and on the ground of our pleasure. Contrary to mere sensory judgments of the agreeable, a judgment of beauty clearly necessarily involves cognitive activity, whereby our imagination and understanding produce pleasure or displeasure. Judgments of beauty are reflective judgments, which means that – although they are non-cogni-tive because they are based on the feeling of pleasure or displeasure and not on any determinate concepts – they presuppose cognitive activity, more specifically the purposeful ‘play’ of our imagination and under-standing, and the pleasure we take in the beautiful is rightfully charac-terised as disinterested only because it is ultimately grounded in the ‘free harmonious play’ of imagination and understanding, which recipro-cally enliven each other and purposefully accord. Thus the disinterested quality of our pleasure does not merely refer to but actually arises from a harmonious relation between our cognitive faculties, which is purposive with regard to cognition in general (§ 9, 5:217; § 12, 5:222). 24

We thus arrive at what is, in Kant’s view, the distinctive (albeit some-what paradoxical) source of pure aesthetic pleasure: the disinterestedness of our pleasure in the beautiful is ultimately based upon the interests of the cognitive faculties to engage with and cognitively explore the formal features of an object. By exploring various shapes and contours, and randomly trying out several configurations, they stimulate and enliven each other, without their activity being determined by the application of concepts to the phenomenal unity: ‘we linger over the consideration of the beautiful’ (§ 12, 5:222). For Kant, aesthetic reflection somehow attempts to realise the ultimate goals of cognition in the absence of the subsumption of sensory intuitions under determinate concepts. ‘Imagination’, he says, ‘must in the judgment of taste be considered in its freedom ... not taken as reproductive, as subjected to the laws of asso-ciation, but as productive and self-active (as originator of arbitrary forms of possible intuitions)’ (§ 22, ‘General Comment’, 5:240). To make sense of this, we must recall that in ordinary cognition the imagination oper-ates in the service of the understanding’s determining activity: it is not free but produces schemata that enable conceptual determination and identification of objects. The specific reflective nature of aesthetic appre-ciation precludes, however, the mutual accord of imagination and under-standing from resulting in a conceptual determination of the object. On the contrary, the imagination gains a freedom to ‘play with’ the forms and explore and develop ever new configurations and patterns instead of plainly offering the understanding schemes which are to be deter-mined conceptually in order to identify the object. In aesthetic reflec-tion, the imagination gains a freedom that surpasses the subservient role


it plays in ordinary cognition: ‘only ... a subjective correspondence of the imagination and the understanding without an objective one – where the representation is related to a determinate concept of an object – are consistent with the free lawfulness of the understanding (which is also called purposiveness without a purpose) and with the peculiarity of a judgment of taste’ (§ 22, ‘General Comment’, 5:241).

Despite Kant’s sharp distinction between aesthetic (reflective) judg-ments, which are based on subjective feelings, and cognitive judg-ments, which are determined by categories of the understanding, pure aesthetic judgments too, then, require the activity of the cogni-tive faculties, for Kant associates aesthetic judgments with the use of the cognitive faculties, albeit in the absence of conceptual determina-tion. Thus, although Kant is well aware that our reflective engagement with beautiful objects may produce intellectual, empirical, and moral interests and might even be conducive to genuine moral behaviour, he shuns any identification of the aesthetic and cognition, even though he nonetheless insists that the free formative activity of our cogni-tive capacities is intrinsically pleasurable and that aesthetic judgments of beauty cannot be realised without this heightened activity of our cognitive faculties.

Now, while Kant grounds the disinterested pleasure of beauty in the ‘free harmonious play’ of the cognitive powers, Schopenhauer too asso-ciates beauty with the quickening of our cognitive capacities, that is, our ‘intellect’, and (again like Kant) contends that pure aesthetic percep-tion cannot be based on subsumption of intuitions under determinate concepts. He transforms the Kantian transcendental analysis of beauty, however, into a psychological theory of will-free consciousness and deep absorption, which not only necessarily involves detachment from individual desires, urges, and affects, but also affords a superior kind of cognition of the aesthetic object’s universal essence. Thus, whereas Kant founds his distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful on the presence or absence of any specific prudential, personal, or moral interest in the actual existence of the object, yet nevertheless claims that the pleasure in the beautiful is transcendentally grounded in the ‘free harmonious play’ of our cognitive powers, which is free from regulation by determinate concepts, Schopenhauer founds the distinction between the ‘alluring’ (or ‘charming’, i.e. das Reizende ) and the beautiful on the criterion whether our perception of the object is or is not in the service of our individual interests, needs, and wants, that is, our will. As we shall see, he ultimately identifies the ‘experience’ of beauty with a deperson-alised, will-less state of inner peace and tranquillity, which affords not


merely relief from pain and suffering but also genuine cognition of time-less (and, as Schopenhauer insists, Platonic) Ideas.

Having provided an exposition of Kant’s theory of disinterested beauty and discussed some of its merits and flaws, I am now in a position to clarify how Schopenhauer, while retaining Kant’s insight that beauty stimulates our cognitive capacities in an unusually lively way, radically transforms the Kantian idea that beauty is based upon free reflection on an object without ulterior cognitive aim into the idea that beauty is based upon the will-free contemplation of an object’s universal essence. It is to Schopenhauer’s contrast between interested cognition in the service of the will and painless, will-free contemplation, which arguably characterises aesthetic cognition, that I now turn.

Disinterested contemplation (Schopenhauer)

Inspired by, amongst others, Schelling’s essay on The Essence of Human Freedom (1809), Schopenhauer claims that the whole of reality is basi-cally the expression of a blind unconscious will and holds that the intel-lect (which he identifies physiologically with the brain) is merely an instrument or tool of this will. 25 As indicated in the previous chapter, for Schopenhauer, the intellect is ‘at bottom tertiary, since it presupposes the organism, and the organism presupposes the will’ (WWR II, 278).

However, whilst the whole world, including human life, is nothing but an uncanny puppet show of one and the same blind and ruthless will, we do not have to give up considering things altogether to be able to attain a state of pure, will-less, and painless perception or intuition ( Anschauung ). For, during a few scarce moments in our lives, all of a sudden:

we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves. We are no longer the individual that knows in the interest of its constant willing; the correlative of the particular thing to which objects become motives, but the eternal subject of knowing purified of the will, the correlative of the Idea. And we know that these moments, when, delivered from the fierce pressure of the will, we emerge, as it were, from the heavy atmosphere of the earth, are the most blissful that we experience. (WWR I, 390)

Schopenhauer here characterises a peculiar state of consciousness, in which we are still live subjects and yet become aware of ourselves as pure,


will-less subjects of knowledge, who have overcome the ordinary state of willing individuals in which we ordinarily find ourselves. In this state of pure contemplation, we are raised ‘above all willing, above all desires and cares’, and are able to experience what it is to be overwhelmed by the perception of an object. This state of pure contemplation (in which we become one with the object we perceive) is, Schopenhauer argues, aesthetic . In aesthetic experience we cease to view objects in relation to our will: our ordinary empirical consciousness of the object, which is determined by the subjective forms of space, time, and causality, has been suspended and replaced by a pure, will-free way of perceiving. We are fully absorbed in the object and lose ourselves in the contemplation of it:

When, however, an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises us out of the endless stream of willing, and snatches knowledge from the thraldom of the will, the attention is now no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will. Thus it considers things without interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively; it is entirely given up to them in so far as they are merely representations, and not motives. Then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us on that first path of willing, comes to us of its own accord, and all is well with us [ uns its völlig wohl ]. (WWR I, 196)

The passionate way in which Schopenhauer describes the aesthetic experience is related to his basically pessimistic view of man and world. From his youth onwards, Schopenhauer had been looking for a way of approaching the world that could – at least momentarily – offer a way out of the thraldom of the will and the suffering that is inextricably linked up with it. In 1812, when he was still in Berlin, he already seems to have identified the experience of aesthetic pleasure as the ideal way to escape from the misery of ordinary empirical consciousness of the world, which is full of horror and suffering, and enter into the blissful state of what he then still called the better consciousness . Ordinary consciousness is embodied, and connected with individual interests and desires, and since those can only be momentarily satisfied and will constantly be replaced by new ones, they inevitably lead to the pain of unfulfilled desire. The better consciousness, however, is consciousness of oneself as pure will-less, timeless, and painless subject of knowledge. It is an ‘experience’ of being purified of one’s own human individu-ality – which is not really an experience in the usual sense, for (strictly


speaking) there is no individual being to experience this, but only a pure, de-individualised mental state and impersonal ‘vanishing point’, a ‘clear mirror of the object’, an imperceptible perceiver; pure awareness of harmony, tranquillity, and even, Schopenhauer insists, ‘unearthly serenity’ (WWR II, 380).

What Schopenhauer describes here is a complex state of mind which is completely purified of personal emotion, desire, needs, and interests, but is by no means passive or apathetic. It creates a rupture with ordi-nary empirical consciousness, which is naturally in the service of our individual needs, urges, and affects, and is – in a way – more passive, for it is a mere physiological reaction of our will to the environment. Certain experiences, Schopenhauer argues, are so intense that they are able to lift us above ourselves and enable us to get rid of all the excessive lumber of individual emotions, desires, and even thoughts. Our indi-viduality has vanished, and all that is left is a state of de-individualised, ‘pure’ subjectivity which is no longer determined by the urges of indi-vidual willing.

Thus, for Schopenhauer, beauty rests on the disinterested objectivity of perception. Schopenhauer even claims that ‘everything is beautiful only so long as it does not concern us’ (WWR II, 374). The drastic nature of this definition cannot be sufficiently stressed. All typically human, indi-vidual ways of considering an object are suspended and what remains is a subject without ego , which perceives the aesthetic object thoughtless – we come to see the world ‘from outside’ (WWR I, 372). An experience of beauty is thus, on Schopenhauer’s his terms, abnormal: a purely disinter-ested, will-less, and detached (but also, paradoxically, unusually intense and focussed) state of consciousness, in which we have transcended our individual interests, and have ultimately become the object’s ‘pure mirror’ (WWR II, 367). 26 In aesthetic contemplation we have become somehow disengaged and even completely estranged from the world, for we have adopted a stance in which ‘the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception’ (WWR I, 179), and which enables us to become alive to usually unnoticed significant features of objects. Thus, aesthetic objects are no longer perceived according to their relations to other objects but as what they are in themselves, and we remain ‘detached’ spectators, for we no longer consider the object in its relation to our will, that is, our desires, needs, interests, and wants.

This ‘abnormal’ aesthetic state of mind, which offers an ‘escape’ from the ordinary way of estimating an object, cannot, however, proceed from a conscious act of will ( Akt der Willkür ): we cannot decide to enter into the blessed state of the better consciousness but have to be stimulated


by an object through which we can enter into a peaceful, timeless, and tranquil state of mind:

The change in the subject required for this, just because it consists in the elimination of all willing, cannot proceed from the will, and hence cannot be an arbitrary act of will, in other words, cannot rest with us. ... Such a state of itself eliminates the will from consciousness, and in it all things stand before us with enhanced clearness and distinct-ness, so that we are aware almost alone of them and hardly at all of ourselves . Therefore our whole consciousness is hardly anything more than the medium through which the perceived object appears in the world as representation. Thus pure will-less knowledge is reached by the consciousness of other things being raised to so high a potential that the consciousness of our own selves vanishes. For we apprehend the world purely objectively, only when we no longer know that we belong to it; and all things appear the more beautiful, the more we are conscious merely of them, and the less we are conscious of ourselves. (WWR II, 367–368)

This passage already partly reveals to what extent Schopenhauer’s theory of disinterested perception really departs from Kant’s aesthetic theory. Although Schopenhauer’s will-lessness clearly echoes Kant’s concept of disinterestedness, Schopenhauer radically breaks with the idea that aesthetic experience is based on the reflection and feeling, let alone the Lebensgefühl , of a judging subject. First, Schopenhauer’s aesthetic subject is a ‘pure’ subject in which the capacity to judge – not only of determining but also of reflecting judgment – has vanished altogether. Schopenhauer’s pure aesthetic subject does not judge, it is not detached in the sense that it takes some distance to be able to judge the object; it is, on the contrary, totally absorbed by the object. It does not behave as someone who, after many years, meets an old friend again and studies her features to see whether she has changed much, but as a passionate lover who is so madly in love that he forgets everything, even himself, and melts together with the other and becomes one with her. And even this comparison is probably not really accurate, as Schopenhauer warns us against too romantic an identification of aesthetic beauty with amorous passion (WWR II, 374): despite his use of terms such as rapture, exaltation, and enjoyment, the type of awareness he describes is not a matter of our emotions, affects, or feelings, but of inner peace, serenity, complete objectivity, and painless contemplation; our will and emotions are expelled from consciousness and we perceive the object as universal.


Moreover, for Schopenhauer, an experience of beauty is not, as Kant insisted, based upon our ‘feeling of life’ (§ 1, 5:204; see also Anthropology , § 60, 7:231), but is rather an intimation of death : the world has become ‘something foreign’ to us (WWR II, 387), we lose ourselves in the object and ‘become the pure mirror of the objective inner nature of things’ (WWR II, 367), and we are aware only of the deprivation of every-thing that is typical of individual human beings (see WWR I, 178; I, 195–196). We have become will-less, timeless, and totally disengaged subjects – subjects without ego . Hence, hardly human subjects at all, since we remain ‘wholly foreign to, and detached from, the scene to be contemplated’, and adopt ‘the view from nowhere’ (WWR II, 373). We have become so overwhelmed by the perception of the object, that we are no longer conscious of our individual selves anymore, and have temporarily become disposed of our own living nature, our own will to life (ibid.).

Thirdly, whereas Kant claims that an aesthetic judgment’s determining ground cannot be other than subjective ’ (§ 1, 5:203), Schopenhauer will argue, as we shall see, that aesthetic experience is concerned not with subjective feeling but with objective cognition . Instead of reflecting upon our individual feelings of pleasure or displeasure, Schopenhauer urges that in aesthetic perception (or intuition) ‘the consciousness of our own selves vanishes. For we apprehend the world purely objectively ... and all things appear the more beautiful, the more we are conscious merely of them, and the less we are conscious of ourselves’ (WWR I, 368; italics added). Aesthetic consciousness is thus not merely an escape from the torments of our existence as willing subjects, but somehow offers us ‘objective’ knowledge of the world. 27 This involves a peculiar type of intuitive knowledge, however, which is not based on concepts, as is the case in the ‘subjective’ kind of knowledge that is, scientific knowledge, for instance, but knowledge of, what Schopenhauer calls (Platonic) Ideas . As said, Schopenhauer was always fascinated by the possibility of a ‘better consciousness’, not only as a kind of awareness that enables us to escape from the sufferings that are inherent in our nature as willing individuals, but also as a path to a superior kind of knowledge and understanding which transcends the ordinary way of perceiving and coping with the world around us and our position in it (WWR I, 372; WWR II, 386). 28

Ordinary knowledge needs concepts to be able to understand the things around us and carve nature at its joints. In the aesthetic state of consciousness described above, however, the object is not known by means of concepts; aesthetic cognition is not characterised by the


conceptual clarity and rigid distinctions typical of scientific insights, for ‘we are entirely satisfied by the impression of a work of art only when it leaves behind something that, in spite of all our reflection on it, we cannot bring down to the distinctness of a concept’ (WWR II, 409). Although Schopenhauer continually identifies the Ideas as Platonic – as timeless, universal essences – this crucial observation intimates that his characterisation of artworks in terms of vehicles of knowledge and understanding that transcend our determinate conceptual knowledge of objects is remarkably close to Kant’s suggestion that works of art commu-nicate aesthetic ideas . Aesthetic ideas, Kant says, are the products of the artist’s imagination, which strives ‘toward something that lies beyond the bounds of experience’ – or more precisely, ‘inner intuitions ( innern Anschauungen ) to which no concept can be completely adequate’ (§ 49, 5:314). This is exactly the thought that we find in Schopenhauer, but it should not blind us to the important differences between their respective views: as we have seen, for Kant, aesthetic imagination is ‘productive’, for it invents intuitions and produces new configurations, whereas for Schopenhauer the Ideas are timeless universals which the artist discovers by adopting an objectifying, disinterested, and depersonalised stance towards the world. Nonetheless, the suggestion that artworks communi-cate Ideas that offer a kind of understanding or knowledge that cannot be reduced to the knowledge we gain through concepts is important, for it gives the lie to those that consider aesthetic cognition to be inferior to the (scientific and philosophical) sort of knowledge that is conceptual in nature.

Yet what kind of knowledge Schopenhauer has in mind when he char-acterises will-less aesthetic knowledge in terms of knowledge of time-less Ideas still remains puzzling. One commentator offers the following: ‘The Ideas might just be ordinary perceptual objects ... their universality having to do ... with the selectiveness of attention paid to them by the observer ... Perceiving an Idea ... is a matter of perceiving an ordinary object but with one’s attention focussed on its essential, and away from its inessential aspects.’ 29 What is significant in an object, though, does not necessarily coincide with the ‘universal’ it is supposed to be an instance of. 30 In artworks minute details of brushwork, colour hues, voice timbre, and so on are often more artistically relevant and significant than the ideas conveyed. Moreover, the universal ideas that are expressed in some masterpiece painting may often be rather trivial. If the way in which the artist renders the subject-matter does not really engage us in stimulating and moving ways and enrich our imaginative capacities, the artwork will not be of much value (and will definitely not lead to the blissful


state of the ‘better consciousness’ which Schopenhauer identifies as the aesthetic attitude). Good art not only occasions interesting ideas but develops our capacities for discrimination and appreciation. The value of a work of art mainly depends on the way it penetrates and shapes our grasp of the ideas and attitudes conveyed. Art’s cognitive value cannot be reduced to the ideas – Platonic or not – that they express and commu-nicate. The way in which they stimulate our imaginative perception and shape our discriminatory capacities is at least as important a value of good art as conveying crucial thoughts or ideas might be.

Schopenhauer’s Platonic idealism fails to accommodate for the partic-ularly valuable way in which art can express ideas, thoughts, emotions, and attitudes. This is a fundamental value of good art, though. Take any work by such masters as Rogier van der Weyden, Lorenzo Lotto, René Magritte, and Alberto Giacometti, for example. The ideas they convey and the themes they treat may at times be trivial, but the value of their work does not solely (nor perhaps primarily) depend on the content of the ideas they communicate. It is the sophisticated, complex, and often radical way those artists challenge, shape, and transform our visual attention and imagination, using multiple revolutionary techniques and contrasting distinct detailing which renders some of their works eminent masterpieces. Even though Schopenhauer does pay some atten-tion to the exquisite way in which Dutch still-life painters manage to direct ‘such purely objective perception to the most insignificant objects, and set up a lasting monument of their objectivity and spiritual peace in paintings of still life ’, and ‘in the same spirit landscape painters, espe-cially Ruysdael, have often painted extremely insignificant landscape objects, and have thus produced the same effect even more delightfully’ (WWR I, 197), he still seems too preoccupied with defending art against Plato’s estimation of it.

Now, for Plato, art is worthless and even harmful, since it only offers the illusion of knowledge and leads us away from a genuine under-standing of the world. Contra Plato, Schopenhauer argues that art can afford true knowledge and understanding. Now he is so eager to repu-diate Plato’s scathingly negative estimation of art by offering a Platonic answer himself, that he does not pay sufficient attention to the way in which art can be cognitively significant not because it necessarily conveys universal, timeless Ideas, but (more importantly) due to the way it shapes, expands, and deepens our cognitive and imaginative capaci-ties and enriches our mental life. The way in which such artists as Bach, Schubert, Shakespeare, Keats, Wilde, Magritte, and so on have been successful in modifying the forms, styles, and media through which they


transmit their ideas explains the significance and timeless value of their work. Not (primarily) because they communicated universal or revolu-tionary ideas, but because they expressed their ideas in an absorbing, touching, and enriching way, and shaped how we look at what their art expresses. Thus what matters is not primarily the nature or content of the ideas themselves, but whether the media and styles of representing or expressing them deepen our responses to them and shape and modify our grasp of the ideas conveyed – and not necessarily, as Schopenhauer would have it, how they enable us to adopt an objectifying, ‘disengaged’ stance towards the miseries of the world, in which we feel no longer concerned by them.

Still, Schopenhauer’s insistence ( contra Kant) that aesthetic experience affords knowledge and has clear cognitive value is a theoretical gain over Kant. For Schopenhauer argues that aesthetic perception is superior to ordinary perception, for the sight of the aesthetically pleasing object makes us ‘objective’, Schopenhauer says: ‘that is to say, in contemplating it we are no longer conscious of ourselves as individuals, but as pure, will-less subjects of knowing’ (WWR I, 209; see also WWR I, 195 and passim ). This heightened, ‘objective’ state of consciousness transcends the torments of individual willing and thus alleviates our suffering. For Kant, however, there is no obvious connection between aesthetic expe-rience and ‘objective’ consciousness. Although he recognises that the cognitive powers are involved in aesthetic experience, he clearly refrains from identifying pure aesthetic experience with cognition of universal aspects of an object. Schopenhauer argues that perceiving (and, hence, enjoying) something aesthetically presupposes that our ordinary cate-gories of perception are suspended, which implies that objects are no longer apprehended in relation to other objects, and secondly, that we do not consider objects in relation to our will. Kant, however, neither believes that objects of aesthetic experience are seen in a fundamen-tally different manner – let alone, as Schopenhauer none the less insists, from the standpoint of eternity – nor that our ordinary categories of perception are suspended, nor that the aesthetic subject’s consciousness is fundamentally transformed into a pure, objective consciousness.

Thus Schopenhauer’s conception of a ‘pure, objective consciousness’ is closer to the Platonic ideal of ‘pure knowledge of the soul’ than to Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience: as Schopenhauer puts it, in aesthetic contemplation ‘we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what ’ (WWR I, 178). Aesthetic will-less perception, which Schopenhauer iden-tifies with Spinoza’s notion of knowledge ‘sub aeternitatis specie’ offers


insight into the timeless kernel of things, that is, the universal essences of the perceived objects, beyond mere appearance. Schopenhauer calls these eternal essences the (Platonic) Ideas, the ‘eternal forms’ behind the mere appearances of common empirical cognition. Schopenhauer here, again, clearly moves beyond Kant’s analysis of aesthetic disinterested-ness and appropriates a more Platonic vision of knowledge of eternal Ideas.

That Schopenhauer’s radical transformation of Kant’s theory of disin-terestedness ultimately results in an account of aesthetic experience, which is perhaps unnecessarily clouded by Platonic metaphysical idiom, does not automatically render the account as such invalid. There are at least three plausible elements in Schopenhauer’s description of the expe-rience of beauty, and each of these is a theoretical gain over Kant.

First, Schopenhauer’s particularly strong requirement that, in aesthetic contemplation, we temporarily lose ourselves completely in the aesthetic object may be overstated, but is far from implausible as a characterisa-tion of (at least some genuine instances of) aesthetic experience. For, in aesthetic contemplation, we are surely taken in by the object and are temporarily immune to our environment, that is to say, to the mecha-nistic causal network of things, and – as Schopenhauer plausibly holds – at the same time our relation to the world is deepened and enriched.

Secondly, his insistence that our desires, urges, needs, and wants temporarily abate in aesthetic experience equally holds for experiences we typically tend to identify as aesthetic. Considering an object from an aesthetic point of view does – at least in some cases – require, as Schopenhauer insists, that we set aside our personal needs, desires, and wants. Aesthetic perception is not merely a question of our pleasure being unrelated to the real existence of the object, as Kant maintains, for (as we have seen) this criterion does not offer any independent ground for all cases of the beautiful. However, aesthetic experience does involve, as Daniel Came puts it, ‘an attitude of reflective disengagement from all considerations of utility, which considers only what the object is “in itself”’, which is precisely what Schopenhauer argues. 31

Thirdly, Schopenhauer’s defence of the cognitive value of aesthetic experience in terms of ‘pure objectivity’ may be metaphysically over-charged, but is definitely rich in phenomenological insight, and gives the lie to those who, like Nietzsche, identify Schopenhauerian disinter-estedness and objectivity with the ‘blessed peace of nothingness’, which is supposedly ‘hostile to life’. That Schopenhauer connects his (plau-sible) characterisation of disinterested aesthetic experience with a soteri-ological metaphysics of life-denial and asceticism does not entail that


aesthetic disinterestedness in itself is, as Nietzsche holds, necessarily a ‘homage to ascetic ideals’. 32 As I have argued elsewhere, Schopenhauer’s characterisation of aesthetic experience in terms of will-less and pain-less objectivity may indeed be closer to an intimation of the eternal tranquillity of death than to Kant’s ideal of Lebensgefühl . 33 Yet, contra Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s claim that the aesthetic subject’s exception-ally ‘pure’ state of consciousness allows it to discover the deeper objec-tive essences of the world is hardly implausible: at least some (intense) aesthetic experiences, in which our self-consciousness dissolves and we become immune to ulterior aims and desires, enable us to unravel universal truths about mankind and its place in the world.

Stripped from its idealistic metaphysics, Schopenhauer’s characterisa-tion of aesthetic experience in terms of will-free objective cognition may perhaps not hold for all kinds of aesthetic experience but is a plausible and perceptive characterisation of at least some basic aspects of genuine instances of it. For, at least one of the reasons why we value artworks such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia , Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Bach’s St. Matthew Passion , and Goya’s The Third of May 1808 is because they convey profound universal truths about the world and our place in it, and because (as Schopenhauer insists) they offer us both a release and a renewal, since they return us to something fundamental. And even if we cannot put what this something is adequately into words, the experience ‘revives’, ‘cheers’, and ‘comforts’ us (WWR I, 197). Hence, Schopenhauer’s radical transformation of Kant’s analysis of disinterested pleasure results in too idealistic a theory of aesthetic will-lessness to be able to account for each and every genuine aesthetic experience. To dismiss it completely, however, risks dispensing with an invaluable philosophical contribution which departs from and surpasses Kant’s analysis of beauty, and enables us to think through the essential features of the fabric of our conscious-ness and the primordial significance of beauty to human life.

Notes

1 . Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality , trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 78–79.

2 . Schopenhauer may well have been the first to hold that disinterestedness is a defining quality of the aesthetic attitude. Although Kant has often been interpreted to defend such a view, he nowhere claims that disinterestedness is essential to the aesthetic attitude but (as we shall see) that it is a require-ment of the pleasure on which a pure aesthetic judgment is based. Neither do British philosophers such as Lord Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Alison defend a disinterested attitude view of beauty and taste. Their work does not contain


any reference to ‘disinterested attention’, ‘disinterested contemplation’, or ‘disinterested perception’. See Miles Rind, ‘The Concept of Disinterestedness in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 40, 2002, 6–87. To hold that disinterestedness is a defining element of aesthetic perception, as Schopenhauer does, was (as far as I know) entirely new in the history of philosophy.

3 . Schopenhauer also claims that our aesthetic relation to the world also has genuine moral value, for it allows us to exist (at least temporarily) as pure will-less subjects which is, on Schopenhauer’s views, remarkably similar to the moral state of ‘complete resignation’, in which ‘one is then left only as purely knowing being, as the undimmed mirror of the world’ (WWR I, 390). Although Kant, of course, never denies that beauty may have cognitive or moral value, the cognitive and moral values Schopenhauer attaches to the contemplation of beauty are obviously very un-Kantian.

4 . Nick Zangwill, ‘Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, 1995, 17.

5 . See Robert R. Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146–147, to which the following is highly indebted. Clewis also mentions the references to Kant’s work.

6 . See Clewis, The Kantian Sublime , 149. 7 . Whereas the other senses of disinterestedness are clearly the negations of the

positive senses of interest, sense 5 of disinterestedness (which can be found in § 13, 5:223), is a new addition to the list, as Clewis himself acknowledges (see Clewis, The Kantian Sublime , 149). Clewis rightly argues that ‘Kantian disinterestedness should not be identified with detachment, abstraction, or distance.’

8 . See Clewis, The Kantian Sublime , chapter 4. 9 . In ‘Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable’, Nick Zangwill rightly emphasises that

this ‘unfreedom’ of the pleasure in the agreeable is ‘a matter of the causes of the pleasure. It does not detract from what Kant is saying about the way that pleasure then provokes desire, via a representation. If a pleasure is unfree, it is unfree because of the way it is caused, not because of what it causes’ (170).

10 . This does not necessarily imply that Kant is offering a purely causal account of the interestedness of pleasure in the agreeable. I here concur with Zangwill (‘Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable’, 169): ‘Once we see that Kant is not offering a purely causal account of the interestedness of pleasure in the agree-able, we will be less prone to think that he thinks that pleasure in the beau-tiful is disinterested because the pleasure bears no causal relation to the objects that we find pleasurable and thus call beautiful. If Kant did think this, it would make his claim that pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested very implausible. But fortunately Kant holds no such view.’

11 . Zangwill, ‘Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable’, 172. 12 . Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1997), 153. 13 . Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), 280–281, and Kant and the Claims of Taste , 104–105. 14 . Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2007), 233. I here follow Zuckert’s account (233 and following) of the


intentional nature of pleasure, yet I do not agree with her identification of the intentionality of pleasure with purposiveness without a purpose.

15 . I here refer to Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View , trans. Mary Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).

16 . Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology , 233. 17 . Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology , 233. 18 . Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology , 236. See also Henry E. Allison, Kant’s

Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 69–70. 19 . Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology , 240. 20 . Zangwill, ‘Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable’, 174. 21 . Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste , 174. 22 . I have discussed this elsewhere. See Bart Vandenabeele, ‘The Subjective

Universality of Aesthetic Judgements Revisited’, British Journal of Aesthetics 48, 2008, 410–425.

23 . Paul Crowther, ‘The Significance of Kant’s Pure Aesthetic Judgment’, British Journal of Aesthetics 36, 1996, 115.

24 . See also Bart Vandenabeele, ‘Beauty, Disinterested Pleasure, and Universal Communicability: Kant’s Response to Burke’, Kant- Studien 103, 2012, 207–233.

25 . For evidence of Schopenhauer’s interest in Schelling, see HN II, 304–340; HN V, 143–139. Schelling considered nature as a whole not as mechanistic, but as a universal organism, ‘energy’ ( Kraft ) or even a ‘world-soul’. See Friedrich W.J. von Schelling, Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart/Augsburg: Cotta’scher Verlag, 1856–1861), vol. 2, 63; 569.

26 . See Barbara Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität. Kritische Analysen zu Schopenhauers Ästhetik im Horizont seiner Willensmetaphysik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996).

27 . See Bart Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer and the Objectivity of Art’. See also Wolfgang Korfmacher, Ideen und Ideenerkenntnis in der ästhetischen Theorie Arthur Schopenhauers (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1992).

28 . For extended discussion of Schopenhauer’s conception of ‘better conscious-ness’ and its connection with Indian thought, see Stephen Cross, Schopenhauer’s Encounter with Indian Thought: Representation and Will and Their Indian Parallels (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), 193–206 and passim .

29 . Julian Young, ‘The Standpoint of Eternity: Schopenhauer on Art’, Kant-Studien 78, 1987, 434.

30 . Christopher Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity: Schopenhauer on the Value of Art’, in Dale Jacquette, ed., Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 39–61.

31 . Daniel Came, ‘Disinterestedness and Objectivity’, European Journal of Philosophy 17, 2009, 95.

32 . Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality , 80. 33 . See Bart Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer and the Objectivity of Art’, 219–233.

83

The main concern of this chapter is Schopenhauer’s aesthetic doctrine of the sublime and the role pleasure plays in grounding this type of aesthetic experience. But I will come to that main concern obliquely, beginning instead with Kant’s formidably difficult account of the sublime, which heavily influenced Schopenhauer’s theory.

What I will be arguing here is that Kant unwarrantedly downgrades the aesthetic credentials of the sublime by unduly emphasising not merely its moral significance but also, and especially, the moral ground of the pleasure we take in it and of the communicability of the aesthetic judgment based on it. I believe that Kant is wrong both in grounding the aesthetically sublime in morality and our susceptibility to moral ideas, and in grounding sublime pleasure in the awareness of our moral superi-ority over nature. On Kant’s account, I contend, judging the sublime is not purely aesthetic.

Schopenhauer offers, or so I shall argue, a more plausible account of the sublime, which (although influenced by Kant) explores its aesthetic nature in a far more fruitful way, and surpasses Kant’s aesthetic of the sublime by its rightful emphasis on the prominent role of the aesthetic object and the ultimately affirmative character of the pleasure it engen-ders. Contrary to Kant, the Schopenhauerian sublime does not affirm the superiority of humanity over nature, but the ultimately superhuman unity of the world, of which human being is only a puny fragment. Despite its shortcomings, Schopenhauer’s doctrine thus establishes the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with a profound cultural and meta-physical significance.

4 The Aesthetics of the Sublime


The sublime and the triumph of practical reason (Kant)

Kant distinguishes two varieties within the category of the sublime: the mathematical and the dynamical sublime. The mathematical sublime owes its name to the fact that the sublime is aroused through that which is large beyond any comparison, or which is ‘absolutely large’ ( CJ , § 26, 5:255). In keeping with the traditional eighteenth-century distinction between a sense of sublimity connected to size and one connected to power, Kant’s mathematical sublime is connected to what is excessively or absolutely large and cannot be grasped fully by our senses and imagi-nation. The dynamical sublime is, on the other hand, connected to an overwhelming power (of, for instance, a hurricane or a volcano) which surpasses the power of imagination. Despite their differences, both varieties of the sublime are, according to Kant, united in putting us in touch with our moral powers and sensibilities and, as we shall see, the pleasure they yield is ultimately grounded in man’s moral superiority over nature.

The mathematical sublime

In the mathematical sublime our senses are pushed to the limits of their powers through the overwhelming size of natural objects or phenomena. Although Kant clearly holds that ‘nature is sublime in those of its appearances whose intuition carries with it the idea of their infinity’, he meaningfully adds that ‘the only way for this to occur is through the inadequacy [ nicht anders geschehen, als durch die Unangemessenheit ] of even the greatest effort of our imagination to estimate an object’s magnitude’ (§ 26, 5:255). On Kant’s view, the sublime is certainly not a transcendent experience of the absolute, and nor does it involve a (sense of) timelessness. Time does not stand still when faced with the sublime. We do, however, experience the limitations or the ‘maximum’ of the power of our senses, that is, our imagination. Kant specifies this in a complex passage that is worth quoting in full:

Now even though there is no maximum [ Grösstes ] for the mathe-matical estimation of magnitude (inasmuch as the power of numbers progresses to infinity), yet for the aesthetic estimation of magnitude there is indeed a maximum. And regarding this latter maximum I say that when it is judged as absolute measure beyond which no larger is subjectively possible (i.e., possible for the judging subject), then it carries with it the idea of the sublime and gives rise to that emotion which no mathematical estimation of magnitude by means

The Aesthetics of the Sublime 85

of numbers can produce (except to the extent that the basic aesthetic measure is at the same time kept alive in the imagination). For a math-ematical estimation of magnitude never exhibits more than relative magnitude, by a comparison with others of the same kind, whereas an aesthetic one exhibits [ darstellt ] absolute magnitude to the extent that the mind can take it in one intuition . (§ 26, 5:251; italics added)

Kant argues that judging the sublime involves not a mathematical method of measuring, but an attempt to grasp the whole through ‘aesthetic comprehension’. Since there is never a first or original measure to estimate the magnitude of objects, however, ‘our estimation of the magnitude of the basic measure must consist merely in our being able to take it in directly in one intuition and to use it, by means of the imagi-nation, for exhibiting numerical concepts. In other words, all estimation of the magnitude of objects of nature is ultimately aesthetic (i.e., deter-mined subjectively rather than objectively)’ (§ 26, 5:251). The sublime is thus indeed a limit experience, but not in the sense that it involves a transcendent, timeless experience of the absolute (or of the absolutely large, or of ‘that which is large beyond any comparison’), but is rather a double-edged experience of the limits of sensory perception. It is a feeling of the ‘basic measure’ upon which all reflective judgments are based – the ‘horizon’, as it were, which accompanies any estimation of magnitudes – as well as of the limitations of imagination to comprehend the absolutely large, that is, the maximum of simultaneously presentable magnitude in a single image. The sublime is, hence, not an experience of an absolute existing beyond the power of imagination (e.g., God), but of the absolute nature of the unsurpassable limits of our senses to compre-hend large wholes in a single image. Our appreciation of the mathemat-ical sublime in nature begins with aesthetically comparing the size of the vast object, but we are soon lost in the comparison. And yet, Kant thinks, through imagination’s effort to aesthetically comprehend the absolutely great, we are made aware of our capacity to apprehend over-whelming objects, and this points to something that remains unscathed by the unfathomable vastness of the object.

For through the failure of imagination to comprehend incomparably vast magnitudes, that is to say, to present them in a single image, we become aware of ‘the feeling of a supersensible power in us’, namely reason’s striving for totality and its urging imagination to come up with a measure that is suited to take in incomparably great wholes (§ 25, 5:250). Thus Kant argues that imagination’s failed effort reveals reason’s ability to think the absolutely large as a rational idea of infinity (§ 26,


5:255). By transcending the limitations of our sensibility and embodi-ment, the vast, overwhelming phenomenon makes vivid the limitless-ness of reason, which imagination inevitably fails to match. This felt inadequacy of imagination is, or so Kant argues, precisely what mani-fests the immense power of reason at the level of human sensibility and makes us aware of the ‘higher ends’ of our rational being, that is, our ultimate vocation, which is moral.

Despite his important suggestion that the (mathematical) sublime cannot be imagined without morality, Kant still insists that the judg-ment of the sublime is aesthetic and not intellectual. Kant probably has something like the following in mind. When casting our eyes across the starry sky, we can surely ponder the infinite greatness of it without necessarily experiencing the feeling of the sublime. We may then have an experience of wonder , which is akin to the sublime but is more directly based on intellective considerations. An astronomer, for instance, can experience a sense of wonder when studying the complex characteristics of stars. Kant (rightly) contends, though, that the math-ematical sublime is not based on mathematical measurements, but on the aesthetic sensuous feeling of infinite vastness. Yet, he obscures the purely aesthetic nature of the judgment of the sublime because of his inveterate urge to connect it with morality, the power of practical reason, and ‘respect for our own vocation’. For Kant leaves no doubt that it is not nature itself but rather our own mind that is properly called sublime, as he maintains that:

our imagination, even in its greatest effort to do what is demanded of it and comprehend a given object in a whole of intuition (and hence to exhibit the idea of reason), proves its own limits and inadequacy, and yet at the same time proves its vocation to obey a law , namely, to make itself adequate to that idea. Hence the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation . But by a certain subreption (in which respect for the object is substituted for the idea of humanity within ourselves, as subjects) this respect is accorded an object of nature that, as it were, makes intuitable for us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensi-bility . (§ 27, 5:257; italics added)

Kant insists that the inadequacy of imagination to intuit infinite magni-tudes is still pleasurable, as the judgment of the sublime is ultimately purposive for the power of reason and is in harmony with rational ideas. In fact, and surprisingly to say the least, the Kantian sublime


almost loses sight altogether of the aesthetic object since our admira-tion and astonishment for its vastness is ultimately due to a so-called subreption. Nature is actually mistakenly called sublime, for it is the mind that makes the sublimity of its own moral vocation palpable to itself . Sublime objects seem to be reduced to merely offering ‘occasions’ to enjoy our own superiority as moral subjects. No matter how deeply concerned Kant really is with pointing out the aesthetic nature of judg-ments of the sublime, and no matter how sophisticated his analysis, the core significance of the Kantian sublime is undeniably moral, since it offers ‘an expansion of the mind that feels able to cross the barriers of sensibility with a different (a practical) aim’, and ‘thus nature is here called sublime merely because it elevates our imagination to the point of exhibiting those cases where the mind can come to feel the sublimity of its own [moral] vocation and elevates it even above nature ’ (§ 26, 5:255; § 28, 5:262; italics added).

I believe that Kant is wrong to one-sidedly focus on the moral basis of the mathematically sublime. 1 To revalue the specifically aesthetic char-acter of the mathematically sublime feeling (as a paradoxical ‘mixture’ of pleasure and pain), I want to suggest ( contra Kant and his followers) that it suffices to accept that reason in its theoretical capacity forces the imagination to present the idea of vast totality – which turns out to be impossible. 2 I maintain that we do not have to presuppose that the math-ematical sublime is necessarily grounded in the awareness of the superi-ority of our moral vocation. To experience the mathematical sublime, it suffices that theoretical reason challenges the imagination to surpass its own limits and present to the senses what is ‘absolutely large’ in a single image, which it obviously fails to do and through which we experience displeasure. However, the pleasure that we immediately experience by realising the superiority of reason (by means of the displeasure arising from the failure of imagination) should not be understood primarily in moral terms. For the pleasure in the sublime results from the pecu-liar awareness – which makes itself felt only through the displeasure of imagination’s inadequacy, hence, at the level of sensibility – that we, as rational beings, have the power to think ideas which we cannot compre-hend in a single intuition. 3 The conflict between reason and imagina-tion is thus inextricably linked up with our awareness of the tremendous power of reason in its theoretical capacity, which keeps striving for abso-lute totality even if this implies perturbing or distorting sensory percep-tion. The question now arises as to whether Kant is able to offer a more plausible account of the other variety of the experience of the sublime, namely the dynamical sublime.


The dynamical sublime

In the dynamical sublime, it is power and not just size that is over-whelming to the senses and imagination. Although we feel ourselves to be in safety, we are still overwhelmed by the might of nature. Kant writes:

Bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunder-clouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunder-claps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurri-canes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on. Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insig-nificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they ... allow us to discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the courage to believe that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence. (§ 28, 5:261)

Kant concurs with Edmund Burke that the feeling of the dynamically sublime arises only ‘provided we are in a safe place’, but ( contra Burke) Kant argues that the concomitant pleasure does not result from realising our personal safety but from realising that we have in us ‘an ability to resist [nature’s might] which is of a quite different kind’. By this Kant clearly means our ability as moral persons, who are orientated towards suppressing sensible inclinations in order to behave morally. Being in a safe place enables us to judge the might of hurricanes, volcanoes, and so on, as sublime without undergoing real fear.

Moreover, this type of aesthetic judgment is not merely ‘similar to the moral disposition’ (‘General Comment’, 5:268), it also prepares us not merely for loving nature, as beauty does, but ‘for esteeming it even against our interest (of sense)’ (‘General Comment’, 5:267). And, even more crucial to Kant’s analysis of the dynamical sublime, the pleasur-able aspect of the sublime ‘vibration’ ( Erschütterung ), as Kant calls it, is essentially based on our susceptibility to morality, for it is a ‘feeling of this supersensible vocation’ that we, as rational beings, all have. Thus, even though the sublime is ‘a pleasure that is possible only by means of a displeasure’, the unpurposiveness of imagination’s ability to grasp nature’s might is ultimately judged as purposive, and hence pleasur-able, only because we feel ‘that we have a pure and independent reason’ (§ 27, 5:260; 5:259). The violence that we experience as resisting ‘the


interest of our senses’ and ‘the violence that the imagination inflicts on the subject’ are experienced as pleasurable merely because they are ‘judged purposive for the whole vocation of the mind ’, which is (in Kant’s view) purely moral. It even ‘reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature’ (§ 28, 5:261). Although the sublime does not necessarily involve any conscious intellectual recognition of our moral vocation, the pleasure that we may experience, provided we believe ourselves to be safe, is based upon ‘discovering’ in our mind ‘a superiority over nature itself in its immensity’, since ‘it reveals in us an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature’, which ‘keeps the humanity in our person from being degraded, even though a human being would have to succumb to that dominance of nature’ (§ 28, 5:261; 5:262). Although Kant some-times seems to suggest otherwise, the dynamical sublime arises through an activity of the imagination, is based on feeling and does not neces-sarily require any cognitive recognition of our power of reason.

It is hard to see, though, how the revelation of our moral independ-ence and superiority over nature can come about without any concep-tual basis for our judgment. 4 Thus not only the purported moral basis of the pleasure threatens the Kantian sublime’s purely aesthetic nature, but also Kant’s emphasis that the sublime allows us to recognise ourselves as moral beings. Despite his insistence that this ‘recognition’ is merely signalled through feeling so as to safeguard the experience’s aesthetic character, it remains hard to see how purely aesthetic feeling could bring this about without any recourse whatsoever to concepts.

Now, faced with a dynamically sublime object, such as a hurricane, a thunderstorm or a volcano, we call it sublime, Kant says,

because it calls forth our strength (which does not belong to nature within us), to regard as small the objects of our natural concerns: property, health, and life, and because of this we regard nature’s might ... as yet not having such dominance over us, as persons, that we should have to bow to it if our highest principles were at stake and we had to choose between upholding and abandoning them. Hence nature is here called sublime merely because it elevates our imagina-tion, making it exhibit those cases where the mind can come to feel its own sublimity, which lies in its vocation and elevates it even above nature . (§ 28, 5:262; italics added)

Here it becomes crystal-clear that the dynamical sublime is even more strongly connected to morality than its mathematical counterpart.


Although Kant (fortunately) concedes that this connection with morality ‘seems farfetched and the result of some subtle reasoning, and hence high-flown [ überschwenglich ] for an aesthetic judgment’ (!), he still maintains that he offers the only correct explanation of the paradox-ical pleasure of the sublime, which ‘concerns only our ability’s [moral] vocation ’ (§ 28, 5:262). This seems to me to be as straightforward as it is implausible, and grounding the pleasure of the sublime in morality tarnishes its purely aesthetic nature.

What is perhaps more perplexing than this quasi-moralisation of the sublime, and even more damaging to his aesthetic doctrine, is that Kant, when discussing the modality of the judgment of the sublime in § 29, argues not merely ‘that a judgment about the sublime in nature requires more culture than a judgment about the beautiful’, but that it ‘ has its foundation ... in something that, along with common sense, we may require and demand of everyone, namely the predisposition to the feeling for (practical) ideas, i.e., to moral feeling ’ (§ 29, 5:265; italics added). One should not too easily disregard such a comment, by claiming, as Emily Brady does for instance, that this type of judgment only prepares us for morality, for Kant emphatically claims that the sublime is founded on our predisposition to moral feeling , and despite his attempt to safeguard the sublime’s aesthetic credentials, this definitely affects the purely aesthetic nature of the judgment of the sublime. 5 It is obviously right that the sublime may have a propaedeutic function with regard to morality, and that this does not necessarily turn the sublime into moral feeling. 6 The Kantian sublime is indeed merely akin to moral respect, since it does not suppress our sensible inclinations ( Neigungen ) but rather violates as well as expands our imagination, offering us a mixed feeling of pleasure and displeasure which is analogous (and, hence, not identical) to the struggle with sensible inclinations involved in behaving morally. 7

However, what most commentators seem to have overlooked but actually proves far more damaging to the purely aesthetic nature of the judgment of the sublime, is that one of the vital a priori requirements of pure aesthetic judgment, namely its necessary universal communi-cability (sometimes inappropriately called its intersubjective nature) cannot be met by the judgment concerning the sublime, unless it is grounded in morality. 8 For Kant argues that it is only by becoming aware of our moral superiority to nature within us, and therefore also outside us, that the dynamical sublime may arise. He significantly adds that ‘it is only by presupposing this idea within us, and by referring to it’, that we therefore become able ‘to judge nature without fear and to think of our vocation as being sublimely above nature’ (§28, 5:264). What has often


been downplayed in the literature, however, but seems to me to be one of the determining aspects of the Kantian sublime, is that, compared to judgments of natural beauty , ‘we cannot with the same readiness count on others to accept our judgment about the sublime in nature’ (§ 29, 5:264). This has a number of reasons, three of which are especially worth emphasising.

First, unlike beauty, the sublime does not provide an ‘attunement [ Stimmung ] of the cognitive powers that is required for cognition in general’ and ‘without which cognition ... could not arise’ (§ 21, 5:238; see also §39, 5:293). This ‘attunement’ purportedly grounds the judg-ment of beauty’s universal validity, and since it fails to occur in the sublime, which does not offer a harmonious play between imagination and understanding but a turbulent struggle between imagination and reason, the sublime cannot ‘with the same readiness’ demand to be universally shared. (We shall shortly see why this is the case exactly and also why this severely damages the sublime’s purely aesthetic status.)

Secondly, to be able to judge vast or mighty natural objects as sublime one needs culture – or, at least, more culture is required compared to what is needed to appreciate natural beauty (see § 29, 5:265). One must be receptive to rational ideas, in order to become properly attuned , as Kant puts it, to the feeling of the sublime. The main reason for this will not come as a surprise anymore:

For it is precisely nature’s inadequacy to the ideas – and this presup-poses both that the mind is receptive to ideas and the imagination strains to treat nature as a schema for them – that constitutes what both repels our sensibility and yet attracts us at the same time, because it is a dominance [ Gewalt ] that reason exerts over sensibility only for the sake of expanding it commensurately with reason’s own domain ( the practical one ) and letting it look outward toward the infinite, which for sensibility is an abyss. (§ 29, 5:265; italics added)

Thus, instead of urging that the sublime merely prepares us for morality, Kant in fact argues that people who have not been sufficiently ‘prepared’ by culture to appreciate the sublimity of overwhelming nature will simply be frightened and repelled by such overwhelming natural phenomena: they will not be able to take pleasure in what is violent, overwhelming, and potentially destructive to them. Only if one is suffi-ciently susceptible to rational ideas can one judge mighty objects as sublime, that is to say, as not merely chaotic, harmful, dangerous, and frightening, but also as ultimately purposive. It should be clear from


the above passage that it is, again, reason (and not understanding, as in the beautiful) that grounds the feeling of the sublime. Reason actually uses, or rather abuses, imagination so as to confront nature’s destructive powers in order to reveal its own superior might. The sublime is indeed ‘a pleasure involved in reasoning contemplation ( Lust der vernünftelnden Kontemplation )’ (§ 39, 5:292).

Thirdly, and intimately tied up with the previous reasons why we cannot easily expect others to assent in our judgment about the sublime, is that its presumed necessity cannot be justified solely by referring to purely aesthetic principles. The modality of the judgment of sublimity is, as Kant says, ‘one principal moment for a critique of judgment’ (§ 29, 5:266), but it has received surprisingly little attention from most commentators. 9 Its importance can hardly be overlooked, however, for it is supposed to convince us of the thought that, as Brady contends, despite ‘important differences between the sublime and the beautiful, these differences do not undermine a case for the sublime as aesthetic’. 10 I concur with Brady that questioning the aesthetic status of the Kantian sublime simply by referring to its intimate links to our moral disposition and the moral feeling of respect may not be altogether convincing. For whilst it is true that the sublime may somehow prepare us for treating nature with admiration and persons with respect, that in itself is no reason to question the sublime’s aesthetic nature. For pure beauty, too, prepares us to love nature and even symbolises morality, yet this does not therefore turn the feeling of the beautiful into a moral feeling. On the contrary, this might actually work in the opposite direction. It is only because beauty exclusively belongs to the aesthetic domain that it may enhance moral capacities and teleological understanding, and be a sign of a genuinely moral disposition. Moreover, that Kant attends to the formless character of sublime objects might further support its aesthetic character, as for example, Brady, Gibbons, and Makkreel contend. 11 Judging the sublime is clearly connected to peculiar features of ‘raw nature’, which engage imagination and ‘expand it commensu-rately’ with reason’s power, through which it ‘acquires an expansion and a power that surpasses the one it sacrifices’ (§ 25, 5:249; ‘General Comment’, 5:274; 5:269; see also § 28, 5:262).

Yet, even though (as I aimed to show elsewhere 12 ) Kant’s doctrine of the sublime can be upgraded to a genuinely aesthetic exploration of the sublime (in art) and offer a more positive evaluation of imagination’s productive activity and presentational powers, at least one striking and, to my mind, insurmountable difficulty remains. For, whilst on Kant’s official view, judgments of beauty and sublimity share the general


characteristics of aesthetic judgments – they please without necessary reference to concepts, they claim universal validity, they are subjec-tively purposive, and they are subjectively necessary; however, unlike judgments of beauty, judgments about the sublime cannot immediately demand universal assent, unless quite a ‘detour’ is made, namely via practical reason. What Kant does not sufficiently emphasise is that, despite all that beauty and sublimity have in common, the modality of the two judgments is far from similar – and this severely tarnishes the sublime’s aesthetic credentials.

What are, then, the most striking differences with regard to their modality? First, as we discussed above, Kant argues that the sublime requires more culture , that is, ‘Kultur’ in the sense of the development of moral ideas, than the beautiful (§ 29, 5:265). This is of the utmost impor-tance. For, according to Kant, the beautiful testifies to a felt harmony not only between imagination and understanding but also between the mind ( Gemüt ) and the purposive forms of nature, which tightly connects beauty to natural teleology. The feeling of the sublime, on the other hand, by no means presupposes nor engenders such a harmonious continuity between our mind and nature. In the sublime, Kant contends, reason is felt to be triumphant over nature, for ‘we judge the sensible in the presentation of nature to be suitable for a possible supersensible use ’ (§ 27, 5:258). Furthermore, the sublime can ‘present ... imagination and reason as harmonious by virtue of their contrast ’ and give rise to a purpo-siveness by the very conflict of imagination and reason (ibid.). The over-whelming object is excessive for the imagination, ‘against our interest of sense’ and even ‘repulsive to mere sensibility’, and pleasure can arise solely because reason uses nature to force imagination to surpass its limits in order to make palpable the moral vocation of the mind, which is infi-nitely superior over nature (see ‘General Comment’, 5:267).

Secondly, whilst the exemplary necessity of the judgment of beauty is based on the free yet harmonious play of our cognitive powers which is purportedly conducive to any type of cognitive operation, the pleasure accompanying the judgment of the sublime cannot be immediately shared by all, as the sublime is not a matter of taste, says Kant, but of feeling . Importantly, as already indicated, the pleasure in the sublime is ‘a pleasure involved in reasoning contemplation’ (§ 39, 5:292; italics added). Its demand that everyone approve refers to ‘subjective bases as they are purposive’ not for ‘the benefit of the contemplative under-standing’, as it is with the beautiful, but ‘in relation to moral feeling’ (‘General Comment’, 5:267). Kant even insists that ‘what is sublime, in the proper meaning of the term, cannot be contained in any sensible


form but concerns only ideas of reason ... Thus the vast ocean heaved up by storms cannot be sublime. The sight of it is horrible’ (§ 23, 5:245). Pace Brady and Deligiorgi, the object itself does not really seem to matter much in Kant’s doctrine of the sublime: the hurricane or vast ocean are not genuine objects of aesthetic appreciation, but merely triggers for the mind to ‘abandon sensibility’ and reveal its ‘higher purposiveness’ and moral superiority (§ 23, 5:246). 13 The concomitant feeling of amazement ( Verwunderung ) bordering on terror, the ‘rührendes Wohlgefallen’ (liter-ally, ‘stirring liking’), which is characteristic of the sublime, is by no means admiration for nature’s aesthetic sublimity, but, suggests Kant, ‘merely our attempt to incur it with our imagination in order ... to feel our superiority to nature within ourselves, and hence also to nature outside us, ... assert our independence of natural influences, to degrade as small what is large according to the imagination in its first role, and so to posit the absolutely great only in our own vocation’ (§ 23, 5:245; § 26, 5:253; ‘General Comment’, 5:269; italics added). The sublime thus ‘reveals an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature’, which ‘keeps the humanity in our person from being degraded’ (§ 28, 5:261). Contrary to Emily Brady, who claims that ‘Kant does not argue from the position of human separation from nature ... and is not arguing for a dominion of humans over nature’, I concur with commentators such as Malcolm Budd and Katie McShane, who interpret Kant’s theory correctly as overly directed at the sublimity of the (moral) subject and with Ronald Hepburn, who justly argues that Kant’s doctrine downgrades ‘nature’s contribution in favour of the one-sided exalting of the rational subject’. 14 For one can hardly overlook the many passages that I have indicated to confirm this view.

Furthermore, Kant is adamant that sublime pleasure ‘concerns only our ability’s vocation ’ (§ 28, 5:262; first italics added) and not some quality of a natural object. 15 Also, someone lacks feeling, not taste, Kant contends, ‘if he remains unmoved in the presence of something we judge sublime’ (§ 29, 5:265). Therefore, and this is an extremely important point, contrary to judgments of beauty, the sublime cannot demand immediate communication ( unmittelbare Teilnehmung ). The principal reason for this is that, whereas assenting to judgments of taste can be ‘demanded unhesitatingly from everyone’:

In the case of [sublime] feeling, on the other hand, judgment refers the imagination to reason, our power of ideas, and so we demand feeling only under a subjective presupposition (though we believe we are justified and permitted to require fulfilment of this presupposition in everyone): we


presuppose moral feeling in man . And so we attribute necessity to this kind of aesthetic judgment as well. (§ 29, 5:266; italics added)

From this follows that, despite all similarities between judgments of beauty and sublimity that Kant is keen to point out, there is an immense difference between the ways they are able to meet the modal requirement of pure aesthetic judgments, that is, the crucial a priori requirement to be universally communicated or shared. Pace Brady and numerous other commentators, I do not think this is a minor point which leaves the sublime squarely in purely aesthetic territory. On the contrary, it deeply affects the purely aesthetic character of the Kantian sublime. For the requirement of universal assent is one of the transcendental conditions that is supposed to logically distinguish aesthetic from non-aesthetic judgments. It forms the very heart of Kant’s critique of aesthetic judg-ment. For, as he emphasises again in the ‘General Comment’, Kant is convinced that empirical laws ‘reveal only how we do judge; they do not give us a command how we ought to judge, let alone an unconditioned one’, and this is precisely what a transcendental analysis of aesthetic judgment is expected to provide (‘General Comment’, 5:278). I believe it is telling that Kant ends his ‘General Comment’ by referring merely to a transcendental critique of taste , that is, beauty, which provides a priori principles that purportedly ground ‘pronouncing on the judgments of others and pass verdicts approving or repudiating them’, but not to a similar critical discussion of the sublime (‘General Comment’, 5:278).

This can hardly be a coincidence, I think, and appears to be based on the worrying thought that, contrary to pure judgments of taste, the universal assent demanded by the judgment of the sublime cannot be justified in purely aesthetic terms. The pleasure of the sublime cannot demand to be universally communicated, unless we presuppose a feeling that the mind has a supersensible vocation that wholly transcends nature. That feeling is moral feeling (see ‘General Comment’, 5:268). Moral feeling or respect ( Achtung ), as Kant calls it, seems to be the only solid basis for the sublime’s demand to universal assent. As Kant clari-fies, sublime pleasure is ‘only negative (whereas a liking for the beautiful is positive )’, not because it offers us a kind of Burkean delight resulting from the feeling of relief felt because we are in relative safety to the threatening spectacle, but because our imagination is being deprived of its freedom, as it is dominated by reason’s immense power. The freedom of productive imagination is sacrificed to the might of practical reason. Judging the sublime, Kant maintains, ‘strains the imagination because it is based on a feeling that the mind has a vocation that wholly


transcends the domain of nature (namely, moral feeling), and it is with regard to this feeling that we judge the presentation of the object subjectively purposive ’ (‘General Comment’, 5:268; italics added). For Kant our senses and imagination are reduced to ‘an instrument of reason’, used merely to assert reason’s independence of and triumph over nature’s power (‘General Comment’, 5:269), and the natural object is merely a trigger to become aware of ‘pure intellectual purposiveness (namely, the super-sensible)’ and the ‘power of the mind to rise above certain obstacles of sensibility by means of moral principles’ (‘General Comment’, 5:274; 5:271). Furthermore, whereas the beautiful lays claim to immediate participation ( Teilnehmung ) and universal assent, the sublime demands universal participation, merely because it ‘presupposes ... a feeling of our supersensible vocation, a feeling which, however obscure it may be, has a moral foundation’ (§ 39, 5:292). And as the sublime reveals the presence of moral freedom and thus endows us with a value infinitely superior to nature, its demand to be universally shared can be based solely on the transcendental idea of moral freedom. Kant expressly specifies this in section 39, which has been usually downplayed by commentators, possibly because it does not feature in the Analytic of the Sublime as such. Yet what Kant writes is crucial and unambiguous: ‘I may require that liking too from everyone, but only by means of the moral law, which is in turn based on concepts of reason’ (§ 39, 5:292). What demands and legitimates the necessity of the sublime’s universal shareability is neither cognitive nor aesthetic, but moral.

Does this, then, turn the feeling of the sublime into moral feeling? By no means, for the feeling of respect is not aesthetically pleasurable (it is definitely not ‘Wohlgefallen’). Furthermore, as already indicated, in the sublime ‘the imagination thereby acquires an expansion and a power that surpasses the one it sacrifices’, which is (although clearly grounded in practical reason’s impossible demand to present what cannot be presented) obviously a matter of aesthetic presentation ( Darstellung ), which cannot be confused with moral action and the feeling of respect (‘General Comment’, 5:269; see also § 25, 5:249).

However, as already noted, the story of the Kantian sublime does not end here. The Kantian sublime is not merely analogous to moral struggle. For Kant is adamant that what grounds not only the universal communicability of the sublime but also the pleasure we take in it – hence, what supposedly resolves ‘the paradox of the sublime’ – is really the ‘non-pathological’ feeling of moral respect. Thus, the feeling of the sublime is not itself a moral feeling, but both its requirement to be universally shared, which is supposed to guarantee its purely aesthetic


credentials, and its pleasurable aspect do presuppose the ability to take pure interest in the moral law. Hence, contrary to pure judgments of beauty, judgments about the sublime cannot be immediately shared, as their demand to be assented to by all others purportedly needs to be mediated by morality.

Only thus can we account for the paradoxical nature of the feeling of the sublime, namely as a combination of pleasure ( Lust ) and pain ( Unlust ), for it is torn apart by its contrary (aesthetic and moral) demands. This clearly tarnishes the sublime’s purely aesthetic character. For, as Kant writes, ‘from the aesthetic side ... , the pleasure is negative, i.e., opposed to this interest, but considered from the intellectual side itis positive and connected with an interest’ (‘General Comment’, 5:271). No matter how hard Kant and several of his sympathetic commentators attempt to safeguard the sublime’s purely aesthetic nature, one ought to concede that the demand of the sublime for universal assent stems solely from ‘the intellectual side’ of the feeling, that is, the universal validity of the moral law, which is intimately tied up with the palpable presence of the Idea of moral freedom in the mind. 16 The sublime is a paradoxical feeling that involves attraction as well as repulsion, elevation as well as humiliation, pleasure as well as pain. Yet it cannot, as such, require others to share it; only its pleasurable ‘side’, which is ultimately moral, can. Apparently, it cannot occur as a pure aesthetic judgment, for the ‘aesthetic necessity’ of the sublime presupposes the universalisability of moral feeling and thus of the susceptibility to the transcendental idea of moral freedom. There can thus be neither a completely disinterested judgment of the sublime nor a sublime ‘sensus communis’. It is neces-sarily an impure or ‘dependent’ judgment. 17 This might also ultimately explain the healthy ‘ madness ’ ( Wahnsinn ) which is typical of sublime affects, such as enthusiasm (‘General Comment’, 5:275). 18

Sublime ‘vibration’ ( Erschütterung ), as Kant calls it in § 27, cannot be purely aesthetic, as it really belongs to two separate realms or territories, the moral and the aesthetic – or, rather, to neither of them as such. The sublime indeed simultaneously involves ‘repulsion and attraction’. It is a radically split feeling dwelling in two distinct domains, and is torn between their opposite requirements. The Kantian sublime is, like a monster in a horror film, interstitial. 19 Yet there can be no doubt that, in Kant’s view, the paradoxical pleasure we take in it can be justified only by ‘a feeling of the supersensible’ – by an awareness of the triumph of practical reason over nature both within us and outside us (§ 27, 5:258; see also § 28, 5:262; § 29, 5:265). Kant’s doctrine of the sublime, with its numerous references to the supersensible, is of the utmost importance


to Schopenhauer’s theory, which surpasses it in several ways. It is to Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime, which offers a more viable alternative, that we now turn.

Schopenhauer beyond Kant: towards the affirmative sublime

As I pointed out elsewhere, Schopenhauer was one of the first to acknowledge the worth of Kant’s theory of the sublime. 20 In his magnum opus , more specifically in the appendix devoted to a critique of Kant’s philosophy, Schopenhauer asserts that Kant’s theory of the sublime is ‘by far the most excellent thing in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment ’. He also claims that ‘it is incomparably more successful than that of the beautiful, and gives not only, as that does, the general method of inves-tigation, but also a part of the right way to it’ (WWR I, 532). But he adds, and this (as we shall see) will be of fundamental importance, that ‘it does not provide the real solution to the problem’ (ibid.). Further, although the younger Schopenhauer testifies in his Notebooks that he was defi-nitely impressed by Kant’s theory of the sublime; 21 he also significantly urges to do away with ‘the fatal faculty of reason’ in Kant’s account so as to develop a viable theory of the sublime – and reason is, whether fatal or not, hardly a minor detail in Kant’s doctrine. Furthermore, in his own impressive account of the sublime in § 39 of The World as Will and Representation , Schopenhauer acknowledges his indebtedness to Kant’s terminology and to his ‘correct division’ between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime. However, he explicitly adds the following quali-fication: ‘we differ from him entirely in the explanation of the inner nature of that impression, and can concede no share in this either to moral reflections or hypostases from scholastic philosophy’ (WWR I, 205). This is clearly a qualification of Kant’s account that is diametri-cally opposed to his youthful admiration, expressed in the 1808–1811 Studienhefte (MR II, 320). Unlike several other commentators, I believe we should take these qualifications very seriously since they suggest that Schopenhauer, despite his qualified appraisal of Kant’s theory, offers not just a ‘transformation of the Kantian sublime’ but actually a radical departure from Kant’s explanation – and one which is, or so I shall argue, really more plausible than his predecessor’s. 22

The weaker grades of the feeling of the sublime

In line with Addison, Burke and several other British eighteenth-century empiricist philosophers, Schopenhauer develops a psychological theory


of the beautiful and the sublime, but he supplements it with impor-tant metaphysical insights. Contrary to Kant, for Schopenhauer there is no such thing as a transcendental difference between the beautiful and the sublime. The distinction between both is not grounded in transcen-dental faculties – ‘understanding’ in the beautiful and ‘reason’ in the sublime, respectively – but primarily in empirical and phenomenolog-ical features. Schopenhauer’s novel thought that the beautiful and the sublime cannot be distinguished as sharply as several of his predecessors thought is of paramount importance in this respect.

One of the most revealing passages in his account of the sublime is where he sketches so-called transitions from the beautiful to the sublime. He actually attaches great importance to these often very subtle transi-tions, and he regards it ‘as more appropriate to the discussion to adduce first of all examples ... of the weaker degrees of the impression of the sublime’, whilst fully realising that ‘those whose aesthetic sensibility in general is not very great, and whose imagination is not vivid, will understand only the examples ... of the higher and more distinct degrees of that impression’ (WWR I, 202–203). Here already, a first striking difference with Kant can hardly be overlooked. For Schopenhauer is convinced not only that there may be transitions from the beautiful into the sublime (which is unthinkable from a Kantian viewpoint), he also specifies that there are ‘several degrees of the sublime’, and that, again contrary to Kant, the sublime is not a reflective judgment, but an aesthetic feeling which is ‘in the main ... identical with the feeling of the beautiful’ (WWR I, 202).

Schopenhauer takes great pains to minimise the distinction between both aesthetic feelings. The feelings of the beautiful and the sublime are fairly similar, he suggests, for ‘the feeling of the sublime is distinguished from that of the beautiful only by the addition, namely the exaltation beyond the known hostile relation of the contemplated object to the will in general’ (WWR I, 202). Their main difference lies in the fact that the appreciation of beauty is characterised by a fairly smooth transi-tion from ordinary perception, which is dominated by the will of the individual, into a state of pure will-less perception, to which beautiful objects ‘most easily accommodate themselves’; whereas the sublime involves a painful struggle with the will to obtain a pure aesthetic will-less state of mind, which then allows us to engage with the Idea that the object embodies (see WWR I, 201–202).

Schopenhauer illustrates the distinction he has in mind by comparing natural beauty with sublimity in nature. The plant world in particular, Schopenhauer maintains, ‘invites’ us to contemplate its Ideas: it is as


if plants ‘need the foreign intelligent individual in order to come from the world of blind willing into the world of representation’ (WWR I, 201). When we admire the beauty of nature, we become absorbed in our tranquil perception of it and ‘not even a recollection of the will remains’ (WWR I, 202). 23

Schopenhauer then offers fascinating examples of how the experience of ‘easy’ natural beauty can begin to show traces of sublimity. A first nice example is worth quoting in extenso :

Now if in the depth of winter, when the whole of nature is frozen and stiff, we see the rays of the setting sun reflected by masses of stone, where they illuminate without warming, and are thus favourable only to the purest kind of knowledge, not to the will, then contem-plation of the beautiful effect of light on these masses moves us into the state of pure knowing, as all beauty does. Yet here, through the faint recollection of the lack of warmth from those rays, in other words, of the absence of the principle of life, a certain transcending of the interest of the will is required. There is a slight challenge to abide in pure knowledge, to turn away from all willing, and precisely in this way we have a transition from the feeling of the beautiful to that of the sublime. It is the faintest trace of the sublime in the beautiful [ der schwächste Anhauch des Erhabenen am Schönen ], and beauty itself appears here only in a slight degree. (WWR I, 203)

This intriguing description of ‘der schwächste Anhauch des Erhabenen’, which E.F.J. Payne translates as ‘the faintest trace of the sublime’ – the German Anhauch actually refers to ‘breath’ (the verb ‘anhauchen’ means ‘to breathe on’), as when we breathe on a window and, for example, cause to melt delicate ice crystals on a window-pane, which Schopenhauer mentions elsewhere in the context of beauty – refers to how a tiny amount of sublimity can be metonymically present in the sense of beauty (see WWR I, 182). Translating Anhauch with ‘trace’ is perhaps too strong, for the example clearly shows that beauty here is rather tinged with sublimity , as the air can be tinged with rain. It is as if the faintest touch of the sublime here somehow mildly qualifies the smoothness of the transition from will-driven into will-less, tranquil perception. 24 Schopenhauer explains why this is the case here: because of our aware-ness of the lack of warmth of the sunrays, some mild effort is required to overcome our sense of uneasiness and perhaps even worry about the lack of life energy the winter sun is providing, which adds a peculiar thrill to this experience of beauty and makes us shiver slightly at the sight of it.


As Schopenhauer puts it: ‘through the faint recollection’ – we will see how crucial the term ‘recollection’ is in the context of Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime – of the thought that in winter the sunrays are not strong enough to provide much warmth, ‘a certain transcending of the interest of the will is required’. In the German text, ‘transcending’ is ‘Erheben’, which is very closely related to ‘das Erhabene’ (the sublime). What distinguishes the mildly sublime experience just mentioned from a pure experience of beauty is that, despite the beauty of the sunlit scene, the faint awareness of the lack of solar energy in winter affects our will negatively. Hence, Schopenhauer argues, a certain elevation is needed somehow to remain in a purely contemplative mood instead of yielding to the negative emotions that are caused by the affection of the will, which slightly tarnishes the purity of our experience of natural beauty. This is because this instance of weak sublimity is accompanied with ‘the faint recollection of ... the absence of the principle of life’ (WWR I, 203). The key difference with ‘easy beauty’ is that here we are aware of a mild challenge to engage the object purely contemplatively, since we somehow realise that when ‘nature is frozen and stiff’, it is not a hospi-table environment. We are faintly reminded of our dependence upon the energy of the sun to be able to survive in nature as the will-driven, embodied creature that we are .

Now, I would like to suggest that this example of an experience of beauty slightly tinged with sublimity – which might actually be better categorised as an example of terrible beauty rather than sublimity – shows how far removed we already are from a Kantian explanation of the sublime. For Schopenhauer neither our senses nor our imagination are violently dominated by reason to measure the might of nature, as Kant holds; and there is no mention of what forms the core of Kant’s theory, namely the judgment of (moral) purposiveness, the superiority of practical reason and the susceptibility to moral feeling. Even if we disregard the prima facie difference between their respective approaches, that is, Kant’s being a transcendental story and Schopenhauer’s a psycho-logical account, the gap between the way they aim to resolve the so-called paradox of the sublime – the way they account for how it is that we can actually enjoy what is disturbing and overwhelming – is already very wide. For Kant would argue that even mild experiences of the sublime are based on our (perhaps subconscious) acknowledgement of the inad-equacy of our imagination to the power of practical reason, whereas Schopenhauer makes it clear from the outset that any reference not only to ‘that fatal faculty of reason’ but also to transcendental imagination is superfluous. What the above example shows is that, on Schopenhauer’s


account, the pleasure in the sublime does not ultimately differ from the pleasure we experience in the beautiful. Both are equally based on the contemplation of the Idea embodied and the concomitant deliverance of knowledge from the service of the will, whereas for Kant practical reason’s dominance delivers the will merely from the influence of incli-nations upon it.

These differences can hardly be overlooked. Not only does (practical) reason play no part in Schopenhauer’s account, nor does he explain the pleasure in the sublime as an experience of deliberation from the determination of the will by inclinations or as a way of judging the counterpurposiveness of the sublime as ultimately (morally) purposive. On the contrary, in Schopenhauer’s view, the sublime liberates us from the concerns of the will altogether and is a purely aesthetic experience, which expresses not our moral superiority over nature but the struggle with ‘our broken will’, which intensifies awareness of our embodied nature .

This becomes even more obvious in the following examples of the weaker grades of the sublime which Schopenhauer adduces. Like, for example, Burke and Mendelssohn and unlike Kant, Schopenhauer attaches particular importance to the existential dimensions of the sublime, especially in the examples of aesthetic experiences where the feeling of the sublime becomes more outspoken. Schopenhauer (rightly) suggests that the experience of the sublime is based on an existential awareness of ourselves as fragile, puny individuals and our precarious embodied engagement with the world. 25 Burke’s characterisation of the sublime not as positive pleasure but as delight , which means ‘a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror’, has clearly deeply inspired Schopenhauer’s account. 26 It is this fundamental exis-tential element of the experience of the sublime, featuring prominently in both Burke’s and Schopenhauer’s, which is marred in Kant’s account by his rather farfetched digressions about moral feeling and practical reason.

Schopenhauer’s next example nicely illustrates the existential facets of the experience of the sublime:

Let us transport ourselves to a very lonely region of boundless hori-zons, under a perfectly cloudless sky, trees and plants in the perfectly motionless air, no animals, no human beings, no moving masses of water, the profoundest silence. Such surroundings are as it were a summons to seriousness, to contemplation, with complete emanci-pation from all willing and its cravings; but it is just this that gives


to such a scene of mere solitude and profound peace a touch of the sublime. ... The surroundings just described, therefore, give us an instance of the sublime in a low degree, for in them with the state of pure knowing in its peace and all-sufficiency there is mingled, as a contrast, a recollection of the dependence and wretchedness of the will in need of constant activity. This is the species of the sublime for which the sight of the boundless prairies of the interior of North America is renowned. (WWR I, 203–204)

What explains the mildly sublime character of lonely prairies and deserts is not so much, as Kant thought, their limitlessness which the imagina-tion fails to ‘comprehend’ in a single image, and which thus engenders the mathematically sublime, as rather the sense that these surroundings are felt to be existentially disturbing to finite embodied individuals like ourselves, who need objects to strive for in order to feel alive and survive . The feeling of life , which is central in Kant’s account of the beautiful but plays only a minor part in his account of the sublime, is given a promi-nent place in Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime. 27 Schopenhauer argues that whoever is incapable of contemplating such rather uncanny surroundings and whose perception remains in the service of the will, will be ‘abandoned with shameful ignominy to the emptiness of unoc-cupied will, to the torture and misery of boredom’ (WWR I, 203–204). The tinge of the sublime that we experience in such surroundings is grounded in an experience of contrast : the contrast between the goals of our willing self and the lack of objects to satisfy it. Again it is also a recol-lection not only of our dependence on the will, but also of our will on nature which explains the ambivalent and ultimately sublime nature of such an experience; whereas in Kant it is the ‘attunement’ of the mind itself to its supersensible vocation, which is properly called sublime.

The experience of ‘the sublime in a low degree’ can become more intense – the Schopenhauerian sublime is indeed often more a matter of intensification (as in Burke) than of elevation – if we imagine ‘such a region denuded of plants and showing only bare rocks’ (WWR I, 204). For then the threat which the surroundings pose to our physical existence becomes far clearer and, suggests Schopenhauer, ‘the will is at once filled with alarm [ schon geradezu beängstigt ] through the total absence of that which is organic and necessary for our subsistence [ zu unserer Subsistenz nötigen ]’ (WWR I, 204). Here we find a splendid echo of Burke’s existential sublime. 28 What really terrifies us – the German beängstigt is much stronger than the translation’s ‘filled with alarm’ suggests – is nothing less than our awareness that the surroundings that


we perceive are possibly life-threatening since they lack what we need ‘for our subsistence’, for our survival. To be able to contemplate serenely such surroundings, ‘a more decided emancipation from the interest of the will’ is needed, and therefore ‘the feeling of the sublime distinctly appears’ (ibid.). Here the feeling of the sublime comes close to an expe-rience of the uncanny, which translates the poignant German term ‘unheimlich’ (literally ‘un-homely’). The environment Schopenhauer describes is more distinctly sublime because we cannot imagine it to be our home. We feel that we could not survive in an environment which does not offer the necessary means to feed us; this is what causes it to be felt as ‘unheimlich’. Much more effort is therefore required to be able to persist in the state of pure knowledge which is essential to aesthetic contemplation, for we feel uneasy in this environment because it is not conducive to our will to life, and we are aware that we would not be able to live and survive in it. 29

In these examples, another key difference between Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s resolutions to the problem of the sublime comes more clearly into view. Both justly characterise the sublime as involving some sort of struggle. Yet, whilst Kant characterises the feeling of the sublime as a struggle to present ( darstellen ) the immensity of the size or power of overwhelming phenomena, Schopenhauer more plausibly considers the sublime feeling as centred on a sense of feeling reduced or overwhelmed, and of a concomitant struggle to cope with the existential threat which the object poses to such embodied individuals as ourselves. The resolu-tion to the paradox of the sublime is thus to be situated not, as Kant argues, in a struggle to overcome the limits of sensibility, which is not merely analogous to the struggle involved in acting morally but also eventually discloses moral freedom.

Schopenhauer suggests a completely different and, in my view, more plausible explanation. The core of the experience of the sublime lies in the essential tension between knowledge and desire and involves a struggle with our will which is negatively affected by the (real or imag-ined) hostile character of the object through which ‘we feel ourselves reduced to nothing ... like drops in the ocean, dwindling and dissolving into nothing’ (WWR I, 205). The sublime, Schopenhauer insists, is indeed a humbling experience, but not because (as Kant thinks) we, as physical creatures, feel humbled ‘by the superiority of the rational voca-tion of our cognitive powers’, and manage, ‘by a certain subreption (in which respect for the object is substituted for the idea for humanity within ourselves, as subjects)’, to accord a similar respect to ‘an object of nature that, as it were, makes intuitable the superiority of the rational


vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility’ (§ 2, 5:257). Schopenhauer offers a much more adequate explanation of the peculiarly humbling effect of the sublime. The struggle accom-panying the sublime is not between transcendental imagination and reason, but between intellect and desire. What is particularly humbling when we are faced with sublime phenomena is that they cause our sense of vulnerability to nature’s might to be heightened . Schopenhauer’s approach thus surpasses Kant’s for being more clearly object-centred. 30 Moreover, according to Schopenhauer, what is essential to the experi-ence of the sublime is not that we feel our senses and imagination to be unable adequately to present images that match the immense size or power of the overwhelming natural objects, but rather that the object ‘stands in a hostile relation to our will’. Hence, we feel our inability to withstand the tremendous shock the overwhelming object causes to our self-esteem: we are being made vividly aware of the insignificance, fragility, and nullity of our existence as desiring, embodied, and insa-tiable individuals. 31

The full impression of the sublime

The problem of why such tremendously shocking and usually (but not necessarily) fearful experiences can actually be sought out, enjoyed, and positively valued has yet to be answered. For why is it that we experience this humbling of our self-esteem with pleasure ? What is Schopenhauer’s resolution to the paradox of the sublime? Studying his examples of the more outspoken instances of the sublime will shed light on this. Schopenhauer suggests that the feeling of the sublime manifests itself to a much higher degree, when we are faced with

nature in turbulent and tempestuous motion; semi-darkness through threatening black thunder-clouds; immense [ ungeheure ], bare, over-hanging cliffs shutting out the view by their interlacing; rushing, foaming masses of water; complete desert; the wail of the wind sweeping through the ravines ... But the impression becomes even stronger, when we have before our eyes the struggle of the agitated forces of nature on a large scale, when in these surroundings the roaring of a falling stream deprives us of the possibility of hearing our own voices. Or when we are abroad in the storm of tempestuous seas; mountainous waves rise and fall, are dashed violently against steep cliffs, and shoot their spray high into the air. The storm howls, the sea roars, the lightning flashes from black clouds, and thunder-claps drown the noise of storm and sea. (WWR I, 204)


Schopenhauer here offers an impressive description of a terribly fright-ening, multi-sensory experience of the sublime in nature, bordering on the monstrous ( ungeheuer ) – a term he uses, unlike Kant, to suggest not merely the immensity of the might of nature but also especially its actual threatening character. Schopenhauer is, of course, fully aware that not all frightening experiences are necessarily sublime. What is it that renders this terrifying spectacle, which Schopenhauer describes so movingly, truly sublime?

Schopenhauer offers the following answer. Our being negatively, and often painfully, affected by the immensity of what we face when we realise, through feeling , the destructive threat of the natural forces suggests that we are ‘helpless against powerful [or, rather, “violent” ( gewaltige )] nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in face of stupendous forces’ (WWR I, 205). What Schopenhauer argues here is truly a crucial step beyond both Burke and Kant. For contrary to his predecessors, Schopenhauer justly contends that we need not be in a safe place in order to experience the sublime. To feel safe is not required for having a sublime experience (see MR II, 321; HN II, 289): it is neither necessary (as both Burke and Kant hold) nor sufficient (as Burke holds). I side with Schopenhauer in this. For whilst being (or imagining ourselves to be) in a safe place may definitely aid in overcoming the anxiety aroused by the threatening object, feeling too safe might also have the opposite effect of making our awareness of the object’s threat too weak actually to experience the danger it might cause, and it would thus also lose its sublime effect.

Hence what procures the ambivalent pleasure of the sublime is not – as Burke supposes – reducible to a sense of moderation of experienced terror by beholding the object from a safe distance. 32 There is indeed a major difference between, for instance, the relief felt upon having escaped from a perilous situation and the pleasurable, uplifting feeling of the sublime. For, whilst we would actually dread confronting a similar dangerous situation again or even thinking about it or remembering it, we will surely gladly revisit a sublime object in nature and also seek out objects that give rise to a similar sublime feeling. This crucial difference between relief and sublimity is one that Burke’s theory has trouble to accommodate. The sublime cannot be reduced to an experi-ence of ‘uneasiness’ or ‘instability’ either, let alone to the recognition of the power of (practical) reason over our imagination and the superi-ority of our morality above nature, as Kant argues. Quite the contrary, Schopenhauer rightly holds that ‘we feel ourselves reduced to nothing’ and ‘with the state of pure knowing in its peace and self-sufficiency


there is mingled, as a contrast , a recollection of the dependence and wretchedness of the will’ (WWR I, 205; I, 204; italics added). By empha-sising that the sublime involves awareness not just of ‘uneasiness’ but of contrast , he clearly moves beyond his predecessors’ doctrines. 33 Against this, one could remark that Kant, too, characterises the sublime as a ‘mixed’ emotion and refers to the contrast between imagination and reason. This would obviously be right. Yet, on Kant’s account, in the sublime we judge the displeasure accompanying our nullity and depend-ence on nature to be ultimately purposive because it renders palpable the power of reason, whereas Schopenhauer defines an aesthetically sublime experience as based upon the felt contrast between our ‘broken will’ and our unmoved contemplation of the cause of this ‘brokenness’ (WWR I, 204). ‘In this contrast’, Schopenhauer urges, ‘is to be found the feeling of the sublime’ (ibid.). Hence, even though we may not be, nor imagine ourselves to be, in safety we are still able to experience the sublime when faced with objects that have a hostile relation to the human will. Again, this manifests itself in ‘a consciousness, merely felt’, that we are both ‘a vanishing nothing in face of stupendous forces’ and ‘the unmoved beholder of this scene’ (WWR I, 205; I, 204). This is again hugely different from and more plausible than what Kant argues. According to Kant, the sublime is not an experience of the contrast between our awareness of the threat of the overwhelming object and our consciousness of our own tranquillity as ‘unmoved beholders’ of the scene. Far from it, for we do not experience real fear and, moreover, we experience ‘merely’ the pain ( Unlust ) of failing to estimate the size or power of the object, but (as we feel ourselves to be safe) we are somehow able to judge this ‘negative pleasure’, this Unlust , as ultimately purposive, since it is produced by imagination’s incommensurability not to nature but to the power of reason; and the sublime thus reveals the attunement of our mind to ‘abandon sensibility’ in order to meet the demands of our moral vocation, which is purportedly infinitely superior to nature within and outside us (see § 28, 5:261 and passim ).

What is, then, on Schopenhauer’s account, required to experience the sublime is neither that we feel safe – for we do feel really threatened – nor that we sense the presence of our moral superiority, but that we do not direct our attention to the hostile relation of the object to our own will , and do not let ‘ personal affliction ... gain the upper hand’ (WWR I, 204; italics added; see also WWR I, 203; I, 199; II, 373). This is of para-mount importance. For whilst Kant maintains that we merely ‘ present nature as arousing fear’ and ‘consider an object fearful without being afraid of it, if we judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case


where we might possibly want to put up resistance against it’, it seems to me that what is truly at stake in the sublime is not actual safety and mere thinking of something as fearful, as rather being able to mentally withstand considerable levels of real danger and fear. What is at stake is a heightened awareness of human fragility compared to overwhelming nature, and the psychological (not moral) strength to cope with this. That this is what Schopenhauer, contra Kant, considers to be essential to the sublime experience is clear from his insisting that ‘the individual will’ is ‘actually affected’ by the overwhelming object, and that the beholder, ‘although he perceives and acknowledges’ the hostile relation of the object ‘to his will which is so pressing ... may not direct his atten-tion to this relation to his will’, and ‘consciously turn away from it, forcibly tear himself from his will and its relations’, and contemplate the Idea embodied in it (WWR I, 202; 201; italics added). This gives the lie to those who hold that what really matters in the sublime is overcoming the hostile relation of the object to the human will in general instead of to the individual will. For, while taking into account human willing in general obviously plays an important part in the aesthetic experi-ence of tragedy, Schopenhauer does not argue that this forms the true core of the experience of the sublime in nature. Schopenhauer rightly argues that real fear is involved in the experience of the sublime and that consciousness of the (individual) will is not lost, even though we may not focus our attention on it. But I see no inconsistency in holding, as Schopenhauer does, that we are aware both of the threat posed to our will as well as of wresting ourselves from our own will. In the sublime, we raise ourselves above ourselves, that is, above our own willing, but (unlike what happens in the case of the beautiful) we remain fully aware of the threat posed by the hostile objects to our individual will. Consciousness of the threat to our will has not vanished. It is, indeed, essential for the feeling of the sublime. If there were no such awareness of a threat, it is hard to see how the mixed emotion of the sublime could arise altogether.

Schopenhauer’s resolution of the paradox of the sublime

How can Schopenhauer explain the possibility of aesthetically contem-plating that which makes us feel insignificant creatures, abandoned to powerful natural objects that could easily annihilate us? The answer he offers is extremely complicated and not always easy to distil from his dense account. In fact, I think he actually provides two different answers, but does not sufficiently distinguish between them. One explicit answer is what I have called elsewhere Schopenhauer’s doctrine


of ‘transcendental pride’, which has recently attracted particular atten-tion by several commentators. 34 As far as this aspect of Schopenhauer’s resolution to the paradox of the sublime is concerned, Kant’s influence is fairly obvious, although Schopenhauer, again, parts ways with Kant on a number of immensely important issues. 35

According to Schopenhauer, and again contrary to Kant, we experi-ence real fear when faced with sublime objects. Yet, when we regard an overwhelming phenomenon as personally threatening or distressing, we may also manage to disregard the actual threat and do not let personal feelings of distress take the upper hand. 36 Hence, Schopenhauer never denies that I may really feel fear for myself, and feeling myself as a vulnerable individual, ‘as the feeble phenomenon of will ... helpless against powerful nature, dependent, abandoned to chance’ may even heighten the sublime character of the scene and the fierceness of the concomitant emotion (WWR I, 205). Yet Schopenhauer is obviously fully aware that not all frightening experiences are also necessarily sublime , so he needs a clear distinction between them. That is why he stresses the aesthetic character of the sublime experience, not only by emphasising the relational and even correlative quality of it and granting (much more explicitly than Kant) a prominent causal role for the object of the aesthetic experience, but also by pointing out that, despite the distress caused by the object, we do ‘remain in aesthetic contemplation’, and ‘the pure subject of knowing gazes through ... this picture of the broken will, and comprehends calmly, unshaken and unconcerned, the Ideas in those very objects that are threatening and terrible to the will’ (WWR I, 204). Schopenhauer leaves no doubt that it is ‘in this contrast’ between real fear and unmoved contemplation that the feeling of the sublime is really to be found (ibid.).

Thus, on Schopenhauer’s account, the sublime is on the whole fairly similar to the beautiful, for although the beholder ‘perceives and acknowledges’ the hostile relation of the object to his will (and it is of paramount importance that he does), he ‘forcibly tear[s] himself from his will and its relations’, and then may ‘quietly contemplate, as pure, will-less subject of knowing, those very objects so terrible to the will’ (WWR I, 201). The striking similarity with the beautiful is that in the sublime – as a purely aesthetic feeling – we ultimately withdraw from the personal suffering caused by the overwhelming object and quietly contemplate the object which is found to be so distressing to the will.

Yet despite Schopenhauer’s insistence on the important similarities between the feelings of the sublime and the beautiful, he also down-plays several crucial differences between them. For, although both


aesthetic experiences are essentially characterised by a liberation from the will and calm contemplation, in the sublime this state of pure, will-less contemplation is far more difficult not only to attain but also to maintain . This crucial difference, which I discussed at great length elsewhere, 37 seems to undermine Schopenhauer’s neat distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. For whereas beautiful objects easily invite us to transcend our will and are very accommodating to tranquil contemplation, sublime objects offer resistance ( Widerstand ) to this transition in the beholder from willing individual into pure contemplative subject. From this follows that sublime ‘exaltation must not only be won with consciousness, but also be maintained, and it is therefore accompanied by a constant recollection [!] of the will’, albeit not of the individual will, but ‘of human willing in general in so far as it is expressed through ... the human body’ (WWR I, 202). Rather surprisingly, this seems to suggest that, despite Schopenhauer’s earlier remarks on the similar tranquil contemplation both experiences share, the sublime now clearly differs phenomenologically from the beautiful. For now Schopenhauer maintains that sublime exaltation is neces-sarily accompanied by ‘a constant recollection of the will [ einer steten Erinnerung des Willens ]’, which may obviously disturb the tranquil char-acter of the sublime state of consciousness (WWR I, 202).

I used to think that this crucial characteristic of the sublime under-mines the unity of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of aesthetic appreciation, which is supposedly based on a Platonic ideal of calm contemplation. 38 Now, I still believe that Schopenhauer should have paid more atten-tion to the peculiar way in which the turbulent character of sublime experiences cannot always be easily reconciled with his outspoken Platonic ideal of tranquil, will-less knowledge of Ideas. Yet it is impor-tant to point out that what Schopenhauer identifies here as ‘will-less’ contemplation is not to be identified solely with pure knowledge of Platonic Ideas nor with a resigned, disembodied state through which we may escape from our attachment to the will to life. Rather, what unites beauty and sublimity, and what keeps these experiences squarely within the aesthetic realm is that we turn away from the interest of the will not in order to give up the will to life, but to gain insight into what the object essentially is and how it manifests itself in the world of representation. This is particularly obvious when we are faced with the sublime in nature. For then, Schopenhauer writes, we turn away from the interest of the will, in order to behave in a purely perceptive way ’ (WWR II, 433; italics added). Thus, by engaging with sublime nature we do not turn away from the will in order achieve what Christopher Janaway


calls ‘sublime resignation’ 39 , but to remain an aesthetic spectator of the world , that is, an unmoved beholder focussing not on our personal afflic-tions and concerns, but transcending our self-centred desires in order to contemplate and admire even those objects that are threatening to the human will. Contemplation is what is required, but not resignation; for our personal needs and desires are transformed into a disinterested interest for the aesthetic object, but have not completely vanished. 40

Thus, although the will has certainly not disappeared completely from consciousness in the sublime – it is indeed essential to the feeling of the sublime – Schopenhauer does not threaten the unity of his aesthetic theory by emphasising the degree of mental activity that is needed to remain in a contemplative state of mind when confronting sublime nature. For, despite the prima facie impression one may get from Schopenhauer’s insistence on the smoothness of the transition into will-less contemplation in the beautiful, it seems to me to stand beyond doubt that some degree of activity, at least some ‘tearing away of the object from the relations to the will’ will also be required to arrive at will-free contemplation when engaging with ‘easy beauty’, for our will is always inevitably looking for personal fulfilment and not for disinter-ested perception. In the beautiful there is, Schopenhauer insists, hardly any struggle with our will at all to attain an aesthetic, will-less state of consciousness, for our will does not feel hampered or threatened by beautiful objects – on the contrary, they invite tranquil contempla-tion. But since our ordinary perception necessarily is, as Schopenhauer repeatedly urges, in the service of the will or even a slave to the will, we must presuppose that even in engaging in beautiful objects at least some degree of mental activity will be required to overcome the domi-nance of the will and liberate our perception and knowledge from its thraldom. For that we do not consciously perceive any resistance from the beautiful object to offer itself to our contemplation, nor manage to bring about the beautiful intentionally does not contradict the thought that some amount of mental effort is required to attain an aesthetic will-less state of mind and contemplate the Idea embodied by the object. More concisely put, that we do not sense any kind of struggle to turn away from the interests of the will in the case of the beautiful does not imply that no activity whatsoever on our part is required to enable us to appreciate a beautiful object. Because of Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the struggle with the interests of the will in the sublime, one may easily overlook the fact that this does not exclude mental activity in the beau-tiful. The emphasis on the struggle with the will in the sublime preserves the unity of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, which is grounded in the


thought that aesthetic appreciation involves our – conscious (as in the beautiful) or unconscious (as in the sublime) – transcending of the inter-ests of our will.

Yet because the sublime is essentially an experience of contrast, that is, the experience of ‘the twofold nature of consciousness’ ( Duplizität des Bewusstseins ), in which we feel ourselves both insignificant, helpless individual and serene subject of knowing, the pleasure in the sublime is characteristically more vigorous than the pleasure in the beautiful. For whereas in the beautiful consciousness of the will, and of our transcending it, completely disappears, in the sublime we violently and consciously tear ourselves away from the will, and this very process enables us to identify with ‘the eternal, serene subject of knowing’ (WWR I, 204). As in Burke, the difference between the beautiful and the sublime is, at least partly, a matter of the intensity of the experience.

Here, then, we arrive at Schopenhauer’s idea of so-called transcen-dental pride (Blumenberg), which I already mentioned above. Through the struggle to attain and maintain our state of pure contemplation in the face of terrifying objects, we also feel our own power to withstand the urge of our own will to succumb to anxiety, and we sense that the perceived threat ‘exists only in our representation’ (WWR I, 205). Thus Schopenhauer does not offer a merely negative account of pleasure – sublime exaltation is not mere relief from pain. On the contrary, it is through identifying with the eternal subject of pure knowing, that is to say, by being aware that our perception no longer operates in the service of our will, that sublime exaltation is realised to the full. Thus the ‘full impression of the sublime’ is, Schopenhauer suggests, ultimately based on our realising that ‘the fearful struggle of nature’ is only a ‘mental picture or representation’. By identifying with the pure subject of knowing, we are conscious of being liberated from the thralls of our will and feel exalted, since our dependence of the world, suggests Schopenhauer, ‘is now annulled by its dependence on us’ (WWR I, 205). Summarising, Schopenhauer’s first answer, which dominates his account of the sublime, is that we can actually enjoy aesthetically what is really contrary to the interests of our will, through realising that we are not merely a feeble phenomenon of the will but are somehow able to (partly) identify with an unshaken beholder standing, as it were, cognitively outside nature. Although Schopenhauer (justly) refrains from Kant’s ‘moralisation’ of the sublime feeling, he does seem to inherit his idea that the sublime somehow reveals the supersensible side of human beings. I put this hesi-tantly and expressly say that ‘he does seem to inherit’ this from Kant, for as we shall see, Schopenhauer’s second answer severely nuances the


Kantian character of his doctrine, and the ‘supersensible’ has a mani-festly un-Kantian meaning in his philosophy. 41

Yet, Kantian or not, more importantly, Schopenhauer’s reference to the pure subject of knowing does not aid much in finding an adequate resolution for the paradox of the sublime. For, although he (fortunately) avoids some of the pitfalls of Kant’s transcendental account, there are still a number of weaknesses in Schopenhauer’s first resolution to the paradox of the sublime. First, Schopenhauer does not sufficiently explain how it is that we come to ‘find ourselves to be’ the eternal subject of knowing, with which we are to identify. How does this transition from the will into a state of tranquil contemplation come about in beings like us, who are necessarily insignificant embodied individuals that are wholly determined by our will? How could a willing individual be able to tear itself away from the whims of the will, if the latter dominates not only our perception but also our actions, our thoughts, and our whole existence – if, in short, the willing self is the real self?

Secondly, Schopenhauer here offers another, albeit impressive, variant of what Tom Cochrane aptly calls the ‘heroic model’ of the sublime. 42 On Schopenhauer’s account, we proudly rise above the strivings of the will and enjoy our engagement with a sublime object because it provides an enhanced awareness of our cognitive powers. However, this Kantian-inspired model is flawed for a number of reasons. For, although Schopenhauer avoids Kant’s appeal to the indestructible power of reason, he does seem to ground sublime pleasure in the superiority of a pure subject that cannot be annihilated by the threatening object in nature, being itself the epistemic supporter of the representation that gave rise to the affective response in the first place. This is not only quite counter-intuitive as a correct description of actual sublime experi-ences, it is also difficult to see why realising that I am really the subject that is perceiving the sublime object would allow me actually to enjoy the aesthetic features of the object . The kind of awareness Schopenhauer seems to have in mind is clearly self-centred. This might be a perhaps rather unfortunate remnant of Kant’s transcendental account, although Schopenhauer (unlike Kant) refrains from suggesting that it is ultimately the mind that is sublime and not the object in nature. Still, in his first attempt to resolve the paradox of the sublime, Schopenhauer unjustly downplays the sublime properties of the object which produce the aesthetic pleasure in the first place. Further, a sense of (Kantian) self-aggrandisement seems to have taken the place of the earlier, impressive, and far more plausible focus on the threatening, dislocating, and deeply distressing effects that sublime objects have upon us. This ‘heroic’ story


not only ignores the distinct object-directedness of sublime experiences, but also fails to explain why we may actually take aesthetic pleasure in them. Furthermore, no matter how idiosyncratic and farfetched Kant’s doctrine may be, he might still justifiably defend his approach by referring to universal transcendental faculties, and especially to prac-tical reason’s superior power in a way that is fully compatible with the whole of his critical philosophy. Schopenhauer is, however, not equally warranted to use this kind of transcendental argument in what is ulti-mately a psychological doctrine of the sublime.

Thirdly, the thought that the sublime temporarily lifts us ‘out of ourselves’ does not properly accommodate the phenomenology of the sublime experience, for it downplays the fact that we really are puny and insignificant in comparison to the sublime object in nature.

Finally, Schopenhauer’s ‘transcendental pride’ model fails to explain why sublime objects are appealing and why we are genuinely attracted to such ‘hostile’ objects. Identifying the pleasure of the sublime with an enhanced appreciation of the scope of our cognitive powers does not sufficiently focus on the core of the experience of the sublime, which is to be situated in our relation to the overwhelming characteristics of the hurricane, the mountain range, the erupting volcano, and so on. By downplaying the positive qualities of the sublime object, Schopenhauer fails to offer an acceptable resolution to the paradox of the sublime.

Schopenhauer’s explanation does not end here, however. For he offers some crucial and intriguing modifications to his Kantian-inspired doctrine, which have been frequently downplayed in the literature. 43 Recall that Schopenhauer’s first solution focused especially upon the thought that in the sublime we discover the twofold nature of our consciousness and that by feeling oneself as the pure subject of knowing, which is the condition of every possible object of perception, one experi-ences the pleasurable exaltation that emerges in contemplating sublime objects. Such a feeling of sublime pleasure is more intense than the feeling of the beautiful since the latter does not involve any conscious awareness or ‘recollection’ of oneself as dependent on the will whereas the former does. Schopenhauer yet adds a particular twist to his argu-ment by specifying that, although ‘we feel ourselves reduced to nothing’ by the sublime object, at the same time:

against such a ghost [ Gespenst ] of our own nothingness, against such a lying impossibility, there arises the immediate consciousness that all these worlds exist only in our representation, only as modifica-tions of the eternal subject of pure knowing. This we find ourselves


to be [ als welches wir uns finden ], as soon as we forget individuality; it is the necessary, conditional supporter of all worlds and of all periods of time. (WWR I, 205)

Although prima facie a repetition of his earlier claim that it is by iden-tifying with the pure subject of knowing that we can actually relish in sublime objects, this passage offers several novel, significant elements to his earlier endeavour to come up with a resolution to the paradox of the sublime.

First, Schopenhauer here emphasises the immediacy and simultaneity of the experience of being humbled as well as uplifted by the sublime. This is of the utmost importance. It clearly confirms that Schopenhauer considers the sublime not as an experience which is first painful or distressing and subsequently uplifting, but which is simultaneously painful and pleasurable or characteristically oscillating between feelings of tranquillity and turbulence, elation and humiliation, pleasure and pain, and so on. The sublime is typically an unstable emotion in which the mind seems to go back and forth from negative to positive feelings and back again.

A further striking element in this excerpt is that, although he still explicitly refers to the pleasure of discovering that I am the one who actually represents the sublime scene, he significantly adds that the consciousness with which we identify or, rather, ‘that we find ourselves to be’ is the epistemic ground not just of this representation but ‘of all worlds and of all periods of time’. This pure ‘I’ ultimately has genuine metaphysical significance. The cosmic consciousness does not primarily refer to myself as the tranquil beholder of the object, but is, Schopenhauer urges, ‘the necessary supporter of all worlds and all periods of time’. So what at first seemed to be, as in Kant, a discovery of the supersensible side of our being which distinguishes us from nature , is now more precisely qualified as ‘the felt consciousness of what the Upanishads of the Vedas express repeatedly in so many different ways, but most admirably in the saying “Hae omnes creaturae in totum ego sum, et praeter me aliud (ens) non est” [I am all this creation collec-tively, and besides me there exists no being]’ (WWR I, 205). Unlike many commentators, who focus exclusively on the Kantian influence, I believe we should not underestimate the importance of this refer-ence to the Indian Upanishads, for it shows how Schopenhauer arrives at a position that radically parts ways with Kant’s morally orientated doctrine of the sublime, and offers a more plausible (albeit merely partially successful) alternative to it.


For what Schopenhauer suggests here offers a way out of the self-cen-tred and ‘negative’ approach that has dominated the recent literature on the sublime for so long. For Schopenhauer adds a metaphysical argu-ment to his explanation that is of the utmost importance, as it rightly (and again contrary to Kant) considers the experience of the sublime to be deeply affirmative . For, as Schopenhauer clarifies, the pleasure in the sublime is not based primarily on the recognition of our superi-ority to nature, as Kant believed. Admittedly, Schopenhauer writes that ‘the vastness of the world, which previously disturbed our peace of mind, now rests within us’, and this might suggest – as it has indeed struck several commentators 44 – that he settles with, yet again, another heroic, egocentric explanation of the sublime (WWR I, 205). Yet, in an extremely revealing passage he specifies the basis of our pleasure in the sublime as follows:

All this [i.e., that our dependence on nature is now annulled by its dependence on us], however, does not come into reflection at once, but shows itself as a consciousness, merely felt [ als ein nur Gefühltes Bewusstsein ], that in some sense or other ... we are one with the world, and are therefore not oppressed but exalted by its immensity. (WWR I, 205; italics added)

At least two insights from this passage are worth considering. First, contrary to Kant, Schopenhauer succeeds in more properly safeguarding the purely aesthetic nature of the feeling of the sublime by insisting on the non-representational nature of our consciousness of exaltation. Our exal-tation does not come into reflection, it is not propositional, discursive, or bound up with conceptual representation, but (as Schopenhauer insists) ‘merely felt’. It is not based on the thought that I am somehow elevated above my will, but on feeling this, that is to say, on a bodily response and an inner affect of sorts. Secondly, and perhaps even more impor-tantly, the source of sublime pleasure, which Schopenhauer explained in rather heroic terms before, is now clearly situated in our relation with the world. There is thus clearly no ‘subreption’ at all here, as Kant never-theless urged, for we are not exalted primarily by discovering that we are somehow epistemically or morally superior to nature. We are not exalted by our own power but, as Schopenhauer argues, ‘we are one with the world, and are therefore not oppressed but exalted by its immensity’ (italics added). Not the immensity of our cognitive powers is what is ulti-mately judged sublime, as Kant insists; what produces sublime exaltation is the immensity of nature’s powers in which we become absorbed .


This brings out the third crucial element in Schopenhauer’s impres-sive account. Contrary to his predecessors, Schopenhauer rightly claims that sublime delight is not merely more precarious than pleasure in the beautiful but also more intense and even ecstatic. Schopenhauer radi-cally modifies his Kantian-inspired account of ‘transcendental pride’. For what is ultimately pleasurable in the sublime is not our separation from the world but, rather, as one commentator aptly puts it, ‘a pleasure in the recognition and indeed affirmation of the individual’s underlying identity with a greater reality’. 45

The most remarkable and crucial difference between sublimity and beauty has now been disclosed. In the sublime we positively rejoice in belonging to a larger whole, whereas in the beautiful we quietly contemplate Ideas that are accommodating to aesthetic perception. The sublime is thus not merely more active because it requires more effort on the part of the subject to engage aesthetically with the overwhelming object. It is, first and foremost, hedonically more intense because of the struggle with the ‘broken will’ and the experience of contrast between pure knowing and willing, and also emphatically more positive and affirmative . The sublime thus offers not mere negative pleasure (as Kant believes), nor just relief from pain and suffering (as Burke suggests), but engenders the positive pleasure of feeling ‘one with the world’ instead of merely contemplating Ideas in a disengaged way. As Lydia Goehr nicely puts it in the context of the aesthetics of music, the sublime ‘ultimately symbolizes ... the essential tension between, and mutual involvement of, knowledge and desire. ... It can only hint at what the world would be like if our experience would be different – if we had no illusions and no unfulfilled desires. But for most of us, this is merely an empty hint’. 46

Now, whilst Schopenhauer insists that we remain, at least partly, the ‘unmoved beholder’ of the threatening object and of our feelings of terror and anxiety when faced with it, in contrast with beauty, the source of sublime pleasure cannot be traced back to this disengaged attitude. 47 For, even though Schopenhauer may not sufficiently elaborate this important aspect of the sublime in nature, he does suggest that the felt absorption into and ultimate identity with the core of the world offers an addi-tional basis to the experienced pleasure in the sublime – a basis which is existential and ultimately metaphysical. Schopenhauer’s doctrine thus surpasses Burke’s, Kant’s, and many others’ in offering a metaphysical and ultimately affirmative basis of sublime experiences, which is rooted in humanity but also transforms it. For, on Schopenhauer’s account (and again contra Kant), the sublime reveals not the supersensible power of human reason but the presence of a superhuman unity beyond good and


evil , which disrupts our perception and evaluation of the phenomenal world. Schopenhauer values nature not merely, as Kant does, ‘for the challenges it presents to us, as something that is difficult for us to face, and against which morality provides the resources needed to cope’ 48 , but for its awe-inspiring, superhuman qualities that enable us to realise the nullity and fragility of our existence as individuals as well as the ability to affirm our deep identity with a greater reality, with life as a whole – albeit one that is necessarily mediated by a sense of the struggle with our individual desires, interests, and needs. Faced with overwhelming objects, Schopenhauer says, ‘we feel reduced to nought in their pres-ence, and yet revel in the pleasure of beholding them’ (WWR I, 206), and this is due, in particular, to our ability to somehow identify with their overwhelming power and awesome properties. 49 Enjoying sublime objects is, therefore, a matter not of recognising the superiority of our cognitive or moral powers to nature, but of rejoicing in our belonging to a larger whole, and being called upon to renounce our everyday self-concern. It is in this sense that the sublime is more akin to an experience of the sacred character of nature and the world than to a self-centred admiration of our moral superiority over nature.

Further, it also allows us to better understand why the sublime really offers a shock to our self-esteem. For it is only through affirming our participation in a realm of awe-inspiring, sacred phenomena and somehow identifying with this world in which all our separate selves aspire to be absorbed and united, that we vividly become aware, through feeling , of the ultimate insignificance of our ordinary self-centred lives (WWR I, 205). The kind of experience Schopenhauer is identifying here can be compared to an image that is often used in Buddhism. In daily life we are like the waves of a large ocean, and each wave thinks that it is separate and different from the other numerous waves, and strives to distinguish itself still more from the other waves. Yet, in reality, the waves are all the same, they are the same vast ocean, manifesting itself in numerous different ways. The absorbing experience of the sublime which Schopenhauer describes is ultimately an aesthetic affirmation of the ultimate oneness of reality. In the sublime the individual ‘waves’, as it were, finally realise that they are really one and the same ‘water’. By identifying with the core of the world, and grasping the insignificant and illusory character of our individual existence, we are able to identify with and find our home in the world – even if only temporarily. The sublime offers not a way of affirming our superiority, let alone the superiority of our rational capacities, over nature, but rather a path to identifying with reality as it is in itself, which involves expanding our consciousness by


becoming part of the cosmic energy to which we truly belong and with which we are one. The sublime privileges human beings not because of their rationality, but because they are perhaps the only beings capable of suspending themselves as centre of the world and identifying with the true core of the world, from which everything (including us) emanates. The self becomes, as it were, a limitless point of view, through which the world perceives itself as it really is. By emptying our consciousness, by getting rid of superfluous egocentric contents and all its self-centred ‘soft-ware’, aesthetic subject and object merge into one another. We become one with the bottomless emptiness that we essentially are.

Thus, Schopenhauer’s account parts ways with Kant’s by insisting that a heightened awareness of our manifest fragility in the natural world offers us a unique occasion (perhaps matched only by engaging with profound music) to experience elatedly our ultimate identity with and non-separateness from the world as a whole. 50 Sublime experience is neither moral nor merely relational, it is close to being fusional , since it allows us to become one , as it were, with cosmic willing – the primal life energy permeating the whole of reality. 51 The sublime is thus not so much an experience of the indestructability of ‘humanity in our person’, as Kant argues, but rather an inhuman or superhuman experi-ence, that is, an experience by which we transcend our typically human concerns and become absorbed by inhuman nature itself. Subject and object, mind and matter, spectator and spectacle converge into an undi-vided, symbiotic whole. Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime clearly suggests a kind of psychological and metaphysical intensity which is absent from other kinds of aesthetic experience. For, although we neces-sarily remain contemplating subjects when faced with sublime nature, our exalting experience of it offers a unique and particularly delightful and energising way to confront the life-threatening and tragic aspects of the world and its exhilarating, unfathomable, awe-inspiring might. This may actually be part of a plausible explanation of why it is that we actu-ally seek out sublime objects. If Schopenhauer is right that confronting sublime objects may enable us to affirm our identity with the tremen-dous primal life energy of reality, then this cannot only inspire, comfort, and delight us but also revitalise us powerfully. Then we feel the will’s exuberant lust for life and affirm our identity with it. As the feeling of the sublime ultimately lifts the burden of anxiety that overwhelming natural objects cause, it may enable confronting real life disasters and suffering without denying life and yearning to escape from them. The feeling of the sublime may indeed considerably boost our energy levels, enabling us to cope more adequately with the vicissitudes of life instead


of fleeing from them or ignoring them. Prefiguring Nietzsche’s account of tragedy and the Dionysian, for Schopenhauer the feeling of the sublime is not ultimately moral but fundamentally existential and life enhancing, for it shows how pain can become exquisitely pleasurable and how even the utmost terror can be transformed into a joyful identi-fication with and affirmation of the will to life.

Schopenhauer’s doctrine of what I should like to call ‘the affirmative sublime’ has shown us an impressive, authentic route to fully appreci-ating the profound philosophical import of this type of complex and intense aesthetic experience. As I will show in the following chapter, a critically upgraded version of this theory, which focuses on the psycho-logical aspects of affirmative identification, will allow us to grasp more adequately why and how sublime objects are pleasurable and why engaging them may prove to be extremely valuable.

Notes

1 . Although I would not go as far as Paul Crowther, who argues that Kant ‘fails to offer anything convincing – apart from scattered hints – as to its [i.e., the sublime’s] credentials as an aesthetic concept’. See Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 134–135. Yet Crowther is surely right in stressing that the Kantian sublime is not a purely aesthetic feeling. See Crowther, The Kantian Sublime , 93, 135 and passim . I will spell this out more fully in what follows. In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy, Emily Brady courageously defends the aesthetic credentials of Kant’s doctrine of the sublime, but a lot of the essential characteristics of the sublime experi-ence she identifies – her emphasis on its relational character, its metaphysical import, its embodied nature, its humbling aspects, and so on – are actually much closer to Schopenhauer’s doctrine than to Kant’s, and can be related to Kant only by downplaying the moral kernel and the anthropocentric nature of the Kantian sublime, that is to say, exactly what are the core elements in his approach.

2 . Thus my interpretation differs from Patricia Matthews, ‘Kant’s Sublime: A Form of Pure Aesthetic Reflective Judgment’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, 1996, 171, who offers an ‘aesthetic’ reading of the sublime in Kant but seems to accept Kant’s moral foundation of the sublime: ‘From a theoretical perspective, we have an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the imagination to try to fulfill an idea of reason (the infinite as a totality). From a practical perspective, we have imagination and reason inadvertently harmonizing by fulfilling a requirement of practical reason. Theoretical reason functions to begin and maintain an affective state that results in the feeling of sublimity, and that state is purposive for practical reason .’ This is only partly correct, I would suggest, since the failure of the power of imagination reveals also the power of theoretical reason. In order to explain the pleasure of the sublime, we do not, pace Kant and Matthews, need to appeal to the power of practical reason.


3 . ‘Intuition’ is often used to mean ‘ineffable insight’, and the sublime has frequently been associated with this kind of (quasi-)mystical understanding. I here use ‘intuition’ in the Kantian sense of an imaginative synthesis of the manifold’s appearance.

4 . Here I take issue with Emily Brady’s all too charitable, ‘aesthetic’ reading of the Kantian sublime. See Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 189.

5 . See Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 61: ‘My reading of Kant’s sublime places it firmly within the aesthetic domain. While there are key links made to practical reason, the foundation of Kantian morality, it is important to emphasize that this type of judgment, like the beautiful, only prepares us for morality.’ This is misguided, since for Kant the modality of the sublime, that is, its demand to be universally shared, ‘has its founda-tion in human nature: in something that ... we may require and demand of everyone, namely, the predisposition to the feeling for (practical) ideas, that is, to moral feeling’. Therefore, someone who cannot appreciate the sublime in nature is ‘someone who has no feeling ’ (§ 29, 265). Hence the sublime does not merely prepare us for morality, but is actually based upon our predisposi-tion to moral feeling. Moreover, its claim to universal communicability is construed as grounded in the (unwarranted) assumption of a susceptibility to moral ideas in all human beings. It might be no coincidence that Kant usually puts ‘practical’ between brackets in § 29, as he often does in the context of the sublime. Perhaps he sensed the threat that such a close link to morality would pose to the purely aesthetic nature of the sublime. But unfortunately Kant could not resist, what Malcolm Budd aptly calls, ‘his inveterate tendency to evaluate everything by reference to moral value’. See Malcolm Budd, ‘The Sublime in Nature’, in Paul Guyer, ed., Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 134 and Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 68 and 84. My view is that Budd is right and that Brady’s reading is overly charitable.

6 . Here I disagree with Melissa McBay Merritt, who holds that ‘moral feeling is a mode of the Kantian sublime: it is an elevated state of mind, registering as the subject’s attraction to an ideal conceived through the moral law’. See Melissa Merritt, ‘The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime’, in Timothy M. Costelloe, ed., The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 46–47. Merritt overlooks the fact that, in Kant’s view, unlike the sublime, respect is a ‘non-pathological’ feeling. Kant does say at one point that ‘the liking for the sublime contains not so much positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect, and so should be called a negative pleasure’ (§ 23, 5:245). From this does not follow, however, that Kant implies that the moral feeling of respect is identical to the feeling of the sublime, and it would be rather odd if he did. He even explicitly acknowledges that ‘the moral law in its might’ is ‘the object of a pure and unconditioned intellectual liking’ and, hence, not aesthetically sublime itself. It is only ‘if we judge aesthetically ... the moral good, [that] we must present it not so much as beautiful but rather as sublime, so that it will arouse a feeling of respect’ (‘General Comment’, 5:271; italics added). Kant thus holds that moral feeling is analogous to the sublime, not that it is identical with it, and that the sublime may give rise to a feeling of respect.


7 . Katerina Deligiorgi even argues that sublime pleasure ‘comes from the mere thought that we have the capacity for agency’. See Katerina Deligiorgi, ‘The Pleasures of Contra-Purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, 2014, 32.

8 . Already in the pre-critical Observations , Kant draws a connection between the sublime and morality. See also Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom , 13. Still, the connection between sublimity and morality is much tighter in his critical work.

9 . One notable exception is Jean-François Lyotard. See Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime , trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 224–239.

10 . See Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 74. 11 . See Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 74–79; Sarah Gibbons, Kant’s

Theory of Imagination: Bridging Gaps in Judgment and Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 136, 148ff., 150–151, and passim ; and Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Understanding in Kant (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), esp. chapter 3.

12 . See Vandenabeele, ‘Kant, the Mannerist and the Matterist Sublime’. 13 . As already indicated, Emily Brady rightly defends an integrated aesthetic of

the sublime, emphasising its relational aspects, but wrongly bases this on Kant’s doctrine of the sublime. In ‘The Pleasures of Contra-Purposiveness’, Katerina Deligiorgi claims that Kant does not completely neglect the object. She bases this assumption upon two passages: CJ , § 27, 5:259 and § 24, 5:247. This is rather puzzling, as only the latter excerpt contains the explicit conces-sion that we ‘present the object as sublime’, and the former refers to the fact that the sublime is characterised by ‘a displeasure that we present at the same time as purposive’. There is thus only one explicit reference to the object as sublime in his more than 40 pages long analysis of the sublime, and it occurs in an introductory section, in which he briefly introduces the differ-ence between the two varieties of the sublime! Contra Brady and Deligiorgi, I believe that Kant makes it crystal-clear that sublimity resides in the mind and not in the object. This is not due, as Deligiorgi seems to think, merely to the formlessness of sublime objects, but to the overly anthropocentric and moral nature of the Kantian sublime.

14 . See Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 70–71. Here I side with Katie McShane, ‘Neosentimentalism and the Valence of Attitudes’, Philosophical Studies 164, 2013, 747–765, and Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Landscape and Metaphysical Imagination’, Environmental Values 5, 1996, 201.

15 . Indeed, as Melissa Merritt argues, ‘our capacity to appreciate the sublime in nature is grounded in the development of sound moral disposition’. See Merritt, ‘The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime’, 49.

16 . As Robert Clewis justly points out, ‘for Kant the sublime discloses that the subject belongs to a realm of freedom’. See Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom , 22.

17 . Whether intentionally or not, Kant actually seems to leave room for dependent or partly intellectual judgments of the sublime, by insisting that ‘if the aesthetic judgment [of the sublime] is to be pure ( unmixed with any tele-ological and hence rational judgment), ... then we must point to the sublime not in products of art (e.g., buildings, columns, etc.), where both the form


and the magnitude are determined by a human purpose, nor in natural things whose very concept carries with it a determinate purpose (e.g., animals with a known determination in nature) but rather in crude nature [ an der rohen Natur ] (and even in it only insofar as it carries with it no charm, nor any emotion aroused by actual danger), that is, merely insofar as crude nature contains magnitude’ (§ 26, 5:252–253). Kant does not really make clear what ‘crude nature’, which allegedly occasions pure sublimity, exactly is, but he does seem to allow the occurrence of impure or dependent sublimity.

18 . Like Kames, Dennis and others, Kant connects enthusiasm and the sublime. He does so in a rather confusing passage in the ‘General Comment’, 5:272, in which he first claims that enthusiasm merely ‘seems to be sublime’, then also asserts that enthusiasm is as blind as any other affect and can by no means ‘deserve to be liked by reason’. Yet, he adds in the following sentence that ‘enthusiasm is sublime aesthetically because it is a straining of our forces by ideas that impart to the mind a momentum whose effects are mightier and more permanent than are those of an impulse produced by sensory representations’. Further in the same section, he distin-guishes between ‘fanaticism’ ( Schwärmerei ), ‘madness’ ( Wahnsinn ), ‘mania’ ( Wahnwitz ), and ‘enthusiasm’ proper ( Enthusiasmus ). Kant now suggests that fanaticism and mania are closely related and not compatible with the sublime, whereas enthusiasm is (see ‘General Comment’, 5:257). See also Jean-François Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History , trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). For a critical rebuttal of Lyotard’s interpretation, see Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom , 21–23.

19 . For the complicated relation between the sublime and the monstrous ( unge-heuer ), see Kant, Critique of Judgment , § 26, 5:253. For a controversial reading of Kant’s account of the relation between the monstrous and the sublime, see Jacob Rogozinski, ‘The Sublime Monster’, in Donald Loose, ed., The Sublime and Its Teleology: Kant, German Idealism, Phenomenology (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 159–168. For an inspiring account of monsters in art-horror, see Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), especially 31–33, 42–49, 176, 185.

20 . See Bart Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime’, 90–99.

21 . Schopenhauer’s favourable judgment on Kant’s theory of the sublime dates back to 1813 (see HN I, 48 ff.).

22 . This is the title of an article by Sandra Shapshay, which appeared in Kantian Review 17, 2012, 479–511. My account of the superiority of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime to Kant’s may be taken as a partial response to the reading Shapshay offers in that article.

23 . The thought that in contemplating beauty ‘not even a recollection of the will remains’ will prove to be crucial in the comparison with the sublime.

24 . Christopher Janaway translates ‘Anhauch’ as ‘intimation’, which is closer to the original German.

25 . I shall offer a more extensive account of the existential and metaphysical significance of the sublime in the final chapter of the present book.

26 . Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful , 134.


27 . Kant does describe the sublime as ‘the feeling of a momentary inhibition to the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger’ (§ 23, 5:245), but this is marginal to his overall account and primarily serves to distinguish the sublime, which offers negative pleasure (‘a pleasure that arises only indirectly’), from the beautiful, which immedi-ately ‘carries with it a feeling of life’s being furthered’ (§ 23, 5:245; 5:244).

28 . I borrow the term ‘existential sublime’ from Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), chapter 6.

29 . Schopenhauer does not insist that we need to be consciously aware of this to be able to experience the sublime, and it would be misguided if he did. Feeling uneasy is essential, Schopenhauer justly argues, but not our conscious recognition of the reasons for it. Here I cannot agree with Sandra Shapshay, who argues that a ‘thick sublime’, as she calls it, is more profound for having a cognitive (and often scientific) basis and that Schopenhauer defends this type of sublime experience. See Sandra Shapshay, ‘Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime’, British Journal of Aesthetics 53, 2013, 181–198. That the thick sublime ‘involves reflection upon the relationships between humanity and nature more generally’ (189) turns the sublime into an overly intellective experience and unjustly undermines its aesthetic creden-tials. As I have argued, Kant fails to offer a convincing account of the sublime as a purely aesthetic feeling, but Schopenhauer succeeds in this. Reflection upon humanity and nature can be a valuable consequence of an experience of the sublime, and the sublime may lead to deep metaphysical insights, but these are not (necessarily) part of the aesthetic experience itself. For more on the existential and metaphysical significance of the sublime, see Chapter 7.

30 . Here, and in what follows, I take issue with Sophia Vasalou, who argues in Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint that, according to Schopenhauer, ‘the mind [is] the true object of sublimity’. See Sophia Vasalou, Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7 and passim . This seems to me to be a gross distortion of Schopenhauer’s highly-sophisticated analysis of the experience of the sublime. I would suggest that, despite Kantian remnants in Schopenhauer’s account, one important reason why Schopenhauer’s doctrine is superior to its predecessor is that it is more genuinely object-centred.

31 . I am indebted to Budd, ‘The Sublime in Nature’. 32 . See Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and

the Beautiful , 136. See also Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 156: ‘As a baseline, actual physical safety from a lightning storm or erupting volcano is crucial for enjoying the spectacle. We could not engage in aesthetic disinter-estedness if we were not in some position of safety or the equivalent, where we can give proper attention (e.g., we are not running away)’.

33 . Alex Neill argues that ‘uneasiness is the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience of experience of the sublime’. See Alex Neill, ‘Schopenhauer on Tragedy and the Sublime’, in José Luis Bermúdez and Sebastian Gardner, eds, Art and Morality (London: Routledge, 2003), 216 and passim . This cannot be right, however, for whilst uneasiness is a typical effect of watching a tragedy according to David Hume, it is not a sufficient condition of an experience of the sublime. Experiences of ugliness, terrible beauty, disgust, and perhaps also grandeur, for instance, may all involve uneasiness, but are not sublime.


34 . The expression ‘transcendental pride’ is Hans Blumenberg’s. See Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime’, 94. See also Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 97; Guyer, ‘The German Sublime after Kant’, 112–114; Dale Jacquette, ‘Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Appearance and Will in the Philosophy of Art’, in Dale Jacquette, ed., Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22; Christopher Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity: Schopenhauer on the Value of Art’, in Dale Jacquette, ed., Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts , 56; Shapshay, ‘Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian Sublime’, especially 494–498, and Vasalou, Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint , 92.

35 . I already emphasised Kant’s influence in my book De bloesem van het leven: Esthetiek en ethiek in Arthur Schopenhauers filosofie ( The Blossom of Life: Aesthetics and Ethics in Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy) (Assen: Koninklijke van Gorcum), which appeared (in Dutch) in 2001, and in my 2003 paper ‘Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime’. Julian Young had pointed this out in his 1987 (!) book Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987); Chris Janaway had already claimed that ‘Schopenhauer’s notion of the sublime is quite closely based on Kant’s, which he considers by far the most excel-lent thing in the Critique of Judgment ’ in his 1996 paper on ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity’, and there are several others as well. Hence, Shapshay’s talk of ‘the general scholarly neglect of the Kantian inheritance of Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime’ is an overstatement. See Shapshay, ‘Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian Sublime’, 480. Far more crucial, however, and this is where I clearly differ from Shapshay and many others, is that one should recognise that, despite its ‘Kantian inheritance’, Schopenhauer offers an account that not only departs from Kant’s in several important ways but is also more plausible than his predecessor’s.

36 . Here I differ from Christopher Janaway, who argues that ‘what the sublime demands is that I recognize a situation as threaten ing or distress ing – but without feeling personally threatened or distressed’ (italics added). See Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity’, 56. I see no arguments in Schopenhauer’s account to deny the possibility of feeling personally threatened and still being able to experience the sublime. On the contrary, Schopenhauer rightly maintains that ‘perceiving and acknowledging this hostile relation to his will’ is essential to the sublime; that ‘the beholder may not direct his attention to this relation to his will’ (ibid.); and that ‘he may consciously turn away from it, forcibly tear himself from his will and its relations [!] ... those very objects terrible to the will’ (WWR I, 201; italics added). Moreover, in his account of tragedy, the ‘shuddering’ quality of our personal engagement in the sublime is developed more fully. I discuss this extensively in Chapter 6.

37 . See Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime’, and ‘Schopenhauer on Aesthetic Understanding and the Values of Art’. See also Neill, ‘Schopenhauer on Tragedy and the Sublime’.

38 . See Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime’. For a Platonic reading of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic doctrine, see Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity’, 39–61.

39 . Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity’, 58.


40 . See Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer on the Values of Aesthetic Experience’, Southern Journal of Philosophy 45, 2007, 565–582.

41 . Here I disagree with Shapshay, ‘Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian Sublime’.

42 . See Tom Cochrane, ‘The Emotional Experience of the Sublime’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42, 2012, 134.

43 . One notable exception is Paul Guyer, ‘Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics’, in Dale Jacquette, ed., Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts , 109–132. He rightly emphasises that the Schopenhauerian sublime is ‘positively exalting’, and offers not merely an escape from the thralls of willing, since ‘we are not just relieved from the pain of being’, but also experience ‘a joyful affirmation of our identity with reality’ (129). He adds that Schopenhauer offers ‘no merely negative account of aesthetic pleasure, but a complex and ultimately affirmative account’ (ibid.). Unfortunately, he recently seems to have changed his mind, and now completely disregards this essential affirmative aspect of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime. While in the former article, he still justly stressed the close link between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, he now asserts that only Kant and Nietzsche offer ‘affirmative’ accounts of the sublime, and that ‘given Nietzsche’s later dismissal of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics ... , we should not expect him to be drawn to Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime’. See Guyer, ‘The German Sublime after Kant’, 115. This seems to me to be utterly misguided, for while Nietzsche dismisses Schopenhauer’s all too moral interpretation of the effect of tragedy, his treatment in The Birth of Tragedy of the Apollonian and Dionysian and his emphasis on transcending individuality and joyfully iden-tifying with the primal unity of reality clearly build upon Schopenhauer’s affirmative account of the sublime.

44 . See, most notably, Shapshay, ‘Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian Sublime’, and ‘The Problem with the Problem of Tragedy: Schopenhauer’s Solution Revisited’, British Journal of Aesthetics 52, 2012, 17–32; Julian Young, ‘Death and Transfiguration: Kant, Schopenhauer and Heidegger on the Sublime’, Inquiry 48, 2005, 131–144.

45 . Guyer, ‘Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics’, 129. 46 . Lydia Goehr, ‘Schopenhauer and the Musicians: An Inquiry into the Sounds

of Silence and the Limits of Philosophizing about Music’, in Jacquette, ed., Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts , 210.

47 . Most commentators, however, argue that becoming disassociated from personal distress forms the core of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime. See, for instance, Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity’, 56, and Julian Young, Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer , (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987). especially 89–90.

48 . Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 83. On the same page, she also contends that ‘Kant is not arguing for a dominion of humans over nature’. It depends on what is exactly meant by ‘dominion’ here. Obviously, Kant does not contend that we ought to spoil nature or behave disrespectfully towards it, but he does argue that the sublime manifests a dominion of practical reason over nature, and practical reason is a capacity possessed by human beings – a capacity, which allows us (to speak Kant’s idiom) to make use of nature’s power to express the infinite superiority of our own rationality. See also Guyer, ‘The German Sublime after Kant’, 112.


49 . I will develop this line of thought in more detail in Chapter 5. 50 . Schopenhauer’s doctrine thus prefigures Nietzsche’s account of the

Dionysian pleasure in tragedy. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings , ed., Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially in The Birth of Tragedy , § 17, 80–85.

51 . Compare with Nietzsche’s famous reference to Heraclitus’ image of the playing child-god in The Birth of Tragedy , § 24, 114.

128

The argument of the previous chapter contains a vital suggestion about the sublime, namely, that it comes to us as part of a profoundly rela-tional state of mind. The sublime is a high point in our demand that the world be meaningful to us, and our attempt to come to terms with its overwhelming and distressing aspects. The experience of the sublime thus has deep existential and metaphysical significance, the scope of which will be tackled in the final chapter of the present book. That an experience has metaphysical value does not, however, imply that the experience itself can be reduced to this specific value, and neither does it imply that the pleasure procured is the effect of metaphysical reflec-tion. For the sublime is, first and foremost, an aesthetic feeling , not a philosophical, moral, or transcendental insight.

Therefore, it is worth returning to recent attempts that have been developed, and in my view successfully developed, in psychology and philosophy of mind during the last decades regarding affective matching, bodily simulation, and empathy. It is basically from this perspective that I set out to reconsider Schopenhauer’s version of the sublime, to upgrade it critically, and offer a more viable alternative to it. Focussing on the fundamental identification processes that ground the possibility of aesthetic pleasure in the sublime, I shall briefly explore the ways in which the sublime can be established as a viable aesthetic concept. It is argued that the sublime is not just one kind of pleasurable experience amongst others, but one based on mental capacities neces-sary to cognition, self-other awareness, and agency (such as simulation and empathy), and which itself plays a role in how these capacities develop.

5 A Psychological Alternative to Schopenhauer’s Theory of the Sublime

A Psychological Alternative 129

Schopenhauer’s ‘absorption’ model of the sublime

One of the most difficult but also most interesting facets of the aesthetic experience of the sublime is its paradoxical complexity. The sublime is, as Schopenhauer emphasises, a mixed emotional experience: it involves both a feeling of being powerfully overwhelmed, humbled, or dislocated and a sense of being exalted, elevated, or elated.

Contrary to Burke and Kant, Schopenhauer rightly focuses on our awareness of being vulnerable, physically insignificant, and puny in comparison to the vast or powerful object. When confronting genuinely sublime objects, we do not need to feel safe, as Burke and Kant held. But we do feel small and vulnerable, for we are aware of confronting some-thing threatening, hostile, or at the very least something wholly indif-ferent to our existence as human individuals. In an interesting paper on the emotional experience of the sublime, Tom Cochrane uses the term ‘self-negation’ in this context to point out that it is not necessarily fear but rather a sense of being utterly contingent or insignificant in comparison to the overwhelming object which typically characterises sublime experience. 1 The term ‘self-negation’ is unfortunately rather misleading in the context of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as it can be confused with his doctrine of the denial of the willing self, which occurs in ascetic ethics and does not belong to the aesthetics of the sublime. I will therefore avoid the term here, although I will draw on the meaning Cochrane attaches to it, more specifically ‘a sense of how physically insignificant or utterly contingent we are in comparison to the object’. 2

This fundamental element of sublime experience, namely that perceiving the object makes us feel reduced, distressed, frail, or insig-nificant, is (as I argued at length in Chapter 4) rightly brought out by Schopenhauer’s emphasis upon the ‘hostile relation’ in which the sublime object stands to us. Contrary to Kant, who seems to believe that the sublime is connected to the ultimately vain effort to estimate the object’s size or power, Schopenhauer rightly contends that the sublime is not so much a matter of measuring or imagining as rather of genuinely feeling our real insignificance in comparison to the sublime object . This offers a certain ‘reality’ to Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime, which seems to be missing from Kant’s and some of his other predecessors’ theories. For, whereas Kant (wrongly) holds that we do not need to experience real fear when confronting a sublime object, Schopenhauer maintains that the sublime experience is genuinely relational and object-centric: faced with sublime objects, we really are


vulnerable and insignificant in comparison to such objects and thus are justified in considering them distressing to us. 3 That we are able to experience this aesthetically, and actually take pleasure in it, offers a unique occasion to adjust our ordinary, self-centred attitude towards the world.

As Emily Brady justly points out, Burke and Kant suggest that we do not need to experience something like real painful emotions in the sublime. 4 For Burke, our sense of safety modifies felt pain and terror into something positive like ‘delight’, which is hardly distinguishable from a sense of relief. And, according to Kant, we do not necessarily experience real fear in the sublime, even if we believe ourselves to be in a safe place (§ 28, 5:260; see also § 26, 5:253). Yet, as Schopenhauer rightly acknowledges contra Kant, in order to experience the sublime, lack of actual danger is less relevant than feeling distressed and, at least to some extent, being able to tolerate the threat. Contrary to what several commentators suggest, Schopenhauer’s analysis of the sublime does presuppose that we can feel genuinely threatened by the sublime object – and rightly so, for feeling too safe would exclude the possi-bility of experiencing the object as sublime. Unlike Kant, who does not consider actual states of pain or terror to be a constitutive part of the sublime experience, Schopenhauer argues that the painful emotions we experience in the sublime are necessarily bound up with features of the object. Feeling negatively impacted upon is an effect of perceiving the features of the sublime object (see WWR I, 205). The experience of the sublime is thus genuinely relational . It is the properties of the object that heighten our sense of existential insignificance and fragility, and hence ( pace Brady), I would suggest Schopenhauer is right that (to imagine) being in a position of safety is not required to experience the sublime (WWR I, 205; see also MR II, 321; HN II, 289). 5

Although Schopenhauer’s theory deserves praise for its rightfully emphasising the distressing impact of sublime objects, his explanation of the positive, pleasurable side of the sublime experience is actually less convincing and stands in need of a serious critical upgrade. As I argued in Chapter 4, Schopenhauer offers at least two resolutions to the so-called paradox of the sublime, namely, to the question why and how it is that we can actually be attracted to and take pleasure in that which is overwhelming, threatening, and compared to which we feel insignificant.

Schopenhauer and his predecessors have offered several answers to this question. One way of resolving the paradox of the sublime is, as for example, Burke does, to argue that the pleasure in the sublime is


grounded in our awareness that, although we are confronted with a potentially threatening object to human beings, we feel personally safe from its actual threat, which moderates our fear and hence, we feel something like relief. Burke is right in stressing the psychological advantage of encountering overwhelming phenomena at a distance, which enables us to contemplate them instead of fleeing from them. Furthermore, his insisting that the sublime is ‘a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror’ rightly takes into account the ‘mixed’ character of sublime emotions. 6 Yet, as already indicated, his suggestion that we must actually be safe might not be as important to experience the sublime as he thinks. For, as Schopenhauer insists, being able to tolerate feelings of fear and distress may be far more crucial to experience the sublime. Furthermore, instead of enjoying horrifying spectacles in spite of their distressing character, as Burke’s account suggests, genuine sublime experiences involve enjoying horri-fying phenomena because of their horrifying features. We take pleasure in erupting volcanoes not in spite of, but because of their threatening character and enjoy immense ravines not in spite of, but because of their immensity. As Schopenhauer rightly suggests, we are exalted by the immensity of the object (see WWR I, 205). Thus, Burke’s relief model fails to accommodate important aspects of those experiences we tend to identify as sublime and, hence, cannot really resolve the paradox of the sublime.

In Chapter 4, I have already extensively criticised the second attempt to resolve the paradox of the sublime, which is Kant’s tran-scendental, morally orientated theory, remnants of which can be found in Schopenhauer’s account. Recall that one of the main prob-lems with Kant’s account of the sublime is that it ultimately reduces the complexity of the aesthetically sublime to something like uneasi-ness tinged with moral self-congratulation. Whereas the Burkean relief model erroneously assumes that negative affects must be converted into positive affects in order to experience the sublime, Kant offers a more sophisticated theory, which focuses on the sublimity of our mind instead of on the sublime character of the object itself. The pleasure of the sublime is based on recognising the superiority of our cognitive and moral capacities in comparison to the overwhelming object. 7 Natural objects are not themselves sublime, only ideas of reason are (see § 23, 5:245). As Guyer rightly points out, in Kant’s view, ‘nature is ... a force which, for all its power, cannot even touch what is essential to human personality’. 8 According to Kant, we ultimately take pleasure in our own rational and moral superiority, for ‘the feeling of the sublime in nature


is respect for our own vocation’ (§ 27, 5:257). In his ‘On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy’, Kant even adds:

What is it in me that makes it so that I can sacrifice the most inner allurements of my drives and all the desires that proceed from my nature to a law that promises me no advantage as a replacement and threatens no loss if it is transgressed: indeed, a law that I honour all the more inwardly the more strictly it bids and the less it offers in return? The question stirs up the entire soul through astonish-ment over the greatness and sublimity of the inner disposition of humanity and at the same time the impenetrability of the secret that it conceals ... One cannot become tired of directing one’s attention toward it and admiring in oneself a power that yields to no power of nature. 9

This is as self-regarding as an experience can get. 10 We admire a tremen-dous (moral) power in ourselves that surpasses any power in nature. As I have already indicated in Chapter 4, Kant’s doctrine has deeply influ-enced Schopenhauer’s, but is ultimately flawed. For Kant’s insistence that the sublime is due to a so-called subreption, whereby we mistakenly attribute sublimity to the object instead of to the human mind, fails to take into account that a sublime experience (as Schopenhauer rightly insists) involves a continued awareness of our insignificance in comparison to the vast or mighty object . Although he admits that we feel our inferi-ority as embodied creatures, Kant insists that our mind – or at least the rational part of our mind which is destined to be moral – is impervious to the overwhelming threat powerful natural objects might pose to us as sensible beings. The feeling of the sublime offers us a palpable experi-ence of moral freedom and its challenges to human sensibility. The least one can say about this is that this will sound highly implausible to those who, like Schopenhauer, are willing to admit that our mind is wholly dependent upon our finite body and that reason is merely an instru-ment in the service of the will. 11 And that, pace Kant, the feeling of the sublime is not based on our (failed) attempt to estimate the size or power of objects or on a ‘misplaced causal attribution to the object’ at all, but rather on ‘a sincere appreciation of the superior physical properties of the object’ which humble us. 12

Thus, although Kant and (to some extent) also Schopenhauer are right to argue that the pleasure in the sublime cannot be grounded completely in the humbling and sometimes even humiliating effect sublime objects have upon us, and justly focus on the characteristically


invigorating sense of our mental capacities in the sublime, their all too ‘heroic’ doctrine of the sublime falls short of providing a convincing basis of the aesthetic pleasure we take in sublime objects. 13 Even though a sublime experience might produce additional pleasure in the enhance-ment of our mental powers – as other aesthetic experiences, such as the beautiful, or more intellectual activities also might – such pleasure at best supervenes upon the aesthetic pleasure of the sublime itself, which is not self-congratulatory but directly related to and immediately brought about by the qualities of the sublime object or environment itself. We may, of course (and often will) be pleased with ourselves for having confronted a sublime object and feel stronger or more self-con-fident as a result. From this does not follow, however, that the pleasure we take in the sublime is ultimately grounded in a kind of self-centred enjoyment of our mental and moral powers. Indeed, not all thrilling pleasures are really sublime, and those who reduce the sublime to some thrill-seeking adventure wrongly ignore the refined complexity of this particular type of aesthetic experience. Moreover, both the painful and the pleasurable emotions of the sublime are bound up with actual features of the object, not of ourselves. Kant and Schopenhauer are so keen to stress the elevation of the mind and interpret the sublime as self-regarding that they unjustly downgrade the object’s contribution to the aesthetic experience.

As I have suggested in Chapter 4, however, Schopenhauer does not rest with this Kantian-inspired, transcendental explanation of sublime pleasure. For he urges that one of the important facets of sublime pleasure is based on a kind of identification with the object, and ultimately even with the world as a whole. Sublime exaltation, he writes:

does not come into reflection at once, but shows itself as a conscious-ness, merely felt [ als ein nur Gefühltes Bewusstsein ], that in some sense or other ... we are one with the world, and are therefore not oppressed but exalted by its immensity. (WWR I, 205)

This excerpt clarifies a number of vital facets of Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime, showing how he surpasses his predecessors’ accounts. First of all, as I have argued in Chapter 4, this reveals that Schopenhauer rightly refrains from Kant’s all too moral foundation of sublime pleasure. Although Schopenhauer does not deny that engaging with sublime objects may have moral value (as is made especially clear in his account of tragedy, which I discuss in Chapter 6), he does not concur with Kant’s thought that sublime exaltation resides primarily in the human mind’s


vocation to rational freedom – and there is no reason why he should hold this position.

Secondly, Schopenhauer justly emphasises the relational or even correlative character of the experience of the sublime. The sublime does not ultimately refer to our tremendous power, but to the terrifying greatness of the object. The sublime is thus characterised by an aware-ness of being overwhelmed in the face of something much greater than ourselves. This stupefying feeling is often quite visceral. Contrary to the beautiful, we are not freely playing with pleasurable forms, nor are we in restful contemplation. The sublime is turbulent, we feel truly small and insignificant in comparison to the overwhelming object, and we are absorbed by its vastness and power. 14

Indeed, as Schopenhauer points out, ‘we feel oppressed’ by the great scale or tremendous power of what we are faced with. Simultaneously, however, we feel enlivened, to the point of being delighted and even exalted by the object’s awesome features and are taken beyond our ordi-nary human powers of perception. As both Kant and Schopenhauer point out – albeit in totally different ways – the sublime somehow offers a transition from the sensible to the supersensible. As Schopenhauer rightly insists, the sublime engenders an often violent displacement of the self. This crucial correlative aspect of the experience of the sublime – which is sadly downplayed in Kant’s too anthropocentric account 15 – can lead to a kind of perspective-switch: we no longer see ourselves as the centre of the universe but identify with a larger whole. (I shall come back to this below.)

Thirdly, and bound up with the previous point, Schopenhauer rightly focuses on the emotional qualities of the sublime, emphasising that being aware of the sublime involves feeling rather than cognition. One is really moved by a sublime object. And the felt pleasure is not (prima-rily) the result of cognitive effort (as Kant suggests), but of the imme-diate overwhelming emotional impact the object has upon us. 16 There is no need to defend a ‘thick sublime’, as Shapshay does, which would purportedly be more profound for having a cognitive ground. For this so-called thick sublime would actually be (as Brady correctly points out) closer to an experience of wonder. 17 Nor is there any justification in reducing the pleasure of the sublime to some kind of admiration for nature, let alone for ourselves. Admiration for nature might be the result of our encounter with a sublime natural object or environment, but is not itself a necessary or sufficient aspect of sublime experiences.

There is a fourth element in Schopenhauer’s analysis which deserves more attention than scholars have paid to it thus far. For Schopenhauer


does not characterise the sublime merely as both humbling and exalting. He significantly adds that no matter how distressing the feeling of the sublime may be, we really feel absorbed into a vast or powerful object and ultimately identify with it and even with the world as a whole: ‘we are one with the world’. And because we feel absorbed into the world itself, we ‘are therefore no longer oppressed but exalted by its immensity’ (WWR I, 205; italics added).

Schopenhauer thus offers two important observations here. First of all, he suggests that the sublime is characterised by feeling absorbed not merely into the object (as is the case in the beautiful), but into the world itself . Further, he argues that the feeling of exaltation which character-ises a sublime experience is a result of this identification with the world as a whole or of this sense of being absorbed into a larger whole. 18

I believe that we can find the true originality of Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime in precisely these statements. Contrary to his predeces-sors, Schopenhauer offers an account of the sublime that rightly focuses on the alienating effect of our encounter with sublime objects. We really feel lost in the environment, when confronted with sublime phenomena such as erupting volcanoes, ravines, hurricanes, and so on, and are aware of the fact that such objects threaten human flourishing and make us feel dislocated or nullified.

A critical alternative to Schopenhauer’s theory

As I have already indicated in previous chapters, Schopenhauer’s anal-ysis of the effect of the sublime as taking us beyond our ordinary self-concern is profound and paramount to understand the true nature of this specific type of aesthetic experience. Without a sense of our vanishingly small significance in the wider world, an experience cannot become truly sublime. The sublime offers a shock to our first-person point of view and counteracts our ordinary self-centredness. 19 Hence, Schopenhauer seems right to insist that engaging with sublime objects leads us to identifying with something larger than ourselves. This might (at least partly) explain the typically exalting nature of aesthetically sublime experiences.

Yet, although Schopenhauer is definitely right to emphasise the deeply absorbing character of the sublime, his account stands in need of revision on at least two points. First, the absorbing quality which Schopenhauer attributes to the experience of the sublime is hardly suffi-cient to distinguish it adequately from other types of aesthetic expe-rience, such as overwhelming beauty, wonder, bewilderment, or our


encounter with profound artworks that are not necessarily sublime. Identifying with that which is much greater than us cannot be exclu-sively attributed to experiences of the sublime. Although sublime expe-riences are intense and overwhelming, not all aesthetically intense and overwhelming experiences are sublime. One may, for instance, become deeply absorbed in and moved and overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of a profound masterpiece such as Schubert’s song-cycle Die Winterreise or Michelangelo’s David without therefore experiencing the sublime.

There is a further and rather more important flaw in Schopenhauer’s account, however, which is in urgent need of revision. Schopenhauer seems to suggest that a metaphysical identification with a pure, tran-scendental ‘I’ or even with cosmic will offers a solid basis for the pleasure of the sublime. Schopenhauer seems to overstate his case here. For, although I agree with Schopenhauer that the sublime has profound exis-tential and metaphysical significance, I would suggest that grounding the pleasurable aspect of it in some kind of identification with a cosmic consciousness or with the world itself offers a quite implausible resolu-tion to the paradox of the sublime. 20

Why is that so? Apart from the fact that Schopenhauer’s metaphysics may sound otiose to many contemporary ears, the main reason is that his ‘absorption’ model unwarrantedly downplays the role of the aesthetic object in the sublime experience. Recall that one of the main qualities of his account is its relational aspect. Contrary to most of his predecessors, he justly focuses on the shocking impact sublime objects have on our self-esteem and everyday self-centredness. Contrary to Kant, Schopenhauer does not situate sublimity in us, but in the affirmation of our identity with the world as a whole and its metaphysical core, that is to say, will to life.

Now, his metaphysical orientation unjustly ignores the vital role of the qualities of the sublime object or environment. A revisionary account is therefore necessary to give due attention to the qualities of the sublime object itself, whilst preserving both Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the affirmative quality of the sublime experience and the vital role of some kind of identification process to explain sublime pleasure. To develop such a critical alternative in a viable way, we will need to take into account some fascinating developments in psychology regarding ‘motor imaging’ and ‘simulative processes’ in human subjects, explored by Greg Currie and Tom Cochrane, amongst others. 21 This mainly concerns (sub-personal) simulative processes in our brain, which characterise empathic understanding of emotion in other people. As Currie argues, empathy need not be limited to other


persons, for there are a range of bodily simulation-based activities which may be directed towards inanimate objects, including aesthetic objects and works of art. 22 Currie gives the example of someone who imag-ines swaying in the wind like the tree he observes. Just as observing someone with a disgusted facial expression activates the same brain areas that are used when we ourselves are disgusted, we also (subcon-sciously) simulate emotions of people in paintings and sculptures or empathically reproduce the artist’s actions. As Currie rightly points out, this kind of simulative activity feeds directly into visual perception and may occur unconsciously or go unnoticed. This thought chimes with Schopenhauer’s observation that the scale, magnificence, noise, or jaggedness of sublime objects and environments cause us to become unreflectively absorbed in the aesthetic experience.

A revisionary account of Schopenhauer’s theory can, then, be devel-oped along the following lines. The core features of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime can be kept. They can be summarised as follows. An aesthetic experience is sublime, if it meets the following distin-guishing criteria:

i. It is intense. ii. It is emotionally uplifting. iii. It is humbling. iv. It requires more (awareness of) deliberate activity of wresting

ourselves free from our willing than when contemplating beautiful objects.

v. There is a permanent recollection of human willing. vi. We feel exalted above individual willing. vii. We feel absorbed into a vast or powerful object. viii. We identify with a larger whole.

These eight core features can be maintained in a plausible theory of the sublime. One might, however, want to get rid of the confusing term ‘willing’ and replace it by ‘(self-centred) desires, urges, and needs’, but apart from that it seems to me that this theory offers a plausible char-acterisation of experiences we typically identify as sublime, and over-comes several of its predecessors’ flaws.

Yet, there is still at least one problem with Schopenhauer’s theory as it stands. For the last feature in the list – our identification with a larger whole – should be developed into a more plausible psychological direc-tion, since it fails to explain properly the peculiar pleasure we feel when faced with sublime objects.


One of the worries with Schopenhauer’s theory is related to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic outlook on human existence. Schopenhauer supposes that to experience aesthetic pleasure we need to be ‘taken out of ourselves’ and temporarily transcend our ordinary, will-driven point of view. This seems to presuppose that we must be sufficiently troubled or harmed by ordinary life in order to be attracted to aesthetic objects. As Tom Cochrane suggests, however, there is no compel-ling reason to presuppose that it must be unpleasant to be ourselves for us to be attracted to sublime objects. 23 Moreover, I would add that Schopenhauer’s overall pessimism leads him into unnecessarily exagger-ating the transcendental or cosmic nature of the identification process which characterises sublime exaltation.

We can, however, hold on to Schopenhauer’s identification model but re-orientate it in such a way that the aesthetic properties of the sublime object (instead of the world as a whole) become the proper explanatory basis of the procured pleasure and the centre of the experience. Drawing on Cochrane’s identification model of the sublime, I would suggest that a sublime experience is characterised not, as Schopenhauer suggests, by imaginatively identifying with the world itself or its metaphysical core, nor with a transcendental subject which rejoices in its own representa-tional powers, but rather by empathically simulating the features of the sublime object itself.

Thus Schopenhauer is right that a certain amount of imaginative iden-tification is vital to characterise adequately the feeling of the sublime. He is also right to stress the existential and metaphysical significance of this type of experience. Yet, his suggestion that identifying with the world as a whole is necessary to experience the sublime is wide of the mark.

Replacing Kant’s all too moral explanation by a metaphysical one is not required to resolve the paradox of the sublime. For to grasp the pleasurable element of the sublime, and to explain even the ‘oceanic feeling’ it often procures, I would suggest that it is sufficient to refer to human simulation-based activities which are directed towards the qualities of sublime objects. This implies that we imaginatively engage with the grandeur, the power, hugeness, and jaggedness of sublime objects or environments and are able actually to enjoy those over-whelming, uncompromising properties, because we subconsciously simulate them. This does not imply that we literally become typhoons or ravines; neither does it require us actually to believe that we are those sublime objects, nor that we imagine ourselves to be like those objects. 24


Simulating and even imaginatively amplifying the overwhelming qual-ities of such objects does not exclude our being continually aware of how very different and, indeed, physically vulnerable and insignificant we really are in comparison to such objects. In this way, the peculiar ambivalence of sublime experience, which (according to Schopenhauer) reveals the double nature of consciousness, is justified. By simulating awesome properties of sublime objects, we take pleasure not in our own superiority to the object but in the very properties of the object we engage with, whilst we remain aware of our puniness in comparison to it . Contrary to what Ishizu and Zeki suggest, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that the neural activity correlating with an experience of the sublime is quite different from the neural activity that correlates with experiencing beauty. 25

Now, whereas Schopenhauer’s emphasis on identifying with a tran-scendental subject or metaphysical will ultimately fails to do justice to the fact that awareness of our fragility and puniness is essential to the sublime, our revisionary identification account can accommodate this vital aspect. For we are clearly mesmerised by sublime objects and imag-inatively identify with their ruggedness, might, and grand scale, and we take pleasure in those very qualities. The accompanying low-level mental simulation processes do not hinder our continued awareness of being faced with something potentially harmful or hostile, and this will (unsurprisingly) reflect in the concomitant neural activity. There is no reason why mentally simulating and thus perceiving the overwhelming features of objects would hamper our sense of being negatively impacted upon. On the contrary, it is precisely through imaginatively identifying with, for instance, the hugeness of a mountain that we can simulta-neously enjoy its hugeness intensely and be aware of our puniness in comparison to it – which engenders the paradoxical, ‘mixed’ delight that is typical of the sublime experience. Identifying with a transcen-dental subject or the wider universe would hamper one of the most essential aspects of the sublime feeling, namely our continued aware-ness of our own vulnerability and our felt inadequacy to withstand the sublime object.

What is at stake in resolving the paradox of the sublime is precisely to account for the fact that our heightened awareness of our manifest vulnerability and insignificance is ultimately experienced as pleasurable . The sublime is indeed typically a ‘mixed’ experience, involving an oscil-lation between attraction and repulsion, exaltation and humiliation. Thus, the imaginative identification model that I have briefly outlined


seems superior to other accounts in explaining this characteristically ambivalent pleasure, for the following reasons: 26

i. The low-level physiological and perceptual interpretation of imagi-native identification is cognitively undemanding enough to applyto all cases of the sublime.

ii. Imaginative identification best explains how we manage to recog-nise the greatness of sublime objects.

iii. The imaginative identification model is compatible with otheraccounts of the sublime.

The alternative account just outlined does not demand that each and every sublime experience should be characterised by the kind of empa-thetic engagement which I described above. Some aspects of sublime experiences might be more adequately explained along the lines of Burke’s, Addison’s, Kant’s, or Schopenhauer’s accounts. I do want to suggest, however, that the revisionary account offers the most plausible resolution to the paradox of the sublime. The other theories, including Schopenhauer’s, struggle with finding a proper foundation for the pleas-urable side of the feeling of the sublime and cannot properly explain the peculiar pleasure which characterises aesthetically sublime experiences. And even though Schopenhauer’s affirmative account of the sublime, which I sketched in detail in Chapter 4, is not wholly incompatible with the psychological model outlined here; I argue that only the identifica-tion model is able to explain adequately the characteristically mixed delight of the sublime without taking recourse to moral or metaphysical speculation. Only by taking into account recent research in psychology and philosophy of mind regarding empathetic simulation can we account for the fact that we can aesthetically enjoy massive and mighty objects – not in spite of, but because of their massiveness and might. And it is only by acknowledging our capacity imaginatively to simulate the greatness of sublime objects that we can explain how an aesthetic expe-rience of such overwhelming objects can be simultaneously painful and pleasurable, and can affirm both our bodily vulnerability in comparison to them and our mental strength to withstand and contemplate them.

Notes

1 . See Cochrane, ‘The Emotional Experience of the Sublime’, 125–126. 2 . Ibid., 130. 3 . Here I take issue with Julian Young, who (wrongly) claims that ‘while we expe-

rience fear, it is, in an important sense, not our fear ’ and that the sublime is


basically ‘an experience of immortality’. See Julian Young, Schopenhauer (New York: Routledge, 2005), 119–120. Schopenhauer writes that ‘personal afflic-tion does not gain the upper hand’ in the sublime. This presupposes that we do feel personal fear, but struggle to overcome this emotion and attempt to maintain an essentially precarious contemplative state of consciousness (See WWR I, 204). Instead of being an experience of our ‘immortality’, the sublime makes us vividly aware of our vulnerability and nullity in compar-ison to the sublime object. Hence, the more I am aware of myself as a finite, mortal individual, the more intense the experience of the sublime will be. Like Burke, Schopenhauer actually argues that ‘what gives the sublime its distinc-tive character is its connection with our sense of mortality’. See Crowther, ‘The Existential Sublime’, 126, who does not refer to Schopenhauer. See also Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry , 47–48.

4 . I agree with Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 156–157: ‘both Burke and Kant sometimes write as if we experience something like “fictional emotions” in response to the sublime. And they appear to take this route to resolving the paradox. ... We need to be sufficiently close to the action, as it were, to experience the strong negative emotions associated with the sublime ... I believe that Kant is wrong to claim we do not experience actual fear, even if from a safe place.’ And I would add that Schopenhauer is right to stress that we do feel ‘personally afflicted’ in the sublime.

5 . In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , Brady argues ‘that to experience sublimity we must be in a safe place, otherwise it would be pure fear, with no opportunity for aesthetic reflection’ (179). She thus concurs with Burke and Kant and several others in this. I cannot agree, for what seems to me to be required is not being safe nor even imagining ourselves to be safe, but merely being able to tolerate considerable levels of danger and distress, so that (as Schopenhauer writes) ‘personal affliction does not gain the upper hand, but we remain in aesthetic contemplation’ (WWR I, 204).

6 . See Crowther, ‘The Existential Sublime’, 120. 7 . For a thorough critique and inspiring reconstruction of Kant’s theory of the

sublime, see Paul Crowther’s books The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art and The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 173–198.

8 . Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 262.

9 . Immanuel Kant, ‘On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy’, in Peter Fenves, ed., Raising the Tone of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 68.

10 . Paul Guyer insists that ‘the respect for our own vocation which this experi-ence reveals is not a form of self-aggrandizement, for it is not a reason for one human to think himself superior to any other’. This may be true, but what sublime experience discloses, according to Kant, may still be a reason to think of ourselves as morally superior to any other nonhuman creature or object. For Kant is convinced that ‘we have reason to have but a low opinion of ourselves as individuals, but as representatives of humankind we ought to hold ourselves in high esteem’ ( Lectures on Ethics , 126). See Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom , 263.

11 . See Chapter 2.


12 . Cochrane, ‘The Emotional Experience of the Sublime’, 136. 13 . For a sustained critique of Kant’s theory of the sublime, see Crowther, The

Kantian Aesthetic , chapter 7. 14 . It cannot be right that, as Julian Young none the less contends, sublime nature

makes us feel ‘small neither in a causal nor in a spatio-temporal sense’. See Young, Schopenhauer , 117. That the experience of the sublime has profound metaphysical significance, which I address in the final chapter of this book, does not entail that we do not feel really small and puny in comparison to the sublime object or environment. Surely, an important part of the excite-ment of sublime experiences is due to the genuinely overwhelming character of the object or environment.

15 . Recall that, according to Kant, the sublime awakens in us ‘a feeling that we have self-sufficient reason’ (§ 27, 5:258) and ‘respect for the idea of humanity within ourselves as subjects’ (§ 27, 5:257). On the connection between beauty and respect, see Jane Kneller, ‘Beauty, Autonomy, and Respect for Nature’, in Herman Parret, ed., Kants Ästhetik/ Kant’s Aesthetics/ L’esthétique de Kant (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), 403–414.

16 . Kant also emphasises the role of feeling, and describes the sublime as ‘nega-tive pleasure’, and ‘a pleasure that is possible only by means of a displeasure’ (§ 27, 5:260), but he also insists that the sublime involves a conscious recog-nition of ourselves as moral beings. See especially CJ , § 28 and passim .

17 . See Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 189. 18 . I take issue with Julian Young’s unjust suggestion that Schopenhauer’s charac-

terisation of the sublime is ‘egoistic – or more exactly, solipsistic’. See Young, ‘Death and Transfiguration’, 140. This is a gross distortion of Schopenhauer’s views, for Schopenhauer rightly considers the experience of the sublime, on the contrary, as an invaluable way of overcoming our self-centredness and identifying with that which is larger than ourselves.

19 . See Budd, ‘The Sublime in Nature’, 133. 20 . For a detailed discussion of the metaphysical value of the sublime, see

Chapter 7. 21 . See Gregory Currie, ‘Empathy for Objects’, in Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie,

eds, Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 82–95 and Cochrane, ‘The Emotional Experience of the Sublime’, on which the alternative to Schopenhauer’s doctrine is based.

22 . Currie, ‘Empathy for Objects’, 88. 23 . Cochrane, ‘The Emotional Experience of the Sublime’, 137. 24 . Ibid., 144. 25 . See Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir Zeki, ‘A Neurobiological Enquiry into the

Origins of Our Experience of the Sublime and Beautiful’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8, 2014.

26 . The following three points are quoted quasi-literally from Cochrane, ‘The Emotional Experience of the Sublime’, 147.

Part III

Values of the Sublime

145

A lot and perhaps even most of Schopenhauer’s insightful account of the arts can be reduced to a kind of enlightened aesthetic attitude theory that relates all artistic achievements back to the value of the aesthetic experiences afforded. But Schopenhauer’s account of tragedy reveals some reticence about the ‘aesthetic experience’ approach that is mostly attributed to him. Although Christopher Janaway (and many other commentators) is right to emphasise the crucial importance of the pleasure of will-less tranquillity, Schopenhauer’s analysis of the signifi-cance of tragedy at least suggests that the value of all art cannot be explained wholly in terms of the pleasurable experience afforded. 1 We do not value a work of art merely because it offers us pleasure, nor do we repudiate it because it fails to do so.

Chris Janaway rightly insists that ‘aesthetics is at the heart of philos-ophy for Schopenhauer’, 2 but also ultimately reduces Schopenhauer’s theory of art to an account of aesthetic pleasure. However, unlike for example, Paul Guyer, 3 he argues that ‘Schopenhauer’s philosophy, at a deeper level, is more Platonic than it is Kantian’. 4 His main arguments are: first, that the theory of Platonic Ideas is no mere ad hoc insertion into a dominantly Kantian framework, but a carefully prepared and fundamental insight, and, secondly, that his account of aesthetic expe-rience is more truly Platonic, since, unlike Kant’s aesthetics, it is ulti-mately preoccupied with timeless and painless contemplation – that is, the younger Schopenhauer’s so-called ideal of the ‘better consciousness’: the timeless, painless subject – which is ‘indissolubly’ connected with the knowledge of (Platonic) Ideas.

I shall argue that the thesis that the value of art is reducible to the aesthetic pleasure afforded is inadequate 5 and that some important (and often neglected) aspects of Schopenhauer’s insightful discussion

6 Tragedy, Ethics, and the Sublime


of tragedy show that the value of an artwork cannot be reduced to the value of the pleasure we are disposed to have towards it. The value of the insights offered by a work of art does not solely consist in the pleasure it may generate. Although Schopenhauer does not sufficiently develop this strand of thought, he none the less rightly suggests that a theory that conceives of artistic value as being fully exhausted by aesthetic value cannot but be mistaken.

Schopenhauer and Platonic Ideas

Above all else, Plato’s theory of the universal Forms or Ideas has been a continual source of fascination and inspiration for Schopenhauer. The young Schopenhauer was particularly fascinated by the question of the distinction between a concept and an Idea. But he soon realised that a number of modifications would be necessary in Plato’s theory of Ideas so as to develop his own metaphysics of the will. 6 From 1815 onwards, the differences between concept and Idea are further devel-oped: a concept is more clearly and firmly outlined, but not so rich and vibrant as a Platonic Idea, and in any case the former is ‘unproductive for art’ (MR I, 226; I, 295). The immense importance of music was already acknowledged before 1815, and was even chosen as the paradigm par excellence of all art, but the wrestling with the notion of the (Platonic) Idea remained. 7 Schopenhauer keeps hesitating, and his account of the distinction between Idea and concept is never fully consistent; hence this warns against an all too simple interpretation of the significance of the Platonic Ideas. In fact, Schopenhauer’s repeated warning that he always uses the term ‘Idea’ in the Platonic sense and not in the sense of Kant’s ‘Idea of reason’ is the only constant factor that can lead us. What is precisely meant by ‘in the Platonic sense’ is never completely clear. But in any case it is clear that the theory of the (Platonic) Ideas is not an ad hoc addition, but the result of a very long weighing of the pros and cons, and an immense admiration for Plato’s philosophy.

However, this does not mean that the significance and the role of the Ideas in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art are derived exclusively from Plato’s doctrine of Ideas. Kant’s theory of the aesthetic ideas in the Critique of Judgment has also undoubtedly influenced Schopenhauer’s theory. An important difference remains, though, with Kant’s aesthetic ideas, for the latter are the product of the artist’s imagination, whereas the Ideas that artworks express are ‘the timeless paradigms of natural things and complete in themselves’ (WWR I, 211). However, Schopenhauer’s romantic account of genius is often closer to Kant’s conception of the

Tragedy, Ethics, and the Sublime 147

creative genius than is assumed, and there is definitely some imbal-ance in Schopenhauer’s account between the metaphysical status of the Ideas and the creative capacities of the artistic genius. Still one impor-tant divergence cannot be overlooked. Aesthetic imagination in Kant is productive, for it invents intuitions and produces new configurations, whereas for Schopenhauer the artist’s imagination discovers eternal Ideas that are ontologically present. Anyhow, in light of Schopenhauer’s struggle with Plato’s theory of Ideas, it suffices to say that we can defi-nitely dismiss the view that the Platonic Ideas are ad hoc extras and agree with Janaway that Schopenhauer’s ‘aspiration is much closer to Plato’ – despite Schopenhauer’s un-Platonic beliefs that the Ideas are perceptible by the senses, and that the blind will, instead of the Idea, is ontologically fundamental. 8

Nevertheless, important differences with Plato’s theory of Ideas remain. For Schopenhauer surprisingly excludes many of the classic examples that Plato gives of the Ideas, especially in the middle dialogues, such as Phaedo , Symposium , Republic , and Phaedrus . Although Schopenhauer believes that the artist communicates his pure knowledge (or intui-tion) of Ideas and not of concepts – in this sense his view of the artist is extremely close to Plato’s divine creator in the Timaeus – he does not hold that beauty is itself an Idea. The beauty of a painting or a landscape consists in its capacity to give rise to the knowledge of an Idea, but is not itself an Idea. A beautiful flower is not beautiful because it expresses the Idea of beauty, but because it expresses the Idea of the flower. Although Schopenhauer’s view of the beautiful is here again remarkably close to Plato’s in the Timaeus , 9 he will none the less insist that there is no such thing as an Idea of the beautiful. 10

As already noted, Schopenhauer attaches grave importance to the distinction between concept and Idea. He even claims that ‘we are entirely satisfied by the impression of a work of art only when it leaves behind something that, in spite of all our reflection on it, we cannot bring down to the distinctness of a concept’ (WWR II, 409). The transition to a clearly defined concept is, in Schopenhauer’s view, obviously a sign of degradation. An aesthetic intuition does not in any way contribute to conceptual knowledge, but isolates the perceived object from its merely empirical and practical connections with other objects. This kind of perceptual contemplation is particularly the work of the imagi-nation, and is freed from the limitations of the principle of sufficient reason which dominates logical reasoning. Perceiving an Idea provides no abstract knowledge, for when a subject intuits an Idea, perceiving the particular object does not end. One perceives a Platonic Idea in and


through a particular object – whether this is a natural object or a work of art does not really matter. 11 Ideas can only appeal to someone who has elevated himself above all individual desiring and has become a pure subject of knowing. Schopenhauer’s deeper motives seem to be Platonic, because he insists on the strict separation of empirical and pure knowl-edge – although, again, Kant too recognises the possibility of a pure intuition, viz. of space and time.

Janaway is also right to emphasise the Platonic distinction of will-bound versus will-free modes of apprehending the world in Schopenhauer’s theory. Like Schopenhauer, Plato thinks that pure knowledge of the eternal Forms is only possible once one has purified the soul and freed oneself from ‘its contamination by the body’ ( Phaedo 66 a–b). 12

Although Janaway is right that there is at least ‘one drastic divergence from Plato that we cannot ignore’, 13 namely that in Schopenhauer’s account the Ideas are revealed by artworks in aesthetic experience, there are also more relevant similarities with Plato’s philosophy of art than Janaway allows. To begin, although Plato attacks art, and especially so-called mimetic poetry in the notorious tenth book of his Republic , there are really striking parallels between Schopenhauer’s account of the artist as a pure subject of knowledge that intuits timeless Ideas and communicates these in and through works of art, and Plato’s divine creator in Timaeus , who is also a pure knower and also models his crea-tions on eternal Ideas. Secondly, Plato’s notorious attack on poetry in Republic is contradicted many times in his other dialogues and, in this sense too, Schopenhauer’s reverence of the artist’s pure knowledge and the significance of the arts is really more Platonic than is often acknowledged. To give but a few examples: in the Lysis , Socrates says that the poets ‘are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of wisdom’ (213e–214a); in Phaedrus , Socrates refers to ‘a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This seizes a gentle, pure soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry, glorifying the countless deeds of ancient times for the instruc-tion of posterity’ ( Phaedrus 245a); and in Plato’s Symposium , poets like Homer or Hesiod are called ‘the begetters of wisdom and the rest of virtue’ (209a–209d).

Yet, whereas Plato believes that beauty is a motive for our desire and even ultimately satisfies it, Schopenhauer argues that the experience of beauty basically offers us salvation from the torments of desire: beauty consists in a way of considering things ‘without interest, without subjec-tivity, purely objectively; it is entirely given up to them in so far as they are merely representations and not motives ’ (WWR I, 196; italics added).


Schopenhauer sees beauty as mainly offering alleviation of the misery that our existence as willing individuals inevitably engenders. Desire cannot ever be fulfilled, not even in the contemplation of beauty, and contemplating Ideas in and through beautiful objects does not so much offer ultimate satisfaction for our restless desire as rather free ourselves from the thraldom of endless blind willing. Although Schopenhauer acknowledges that the ‘peace’ of aesthetic experience is not merely absence of pain, but also ‘revives’ and ‘comforts’, he nevertheless holds that the will can never be satisfied, not even through a pure experience of true beauty. That the aesthetic state of mind cheers and comforts is at least partly due to the achievement of a will-less and painless state of mind, through which our desire is momentarily stilled instead of defini-tively fulfilled. Moreover, the Ideas are nothing less than the objectifica-tions of the primal will which, by nature, will always inevitably lack an object of satisfaction.

There is no ultimate object that can satisfy the will: as William Desmond suggests, Schopenhauer’s will resembles better Don Juan’s desire than Plato’s eros : ‘desire hurrying from particular conquest to conquest, each taken as absolute in turn, only to breed disillusion at every turn, and forcing desire to set out in search again, forever’. 14 The Platonic tranquillity of the soul, which finds its ultimate fulfilment in the love of beauty, is very different from Schopenhauer’s will-less objectivity, which cannot ever be a kind of (ultimate) fulfilment, not only because, as he says, ‘for one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied’, but mainly since it is a ‘capacity ... to lose oneself in perception, to remove from the service of the will the knowl-edge which originally existed only for this service’, and ‘the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject , the clear eye of the world’ (WWR I, 185–186). Thus, despite Schopenhauer’s Platonic aspirations and his obsession with the ‘better consciousness’, which has much in common with Plato’s account of the pure timeless knowledge of the soul, there are crucial differences between Plato’s eros and Schopenhauer’s will. And because of their different conceptions of desire, Plato holds that the experience of beauty is the culmination of desire, whereas beauty for Schopenhauer is the temporary relief from desire. In this sense , Plato’s account of aesthetic experience is, psychologically speaking, closer to the feeling of satisfaction after an excellent meal, whereas Schopenhauer’s is closer to the feeling of having conquered the desire to feel hungry altogether.


In his account of the value of music, however, Schopenhauer comes closer to Plato’s description of the experience of beauty, since enjoying music is really rejoicing in being part of being itself, and even celebrating being as such: here, the experience’s value is clearly no longer merely relief from suffering and pain, but positive rapture: music expresses the inner being of the world and, paradoxically, we enjoy this experience of being one with the will of the world, not so much because we feel freed from personal desires, but rather because we are able to identify positively with the deepest core of the universe, that is, the will. This idea of positive pleasure (or exaltation) does not only undermine the mainstream hypothesis that, for Schopenhauer, aesthetic pleasure is completely reducible to absence of pain, but also refers to his aesthetics of the sublime, which we discussed extensively in Chapter 4 in the context of the aesthetic experience of nature, but which Schopenhauer also relates to the experience of tragedy ( Trauerspiel ).

The feeling of the sublime

Recall that the sublime demands to cast aside the ordinary interests of our will and to explicitly maintain a contemplative state of mind. The concomitant exaltation is a state of utter tension , which does not only have to be won with consciousness, but also has to be maintained, whereas in the beautiful a state of tranquil contemplation will be reached and maintained without any effort or struggle.

The sublime feeling is a very complex matter that cannot be character-ised merely in terms of the criterion active vs. passive. For one of the most important characteristics of the sublime is that it is ‘accompanied by a constant recollection of the will, yet not of a single individual willing, such as fear or desire, but of human willing in general, in so far as it is expressed universally through its objectivity, the human body’ (WWR I, 202; see also Chapter 4). The word ‘constant’ ( einer steten Erinnerung ) is especially important here: the will remains permanently present in consciousness. The sublime, which can occur in different degrees, is thus typically distinguished from the beautiful by the permanent and unre-mitting recollection of the human will, whose traces remain present in the mind as displeasure.

Schopenhauer unfortunately never really adequately explains the status of this recollection, yet he argues that it is not a recollection of individual willing, fear, or desire. It is recollection of human willing in general ( an das menschliche Wollen überhaupt ), for ‘if a real single act of will were to enter consciousness through actual personal affliction


and danger from the object, the individual will, thus actually affected, would at once gain the upper hand. The peace of contemplation would become impossible, the impression of the sublime would be lost’ (WWR I, 202). If we weren’t able to tolerate and possibly overcome our actual fear and ‘personal affliction’, we could not contemplate aesthetically the threatening or overwhelming scene. When merely our individual will is stimulated, there are two possible effects. When our will is positively aroused, we are ‘allured’ or ‘charmed’ ( das Reizende ), when negatively affected, we end up being disgusted, neither of which are aesthetic, let alone sublime affects (see WWR I, 207). In the charming, the mind is completely passive and occasions merely sensuous pleasure ( Genuss ) and not pure liking ( Wohlgefallen ), as in the beautiful, or joy ( Freude ), as is the case in the sublime. The charming ‘draws the beholder down from pure contemplation’ and thus one ‘no longer remains pure subject of knowing, but becomes the needy and dependent subject of willing’ (WWR I, 207). Contrary to the charming, the sublime is a purely aesthetic feeling.

The sublime allows us to take disinterested pleasure in what is most cruel or life-threatening. Schopenhauer often connects the sublime with a transition or elevation from a passive individual that is submitted to the urges of the will to a pure detached subject that contemplates (Platonic) Ideas. Yet, as I have argued in Chapter 4, the sublime feeling is far more specific. It is not just a feeling that is accompanied by an eleva-tion of the subject over the empirical will – such an elevation also takes place in the beautiful; it also discloses the twofold nature ( Duplizität ) of human consciousness. 15 Schopenhauer writes:

Simultaneously he feels himself as individual, as the feeble phenom-enon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can annihilate, helpless against powerful nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in face of stupendous forces; and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing, who as the condi-tion of every object is the supporter of this whole world ... This is the full impression of the sublime. Here it is caused by the sight of a power beyond all comparison superior to the individual, and threat-ening him with annihilation. (WWR II, 204–205)

This passage reveals that the feeling of the sublime is an experience of contrast – not merely triumphantly subjecting the will, let alone merely ‘a contraction of the vastness of being into the content of the consciousness of the noumenal self’ and ‘a movement of cosmic


egoism’, as Julian Young holds. 16 The experience of contrast (‘ simultane-ously he feels himself’; italics added) testifies to an irremovable tension in the subject’s mind. It is not an individual, let alone an egoistic or solipsistic experience, but the experience of a pure subject that is aware of its own split nature. The irremovable tension between willing and knowing – the continuous oscillation between empirical desire and pure contemplation – can be experienced in different degrees, but can never be definitively put to rest, for in the end the will always prevails. The will cannot be tamed definitively: ‘ Velle non discitur .’ 17 Contrary to the beautiful, which can still promise complete and pure harmony and tranquillity, the sublime offers the fullest impression of the unbridge-able gap between willing and contemplating that characterises human subjectivity. That we can actually enjoy this aesthetically is perhaps the real ‘miracle par excellence ’ – a ‘miracle’ that I have attempted to explain in Chapter 5. 18 Contrary to Kant, who is reticent to allow the sublime in art, Schopenhauer argues that one of the values of tragic art is that it affords sublime pleasure. Hence, it is to Schopenhauer’s account of tragedy that we now need to turn.

The values of tragedy

‘Life is not the greatest good’, exclaims the chorus at the end of Friedrich Schiller’s Bride of Messina (WWR II, 435). The question arises whether and how the depiction of the most terrible things in life, when they are sketched for us ‘in the most glaring light’ (ibid.), can still be beneficial to us. In other words, if a tragic experience is ultimately pleasurable – as Schopenhauer seems to hold – what is the nature of the pleasure that we experience in the contemplation of a tragedy? The older Schopenhauer does not hesitate: ‘our pleasure in the tragedy belongs not to the feeling of the beautiful, but to that of the sublime; it is, in fact, the highest degree of this feeling’ (WWR II, 433). It seems quite evident that tragedy, tech-nically speaking, cannot be called beautiful . But why does Schopenhauer stress so strongly that we ought to call tragedy sublime and that the pleasure attained by the spectator is indeed the highest degree of the sublime? And, furthermore, why does Schopenhauer insist that tragedy is ultimately pleasurable?

The answer to the first question is clear, although – as we shall soon see – the connection with the sublime is not as straightforward as is mostly claimed in the literature. Indeed, it is obvious to call the pleasure that we undergo in contemplation of a tragedy ‘sublime’ and to characterise it more specifically as ‘dynamically sublime’, since in


tragedies we are actually confronted with ‘the wailing and lamentation of mankind, the dominion of chance and error, the fall of the right-eous, the triumph of the wicked’, and with the aspect of the world and life ‘which directly opposes our will’ (WWR II, 433). In Schopenhauer’s view, adequately depicting the terrible side of life is the highest of all possible literary achievements (WWR I, 252). But the connection of art (in this case, tragedy) with the sublime threatens to disturb the unity of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory. Recall that the sublime demands a tremendous effort on the side of the subject to elevate itself above that which threatens or overwhelms it. The beautiful, on the contrary, facili-tates a purely aesthetic, will-less intuition, and a beautiful object invites or even compels us to admire it. For Schopenhauer, apart from music perhaps, art is primarily beautiful or fine art . Schopenhauer even argues that ‘the work of art is merely a means of facilitating that knowledge in which pleasure consists’, and it ‘really endeavours to show us life and things as they are in reality; but these cannot be grasped directly by everyone through the mist of objective and subjective contingencies. Art takes away this mist’ (WWR I, 195; II, 407). 19

How can this general conception of art be unified with the sublime, which (as we have seen in the previous chapters) presupposes a hostile relation to the subject and hampers an easy transition to a pure will-less attitude? How can Schopenhauer insist both that tragedy be sublime and at the same time art? Stricto sensu , the sublime seems only to apply to nature. There actually seems to be a contradiction between the concepts of ‘art’ and the ‘sublime’ in Schopenhauer’s account. Art ought to facili-tate aesthetic contemplation and insight into Ideas, whereas the sublime presupposes overcoming some form of resistance to the tranquil percep-tion of an Idea.

It is worth noting that watching a tragedy may in fact facilitate the exaltation above the will. The events depicted may make it obvious that if the horrific world on stage is really our world, the world to which we as individuals belong, it will definitely be better to tear ourselves away from it. One could suggest that it is precisely the artistic nature of tragedy – a Trauerspiel is, first and foremost, a Spiel , a play – that allows us to adopt a stance of pure contemplation without too much difficulty.

However, contrary to his own explicit intentions, Schopenhauer does not seem to be mainly preoccupied with defending tragedy’s truly artistic nature at all: he emphasises the terrible side of life, the unjust suffering, man’s wretchedness, the human impotence in the face of fate – aspects that hamper an easy transition to tranquil contemplation – and he gives very little attention to the idea of a spectator sitting in a theatre and


being confronted with a play. By presenting the worst and most nause-ating scenes, by bringing them to the stage, a context is created that allows spectators to enjoy what is held before their eyes. As Nietzsche will insist, art is – at least partly – an Apollonian illusion: it creates a world of semblance. Anyone who jumps onto the stage during a performance of Romeo and Juliet and starts fighting with the Montagues, or who phones the Poison Control Hotline when Juliet is poisoned, has absolutely no sense of what art really is. Again, in Nietzschean terms, the arts create a world of semblance and a metaphysical supplement that stands next to reality in order to conquer it. Yet, on Schopenhauer’s account, the oppo-site seems to occur in tragedy. The performance on stage is no semblance but instead offers the truth and makes the spectator conscious that not the play, but rather life itself is ‘a bad dream’ (WWR II, 433).

The question arises why Schopenhauer downplays the artistic illusion, which he knew quite well. Above all, why does he emphasise its sublime character, which he had explicitly situated in nature? 20 Although Schopenhauer emphasises the ‘palliative’ character of aesthetic contem-plation several times, this does not really seem to apply to the effects of tragedy. The aesthetic contemplation of a landscape or a flower can have a soothing effect on the spectator. But a tragedy does not offer any calming images of reality, as it rather compels us to attend to features of life we normally tend to shy away from. It makes us dwell on bloodshed, murder, and cruel violence. By foregrounding the evil aspects in particu-larly vivid and striking ways, it invites or even forces us to consider the disturbing aspects of humanity, which is ultimately wrong, vicious, unjust, and ugly. A tragedy confronts the spectator even with ‘the guilt of existence itself’ (WWR I, 254) and with the bitterness and useless-ness of life, and hence, with the futility of all our individual striving. Thus, the spectator, that is to say, the willing individual and not the pure subject of knowledge, understands ‘that it is better to tear his heart away from life, to turn his willing away from it, not to love the world and life’, and ‘thus in the depth of his being the consciousness is then stirred that for a different kind of willing there must be a different kind of existence also’ (WWR II, 435). Schopenhauer even writes that the best tragedies show us:

those powers that destroy happiness and life, and in such a way that the path to them is at any moment open even to us. We see the greatest suffering brought about by entanglements whose essence could be assumed even by our own fate, and by actions that perhaps even we might be capable of committing, and so we cannot complain


of injustice. Then, shuddering, we feel ourselves already in the midst of hell [ dann fühlen wir schaudernd uns schon mitten in der Hölle ]. (WWR I, 255)

Tragedy not only depicts the renunciation of the will on stage, but also apparently makes us spectators shudder at the depicted horrors. The word ‘shuddering’ ( schaudernd ) is especially striking here. The force of a tragedy seems to be that it genuinely involves an individual human being; it necessitates a personal reaction. Without any personal involve-ment as a spectator, we would not be moved at all by what the charac-ters on stage have to endure. So it is not the pure subject of knowledge, the purely aesthetic subject, which is explicitly addressed by a tragedy. Contrary to other forms of art, tragedies clearly do not address pure aesthetic subjects, but concerned individuals that are able of empathising with the characters and events on stage. 21 Only then will the ‘true tendency’ of tragedies reveal itself: an invitation to turn away from the world and from willing altogether, an urge to forsake all our personal interests. And while the younger Schopenhauer still thought that this kind of detachment occurs principally in the characters of the play and not in the spectator, later (in 1844) he will realise that forsaking our personal interests and desires necessarily presupposes personal involve-ment of a willing individual. And even already in 1818 he writes the following about the effects of tragedy:

The motives that were previously so powerful now lose their force, and instead of them, the complete knowledge of the real nature of the world, acting as a quieter of the will, produces resignation, the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will-to-life itself. Thus we see in tragedy the noblest men, after a long conflict and suffering, finally renounce for ever all the pleasures of life and the aims till then pursued so keenly, or cheerfully and willingly give up life itself. (WWR I, 253)

We are surprisingly far removed from a purely aesthetic affair – at least in the sense Schopenhauer interprets the term ‘aesthetic’. If ‘what the sublime demands is that I recognize a situation as threaten ing or distress ing – but without feeling personally threatened or distressed’, 22 a tragedy cannot but miss its effect of inviting individual resignation if it were really aesthetically sublime. It is therefore of vital importance to note that in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer changes the identification of the tragic and the sublime


into an analogy . Again, he wants to explain the pleasure we take in trag-edies and tries to do so by insisting that we comprehend the depicted events as terrible for humanity in general , and not just for ourselves. But he also hesitates, he also suddenly claims that the pleasure we experi-ence is now merely ‘analogous to the dynamically sublime’ (WWR II, 433): why now merely analogous instead of identical? Why say first that it is the ‘highest degree’ of this feeling, and only some fifteen lines further claim that it is only ‘analogous’?

Schopenhauer clearly sympathises with Aristotle’s famous tenet that tragedy reveals universal truths about humanity. Tragedy is the supreme and most important form of poetry, because the Idea of humanity is the supreme level of the will’s objectification, and because it depicts ‘the antagonism of the will with itself [ Widerstreit des Willens mit sich selbst ]’ (WWR I, 253). Yet Schopenhauer confuses the distinction between a universal and a particular truth with the distinction between a truth that is grasped by a will-less subject and by a willing individual. A tragedy clearly expresses universal truths in and through particular events and individual characters on stage, but, pace Schopenhauer, this does not rule out that it may also demand a spectator’s personal involvement. And only because of this personal involvement can tragedy get the profound significance it really has. So, despite Schopenhauer’s insist-ence, what is ultimately at stake in tragedy cannot be captured wholly in terms of aesthetic experience, not even in terms of the complex feeling of the sublime. For one gains understanding from a tragedy, and this understanding (which is ultimately ethical) is an integral aspect of our experience of tragedy, and is distinct from a purely aesthetic effect (in Schopenhauer’s sense). The understanding one gains from the depicted scene may even lead to a change of one’s personal attitude toward life and to complete resignation.

Now, Schopenhauer may be right that watching a tragedy is ultimately beneficial, but not because, as he suggests, it is an ultimately pleasurable experience. Schopenhauer is trying to justify his theory of the sublime and maintain the unity of his aesthetic theory by insisting on the idea that the value of art can be completely explained in terms of aesthetic experience, that is, experiencing a sublime, hence complex and mixed, but ultimately pleasurable feeling. But watching a tragedy is not a purely aesthetic experience in this sense. The value of great tragedies, such as Othello and Wallenstein , is tightly entwined with a profound concern for the rough and brutish aspects of human nature. Since what we understand about the world and human nature is undoubtedly horri-fying, it cannot be justified aesthetically but only through resignation.


Furthermore, it is hard to see how a horrific metaphysical truth about the baseness and sufferings of mankind may yield pleasure – apart, of course, from the pleasure that any discovery of truth may arouse. Although we are fascinated by tragedies, their value cannot really be reduced to the aesthetic pleasure they afford, since – as Schopenhauer himself recog-nises – the horror ‘is brought terribly near to us ’ and ‘shows us those powers that destroy happiness and life, and in such a way that the path to them is at any moment open even to us ’ (WWR I, 254–255; italics added). Schopenhauer has to allow that experiencing a tragedy really involves being confronted with horrifying truths that affect us directly as concerned individuals; truths that cannot be turned into pleasurable spectacles that can be contemplated by a detached pure subject of knowl-edge. 23 On the contrary, the essence of the experience of a tragedy is not that it compels us to aesthetically contemplate the world, but instead makes us ‘turn away from the will to life itself’ (WWR II, 433).

Thus, if Schopenhauer still wants to argue – as he does – that tragedies stimulate the feeling of the sublime, this feeling of the sublime is very different from the feeling occasioned by nonhuman nature, as exem-plified by violent thunderstorms, deserts, and the Grand Canyon. 24 Schopenhauer does not seem aware of this radical semantic shift. If he had acknowledged this semantic shift of the concept of the sublime, it would have threatened the consistency of his theory of art: he would have been left with just two options: either acknowledging that trag-edies are not genuine art forms, but that would be absurd; or explicitly denying that tragedies yield pleasure, but this would have demolished the only truly unifying component of Schopenhauer’s theory, namely that of the ‘better consciousness’, that is, the will-less and painless pure aesthetic subject. This seems to me to be one of the crucial tensions in Schopenhauer’s conception of art, and, as we shall see, perhaps this is one of the very reasons why he later suggested broadening his definition of art (see WWR II, 407).

Schopenhauer should have recognised expressly that appreciating a work as good art does not coincide with actually liking it or being moved by it: someone may recognise that Matisse’s paintings are good, though they do nothing for him. But even those who find Matisse’s work unaf-fecting will not deny that he is a great artist, and many people consider opera to be good art, though it leaves them cold. For Schopenhauer, however, being aesthetically moved by a work and appreciating it as good art seem to coincide, and this gets him into troubled waters, for he persists in measuring the value of tragedy in terms of purely aesthetic pleasure.


Hence the question arises whether Schopenhauer should not really have admitted more explicitly that not all art can be valued solely in terms of the aesthetic experience afforded. Instead of insisting on the sublime experience that watching a tragedy would afford, he ought to have asked why people tend to be fascinated by tragedies. Experiencing aesthetic pleasure and being fascinated is not really the same: I can be fascinated by a horror movie or a road accident without necessarily expe-riencing aesthetic pleasure. Schopenhauer cannot ask this question – the premises of his aesthetic theory do not allow it – because fascination necessarily implies deep personal involvement, and Schopenhauer holds that personal involvement ruins the purity of an aesthetic expe-rience. This causes two problems for Schopenhauer: personal involve-ment destroys the possibility of an aesthetic will-less experience, and personal engagement with tragedies in particular yields displeasure or even pain because of our empathy and even sympathy with the, often unmerited, suffering of the characters on stage. By focussing one-sidedly on the aesthetic effects of art, Schopenhauer tends to underestimate that art works have other important merits, such as for example, developing our capacities for discrimination and appreciation.

The value of tragedy does not reside in aesthetic contemplation or intuition, but in understanding that it may be better to give up willing altogether. This is obviously not a purely aesthetic merit. The value of a tragedy cannot be reduced to the value of the aesthetic experience it may afford. Its merit is in the understanding it offers and the ethical atti-tude it may henceforth provoke in a fascinated spectator. Schopenhauer has misled many readers, by concentrating on the question of how something tragic can still offer us pleasure. But the value of tragedy lies in the specific philosophical understanding it affords, which is valuable in its own right and may lead to salvation through the denial of the will. Tragedy offers a certain consolation ( Trost ) that makes us momentarily forget life’s horrid miseries (WWR I, 372). At best, it awakens for a few moments the desire for ‘an existence of an entirely different kind, a different world’ (WWR II, 433). The experience of utter horror at the sight of the terrible events moves us personally and prompts us to turn away from the will to life, instead of remaining in sheer contemplation of it. Thus at least part of our experience of a tragedy is, therefore, not aesthetic at all, but this does not make it less valuable for it, on the contrary. Tragedy makes us understand the real (limited) value of our lives as human beings and the world we live in.

Schopenhauer’s account of the value of tragedy is, however, not limited to an analysis merely in terms of purely aesthetic merits. By emphasising


tragedy’s philosophical and moral significance, he has shown a way to transcend the Kantian aesthetic perspective upon art. Although he does not develop the view further into detail, Schopenhauer none the less rightly, if only implicitly, rejects the view that all art is valuable because of the value of the aesthetic experience yielded; understanding that it may be better to turn ourselves away from this wretched world may be an impor-tant effect of watching a tragedy, but whether this kind of insight really provides pleasure is highly questionable. It may, of course, if we have the sense that we have discovered something important about ourselves or about the world, if we understand that the work has shaped and devel-oped our thoughts in and through our experience of it. But claiming that experiencing tragedies is valuable merely because of the pleasure this insight or understanding arouses is – to say the least – highly implau-sible. As Matthew Kieran says, ‘art stretches, extends and revolutionises the ways we come to see the world. It is one of the most powerful means of cultivating our perceptual capacities’, 25 and, I would add, of enabling development of our understanding of the world and our place in it.

To be sure, the aesthetic spectator remains a spectator and will not become an ascetic or saint as soon as he or she is leaving the theatre. So concentrating on whether the spectator will really ever lead the moral life of an ascetic or let alone the holy life of a saint, is really missing the point. The essential value of tragedies necessarily involves understanding that it is possible ‘to will something better’ (WWR II, 574), no more no less. Evoking the spirit of resignation and arousing the abjuration of the will to life definitely remains the ‘characteristic tendency and effect of the tragedy’ or even its only ‘true tendency’, and this attunement or disposi-tion ( Gesinnung ) is evoked ‘only temporarily’ in the spectator (WWR II, 435). The idea that it would be better to turn oneself away from this life altogether arises ‘only in an obscure feeling’ (ibid.): the affective response to the tragedy engenders the understanding. Schopenhauer does not expect tragedy immediately to offer resignation. At most, it awakens some kind of insight that is ‘beyond’ and altogether different from aesthetic intuition. This probably explains why Schopenhauer contends that there is a danger in the admiration of tragic heroes: one could be tempted to remain in a state of sheer contemplation instead of pondering the possi-bility of changing the course of one’s own life. Contemplating works of art would then unfortunately become ‘an end in itself’, which would lead to some form of unwarranted aestheticism (WWR I, 267).

The effect of a tragedy is hence merely ‘analogous to’ the aesthetically sublime, since it completely ‘changes our mood [ uns so umstimmt ]’, that is, it changes our aesthetic mood into an ethical one. What Schopenhauer


seems to have in mind is a will-less, selfless mood which may enhance sympathy with other creatures – a way of understanding life that bears all the characteristics of the Christian attitude towards life, this spirit of renunciation, the complete abolishment of will to life, which Nietzsche will so fiercely criticise in his later work.

Whatever the value of this life-denying attitude that allegedly glori-fies the ‘guilt’ and ‘original sin’ of human existence itself, Schopenhauer definitely believes it to be valuable in its own right and praises the trag-edies that best reveal its profound significance (WWR I, 254). There is no reason to suppose that only works of art that express moral views with which we agree may appeal to us. We can certainly appreciate a work of art that expresses views that are morally at odds with our own assump-tions and convictions. We do not have to agree with the ‘hostile’ atti-tude towards life which tragedy (in Schopenhauer’s view) communicates in order still to gain insight from it and thus value a work that none the less expresses a particular view that we may not share or approve of.

In this sense, by exploring the complex relation between the experi-ences of tragedy and sublimity, Schopenhauer has laid the foundations for moving beyond a conception of art that unjustly reduces its value to the value of the aesthetic experience offered by it. Nietzsche’s fierce attack on the Christian world view that Schopenhauer’s theory of art still supports may have obfuscated one of the most valuable aspects of this theory for us today, namely that we value artworks and aesthetic objects not mainly because they afford us pleasure, but because they offer us valuable ways of viewing life, developing our cognitive and imagina-tive capacities, and enriching and deepening our understanding of the world and ourselves. The final chapter will explore in more detail some of these more profound existential and metaphysical values sublime experiences may possess.

Notes

1 . Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity’, 58: ‘the truly unifying notion in Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory is that of tranquil, will-less contemplation.’

2 . Ibid., 39. 3 . Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),

265–288. See, for instance, 271: ‘[Kant] shares with Baumgarten the under-lying impulse of aesthetic cognitivism, namely, the assumption that there is a powerful source of pleasure directly associated with the use of cognitive facul-ties and the achievement of cognitive goals ... In other words, the key suppo-sition of both these pillars of the cognitivist tradition in German aesthetics is that the unique uses of our cognitive capacities which are paradigmatic for aesthetic experience are intrinsically and positively pleasurable. ... It is


precisely this underlying assumption which Schopenhauer’s conception of aesthetic pleasure appears to deny. What I shall now argue, however, is that a similar assumption that there is a positive source of pleasure in cognition itself is not absent from Schopenhauer’s thought, and some of the puzzles of his aesthetic theory, including the puzzle earlier mentioned about the possi-bility of our pleasure in music, can be resolved by recognizing this positive aspect of his cognitivism.’

4 . Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity’, 39. 5 . For an extended discussion of this matter, see Kieran, Revealing Art , 6–46. 6 . In 1814 he argues that: ‘the Ideas are what remains of the world, when we

do away with the principle of sufficient reason or ground in all its aspects. The Ideas are not the wills, but the way in which the wills become knowable, become knowledge, and through such knowledge salvation, i.e. abolition of the wills, is possible ... Knowledge of the will is the world; the forms of the world are the Ideas ... The artist expresses a priori what must appear, thus he presents the Ideas. Here, then, we certainly see the difference between science and art; the former shows us the How of the phenomenon, the latter the What . The former is concerned with the form of the phenomenon, the latter with the substance and essence . The former reveals the finiteness, the latter eternity’ (MR I, 218–219).

7 . See MR I, 238: ‘ Music is so very much what all art aspires to be.’ That all art strives after the perfection of music is also a central thought of the noto-rious nineteenth-century British philosopher Walter Pater, who deeply influ-enced Oscar Wilde. See Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 86: ‘ All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music .’ He also suggests that ‘music ... most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consum-mate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire’ (88).

8 . See Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity’, 41. 9 . According to Plato in Timaeus 28a–b, something is beautiful if it is modelled

on an unchangeable Idea. 10 . Schopenhauer was convinced that Plato himself would have allowed Ideas

only of things in nature, and that according to the Platonists there are no Ideas of house and ring (WWR I, 211). At the same time he refers to Alcinous as saying that Plato’s earliest followers denied that there exist Ideas of manufactured items such as shields or lyres, or of things opposed to nature like fever or cholera, or of individuals or of trifling things, or of relations (ibid.).

11 . Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 206: ‘awareness and comprehension of the Idea in and through the individual phenomena of everyday experience’.

12 . See also Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity’, 42. 13 . Ibid., 43: ‘There is one drastic divergence that we cannot ignore. Schopenhauer

invokes “Platonic Ideas” as the entities revealed to the mind by art in aesthetic experience , thus setting himself indeed in head-on collision with Plato.’ See also WWR I, 212.


14 . William Desmond, Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Philosophy and Art (New York: SUNY Press, 2003), 151.

15 . See WWR I, 204: ‘Then in the unmoved beholder of this scene the twofold nature of his consciousness reaches the highest distinctness. Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual ... and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing.’ See also Chapter 4 for a more extended discussion.

16 . Young, ‘Death and Transfiguration’, 140. Young (unjustly) contends on the same page that Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime ‘illustrates clearly the egoistic – or, more exactly, solipsistic – character of Schopenhauer’s thought’. See also Chapter 5.

17 . This is a phrase of Seneca’s ( Epistulae , 81 14), one of Schopenhauer’s favourites.

18 . For a more detailed analysis of Schopenhauer’s account of art and aesthetic experience, see also Vandenabeele, ‘Schopenhauer and the Objectivity of Art’, 219–233.

19 . It is worth noting that Schopenhauer’s later definition does not imply that art necessarily generates pleasure. But see below.

20 . Like Kant, Schopenhauer does offer a few examples of sublime architecture, such as the Egyptian pyramids, Saint Peter’s basilica in Rome, and the dome of St Paul’s in London, but it is clear that Kant as well as Schopenhauer relates the experience of the sublime primarily to nature.

21 . Schopenhauer sometimes writes as if aesthetic contemplation involves a kind of disengagement or estrangement from the world. Tragic art, however, seems to demand that this estrangement be overcome. This is possibly because tragedy quietens our will and may produce the effect of resignation. Without referring to Schopenhauer’s account of tragedy, Bernard Reginster suggests that ‘to produce complete resignation, ... my knowledge must become a “living conviction”: I must recognize that the world in which frus-tration is essential and inevitable is also my world . Therein lies the paradox of reflection: the reflection capable of producing resignation is presented in a state to which I must come to see myself in something I also experience as foreign, a state in which I am moved or affected by something from which I am also detached or disengaged.’ Considered from Schopenhauer’s perspec-tive, in my view, this is what happens when watching a tragedy. See Bernard Reginster, ‘Knowledge and Selflessness: Schopenhauer and the Paradox of Reflection’, in Alex Neill and Christopher Janaway, eds, Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 115.

22 . Janaway, ‘Knowledge and Tranquillity’, 56. 23 . For rivalling interpretations of Schopenhauer’s account of tragedy and the

sublime, see especially Neill, ‘Schopenhauer on Tragedy and the Sublime’, 206–218; Alexis Philonenko, Schopenhauer. Une Philosophie de la tragédie (Paris: Vrin, 1980), and Shapshay, ‘The Problem with the Problem of Tragedy’, 17–32.

24 . See Chapter 4. See also John E. Atwell, ‘Art as Liberation: A Central Theme in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy’, in Jacquette, ed., Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts , 81–106.

25 . Kieran, Revealing Art , 147.

163

Whereas beauty usually looks back at us with human eyes, and we are being made to stand still and absorb it in a tranquil way, sublimity is dazzling and deeply disturbing. The immense scale and power of sublime objects and environments do not kindly invite us to contem-plate their qualities, but defy our cognitive and emotional capacities and force us to withstand their dizzying effect upon us and affirm ourselves against them. In the very awe that we experience we do not, pace Kant, sense our own (moral) superiority to nature’s might, but gain an invaluable insight into our humble place in the world. 1 In comparison to the greatness of the sublime object, we feel reduced to nothing. In and through sublime aesthetic experience, we become aware of our puny, vulnerable position in the universe. The experi-ence of the sublime, if understood correctly, may engender – in and through aesthetic feeling – a sense of both our nullity and fragility in comparison to nature and an intimation of the possibility of coming to terms with this. By lifting us out of the utilitarian thoughts and egocentric concerns that ordinarily dominate our practical lives, the experience of the sublime offers a unique way of engaging with the world and affirming our relation to it, not in spite of but because of the terror we experience when confronting hostile objects and environ-ments. This type of intense aesthetic experience is a dramatic exem-plar of several fundamental ways in which we relate to the world and attempt to make our home in it. This chapter will consider (albeit all too briefly) how our understanding of the sublime might point in the direction of existential and metaphysical insights.

7 The Existential and Metaphysical Value of the Sublime


The sublime: against nihilism

Contrary to what most commentators seem to think, and in opposition to his own theory of the value of tragedy, for Schopenhauer, the expe-rience of the sublime in nature is not so much an escape route from the terrors and horrors of existence as a means of joyfully affirming it. Despite common talk of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, I suggest, then, that the sublime is one of the very few paths, matched perhaps only by compassion, that are open to human beings to overcome suffering and transform it into something with which they can live. Unlike the tran-quil contemplation of beautiful things, which offers us a quiet moment of repose, sublime experiences profoundly challenge our relation to the world. One need not accept Schopenhauer’s pessimistic outlook on the world to accept what Nietzsche calls the chaotic, Dionysian character of sublime objects such as erupting volcanoes, thundering waterfalls, violent hurricanes, and jagged mountain ranges. Whereas easy beauty veils the rawness and roughness of nature and allows us to encounter the wonders of nature without feeling distressed, sublime objects exemplify, what Kant aptly calls, ‘raw nature’ ( rohe Natur ). It is nature’s powerful and life-threatening elements and their transforma-tive effects which produce sublime experiences. What engenders the sublime is ‘nature at full strength’, 2 which frightens and fascinates instead of pleasing us.

Sublime objects thus emanate, as it were, a kind of honesty or truth-fulness, which other kinds of aesthetic objects, including gentle, beau-tiful ones, sometimes lack. Whilst beautiful objects often, as it were, veil the terrible truths of the world’s meaningless chaos, sublime objects offer us a view into the abyss. They show us a world which is deprived of human meaning, in which we need to measure ourselves against nature’s awesome greatness and tremendous power. Despite the gener-ally terrifying character of sublime phenomena, Schopenhauer justly acknowledges that – on his view, unlike tragedy – sublime objects in nature do not make us desire to deny the will to life. It is as if sublime natural objects – no matter how cruel and horrifying – can save us from longing for a world in which all willing, and hence all life, will have been extinguished. This is paramount, for it gives the lie to those who reduce Schopenhauer’s aesthetics to ‘a kind of signpost to the higher condition of asceticism’ and ‘to a mystical state in which our true salva-tion consists – permanent nothingness’. 3

In Chapters 4 and 5, I took great pains to show that the (Schopenhauerian) sublime cannot be identified with the feeling of

The Existential and Metaphysical Value of the Sublime 165

relief that follows from the cessation of painful willing, but entails an identification process of sorts, which allows us to engage and affirm the vastness or powerfulness of sublime objects. Although, as Schopenhauer rightly emphasises, we are continually aware of our insignificance and vulnerability in comparison to sublime objects, we simultaneously feel elated by their greatness. And whilst Schopenhauer, as I argued in Chapter 5, perhaps exaggerates the metaphysical ground of the pleasure we experience in the sublime, he rightly intimates that some kind of identification process offers the basis for explaining the sublime’s char-acteristically mixed pleasure.

Now, my attempt to explain sublime pleasure psychologically by reconstructing and critically upgrading Schopenhauer’s doctrine excludes neither other explanations of sublime experience nor its meta-physical significance. On the contrary, although I clearly refrain from siding with Kant’s transcendental and Schopenhauer’s metaphysical resolution of the paradox of the sublime, I shall argue in what follows that the sublime experience has metaphysical significance, and that one of the main reasons for rehabilitating this neglected type of aesthetic experience is not, as Brady and others suggest, primarily moral but rather metaphysical. Although Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s appeal to the supersensible does not suffice to justify the pleasure in the sublime, it does aid in understanding the true significance of this peculiar type of aesthetic experience.

Certain intense aesthetic experiences will enable us to transcend the limits that ordinarily separate us from the world and one another, as when we find ourselves amidst a goaded mass during a music concert and are completely and enthusiastically absorbed in it. We seem to become one with the goaded mass and lose ourselves in it. We are over-whelmed by the massive energy of the music, and may even experience ecstatic fervour, whilst forgetting our everyday worries and concerns. The same holds for erotic love, by which we lose ourselves in the other person and the overwhelming sexual pleasure, and participate in a kind of tremendous energy which seems to swallow us completely.

Such intense aesthetic and erotic experiences, in which we seem to overcome the limits that separate us from others, are not necessarily sublime. Friedrich Nietzsche calls them ‘Dionysian’, for (or so he argues) they originate from orgies and festivals in honour of the Greek wine god Dionysus. Enthusiastically celebrating their god, Dionysus’ followers seemed to lose their individuality and become one with him. 4 Contrary to Apollo, the luminous god, who governs the world as it appears to individual subjects, who defends ‘measured limitation’ and urges people


to respect the limits of the ‘principium individuationis’, the Dionysian causes individuality to vanish and abolishes all rigid barriers.

Although not all Dionysian experiences can be qualified as sublime, we will not be able to understand the full significance of the sublime as an aesthetic feeling, unless we take into account its ‘Dionysian’, measure-less, and intoxicating dimensions. For, as Schopenhauer is at pains to point out, the sublime confronts us with the daunting powers and raw horrors of nature, but none the less yields joyful exaltation. The dark, horrifying might of nature causes agony and pain, but simultaneously awakens pleasure and joy. Stark tragedies, Schopenhauer argues, may make us long to give up suffering and deny the will to life altogether. Giving up willing implies giving up life.

The sublime in nature, however, can save us from the nausea caused by the cruelty of life and from the desire to take refuge in the cessation of painful willing. As Schopenhauer insists, even though sublime objects are terrifying and we ‘feel ourselves reduced to nothing ... like drops in the ocean, dwindling and dissolving into nothing’ in their presence, yet we do not flee from them (WWR I, 205). On the contrary, instead of fleeing or longing for an escape route, we actually manage to subjugate the sublime object to our will to contemplate it aesthetically and truly rejoice in its awesome presence. ‘The vastness of the world, which previ-ously disturbed our peace of mind’, writes Schopenhauer, ‘now rests within us; our dependence on it is now annulled by its dependence on us’ (WWR I, 205). The stupefying greatness and power of the sublime object or environment does not merely weaken us. For, although we certainly sense our agony, our fragility and helplessness, and struggle with unfavourable, hostile nature, we simultaneously feel ourselves exalted beyond our own individuality and ‘revel in the presence of beholding’ the sublime scene (WWR I, 206). The sublime energy, which emanates from the volcano, the hurricane or the thundering waterfalls, does not para-lyse us – on the contrary, it revitalises us.

I am arguing, then, that the sublime may offer an antidote against a nihilistic view of the world. Nihilism invites us to withdraw from suffering, to conquer all forms of pain, hide all kinds of shortcomings, and ultimately consider every kind of suffering as reprehensible or evil. The sole aesthetic value that will be able to survive in such a nihilistic account may well be comfortable pleasure. Such a nihilistic view has severely damaging consequences, for it entails an escape from life, espe-cially from its less comfortable and less agreeable elements. It may also make us weak and sentimental and spoil our ability to cope with grief and misfortunes.


Obviously, cultivating sublime aesthetic experiences alone will not solve the problem of nihilism. Just as ‘there is no necessary connection between aesthetically valuing some place and also respecting and caring for it’, engaging with sublime objects will not necessarily enable us to overcome a nihilistic outlook on the world. 5 Still, I would suggest that the experience of the sublime, if understood correctly, can feed into a non-nihilistic, affirmative attitude toward life and its vicissitudes. The sublime can contribute to developing such an attitude by offering us both a glimpse of the terrors and horrors of nature and a unique way of confronting them in a pleasurable and even exhilarating way. 6 Just as, according to Nietzsche, the ancient Greeks managed to cope with the tragic character of life by creating artworks, which allowed them to look into the dark forces of nature without succumbing to them, without rendering them morose, embittered, and tired of life, sublime experiences in nature, too, may enable us to admire nature, regardless of whether it is serene and soporific or wild and horrifying.

The existential and metaphysical import of this can hardly be over-estimated. Engaging nature in its untamed guise may contribute to developing, enriching, and deepening our capacities to transform that which is rough, threatening, and dazzling into something with which we can cope and which we might even joyfully affirm. As Schopenhauer suggests, the sublime does not merely relieve us from suffering – for suffering is typically an integral part of sublime experiences – but is itself genuinely uplifting. The sublime does not offer us an escape from pain, but shows the path towards a transformation and affirmation of it.

Sublime exaltation and affirmation

As I have argued in Chapter 5, simulating and empathising with the over-whelming greatness of sublime objects may induce a positively exalting experience, whilst we remain aware of our insignificance in comparison to sublime nature. Exaltation does not entail asceticism, incorporeal spir-ituality, and holiness, nor does it depend upon scientific knowledge. Yet it may occasion a joyful affirmation of our strength to affirm ourselves against threatening nature. The strength disclosed is not (necessarily) moral strength, as Kant thought. For, suggests Schopenhauer, ‘it shows itself as a consciousness, merely felt, that in some sense or other (made clear only by philosophy) we are one with the world, and are therefore not oppressed but exalted by its immensity’ (WWR I, 205). Whether plausible or not, this is surely no moral account of sublime pleasure, but a complex and metaphysical account. The value of sublime experience


is not moral, but existential and metaphysical. Pace Kant, we do not discover the superiority of our moral strength over nature’s immense powers, but the amoral, aesthetic energy to rejoice in the bleak, horrific, and terrifying aspects of life. 7

Unlike ugliness, sublimity transforms that which is appalling into something serious and profound that we can positively enjoy. Paradoxically, we feel uplifted by that which simultaneously pains us. Schopenhauer suggests that this is possible only because we are able to identify with a greater reality. We do not merely freeze in horror, for we somehow realise that the agony we suffer as individuals is ulti-mately mere appearance, and that the eternal will to life is not affected by our being negatively impacted upon. Sublime aesthetic pleasure is, for Schopenhauer, ultimately metaphysical delight, for it not only tears us momentarily out of the turmoil of individual willing, but yields a joyful identification with a larger whole.

This latter point is crucial. Schopenhauer’s identification theory not only moves beyond the Kantian ‘moralisation’ of the sublime, but also shows us an aesthetic exemplar of a unique path toward embracing suffering instead of succumbing to life-denying forces. 8 Whereas in everyday-life, our behaviour is determined by egocentric, day-to-day concerns, and is dominated by needs and desires that urge us to avoid pain and suffering as much as possible, sublime phenomena and envi-ronments seem to justify aesthetically the very agony they cause. By occasioning pleasure through what is really rough, disharmonious, and disturbing, they contribute to deepening our valuation of life, including its disturbing and hostile facets. Sublime experiences offer sufficient energy to prevent us from collapsing under the burden of overwhelming life and stir up our desire to affirm even nature’s most horrifying and destructive phenomena.

It is vital to emphasise that we need not consciously recognise the existential and metaphysical significance of encounters with sublime nature. Just as we do not need to posit the mediation of an occurrent psychological state of displeasure on every occasion we experience the sublime, consciously realising its philosophical significance is not required either. Sublime experiences realise their existential potential and metaphysical significance in a vivid, purely aesthetic way. The fact that we are really able to aesthetically contemplate vast and terrifying objects might actually be sufficient to justify the metaphysical value of the sublime qua aesthetic experience . For, instead of shielding us against the overwhelming presence of natural objects, experiencing the aestheti-cally sublime contributes to immersing ourselves into that which would


ordinarily terrify us and distilling its profound value from it. Instead of fleeing from the terrors and horrors of nature, a sublime environment engenders astonishment and even ecstatic bewilderment, as it enables us to resist, contemplate, and even affirm its unhomely presence.

As I have argued in the previous chapter, Schopenhauer thinks that engaging with tragic art may offer an escape route from the inevitable suffering in life. It may even be a bridge toward a completely different way of life, which would be devoid of pain and suffering. Apart from its questionable plausibility as an explanation of why we can take pleasure in watching tragedies, Schopenhauer raises the important question whether or not tragedy offers the sort of pleasure that is identical with, or at least analogous to, the pleasure we experience when we are confronted by sublime natural objects. As I have argued in Chapter 6, Schopenhauer’s hesitation on this point is no coincidence, for the aesthetic effect of tragedy and sublime nature differ on a number of important points. Whether tragedy may or may not yield sublime pleasure, it should be clear that not all sublime experiences are also tragic.

Without addressing the complex issues related to ‘the paradox of tragedy’ here, I would like to point out one crucial specific reason why our pleasure in tragedy and the sublime in nature ought not to be identi-fied too hastily – no matter what Schopenhauer may think. For whereas tragedy clearly has moral content and offers insight into human nature, sublime natural objects lack this kind of moral and cognitive dimen-sion. Pace Emily Brady, unlike many tragedies, I am claiming that the sublime in nature does not necessarily affirm the independence of our moral self. 9 Obviously, we do feel elevated or uplifted when confronted by sublime nature, but not because we admire and identify with the moral strength of mankind – as we often do, when engaging with a tragedy – but because we somehow feel part of a larger whole. Whereas confronting tragic art might aid us in affirming the (moral) power of humanity because we feel awestruck by the courage of the unflinching hero in the face of cruel fate, the sublime in nature is awesome for very different reasons.

One of the main reasons is genuinely metaphysical. In being chal-lenged and even stretched to our limits by mighty natural objects and environments, we learn about our modest place in the world and the insignificance of our day-to-day distractions. An intense encounter with sublime nature does not primarily reveal the idea of humanity in us, but reveals that much is beyond human control. Hence, what the sublime demands of us is not, as Kantian-inspired philosophers suggest, prima-rily admiration for the environment (although this may, obviously, be


a consequence of engaging with sublime nature), nor respect for the idea of humanity within us, but rather to transcend an all too human perspective on the world. 10 This is exactly what Schopenhauer argues contra Kant.

The sublime does not require us to become conscious of our rational superiority over nature’s might. On the contrary, a sublime vista invites another kind of viewpoint, which is ‘inhuman’ or ‘superhuman’, and through which we become aware of our finitude and frailty. 11 In Kant’s theory, this aspect of finitude is chiefly connected with the (ultimately fruitless) struggle of imagination to capture the size or power of the object, and we are ultimately presented with an intimation of our own ability as free beings to affirm ourselves against it. This seems to me to be a gross distortion of what typically occurs in a genuinely sublime experi-ence. 12 Instead of attempting to measure the object’s scale or power and compare it with ideas of reason and our moral worth, we feel that the object is insurmountably independent of us and reveals a ground beyond ourselves. We feel dwarfed by the overwhelming sublime phenomenon and discover our ‘nothingness’ ( Nichtigkeit ) (WWR I, 205). 13 The only right response to sublime nature is awe. What is crucial in the sublime is not so much admiration for ourselves in our capacity to cope with threatening nature, but rather our realising (through aesthetic feeling, not through scientific knowledge) that suffering is not the end of us. 14 It is nature which is awesome, not us. 15 This is what the sublime reveals – and it does this in a rich, aesthetic way, not through fancy or reverie.

Only thus, by dwelling on what shows itself in sensory perception to be truly distressing to human beings, can the sublime obtain its full exis-tential and metaphysical significance. The sublime transforms what is distressing into something that demands to be contemplated. Through the sublime, we can affirm our vulnerability and finitude without completely surrendering to it. Thus, unlike drugs, kitsch, and superficial beauty, the experience of the sublime may afford real solace, since it requires us to overcome real fear – to confront overwhelming, threat-ening objects – and demands us to elicit from this distressing engage-ment with such objects the resolution of anguish and suffering. Pace Shapshay, this is not an intellective process, nor does it induce prima-rily intellectual satisfaction. 16 A sublime experience of nature, no matter how precarious, demands no less than being at one with a distressing environment and ultimately finding our place of rest there.

Giving this vital existential aspect of the sublime encounter its proper due requires overcoming the subject-object division that, unfortunately, still plays such a central part in Kant’s as well as in Schopenhauer’s


accounts of the sublime. Although Schopenhauer rightly suggests that the sublime is a fusional experience (‘we are one with the world’), he still claims that ‘the pure subject of knowing gazes through this struggle of nature, and comprehends calmly, unshaken and unconcerned, the Ideas in those very objects that are threatening and terrible to the will’ (WWR I, 204). As I have argued in previous chapters, this partly Kantian-inspired resolution of the paradox of the sublime is ultimately flawed. By taking into account the further existential and metaphysical dimen-sions of the sublime experience, we are now able to see why exactly this is the case. Apart from the psychological inaccuracies in Schopenhauer’s model, for which I developed a critical, alternative account in Chapter 5, there are existential and metaphysical reasons why Schopenhauer’s offi-cial doctrine of the sublime cannot be right.

The sublime and the sacred

The sublime makes palpable the beauty of cruelty, of pain and misery. Or rather, more precisely formulated, it renders digestible the cruelty of the world. By being both overwhelming and joyful, it enables rejoicing in pain and suffering. Hence the sublime may aid us in considering pain and suffering as an inevitable, necessary aspect of life, including our own life. The primary focus of the pleasure we take in the sublime is not the feeling of pleasure itself, but the object that gives rise to it. Lovers of sublime nature direct their attention outwards, in search of a profun-dity and value which transcends their lives and offers meaning to them. The characteristic instability and uneasiness of the sublime is, therefore, the result not merely of ‘the fact that will-less experience ... is constantly under threat of collapsing into ordinary will-driven cognition’, as Alex Neill suggests, but has profound existential and metaphysical import. 17

The sublime is more often than not really painful. Yet, the suffering involved is really sweet, for we somehow feel that the self-centred perspective which we sacrifice in the sublime yields a change of perspec-tive which offers a more genuine view of the world and our relation to it. Unlike the falsehood of sugary beauty and kitsch, which demean our humanity, the sublime remedies our broken relation to the often terrible truths of life.

Sublime vistas are bearable to us because we see them under the aspect of sacrifice. The sublime demands no less than sacrificing our ‘human all too human’ perspective on things, in order to feel the redemptive awe in the presence of nature and to dwell in wholeness. Wild, ‘raw’ nature is being transformed into something ‘that bears looking at’, and which


attracts our admiration and awe. We succeed in identifying with that which transcends us. 18 This sacrifice of our all too human point of view, which ultimately redeems life, is not moral. The sublime enables us to soar above our ordinary human way of engaging with the world and paves the way for what is more than human, for what is sacred .

Overcoming our all too human standpoint is more often than not really painful since it requires sacrificing not merely our will-driven perception but also nothing less than our ‘ego’ itself. The sublime offers a way of finding pleasure in painful sacrifice and may, thus, contribute both to developing a standpoint which transcends egocentric concerns and to confronting and affirming the chaotic vicissitudes of life instead of being ‘immersed in the whirl and tumult of life’ and remaining ‘as the mussel fastened to its rock, compelled to wait for what chance brings it’ (WWR II, 381; 379).

Sandra Shapshay avers that in characterising the effect of the sublime as overcoming the ‘ego’ Schopenhauer is basically restating Kant’s account of the sublime instead of departing from it. 19 But it seems to me that, as I have pointed out in great detail in previous chapters, Schopenhauer actu-ally surpasses Kant’s analysis of the sublime and offers a genuine alterna-tive to it. The sublime discloses not human reason in me, but allows me to overcome the human point of view and to look at it from the outside. Schopenhauer’s theory recalls Spinoza’s doctrine of amor intellectualis dei , and prefigures Nietzsche’s views of aesthetic justification and the vital importance of the tragic and the Dionysian view of life.

According to Nietzsche, the Apollonian, which is the source of the beautiful, has to do with form, whereas the Dionysian is associated with chaotic life. And whilst the beautiful induces in us an unambiguously pleasurable sensation, the Dionysian is concerned with suffering and, above all, with phenomena that awaken the idea of terror. Nietzsche’s numerous references to the ‘titanic forces of nature’, the ‘indestructibly powerful’ character of life, and ‘the terror and horror of existence’ clearly recall Schopenhauer’s view of the dynamically sublime as an experi-ence of being exposed to a tremendously powerful object that is terri-fying. 20 Whereas in Kant the sublime inevitably involves a ‘subreption’, Nietzsche claims that affirming life, including its horrific aspects, must to some extent involve illusion. 21 In this he differs from Schopenhauer, whose pessimistic evaluation of human life results in condemning suffering and vindicating compassion, asceticism, sainthood, and the denial of the will to life.

Yet, the undeniable differences between Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s views, which Nietzsche is so keen to emphasise, should not


blind us to the important parallels between both. For Nietzsche’s recog-nition that illusion is necessary for (affirming) life does not imply that aesthetic experience has no value. After all, one of the main effects of sublime phenomena is that they embody painful truths about life and the world. Typically sublime objects, such as tsunamis, volcanoes, and thunderstorms reveal the immeasurable power of nature and our frailty and insignificance in comparison to it. Confronting overwhelming, painful elements may contribute to attaining metaphysical insight into the awesome power of nature and its horrifying aspects, which is not necessarily at odds with Kant’s claim about the moral significance of the sublime, but anticipates a profound reverence for the world, which is not moral but ultimately religious.

According to Schopenhauer, a sublime experience of nature exalts the terrifying instead of nihilistically confirming the lack of value of life. In the sublime we do not merely tame the terrible aspects of nature or transform them into something with which we can live. We do not merely render painful affects into pleasurable feelings, for we ourselves are also transformed by the experience . I cannot agree with Nietzsche that confronting distressing phenomena primarily concerns testing one’s strength and thereby obtaining a heightened feeling of power. 22 Criticising a (Kantian) ‘moralisation’ of the sublime does not entail discarding the redemptive qualities of this kind of aesthetic experience. It seems to me to be crucial, therefore, to acknowledge the quasi-reli-gious dimension of the sublime and to take into account its kinship with the experience of the sacred. For, as said, an experience of the sublime involves not merely actively overcoming will-driven affects, such as pain and anxiety, and transforming them into aesthetic pleasure and joy, but also our being transformed (or ‘transfigured’, as Nietzsche would say) by the experience.

Even though aesthetic experience is not to be identified with reli-gious experience, some (intense) aesthetic experiences, especially those that we tend to characterise as sublime, are often hard to distinguish from religious ones. This may have to do with a human need – which Schopenhauer definitely recognised – for redemption or salvation, and for transcending our narrow human concerns. This metaphysical need should not necessarily be interpreted in a strictly religious way, but rather as a need to see our actions, gestures, plans, and so on to be fulfilled in some way. That is why sublime experiences, perhaps more than those of beauty, are particularly close to other types of redeeming experiences, especially experiences of the sacred character of places, environments, rituals, and objects. 23


In particular, I believe that the experience of the sublime can make us vividly aware of the fact that we fit in even with nature’s overwhelming and threatening environments. Being faced with nature’s most terri-fying phenomena involves confronting the painful truth of our puni-ness and fragility, the ‘insignificance and dependence of ourselves as individuals which one experiences in the face of the sublime’ (WWR I, 206). It takes us outside the world of ordinary experience, which is dominated by our self-centred worries and plans, and connects us with that which is larger than us. As T.S. Eliot wonderfully puts it in ‘East Coker’, ‘We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation.’ 24 Indeed, the sublime demands us to leave our day-to-day concerns behind, to ‘move into another intensity’, and confront and even embrace the barren truth of life.

Unlike some experiences of ‘easy beauty’, sublime objects do not afford comforting pleasure or facile satisfaction. The sublime is genu-inely uplifting because we feel ourselves to be in the presence of some-thing that is ‘in the world, but not of the world’. 25 We stand, as it were, on the edge of things. Sublime objects require us to move into ‘a deeper communion’ and take us outside the normal run of events. We seem to be facing into the transcendental. Nothing deceives us anymore. As Schopenhauer insists, ‘it is an exaltation beyond our own individuality’ and ‘we feel ourselves reduced to nought’ in the presence of sublime objects, and ‘yet revel in the pleasure of beholding them’ (WWR I, 206). We are taken beyond what is given to us in physical reality and we expe-rience a sense of reaching beyond the empirical world. Colossal ruins, high mountains, tempestuous oceans do not merely make us aware of ‘the twofold nature of consciousness’, but connect us with a reality which reaches beyond the present empirical community of living beings: ‘hae omnes creaturae in totum ego sum, et praeter me aliud (ens) non est’ (WWR I, 205). Schopenhauer’s intriguing reference to the doctrines on Atman and Brahman in the Upanishads should not be interpreted as self-aggrandisement, self-admiration, but as the experience of a deep sacred bond – of a metaphysical communion which, as it were, tran-scends life and the empirical world. Instead of focusing upon the sacred nature of the moral law, as Kant and his followers tend to do, one should recognise that the scope of the sacred is much wider than our relation to reason and morality, and may be disclosed in aesthetically sublime experiences.

For the sublime lifts us out of our day-to-day appetites and aims to a point of tranquil union and absorption. Indeed, it engenders a feeling


of being ‘one with the world’ and being ‘exalted by its immensity’. In sublime experience, the ‘drops in the ocean’, which we find ourselves to be, realise that they are one with the vast ocean of life and the world. The experience of the sublime affords a view from within , a view which is not normally attainable. Furthermore, despite the distressing char-acter of sublime environments, we experience a fit between chaotic nature and ourselves. As William Wordsworth writes in his preface to The Excursion : ‘How exquisitely the individual mind ... to the external world / is fitted; – And how exquisitely too ... the external world is fitted to the mind.’ 26

As I have argued above, the sublime does not so much separate and distinguish as deepen and refine our ability of identifying with that which inevitably escapes conceptual grasping. Instead of demoting the aesthetic value of nature, as Hegel does, we had better follow Schopenhauer’s advice to treasure the experience of the sublime in nature as one of the particularly exquisite ways in which we may engage with nature’s sacred significance and our place in it. The sublime and the sacred cannot be grasped through reasoning, but can be reached through aesthetic contemplation. 27 Paradoxically, the sublime offers a turbulent point of aesthetic repose, from which we can look back at our lives and perhaps endorse what we have done. Even though Schopenhauer’s relentless pessimism prevents him from fully recognising this affirma-tive potential of the sublime and misses the opportunity of adequately developing its profound relation with the sacred, his analysis hints at it by justly insisting on the metaphysical significance of this type of expe-rience. Life without such experiences gets tired of itself, and may lead to the ‘romantic’ despair and nihilism Schopenhauer’s philosophy is in danger of succumbing to. 28

I am arguing, then, that the experience of the sublime points to the path towards the sacred, in which ( pace Nietzsche) being and seeming coincide, and nothing deceives us any longer. As Simon May says, ‘we all, including diehard atheists and materialists, need the sacred; for we all need to ascribe ultimate value and power to something – if not to God then to freedom, art, nation, landscape, truth, ancestors, leaders, ethnic group, family, language, love, evil, the Devil, even money: to whatever we believe (delusionally or not; durably or not) can give our existence unassailable meaning’. 29 The sublime might thus be a road towards finding a home in the world, through which we will have arrived at a different conception of ourselves as a person. Some profound artworks can surely have this effect, but sublime nature, too, may afford this intense, profound feeling of belonging .


One of the fundamental values of the experience of the sublime is, then, its redemptive quality. Ugly nature asks to be redeemed. The sublime aids us in confronting the terrible dimensions of natural objects and environments and, ‘as long as personal affliction does not gain the upper hand’, in affirming their independence, their apartness, and awesome infinity. The sublime, therefore, offers a unique, intense, and invaluable way of facing and encountering the horrors and terrors of existence – and of finding a sacred place of rest in their redeeming presence. Not seeking out and revisiting aesthetic experiences of such a kind is hardly harmless, for it means missing an important way, avail-able in principle to all of us, to come to terms with the inevitability of human suffering and with our own vulnerability. Ultimately, neglecting the aesthetic experience of the sublime implies missing an invaluable opportunity of distilling our anxiety in the midst of chaos, of giving our existence solidity and meaning, and of finding peace and serenity with the world and within ourselves.

Notes

1 . As Guyer rightly insists, according to Kant, ‘it is not the mere feeling that prac-tical reason exists but a fairly explicit judgment that its dominion exceeds that of mere nature and nature’s deterministic power of disposing over our “worldly goods, health, and life”.’ See Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom , 214. See also Kant, Critique of Judgment , § 28, 5:261–262.

2 . Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy , § 8, 42. 3 . Daniel Came, ‘Schopenhauer on the Metaphysics of Art and Morality’, in

Vandenabeele, ed., A Companion to Schopenhauer , 243. 4 . Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy , § 1, 18. 5 . Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 201. 6 . The sublime does not reveal the ‘total indifference of nature to oneself’, as

Julian Young none the less suggests. See Young, Schopenhauer , 118. Whereas, on Schopenhauer’s view, the beautiful is what does not concern us, in the sublime we are faced with nature’s power over us. Nature is thus experienced not as indifferent, but as hostile to beings like us.

7 . I here concur with Catherine Rigby, who calls Kant’s doctrine of the sublime ‘supremely anthropocentric’. See Catherine E. Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 79.

8 . For more on Kant’s ‘moralisation’ of the sublime, see Chapter 4. See also Donald Crawford, ‘The Place of the Sublime in Kant’s Aesthetic Theory’, in Richard Kennington, ed., The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 161–183; Crowther, The Kantian Sublime ; Katie McShane, ‘Neosentimentalism and the Valence of Attitudes’, and Eva Schaper, ‘Taste, Sublimity, and Genius’, in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 384.


9 . See Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy , 159: ‘Yet, at the same time, or succeeding this painful feeling, there is an aesthetic recognition of our inde-pendence from nature, our humanity, our autonomy, our moral self ’ (italics in the original).

10 . As Martha Nussbaum contends, ‘the problem lies with our distinctively human nature; that correct perception ... can look on the human from the outside’. See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 138.

11 . See also Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time , trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

12 . Here I disagree not merely with Kant, but also with Crowther, The Kantian Aesthetic , 174–180.

13 . See also Vasalou, Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint , 82. In Vasalou’s view, ‘it is our sense of dignity that is repeatedly engaged in the characterisa-tion’ of the sublime (83).

14 . See Ronald W. Hepburn, The Reach of the Aesthetic: Collected Essays on Art and Nature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 80: ‘science does not oust metaphysics: the questions of metaphysics arise on and beyond the boundary of science.’ I could not agree more.

15 . Here I take issue again with Sophia Vasalou, who argues in Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint that, on Schopenhauer’s account, ‘the mind [is] the true object of sublimity’ (3 and passim ). For an alternative interpretation, see Chapters 4 and 5.

16 . Here I take issue with Sandra Shapshay’s defence of a ‘thick’ sublime, which is informed by scientific knowledge. See Shapshay, ‘Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime’, 181–198. My account also differs considerably from Sophia Vasalou’s, who also offers a too cognitivist interpretation of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime. She claims that ‘the terrible has been metabolised into the sublime by the very act of cognising it’, and even reduces the sublime to ‘the exaltation of a cognitive conquest’. (See Vasalou, Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint , 87 and 92.) Vasalou seems to confuse the concepts of sublimity and wonder. I would argue that the experience of the sublime ought to be distinguished sharply from the experience of wonder. The former is an aesthetic experi-ence, based on intense aesthetic affect, whereas the latter is more intellective and seems much closer to what Vasalou has in mind. Throughout her book, Vasalou unjustly confounds these two quite distinct types of experience.

17 . Neill, ‘Schopenhauer on Tragedy and the Sublime’, 214–215. 18 . See also Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin,

1993). 19 . See Shapshay, ‘Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian Sublime’,

479–481 and passim . 20 . See Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy , §§ 3 and 7. 21 . Here I take issue with Daniel Came, who insists that the sublime for

Nietzsche, as for Kant, is a fiction. See Daniel Came, ‘Nietzsche’s Attempt at a Self-Criticism: Art and Morality in The Birth of Tragedy ’, Nietzsche- Studien 33, 2004, 37–67. Yet neither Kant nor Nietzsche argues that the sublime is a


fiction: for Kant, the sublime involves a ‘subreption’, which is not a fiction but a mistaken attribution of sublimity to nature (see CJ , § 28, 5:264; § 30, 5:280; see also Chapter 4 and Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom , 72–79). And for Nietzsche the sublime is either an effect of natural forces, especially the Dionysian, or of tragic art. Only in the latter case is reality somehow falsified.

22 . See also Came, ‘Nietzsche’s Attempt at a Self-Criticism’. 23 . In numerous publications Roger Scruton, to whom this section is much

beholden, has emphasised the importance of the sacred and its relation to beauty. See, for instance, Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). He does not, however, as I do, establish a connection between the sacred and the sublime.

24 . Thomas Stearns Eliot, ‘East Coker’, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 191.

25 . See Scruton, Beauty , 180. 26 . William Wordsworth, The Excursion , ed., Sally Bushell, James Butler, and

Michael C. Jaye (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 77–80. 27 . The demotion of nature will develop from Kant’s anthropocentric account of

the sublime into Schiller’s and especially Hegel’s aesthetics, which explicitly defends the superiority of art over nature’s aesthetic qualities. See also the introductory chapter of the present book.

28 . David Cartwright, however, talks of Schopenhauerian optimism. See David E. Cartwright, ‘Schopenhauerian Optimism and an Alternative to Resignation?’, Schopenhauer- Jahrbuch 66, 1985, esp. 153–158.

29 . Simon May, Love: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 92.

179

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187

absolute, the, 84–85absolutely large, the, 84–87absorption, 56, 70, 72, 74, 78, 100,

116, 117, 118, 119, 129–135, 136, 137, 163, 165, 174, see also sublime, absorption model of

Addison, Joseph, 1, 6, 98, 140admiration, 87, 92, 94, 98, 118, 121,

134, 146, 159, 169, 170, 172, 174aesthetic

aesthetic contemplation, 1, 8, 13–56, 60, 73, 78, 79, 104, 109, 141, 153, 154, 158, 162, 175, 185

aesthetic experience, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 15–32, 33, 48–50, 56, 60, 72, 74–75, 78–80, 83, 102, 108–110, 119–120, 124, 126, 129, 133, 135, 137, 140, 145, 148–150, 156–160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 173, 176, 177, 180, 185

aesthetic ideas, 26, 76, 146aesthetic interest, 24–25, see also

disinterestednessaesthetic judgment, 50, 59, 66–70,

75, 80, 82, 83, 88, 90, 93, 95, 97, 98, 122, 180

aesthetic perception, 8, 31, 32, 34, 41, 44, 46–56, 59, 60, 70, 75, 78, 79, 81, 117, 185

aesthetic properties, see aesthetic qualities

aesthetic qualities, 2, 5, 7, 25, 54, 69, 73, 74, 92, 94, 109, 113, 114, 118, 125, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 163, 173, 176, 178

aesthetic spectator, 7, 29, 30, 73, 111, 119, 152–159

aesthetic subject, 7, 74, 78, 80, 119, 155, 157, see also will-less subject

aesthetic value, 1, 27, 34, 146, 166, 175

affects, 2, 7, 8, 9, 33, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 54, 70, 73, 74, 97, 106, 108, 113, 120, 123, 128, 131, 151, 157, 159, 162, 168, 173, 177

affirmation of life, see life, affirmation ofagreeable, 5, 42, 43, 59, 60–71, 81, 82,

166, 185Apollo, 165Apollonian, the, 126, 154, 172appearance, 49, 50, 52, 62, 79, 84,

121, 125, 168, 181architecture, 10, 54, 55, 122art, 1, 8, 10, 11, 15, 22, 24–32, 50, 56,

60, 68, 76–82, 92, 122, 123, 136, 137, 145–162, 167, 169, 175, 178

artistic genius, see geniusobjectivity of, 28–32, 75, 145–162value of, 28–32, 136, 145–162, 175

asceticism, 3, 19, 21, 31, 33, 79, 80, 129, 159, 164, 167, 172, 181

astonishment, 87, 132, 169Atman, 174attunement, 91, 103, 107, 159auditory perception, 41–42, 43, 44,

54, 105awareness, see consciousnessawe, 4, 5, 118, 119, 134, 139, 163,

164, 166, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 186

beautiful, the, 5–12, 59–82in art, 23–32, see also artnatural beauty, 30, 91, 99, 100, 101and pleasure, 24, 29, 43, 59, 60,

61–71, 145, 150beauty, see beautiful, theBerkeley, Bishop George, 35, 37better consciousness, see

consciousnessbewilderment, 2, 135, 169bliss, 28, 29, 71, 72, 76

Index

188 Index

body, 2, 4, 11, 18, 44, 55, 101, 103, 104, 105, 110, 113, 120, 132, 148, 150

consciousness of, 6, 7, 48, 72, 101, 104–105, 110, 132

the sublime and, 98–127, 128–143, 163–178, see also sublime, the

boredom, 16, 33, 103Brady, Emily, 10, 11, 12, 90, 92, 94,

95, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 130, 134, 141, 142, 165, 169, 176, 177, 179

Brahmanism, 22, 174brain, 9, 34, 39, 41, 45, 46, 52, 71,

136, 137Budd, Malcolm, 94, 121, 124, 142, 179Buddhism, 22, 118Burke, Edmund, 1, 6, 11, 61, 82, 88,

95, 98, 102, 103, 106, 112, 117, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 140, 141, 180, 184, 185

Came, Daniel, 79, 82, 176, 177, 178, 180

Carroll, Noël, 123, 180Cassirer, Ernst, 54, 180chaos, 91, 164, 172, 175, 176charming, the, 5, 70, 151Christianity, 20, 22, 55, 160Clewis, Robert R., 10, 81, 122, 123,

178, 180Cochrane, Tom, 113, 126, 129, 136,

138, 140, 142, 180cognition

aesthetic cognition, 3, 8, 26, 46–56, 49, 50, 51, 52, 71–82, 99

empirical cognition, 8, 33–46, 172will-less cognition, 3, 46–56, 49, 74,

78, 99, 110colours, 42, 43, 49, 55, 66, 76, 172compassion, 164, 172concepts, 1, 3, 4, 9, 10, 15, 26, 28, 32,

34, 36, 37, 38, 48, 50, 54, 60, 64, 67, 69, 70, 74, 75, 76, 81, 83, 85, 89, 93, 96, 116, 120, 123, 128, 146, 147, 153, 157, 175, 177, 184

consciousnessaesthetic consciousness, 26, 46, 47,

48, 49, 75, see also cognition, aesthetic

better consciousness, 8, 48, 72, 73, 75, 77, 82, 145, 149, 157, 162, 183, 184

empirical consciousness, 72, 73, see also cognition, empirical

self-consciousness, 2, 4, 6, 11, 27, 28, 30, 48, 49, 52, 54, 64, 71, 74, 75, 78, 80, 83, 85, 86, 87, 90, 96, 97, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 112, 113–114, 118, 118, 124, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 139, 141, 152, 157, 163, 165, 167, 170, 174

twofold nature of, 5, 112, 114, 151, 152, 162, 174

contemplation, 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 14–56, 60, 65, 66, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 81, 92, 93, 100, 102, 104, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 134, 141, 145, 147, 149, 146–162

Crowther, Paul, 11, 68, 82, 120, 124, 141, 142, 176, 177, 180

cruelty, 15, 151, 154, 164, 166, 169, 171Currie, Gregory, 136, 137, 142, 180

darkness, 105Darstellung, see presentationdeath, 4, 16, 17, 32, 75, 80, 126, 141,

142, 162, 184, 185delight, 3, 6, 7, 16, 77, 95, 102, 117,

119, 130, 131, 134, 139, 140, 168denial of will, see will, denial ofDennis, John, 6, 123deserts, 2, 103, 105, 175desire, 2, 4, 5, 6, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20,

21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 33, 48, 52, 59–82, 104, 105, 111, 117, 118, 132, 137, 148, 149, 150, 152, 155, 158, 164, 166, 168

Ding an sich, see thing-in-itselfDionysian, the, 3, 120, 126, 127, 164,

165, 166, 172, 178Dionysus, 165disgust, 63, 124, 137, 151disinterestedness, 8, 24, 29, 32, 50,

59–82, 97, 111, 124, 151, 180, 184, 185

displeasure, 43, 50, 69, 75, 87, 88, 90, 107, 122, 142, 150, 158, 168

Index 189

domination, 20, 28, 29, 31, 89, 91, 94, 95, 99, 101, 102, 111, 112, 113, 116, 126, 147, 153, 163, 168, 174, 176

dream, 36, 53, 154dynamical sublime, see sublime, the

ego, 35, 73, 75, 115, 172, 174egocentrism, 52, 116, 119, 163, 168,

172egoism, 23, 52, 61, 142, 152, 162Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 174, 178, 180emotions, 3, 5, 6, 27, 28, 49, 60, 67,

73, 74, 77, 84, 101, 107, 108, 109, 115, 123, 126, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 163, 180

empathy, 9, 128, 136, 137, 138, 140, 142, 155, 158, 167, 180

empirical knowledge, see cognition, empirical

environment, 2, 7, 11, 12, 25, 73, 79, 101, 104, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 142, 163–178

epistemology, 8, 39, 40, 52, 67eros, 48, 149erotic desire, 5, 165ethics, 9, 10, 19, 21, 33, 42, 59, 125,

129, 141, 145–162, 177, 179, 182, 183, see also morality

exaltation, 6, 74, 99, 110, 112, 114, 116, 133, 135, 138, 139, 150, 153, 166, 167–171, 174, 177, see also sublime, the

experience, see aesthetic experience

fascination, 2, 3, 4, 41, 75, 146, 157, 158, 164, see also sublime, the

fear, 2, 6, 16, 17, 28, 48, 88, 90, 105, 107, 108, 109, 112, 129, 130, 131, 140, 141, 150, 151, 170

feelingfeeling of the beautiful, 63, 92, 99,

100, 114, 152feeling of the sublime, 3, 6, 7,

83–127, 128–142, 150–152, 156, 157

moral feeling, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 101, 102, 121

feeling of life, see life, feeling ofFichte, Johann Gottlieb, 35, 36, 53finitude, 2, 103, 132, 141, 161, 170formlessness, 92, 122, 181freedom, 2, 4, 10, 17, 19, 20, 29, 37,

43, 48, 49, 59, 60, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 80, 81, 93, 95, 96, 97, 104, 111, 122, 123, 132, 134, 137, 141, 147, 148, 149, 150, 170, 175, 176, 178, 180, 181

genius, 15, 28–32, 49, 56, 146, 147, 176, 184

God, 85, 175gods, 5, 127, 165Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 41, 42grace, 20gracefulness, 66grandeur, 8, 124, 138, 139greatness, 2, 4, 11, 16, 19, 42, 85, 86,

94, 105, 117, 118, 132, 134, 136, 140, 156, 157, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168

Guyer, Paul, 10, 32, 40, 54, 63, 64, 66, 81, 82, 121, 125, 126, 131, 141, 145, 160, 176, 180, 181, 182, 184

happiness, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 31, 61, 62, 154, 157

harmony, 24, 42, 44, 60, 67, 73, 86, 93, 152

hedonism, 22Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 10,

53, 175, 178, 181, 183Hepburn, Ronald W., 94, 122, 177,

181Hinduism, see Brahmanismhome, 104, 118, 163, 169, 175Home, Henry, see Kames, Lordhorror, 6, 7, 72, 97, 102, 123, 131,

155, 157, 158, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 176, 180

Hume, David, 1, 35, 46, 47, 124humility, see sublime, humbling effect

of

idealising, 26, 50idealism, 34, 35, 36, 52, 53, 54, 60, 77,

80, 123, 182, 184, 185

190 Index

illusion, 18, 27, 35, 45, 46, 55, 77, 117, 118, 154, 172, 173

imagination, 2, 3, 26, 30, 50, 59, 60, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 76, 77, 83–98, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 120, 122, 146, 147, 170, 181, 183

imaginative identification, 4, 9, 120, 128–142, 155, 165, 168

immensity, 2, 4, 11, 86, 89, 95, 104, 105, 106, 116, 131, 133, 135, 163, 167, 168, 175

inclination, 4, 47, 60, 63, 88, 90, 102Indian thought, 82, 115, 180, see also

Brahmanism; Buddhismindividual

embodied individual, 2, 4, 6, 7, 48, 72, 101–105, 113, 120, 132

fragility of, 6, 102, 105, 108, 118, 119, 130, 139, 163, 166, 174, 177, 183, see also vulnerability

insignificance of, 2, 3, 6, 7, 16, 17, 33, 88, 105, 108, 112, 113, 114, 118, 129, 130, 132, 134, 139, 165, 167, 169, 173, 174

infinity, 17, 84, 85, 86, 91, 93, 96, 107, 120, 126, 176

intellectaesthetic consciousness and, 29, 60,

62, 68, 70, 86, 89, 96, 97, 105, 121, 122, 124, 133, 170, 172, 177

embodiment, 46, 47, 71sensory perception and, 29, 34, 37,

38, 41, 42, 46, 51, 54tool of the will, 29, 46, 47, 52, 55, 71

interest, 5, 16, 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 33, 43, 46, 48, 49, 56, 59–82, 88, 89, 93, 97, 100, 101, 104, 110, 111, 112, 118, 148, 149, 150, 155, see also disinterestedness

intrinsic value, 7, 22, 24, 26, 27, 32, 70, 160

Jacquette, Dale, 82, 125, 126, 162, 179, 181, 182

Janaway, Christopher, 20, 31, 32, 53, 54, 56, 82, 110, 123, 125, 126, 145, 147, 148, 160, 161, 162, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184

joy, 6, 7, 120, 126, 151, 164, 166, 167, 168, 171, 173

judgment of taste, see aesthetic judgment; Kant

Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 1, 11, 123Kant, Immanuel

aesthetic ideas, 76, 146aesthetic judgment, 50, 59, 66–70,

75, 80, 82, 83, 88, 90, 93, 95, 97, 98, 122, 180

beauty, 8–9, 60–71, 79, 81, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 103, 121, 124, 182

disinterestedness, 59–71dynamical sublime, 1–12, 88–98mathematical sublime, 1–12, 84–87moral feeling, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97,

101, 102, 121moral law, 96, 97, 121, 174moral vocation, 87, 89, 90, 93, 107perception and knowledge, 34–46subreption, 86–87, 104, 116, 132,

172, 178supersensible, 85, 88, 93, 95, 96, 97,

103, 112–113, 115, 134, 165Kieran, Matthew, 32, 159, 161, 162,

182knowledge, see cognitionKossler, Matthias, 31, 32, 182, 185

landscapes, 24, 47, 55, 77, 122, 147, 154, 175, 181

life, 3, 8, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 53, 60, 71, 79, 80, 89, 100, 101, 103, 118, 118, 120, 124, 125, 138, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163–178

affirmation of, 10, 16, 17, 23, 31, 32, 83, 98–127, 136, 140, 163, 164, 165, 167–171, 172–176, 181

as a dream, 36, 53, 154feeling of, 56, 64, 65, 66, 74, 75, 80,

103, 124horrors of, 72, 155, 157, 158, 164,

166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 176meaning of, 10, 18, 27, 33, 128,

164, 171, 175, 176

Index 191

limitlessness, 86, 103, 119, see also infinity

love, 17, 24, 30, 61, 68, 74, 92, 149, 154, 165, 171, 175, 178, 183, see also eros

Lyotard, Jean-François, 11, 122, 123, 177, 182, 185

Magee, Bryan, 53, 183mathematical sublime, see sublime,

theMay, Simon, 175, 178, 183Mendelssohn, Moses, 1, 2, 10, 102mirror of the world, 8, 24, 29, 30, 31,

42, 47, 49, 73, 75, 81monstrous, the, 106, 123moral law, see Kant, Immanuelmoral vocation, see Kant,

Immanuelmorality, 59, 80, 82, 83, 86, 88, 89,

90, 91, 92, 97, 106, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 141, 174, 176, 177, 179, 180, 183

mortality, 4, 141, see also deathmotive, 18–20, 71–72, 148, 155mountains, 2, 5, 105, 114, 139, 164,

174Murdoch, Iris, 177, 183music, 24, 25, 43, 117, 119, 126, 146,

150, 153, 161, 165, 181mysticism, 20, 33, 121, 164

naturalism, 8, 40nature

beauty of, 30, 91, 99, 100, 101, see also beautiful, the

demotion of, 1, 175, 178gardens, 4and the sublime, 2–4, 9, 85, 86, 90,

91, 106, 108, 110, 117, 121, 122, 124, 131, 142, 164, 166, 169, 175, 180, see also sublime, the

needs, 5, 16, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, 33, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 70, 73, 79, 111, 118, 137, 168

Neill, Alex, 11, 124, 125, 162, 171, 177, 183, 184

Neymeyr, Barbara, 82, 183

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 11, 29, 31, 32, 56, 59, 79, 80, 82, 120, 123, 125, 126, 127, 154, 160, 164, 165, 167, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185

nihilism, 31, 164, 166, 167, 175noise, 5, 41–42, 105, 137nothingness, 6, 18, 33, 35, 79, 104,

106, 107, 114, 151, 163, 164, 166, 170

Nussbaum, Martha, 177, 183

objectification, 26, 33, 50, 51, 149, 156

objectivation, see objectificationobjectivity, 25, 28–32, 34, 36, 37, 38,

39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 59, 60, 70–82, 85, 148, 149, 150, 153, 162, 180, 185

ocean, 88, 94, 104, 118, 138, 166, 174, 175

oceanic feeling, 138, see also absorption; ocean

pain, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 29, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 55, 60, 64, 71, 72, 87, 97, 99, 106, 107, 112, 115, 117, 120, 126, 130, 133, 137, 140, 149, 150, 158, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 184

painting, 19, 24–28, 47, 76–77, 137, 147, 157

passion, 23, 47, 48, 61, 74, 148Pater, Walter, 161, 183perception

aesthetic perception, see aestheticimaginative perception, 26, 50, 77,

see also imaginationsensory perception, see empirical

cognitionpessimism, 8, 15–23, 31, 32, 72, 138,

164, 172, 175, 181Plato, 8, 15, 26, 27, 28, 34, 36, 48, 50,

51, 56, 60, 77, 78, 110, 125, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 161, 183

Platonic Ideas, 8, 23–28, 49, 50, 51, 52, 59, 71, 75, 79, 145, 146–150, 161

192 Index

pleasureaesthetic pleasure, 8, 24, 28, 29, 43,

59, 60–71, 72, 113, 114, 126, 128, 133, 138, 145, 150, 157, 158, 161, 168, 173

cognitive pleasure, 29disinterested pleasure, see

disinterestednessintentionality of, 64, 82moral pleasure, 61, see also moralitynegative pleasure, 107, 117, 121,

124, 142pleasurable sensation, 43, 172positive pleasure, 102, 117, 121, 150sexual pleasure, 65, 165, see also

erotic desirewill-less pleasure, 34, see also

beautiful, thepostmodernism, 1, 11, 124, 180, 183poststructuralism, 1power, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 30, 32, 40,

41, 42, 54, 55, 60, 67, 68, 70, 78, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88–98, 98–127, 129–142, 150–162, 163–178, see also strength

presentation, 26, 56, 92, 93, 96principium individuationis, 21, 166principle of sufficient reason, 23–32,

35, 38, 51, 147, 161, 179profundity, 80, 83, 102–103, 119, 120,

124, 134, 135, 136, 142, 156, 160, 168, 169, 171, 173, 175

purposiveness, 67–70, 82, 86–107, 120, 122, 180

ravines, 2, 105, 131, 135, 138reason

and concepts, 3, 50, 54, 132, 147ideas of, 86, 94, 120, 131, 146, 170practical reason, 2, 3, 61, 65,

84–98, 102, 106, 120, 121, 126, 176

and stoicism, 19and the sublime, 2, 3, 6, 11, 84–98,

99, 101, 102, 105, 107, 113, 114, 117, 126, 142, 172, 174, 175, 176

theoretical reason, 3, 38, 41, 42, 47, 50, 54, 84–87, 120, 123, 175

redemption, 10, 171, 173, 176, see also salvation; will, denial of

Reginster, Bernard, 31, 162, 184representations, 25, 26, 30, 31, 33–46,

51, 53, 55, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 70, 72, 74, 81, 82, 98, 100, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 123, 138, 148, 155, 179, 180

resignation, 3, 18, 19, 20, 21, 81, 110, 111, 155, 156, 159, 162, 178, 180

resistance, 19, 21, 88, 108, 110, 111, 153, 169

respect, 3, 86, 90, 92, 95, 96, 104, 121, 126, 132, 141, 142, 167, 170

Russell, Bertrand, 53, 55, 184

sacred, the, 10, 32, 118, 171–178, 184sacrifice, 7, 92, 95, 96, 132, 171, 172sainthood, 5, 19, 33, 159, 172satisfaction, 5, 8, 15–23, 24, 25, 33,

48, 60–71, 72, 76, 103, 147–149, 170, 174

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 53, 71, 82, 184

Schiller, Friedrich, 1, 11, 152, 178, 184Scruton, Roger, 32, 178, 184self

awareness of, see self-consciousnessconceived as will, 5, 6, 7, 16, 18, 20,

22, 28, 31, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 103, 105, 108, 113, 114, 125, 129, 151, 162

negation of, 3, 15, 17, 19–23, 72, 108, 129, 142, 159, 160, 161, 165–166, 172–173, see also will, denial of

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 162, 184sensations, 5, 11, 33–56, 59–71, 172senses, the, 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 33–46,

59–71, 83–98, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 123, 132, 134, 147, 151, 170

sensibility, see senses, theserenity, see tranquillityShaftesbury, third Earl of, 80Shapshay, Sandra, 11, 123, 124, 125,

126, 134, 162, 170, 172, 177, 184simulation, 9, 128, 136–141, 167solipsism, 142, 152, 162Spinoza, Baruch, 49, 78, 172

Index 193

Stimmung, see attunementstoicism, 19–20, 184strength, 89, 108, 140, 164, 167, 168,

169, 173, see also powersublime, the

absorption model of, 129–135affirmative sublime, 98–127,

163–178as anthropocentric, 120, 122, 134,

176, 178and art, 10, 145–162Burke on, 1, 6, 11, 88, 95, 98, 102,

103, 106, 112, 117, 129, 130, 131, 140, 141

contrasted with beauty, 5–12, 59–127

contrasted with the charming, 5–12, 151

dynamical sublime, 2, 9, 10, 84, 87, 88–98, 98–127, 152, 156, 172

exalting character of, 6, 9, 74, 94, 99, 110, 112, 114, 116, 119, 126, 129, 131, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 150, 153, 166, 167–171, 173, 174, 175, 177

existential value of, 3, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 102, 103, 104, 117, 120, 123, 124, 128, 130, 136, 141, 160, 163–178

humbling effect of, 5, 6, 9, 104, 105, 115, 120, 129, 132, 135, 137, 163

and imagination, 83–98, 135–142Kant on, 84–98mathematical sublime, 2, 9, 10,

84–87, 89, 98, 103metaphysical value of, 3, 8, 9, 12,

15, 83, 99, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 123, 124, 128, 136, 138, 140, 142, 157, 160, 163–178

‘mixed’ experience, 7, 8, 87, 90, 107, 108, 129, 131, 140, 156, 165

moral value of, 83–98, 119, 121, 128–134, 145–162, 163–178

in nature, see natureand nihilism, 164–167, see also

nihilism

pain, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 87, 97, 99, 106, 107, 112, 115, 117, 120, 126, 130, 133, 140, 150, 158, 163–178

paradox of, 4, 96, 101, 104, 105, 108–120, 130, 131, 135–142, 165, 171

as relational, 3, 4, 9, 109, 119, 120, 122, 128, 129, 130, 134, 136

and relief, 95, 106, 112, 117, 130, 131, 149, 150, 165

religious significance of, 171–176and the sacred, 118–120, 171–176and safety, 88, 89, 95, 106–108, 124,

129, 130–131, 141Schopenhauer on, 98–127, 129–135,

150–162as self-regarding, 3, 131–133, 174thick sublime, 124, 134, 177and threat, 2, 5, 6, 7, 88, 95,

103–120and tragedy, 145–162values of, 143–178

sufferingaffirmation of, 163–178, see also life,

affirmation ofas consequence of willing, 18–21,

111, 149inevitability of, 15–17, 20, 21, 31,

149, 169, 171, 176and pessimism, see pessimismunattainability of satisfaction, 17,

21, 72suicide, 22–23supersensible, the, 85, 88, 93, 95, 96,

97, 103, 112, 113, 115, 117, 134, 165

terror, 6, 94, 102, 106, 117, 120, 130, 131, 163, 164, 167, 169, 172, 176

thing-in-itself, 21, 26, 36, 38, 50, 51thunderstorms, 89, 157, 173touch, 5, 20, 42–46, 47, 78, 100, 103,

131, 151, see also senses, thetragedy, 9, 10, 11, 108, 120, 124, 125,

126, 127, 133, 145–162, 164, 169, 176, 177, 180, 183, 184

transcendental pride, 109, 112, 114, 127, 125

194 Index

tranquillity, 2, 6, 7, 8, 16, 20, 48, 49, 55, 70, 73, 74, 80, 82, 100, 102, 104, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 125, 126, 131, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 167, 171, 174, 176, 182

truth, 23, 28, 34, 53, 55, 60, 80, 154, 156, 157, 164, 171, 173, 174, 175

understanding, 10, 11, 22, 33–56, 69, 60, 65–70, 75–77, 91–93, 99, 121, 122, 125, 136, 156–162, 165, 181, 183, 185

uneasiness, 2, 7, 100, 104, 106, 107, 124, 131, 171

ungeheuer, 105, 106, 123, see also immensity; monstrous, the

Upanishads, 115, 174utility, 61, 79, see also

disinterestedness

Vasalou, Sophia, 124, 125, 177, 185vastness, 2, 6, 11, 85–94, 116, 118,

129, 132, 134, 135, 137, 151, 165, 166, 168, 175

Vedas, 115visual perception, 33–45, see also

aesthetic perceptionVorstellung, see representationvulnerability, 4, 105, 109, 129, 130,

139, 140, 141, 163, 165, 170, 176, see also individual, fragility of

waterfalls, 2, 88, 164, 166Wicks, Robert, 10, 52, 56, 185Wilde, Oscar, 77, 161will, see also will to life

abolition of will, see denial of willbodily agency, see body; individualdenial of will, 9, 15–23, 31, 33, 36,

79, 119, 129, 158, 160, 164, 166, 168, 172, 181

derived from lack, 16, 17, 21, 33, 103–104, 149

and suffering, see sufferingas thing-in-itself, see thing-in-itselftranscending of, 3, 5, 8, 15, 30, 52,

73, 75, 76, 78, 86, 100–101, 110, 111, 112, 119, 126, 138, 139, 165, 170, 171–178, see also beautiful, the; sublime, the

will to life, 3, 9, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 31, 33, 75, 104, 110, 120, 136, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 164, 166, 168, 172

willing self, see selfWittgenstein, Ludwig, 25, 32, 33, 35,

185wonder, 8, 86, 134, 135, 164, 177Wordsworth, William, 175, 178, 185

Young, Julian, 82, 125, 126, 140, 141, 142, 152, 162, 176, 185

youth, 72, 98, 145, 146, 155

Zangwill, Nick, 61, 63, 81, 82, 185Zuckert, Rachel, 64, 81, 82, 186

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