Schopenhauer and the Sublime Pleasure of Tragedy

Dylan Trigg

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 28, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 165-179(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/phl.2004.0018

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165Dylan Trigg

Philosophy and Literature, © 2004, 28: 165–179

SCHOPENHAUER AND THESUBLIME PLEASURE OF TRAGEDY

by Dylan Trigg

But, my friend, we have come too late.Though the gods are living,

Over our heads they live, up in a different world.—Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments

Despite a notable resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s, promptedchiefly by the French postmodernist Jean-Françoise Lyotard,1 the

aesthetic of the sublime is largely absent from contemporary debate.Countered by the modern desire for base expressionism in art, sublim-ity is perhaps untimely again, and furthermore incongruous with an agein which, either epistemological skepticism or crude (exclusive) empiri-cism predominates.2 At best, it is viewed, not as a permanent structureof consciousness, but contextually as a disposition that peaked duringthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the philosophies ofBurke, Kant, and Schopenhauer, the paintings of Friedrich, Turner,and Carus, and the music of Beethoven, Wagner, and later, Bruckner.Characterized by, to put it prosaically, the inability of the mind or thesenses to grasp an object in its entirety, whether it be in size (math-ematically) or in force (dynamically), the sublime lends itself well to theaffirmation of an experience that contains in itself a sense of both aweand terror. This dynamic is thus embodied par excellence in the opposi-tion between a finite individual existing, and the world of apparent andimmediate infinity, both spatially and temporally, in which he exists.

As an aesthetic category, the sublime emerged in the first century

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A.D. through the Greek writer Longinus. In his On the Sublime, we aretold how rhetoric fills us “with a proud exaltation and a sense ofvaulting joy, just as though we had ourselves produced what we heard.”3

Although he established ideas that would remain central to discussionson the sublime—grand conceptions, inspired emotion, a zeal thatborders on the violent, and above all a gravity of thought,4 Longinus’stext is largely concerned with the rhetorical sublime and to a largeextent excludes Nature, which both Burke and Kant would later hold ascentral to their particular philosophies.

Edmund Burke’s seminal A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of ourIdeas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757 was celebrated for its contrastbetween the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime, Burke tells us is“whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger,that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant aboutterrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror . . . it isproductive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable offeeling.”5 While the beautiful is “a social quality; for where women andmen, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joyand pleasure in beholding them . . . they inspire us with sentiments oftenderness and affections towards their persons.”6 The differences arerendered explicit when Burke, in a well-known passage, depicts thesublime as vast, rugged, negligent, gloomy, and great, and the beautifulas small, smooth, polished, light, and delicate.7

Implicit in Burke’s inquiry is the notion that the sublime experiencestretches the epistemological apprehension both sensibly and intelligi-bly. In Kant’s account of the sublime, this idea is pivotal. For Kant thefeeling of the sublime emerges when the senses fail to sufficientlyapprehend an object. The subject’s sense of individuation is thereforelost in the expansiveness or force of the object. Consider the GrandCanyon. In its spatial depth, we are both astounded and struck with anervous exaltation; in its temporal presence, as an object where thelines of time have manifested themselves physically, we sense thesublimity of history unfold before us, but also realize the contingency ofthe present. The alchemical adage states as above, so below ; and so too inthe sublime: the finite and the infinite, terror and awe compoundviolently. The experience is such that the thought of throwing oneselfinto this yawning abyss is surely never far away. However, this subordina-tion of subject to object is not a consequence of a substance inherent inthe object acting as a causal thing-in-itself, on the contrary: “Thevarious feelings of enjoyment or of displeasure rest not so much upon

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the nature of the external things that arouse them as upon eachperson’s own disposition to be moved by these pleasures or pains.”8

The Kantian sublime is divided into the dynamical sublime and themathematical sublime. In the dynamical sublime, force or poweroverwhelms consciousness to the point of terror. In the mathematicalsublime, the imagination is pushed to its limits by size or depth to thepoint of awe. In his book on Bruckner’s vast Eighth Symphony, BenjaminKorstvedt, describing the Adagio, points out the correlations between itand Kant’s mathematical sublime: “Throughout the movement, Brucknerdeploys a series of increasingly extreme harmonic progressions; theseseem designed to astonish the ear, to push it past its normal habitus,and ultimately set in motion the process of sublime crisis and suddenrevelation.”9 This is an apt description and recalls the Schopenhaueriannotion of Idea becoming visible “At one stroke”10—as if by revelation.

According to Kant, the satisfaction derived from the sublime is theexperience of reason turning the apprehended object into a compre-hended object; that is, from passivity to activity. Reason has no longerleft the object in-itself, but has made it its own by assimilating itcognitively. To hold oneself with disinterestedness in the face ofperceptible terror and to comprehend an object in its infinite entirety,reason must dislodge itself from the senses in order for the senses to beaccountable to it. The sense of exaltation derived from the sublime istherefore nothing else but the experience of subjugation of the sensesthrough reason.

Let us recapitulate: the sublime would seem to involve two aspectsthat are both interconnected. Firstly a conjoining of polarities—finite/infinite, man/Nature, Being/Non-Being—that gives rise to exaltation,and secondly consciousness standing outside of itself, viewing itselfrelating to either a force (dynamically) or a size (mathematically)greater than itself. The attempt of consciousness to elevate itselfbeyond passive apprehension to the point of compression is given risethrough reason.

Kant, as we have seen, holds that the degree to which the sublime canbe experienced is dependent upon the various dispositions of charac-ter. At the lowest level, where consciousness is stultified to the uncanni-ness of existence, that peculiar taint of unfamiliar familiarity thatconsciousness induces, is the phlegmatic temperament. The phlegmaticis indifferent to himself, indifferent to the world, and so indifferent tohis being-in-the-world. Kant’s consideration of this type is minimal,since “in the phlegmatic mixture no ingredient of the sublime or

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beautiful usually enters in any noticeable degree.”11 In the choleric,sublimity emerges but “only the gloss of sublimity.”12 Wrought bysuperficiality and an indulgent vanity, the choleric temperament isveiled from the true sublime “just as a building that imitates stonecarving by means of a whitewashing makes as noble an impression as ifit were really made of stone, and just as pasted on cornices and pilastersgive the idea of solidity although they hold little and support nothing—in the same way do alloyed virtues glitter, a tinsel of wisdom and paintedmerit.”13 The sanguine type meanwhile, lends himself to beauty andcharm and not sublimity and so does not concern us presently. But it isabove all in the melancholic that sublimity finds its greatest expression.Why should it be that the melancholic is best suited to the sublime?Susan Sontag, in her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street,suggests a hint: “The mark of the Saturnine [melancholic] tempera-ment is the self-consciousness and unforgiving relation to the self,which can never be taken for granted.”14 The awareness of the self andso necessarily the Other is hence accentuated in the melancholic15: heis aware of all that which he isn’t; and the sublime is always a contrastbetween microscopic and macroscopic polarities—the greater this isrealized, the higher the sublimity.

A final note: it is characteristic for the melancholic not to veer too farfrom his solitude (consider those nocturnal reveries of Montaigne,Rousseau, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche).16 In solitude, sublimity againemerges as the dominant experience, for the above reason: the contrastbetween self and other, man and nature, the finite and infinite isdisclosed to the point of sublime intoxication. One needs only to thinkof those sublime paintings of Caspar David Friedrich’s (consummately,The Wanderer Before the Sea of Fog, Landscape with Rainbow and Monk on theSeashore) where a lone figure with his back turned is engrossed in thevastness of the landscape—the figure, aware of his finitude and hisinadequate means to compete with nature, resigns himself to passivecontemplation.17

Elsewhere Schopenhauer himself notes the intimacy between soli-tude and the sublime. Describing a scene in which the sublime appearsin a lower degree (i.e., when it is still shadowed by the will) Schopenhauercorrelates solitude with the sublime and the capacity to withstandsolitude as the criterion for our own intellectual worth. It is worthquoting at length for the prose alone:

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Let us transport ourselves to a very lonely region of boundless horizons,under a perfectly cloudless sky, trees and plants in the perfectly motion-less air, no animals, no human beings, no moving masses of water, theprofoundest silence. Such surroundings are as it were a summons toseriousness, to contemplation, with complete emancipation from allwilling and its cravings; but it is just this that gives to such a scene of meresolitude and profound peace a touch of the sublime. For, since it affordsno objects, either favourable or unfavourable . . . there is left only a stateof pure contemplation, and whoever is incapable of this is abandonedwith shameful ignominy to the emptiness of unoccupied will, to thetorture and misery of boredom. To this extent it affords us a measure ofour own intellectual worth, and for this our ability to endure solitude, orour love of it, is a good criterion. (WWR1, p. 204)

For Schopenhauer, if not a melancholic himself, then certainlysomething of a miser,18 the sublime is vital to his theory of aesthetics.Schopenhauer’s aesthetics rest upon a crucial epistemological distinc-tion between knowledge acquired under the influence of the will andknowledge in-itself, i.e., knowledge that circumvents the will. About thewill, it will suffice to say that for Schopenhauer, it is analogous to theKantian thing-in-itself: “It is that which all representation, all object, isthe phenomenon, the visibility, the objectivity. It is the innermostessence, the kernel, of every particular thing and also of the whole. Itappears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in thedeliberate conduct of man . . .” (WWR1, p. 110).

Beyond the apparent plurality of the world (or as Schopenhauer putsit, the principium individuationis) exists a perpetual drive that compelsNature to strive ad infinitum to an end that does not exist. It is asSchopenhauer famously says, “like the alms thrown to a beggar, whichreprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged until tomor-row” (WWR1, p. 196). Happiness consists in the belief that an end hasbeen satisfied, whilst suffering consists in the in-between strife thatconstitutes acquiring the end (WWR1, p. 309). Under the dictates ofthe will, consciousness views the world in a utilitarian manner: objectscorrespond to one another relatedly, and meaning is meaning onlyinasmuch as it can satisfy the will: “. . . the intellect in its activity in theservice of the will . . . really knows mere relations of things, primarilytheir relations to the will itself, to which it belongs, whereby theybecome motives of the will . . .” (WWR2, p. 363) In the world as willthen, the ‘I’ is subordinated to a force both in-itself and outside-itself.

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Yet, Schopenhauer claims that when the will is denied, either tempo-rarily (the aesthetic experience) or permanently (the Saintly Ideal),satisfaction can be found.

Two initial quirks arise: firstly, if the will is that which gives rise to theutilitarian outlook, then if the will is denied, do useful objects becomeuseless objects à la Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades? This is not the case,as we shall discover. Secondly and more pressingly, if the will is thatwhich drives us towards the attainment of ends and if the attainment ofan end can be equated with happiness—however short-lived—then ifthe will is suspended how can happiness be attained? Schopenhauer,aware of this problem19 (PP2, p. 415), emphasized that although thewill-less subject is devoid of the possibility of attaining happiness, so toois he devoid of the possibility of attaining suffering, since there is no willto satisfy or frustrate: “Happiness and unhappiness have vanished; weare no longer the individual; that is forgotten; we are only pure subjectof knowing” (WWR1, pp. 197–98). From this mode of disinterestedness,where the will is suspended, the subject purifies itself and through it theIdea that underlies the phenomenal representation is thus disclosed:“The intellect then freely soars aloft and no longer belongs to will . . .thus it has the permanent, unchangeable forms, independent of thetemporal existence of individual beings . . . which really constitute thepurely objective element of phenomena” (WWR2, p. 364).

By sacrificing the subject for a unity with the object, Schopenhauerwould seem to be aligning himself with mysticism: “This pure will-lessknowledge is reached by the consciousness of other things being raisedto so high a potential that the consciousness of our selves vanishes”(WWR2, p. 368). Elsewhere, Schopenhauer speaks of the pure subjectof knowing as a mysterious “World-Eye”: “This eye looks out from allliving, though with very different degrees of clearness, and is un-touched by their arising and passing away” (WWR2, p. 371); and again:“We are only that one eye of the world which looks out from all knowingcreatures, but in which man alone can be wholly free from serving thewill. In this way, all difference of individuality disappears so completelythat it is all the same whether the perceiving eye belongs to a mightymonarch or a to a stricken beggar” (WWR1, p. 198). This is all very well,but if consciousness loses itself in the object, becoming the pure subjectof knowing, then presumably the point of reference whereby conscious-ness acknowledges its own experience is also lost, i.e., self-consciousness:therefore, how can it—the subject—yield any knowledge of the experi-ence if its own presence is absent? Schopenhauer retorts by claiming

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consciousness is “hardly anything more than the medium throughwhich the perceived object appears in the world as representation”(WWR2, p. 368). Yet, if consciousness is only the medium throughwhich it receives phenomena, then how can it be endowed with the“blessedness of will-less perception which spreads so wonderful a charmover the past and the distant” (WWR1, p. 198) Both “charm” and“blessedness” imply that a subject must be present: do they otherwiseexist in abstracto?

Later on, Schopenhauer has a different strategy, utilizing his thesisthat happiness is only the negative condition of being: “. . . happiness orsatisfaction is of a negative nature, that is simply the end of a suffering,whereas pain is always that which is positive. And so with the disappear-ance of all willing from consciousness, there yet remains the state ofpleasure, in other words absence of all pain” (PP2, p. 416). Thishowever conjures up more a state of Stoic apatheia than anything else—a point of indifference whereby self-consciousness is transported intoobjectivity. Furthermore, without the contrast of pain, pleasure isnonexistent; pain is necessary for pleasure to be recognized as such; andwithout a point of self-reference, i.e., the experience of pleasure, or pain,where, one might ask, is the individual in this? Schopenhauer retainsthe belief that “the individual is transformed into a subject that merelyknows and no longer wills; and yet he remains conscious of himself andof his activity as such” (PP2, p. 416). Schopenhauer’s claim then, is thatif volition, i.e., will, is removed self-consciousness still endures. But canone exist without the other? For is the intellect not an impotentmechanism devoid of the will driving it, and likewise is the will not ablind arational pull without the intellect guiding it?

We have stated how a tranquil bliss arises from the aesthetic experi-ence where the will is denied and the pure subject of knowledge isaffirmed. Now, if will is subjectivity, then devoid of will is objectivity.This is the second part of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, and where the useof Plato’s Idea emerges. We have mentioned the Idea briefly above, buthave yet to relate it to the thing-in-itself—the will. For Schopenhauer,the Idea is adequate objectivity of the thing-in-itself, the will. This meansthat we can at least have an adequate idea of the thing-in-itself,although unknowable fully, by diminishing the degree of subjectivityinvolved in the perception of an object.

Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, as briefly outlined here, is distinc-tive in its twofold purpose: firstly, as a cathartic release from thetorments of the will and secondly as a cognitive mode of acquiring

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adequate objective knowledge. We can deduce then, on account of thesecond purpose, the significance of art: for Schopenhauer, it is no mereindulgent luxury, but, conversely, of paramount importance. Theempirical sciences that claim to know are deluded in thinking that theyare independent, that they are detached observers exhibiting resultsand compiling objective data; but independence or freedom forSchopenhauer consists in autonomy from the will, and only art (andindeed the Saintly Ideal) can offer this.

How then does the sublime fit into Schopenhauer’s theory? Toanswer this, an understanding of Schopenhauer’s view on its counter-part—beauty—is a prerequisite. Beauty arises when an object invites thesubject to view it without apprehension, and when knowledge thenexcludes relations-of-things and moves to the Idea: beauty is indeedknowledge of the Idea. In beauty, “pure knowledge has gained theupper hand without a struggle, since the beauty of an object . . . hasremoved from consciousness, without resistance and hence impercepti-bility, the will and knowledge of relations that slavishly serve this will”(WWR1, p. 202). In other words, objects that lend themselves to thesubject in an accommodating manner (Schopenhauer has in mindhere, “natural beauty” [WWR1, p. 201]) and which then engage withknowledge devoid of will are objects of beauty.

The sublime, on the other hand, involves a “violent tearing awayfrom the relations of the same object to the will which are recognized asunfavourable . . .” (WWR1, p. 202). The sublime presents consciousnesswith an intimidating object, an object that induces fear or terror in thesubject. How then, can consciousness be fearless in a fearful situation,and even take pleasure in the fearful? For Schopenhauer the sublimerequires consciousness to sublimate its own will into a general will, i.e.,human will. The individual sense of trepidation or awe must beannulled if the subject is to ascend beyond his own self. By severing theconnection with subjective will, the exaltation that coexists with thesublime is this very experience of going “beyond our own individuality”(WWR1, p. 206). Yet, it is also the sense of resignation to a force greaterthat oneself that gives rise to exaltation: “. . . he feels himself asindividual, as the feeble phenomenon of will, which the slightest touchof these forces can annihilate, helpless against powerful, dependent,abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in the face of stupendousforces” (WWR1, pp. 204–5). So, both beauty and the sublime areconcerned with Ideas, but for the latter to be received, the dislocationof will from intellect is violent, whereas in the former it is effortless. But

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the dislocation is the source of exaltation; and when the will is silent, sois suffering, and so too happiness—all that remains in the sublime is theexaltation of overcoming the negative relation between object to will.

After Kant’s twofold division between the dynamical and the math-ematical sublime, Schopenhauer postulates a third class: the ethicalsublime. The ethical sublime denotes a character who is divorced fromhis will to the point of being sovereign to it, yet still attached sufficientlyto provide the will to live: “Such a character will . . . consider men in apurely objective way, and not according to their relations they mighthave to his will” (WWR1, p. 206). Schopenhauer’s remarks about theethical sublime are tentative and brief and there is a sense that theSaintly Ideal that emerges in the fourth book was intended certainly toembrace, if not replace, this notion.

As early as 1815, Schopenhauer had already stated the relationshipbetween the sublime and the tragic: “. . . tragedy is the summit of thesublime.”20 Indeed, but how should such an apparent paradox arise—namely, that pleasure should be derived from misfortune? In tragedy,Schopenhauer tells us, consciousness turns away from the will-to-live: inshowing us the “terrible side of life . . . the wailing and lamentation ofmankind, the dominion of chance and error, the fall of righteousness,the triumph of wicked” (WWR2, p. 433) tragedy opposes the will. Tragedyis a confirmation that “life is a bad dream from which we have to wake”(WWR2, p. 433): in short, everything that the will strives for, tragedyopposes. In relation to the sublime, the tragic is analogous to thedynamical sublime: it elevates consciousness above the will, to the pointof pure knowledge, to the point of opposition against the will. Tragedymirrors a death of the subjective self from which an objective andsublime self is born. Is Walter Kaufmann therefore right to point outthat “the main objection to this theory is that it does not accord with thefacts”?21 Schopenhauer concedes: “I admit that rarely in the tragedy ofthe ancients is the spirit of resignation seen and directly expressed”(WWR2, p. 434). But then interjects a reason why: “. . . the ancients hadnot yet reached the summit and goal of tragedy, or indeed the view oflife generally” (WWR2, pp. 434–35).

As with his metaphysics, Schopenhauer’s account of tragedy relies onthe presupposition that posits unity beyond plurality. This unity emergeswhen the individual will is crushed, either by tragedy or, in the finalbook by wilful self-mortification. It no longer sees its own will, but “oneand the same will, living and appearing in them all” (WWR1, p. 253).Here the principium individuationis, the subjectivity that designates all

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phenomena is forsaken; and so “the motives that were previously sopowerful now lose their force, and instead of them, the completeknowledge of the real nature of the world, acting as quieter of the will,produces resignation, the giving up not the merely of life, but of thewhole will-to-life itself” (WWR1, p. 253). This then, is the essence ofSchopenhauer’s theory: through the vanquishing effect of tragedy theself is annihilated; it no longer sees the inflictions of will as my will, butrather the general will, the-will-of-the-world; and as with sublimity, intragedy individuality is negated in resignation; this act of resignationconstitutes the “spiritual exaltation” (WWR2, p. 435) interdependentwith the sublime “pleasure in the tragedy” (WWR2, p. 433).

Can we really concur with Schopenhauer that tragedy leads to loftyresignation and that this is even desirable? Certainly, it is hard not toagree with Lucretius that observing misfortune from a distance ispleasurable: “What joy it is, when out at sea the stormwinds are lashingthe waters, to gaze from the shore at heavy stress some other man isenduring!”22 But deriving pleasure from misfortune that originatesfrom the self can only be pleasurable if the misfortune is real or if yousubscribe to providence. If existence is, beyond representation nothingmore than an arational endless striving, as dictated by the Schopen-hauerian will, then the pleasure that derives from this—and this is themain objection—can only be a consolatory one of knowing you know it.Perhaps this is what Schopenhauer meant when he remarked, “Life is adisagreeable thing: I have determined to spend it in reflecting on it.”23

If you do not believe that what is revealed in the tragic experience isontologically “real” or that fate determines it, then to ascribe self-resignation to it seems at best inconsistent, at worst psychologicaldisplacement. To wilfully impose a structure on an otherwise structure-less world, even by ascribing a wicked one is, of course, a hollow andvain pursuit that endures only as long as the delusion does.

Let us consider an illustration that may elucidate whether tragedydoes indeed offer “a significant hint as to the nature of the world and ofexistence” (WWR1, p. 253). Imagine a man who, to quote Huysmans, isa subject of “those deeper, deadlier, longer-lasting wounds that areinflicted by satiety, disillusion, and contempt upon souls tormented bythe present, disgusted by the past, terrified and dismayed by thefuture.”24 Would such a man sublimate his spleen into will-less resigna-tion, knowing that life is a miserable affair founded in delusion andhabit, and that only the unceasing pulse of the will, a will that must bedisavowed if sanctuary is to be found, is real; or, so as to justify his misery,

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would he displace his embitterment into a will-full annihilation orien-tated around his own self-dissolution and ruin? Indeed, one mightargue that the only difference between self-destruction and self-resignation is their origin: the former being an act of anger turnedinwards, the latter being an act of lamentable despair. Tragedy hasoccurred, but because of the proximity to the experience, sublimity isexcluded, for sublimity requires a belief that the individual’s own willbears no immediate danger, and in this disenchanted character theimmediacy of the event has already taken place. No, it is altogetherclear that to a soul already debased by the infliction of torment, thesimple ravages of despair have supplanted the sublimity of tragedy.Sublimity is therefore a kind of distant proximity that owes itself to thedegree of resignation that consciousness dares to invoke.

We might consider Mahler’s Sixth Symphony as an example of atragedy that whilst soaked in anguish and sorrow, excludes sublimitybecause of its proximity to the act itself. Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is, ofcourse, synonymous with the tragic—and this is merited, for it ends incomplete dissolution and without recourse to resolution. However, thisvery dissolution is the cause of the omission of sublimity. The concernMahler has for presenting a tragic symphony negates the detachedresignation that gives rise to the sublime. We might also includePenderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima in the same category asMahler’s Sixth Symphony: certainly, it is tragic, but sublimity is farremoved from its piercing discordance. Volatility and sublimity can, orcourse coexist—we have seen that from Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony—but the volatility in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is a sour one contra theecstatic volatility that arises from Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony.

As an example where tragedy and sublimity do unite, imagine theman who, having declared himself unfit to exist, resigns himself to hisown wilful demise. Consoled in the knowledge that lucidity is a giftavailable only to those whose lives have already ended, such a soul,cloistered in the ravines of his own loss and unable to abide the tormentof an exile whose home is an absence—“I am a graveyard hated by themoon”25 writes Baudelaire—is thus able to view the wreath of theprosaic with a detached poise that teeters on the ecstatic. So detachedand resigned is such a soul to his own subterranean vacuity, that hiscountenance thus imparts a mood that reflects his serene and deter-mined consciousness. However, the sublimity the man has achievedcould not endure should he postpone his vocation to demise; for then,the sublime would become the familiar and that in turn would reduce

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such an elevated despair to a base depression devoid of the ruinousgrandeur that the sublime implies. The detachment this man hasachieved lends his experience to the sublime and the tragic, and it isabove all else such an exalted resignation that Schopenhauer hasdescribed.

Considered aesthetically, as an example of the union between thesublime and the tragic, Gorecki’s popular Third Symphony might besuggested as a suitable illustration. Here, the prevalent mood is one ofprofound sorrow; and yet at the same time, an underlying resignationbleeds through the music, thus allowing a distance to grow between themusic and listener that in turn induces a sense of exaltation. Considerhow the second movement is set to an inscription written by aneighteen-year-old girl locked in a Gestapo cell in Zakopane. The wordsare tragic, but the music surges to the point where the tragedy of thetext coexists with the exaltation of the music.

We have seen how tragedy leads consciousness away from life to analleged “better conscious,” a will-less world. One might object though,as indeed Nietzsche does, that tragedy leads not to negation but toaffirmation: that in the tragic experience we resign ourselves not tosubmission, but the drive to endure—the Will to Power: “Tragedy doesnot teach resignation—To represent terrible and questionable things isin itself an instinct for power and magnificence in an artist . . . there isno such thing as pessimistic art—Art affirms.”26 Nietzsche’s position isparticularly interesting because it is, or endeavors to be, antithetical toSchopenhauer’s: “Affirmation of life even its strangest and sternestproblems, the will to life rejoicing in its own exhaustibility through thesacrifice of its highest types—that is what I call Dionysian. . . .”27

The tragic experience as portrayed by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer,one ending in affirmation, the other in resignation, could equally beunderstood as ironic. Irony, like sublimity and tragedy, involves anecessary standing-outside-of-oneself. Viewed in a detached manner,the ironist divorces his own self and is thus able to be manipulate hisown will to produce an end without consideration for the consequenceof the immediate self. The ironist is hence sufficiently self-assured toconcede to tragedy and absurdity without fear of self-dissolution.Consider how Kierkegaard treats it: “My life is absolutely meaningless.When I consider the different periods into which it falls, it seems likethe word Schnur in the dictionary, which means in the first place astring, in the second, a daughter-in-law. The only thing lacking is that

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the word Schnur should mean in the third place a camel, in the fourth,a dust-brush.”28

That Arthur Schopenhauer was not an ascetic, living a life isolatedfrom egoism and want, that he was often petty and aggressive, and thathe suffered from jealousy and resentment—in short, that he was notthe ideal that is described in the fourth book, is often acknowledged.29

As a concluding note, I wish to make the tentative suggestion that suchwas Schopenhauer’s personality, that to endeavor a study of his philoso-phy as an isolated affair, remote from the man himself, is as erroneousas it is to view an idea severed from its context.

The ideal behind Schopenhauer’s theory of tragedy is a negation ofthe self and a cessation of willing. Schopenhauer made no claims tohave achieved this. Without wishing to suggest a coarse psycho-biography(Magee conjectures for instance “his conviction of the terribleness ofexistence as such, were in some degree neurotic manifestations whichhad their roots in his relationship with his mother”30), we must at leastask, bearing the details of his life in mind and that he himself failed toachieve this aim—that of turning the will on itself—whether his claimto truth can have objective status or is it nothing more than displacedjustification for his existence?31 And if it is the case does this thendiminish the merit of his philosophy, or is it as Fichte states not so mucha matter of truth but disposition: “What sort of philosophy one choosesdepends, therefore, on what sort of man one is; for a philosophicalsystem is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as wewish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holdsit.”32

The question to what extent did Schopenhauer the man influenceSchopenhauer the philosopher, is not intended to be answered here,but Miguel de Unamuno may be on the right course: “There issomething which, for a lack of better name we will call the tragic senseof life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of theuniverse, a whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or lessconscious . . . and this sense does not so much flow from ideas asdetermine them, even though afterwards, as is manifest, these ideasreact upon it and confirm it.”33

Birkbeck CollegeUniversity of London

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1. Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgment(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

2. Consider this extract from The American Scholar: “The sublime seems, somehow, tooarchaic a concept, like charm or wisdom. It seems soft, impressionistic, conveying asensation that is now of little importance except in understanding some historicalvarieties of romanticism . . . the sublime can seem to be something that is over the top,lacking boundary or sense, overwhelming partly because it seems ungraspable, rather inpoor taste.” E. Rothstein, “Contemplating the Sublime,” The American Scholar 66 (1997):513–28.

3. Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 107.

4. Ibid., p. 108.

5. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime andBeautiful (Harmondsorth: Penguin, 1998), p. 86.

6. Ibid., p. 89.

7. Ibid., p. 157.

8. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. J. T.Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 45.

9. Benjamin Korstvedt, Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000), p. 60.

10. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2vols., (New York: Dover, 1966); this, vol. 1, p. 179. References will be to this edition andabbreviated WWR1.

11. Kant, Observations, p. 70.

12. Ibid., p. 68.

13. Ibid.

14. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (London: Verso,1997), p. 14.

15. For an elucidation on the necessary despair that “otherness” induces, see my“Hegel and the Pathway to Despair,” in Meteorite: The Philosophy Journal for the University ofMichigan 1.4 (2003).

16. Robert Burton writes pertinently: “When I go musing all alone, / Thinking ofdivers things fore-known, / When I build Castles in the air, / Void of sorrow and void offear, / Pleasing my self with phantasms sweet, / Methinks that time runs very fleet. / Allmy joys to this are folly, / Naught so sweet as Melancholy.” The Anatomy of Melancholy(New York, 1927), p. 8.

17. No less than Schopenhauer’s own mother, Johanna (a member of the literarysalons of her time) writes of Friedrich thus: “The air, which he handles masterfully, takesup much more than half of the space in most of his paintings, and frequently a middleground and background are altogether lacking, because he chooses subjects in whichthere are none to depict.” W. Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich (New York: Abrams, 1995),p. 60.

179Dylan Trigg

18. For a description of Schopenhauer’s character see Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauerand the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. E. Osers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1991), p. 284.

19. Cf. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2000), 2 vols.; this, vol. 2, p. 415. Hereafter abbreviated PP2.

20. Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains: Early Manuscripts (1804–1818), vol. 1,trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

21. Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1992), p. 292.

22. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1994), p. 38.

23. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1976), p. 33.

24. J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. R. Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959),p. 148.

25. Charles Baudelaire, “Spleen,” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. J. McGowan (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 147.

26. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale(New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 434–35.

27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1990), p. 121.

28. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. D. Swenson and L. M. Swenson (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 35. Woody Allen, following Kierkegaard’s stance,takes it a step further: “Eternal nothingness is O.K. if you’re dressed for it” (W. Allen,Getting Even [New York: Vintage, 1978], p. 25).

29. See Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, p. 274.

30. Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.13. Magee then remarks somewhat incongruously: “What I am concerned with areSchopenhauer’s ideas, and like all ideas they are logically independent of the psycho-logical process by which they were arrived at.” Can ideas really be understood in this way,namely as ideas qua ideas, devoid of their traces and associations?

31. Martha Nussbaum remarks justly: “. . . when Schopenhauer speaks of what is mostfamiliar, we much always bear in mind the obsessive and sexually tormented personalitythat is doing the asserting,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 348.

32. Rüdiger Bubner, German Idealist Philosophy [Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel] (Lon-don: Penguin, 1997), p. 93.

33. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York:Dover, 1954), p. 17.