THE BODY OF SUBLIME KNOWLEDGE: THE AESTHETIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
2009; Wiley; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00404.x
ISSN1468-2265
Autores Tópico(s)Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications
ResumoSchopenhauer has been portrayed, since the emergence of the analytic philosophies of Russell and Moore1, with respect to two primary philosophical results. On the one hand he is described as a ‘metaphysician’ of the Will. On the other he is depicted as an ‘ethicist’ of the tragic self-denial of the Will. There is indeed evidence for these interpretations in his magnum opus; yet a consequence of this narrow fixation on philosophical results has been to turn Schopenhauer's philosophy into a closed circle, a philosophical fossil or museum piece. The occasional admissions of his influence on major philosophers such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein2 are made without any consideration of the context of Schopenhauer's original questioning and of the meaning ‘metaphysics’ assumes amid these post-Kantian horizons. Up to the last decade or so, the usual attitude to Schopenhauer has been dictated by the logical positivists with their dismissal of all ‘metaphysical’ philosophies. For these iconoclasts, the philosophy of Schopenhauer is an idiosyncratic and contradictory amalgam that sought, because of its own weakness or obscurity (or Orientalism), to escape the facticity of existence.3 Of course, Nietzsche is responsible for some aspects of this picture. Yet, while Nietzsche's criticisms may have their merit, their thrust and direction are distinct from that of the positivists. I will demonstrate the depth of Schopenhauer's philosophy that shows the anti-metaphysical critiques to be wide of the mark, especially given his animosity to the idealistic interpretations of Kant and the Absolute idealism of Hegel – both dominant in the Academy of his day. To brand him simply a ‘metaphysician’ without any specification of the philosophical context obscures what is crucial for an adequate understanding of his philosophy. Schopenhauer does not, as with Kant's description of the ‘rationalists’, play amongst the plethora of mere concepts, nor does he descend into a passive state of pre-critical ‘empiricism’. Rather, as a loyal though dissident post-Kantian, he remains a transcendental philosopher, but one honest enough to embark upon a radical phenomenology –his own hermeneutics of existence. Not only does he underline our finite predicament, he discloses phenomenologies of pain, pleasure, laughter and weeping, etc. (not to mention, for the moment, those of beauty and the sublime). My emphasis will thus be on his methodology of contemplation, from which these philosophical results take their origin. We will find in Schopenhauer's various contemplations of the body, nature and art an aesthetic phenomenology, different from those of both Nietzsche and Husserl.4 In what follows I will give a reading of The World beginning at the end, with Book Four, as a way of uncovering the methodological topos of Schopenhauer's magnum opus. Against a background of his ultimate vision of futility, we will find that each of the prior books falls into a sequence of discovery, universalisation, idealisation, and, denial of the Will. I close with a consideration of Nietzsche's subversion of Schopenhauer's denial of the Will by his own Dionysian affirmation of Fate. I will point to Nietzsche's exposure of a higher contradiction in Schopenhauer, one not concerned, as with the positivists, with his use of ‘metaphysical’ language and techniques, but centring instead on Schopenhauer's failure to live up to his own ‘discovery’ of the tragic sublime. Before we plunge into the pessimism of Book Four of The World as Will and Representation, I would like to make a comment on the organisational structure of this work. This will explain my decision to begin with Book Four. To put it figuratively, The World was written in a circle or spiral whose end joins its beginning; in other words, I am reading Schopenhauer ‘backwards and forwards’ in a way attuned with the hermeneutics of Reiner Schürmann's Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy.5 The thought that Schopenhauer is attempting to convey, his single thought, and the structure of his text have a relationship analogous to that between the unique Will and the Democritean nexus of manifestations – its dispersed representations bound by the principle of sufficient reason. The World is itself a representation, one that exposes its own temporality through the structure of the narrative. This can of course be said of any work, but this observation has special resonance for The World, through its awareness of the necessarily futile attempt to disclose the truth of the Will by means of ‘our way of speaking’ (by the Principle), as Plotinus lamented in his Letter to Flaccus. Moreover, despite the fact that there are four clear divisions to the work, there is a building momentum evident especially in Book Four through which Schopenhauer, as Levinas notes, sets ‘ethics’ off as distinct, as it concerns a ‘first’ philosophy that erupts in the midst of an existential topos. It is here that the lessons learned from the previous books become re-situated in the light cast by his single thought. This encourages us to make our entry through Book Four, since this book most fully approximates the ‘unity’ of the single thought in the lifeworld, to borrow an expression from Husserl. The ‘unity’ of this thought also suggests that we read Book Four before a re-consideration of the labyrinth of empirical representations in Book One, or of the principle of sufficient reason, in its four divisions, set out in the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Although it is indeed necessary to have read the Fourfold Root before a first proper reading of The World, the former remains under the sway of the principle of sufficient reason, as for instance in its consideration of the will still in terms of motivation. My focus will be to uncover the philosophical decisions and methods by which Schopenhauer transcends the principle of sufficient reason in his aesthetic phenomenology of the will. A merely linear or diachronic reading, while necessary in a first instance, does not allow for an adequate understanding of these decisions, especially with respect to, for example, the assertion in Book Three of the liberating character of a pure will-less subject, or of losing oneself in the pure aesthetic contemplation of nature and art, and the simultaneous revelation of the Platonic Ideas. While the single thought is implicit throughout the book – or, as with the ‘metaphysician’ Leibniz, ‘everything is in everything’– the first two books of the World, if considered in isolation from the remainder (not to mention Volume Two of the World) appear to have the character of an abstract metaphysical dualism, that between representation and will, inner and outer. It is in books Three and Four that this appearance of dualism is shattered, as we begin to understand not only the method by which knowledge and Ideas first emerge, but also to fathom the context within which such will-less-ness becomes valorised by Schopenhauer. At the same time, his deconstruction of the ‘circle of consciousness’ acquires its significance only in the context of the eventual decision to deny the Will. From a methodological starting point, that which comes later in terms of the narrative is, from a philosophical perspective, that which comes before, and which must be presupposed as the condition of the possibility for the initial, provisional expression. It is therefore necessary for the reader to ‘keep in mind’ the proposed singularity of the thought, so as not to become lost in the labyrinth of representations which, in this case, is the World itself in its four divisions. I am not seeking to subject the reader to painful feats of hermeneutical gymnastics, but to set forth the context of significance, a topos around which the initial terminologies and philosophical decisions gain a horizon of meaning. This reading should preclude misunderstandings and facilitate a more fertile study of Schopenhauer. Everyone will be familiar with the following narrative of tragic pessimism. Indeed, this narrative has come to define Schopenhauer's philosophy. Life is futile, tragic and, indeed, comedic, he declares in The World. Everything is deception, delusion, ridicule and mask. Pleasure, though a real phenomenon, is merely the temporary absence of pain in a sea of suffering consisting of myriad pains with their eternal recurrence.6 Schopenhauer identifies this expressive/interpretive struggle as the discordant music at the heart of the world. Projected onto the radical temporality of existence, each of us is merely a ‘vanishing’, a momentary spark out-flashing from the passion of a blind, purposeless Will. We erupt out of this vortex, come into ‘form’ or manifestion, only to be annihilated shortly – itself the re-assertion of the Will. In fact, ‘individual’ is not what we are. Existence is the phenomenal objectification of the Will; each of us is subject to the overwhelming desires of the Will. We are Will deluded, thrown, disciplined by the Veil of Maya. Death really comes to nothing. We are encapsulated in our pluriform individualities, subject to the insatiable appetites of the Will, spending our existence seeking to satisfy or quench them. Every satisfaction is merely the temporary abeyance, a ‘little death’, as Bataille termed it, in what is, at its heart, an insatiable desire that re-emerges immediately in differing ‘forms’. Even if desire attains its object, before long another desire craves a different fulfilment. We fight, compete, struggle, in a self-destroying/self-creating effervescence of Will. We are like bubbles which burst upon the surface of a raging ocean. Existence is a war between various assertions of the Will fighting among [themselves], as It tears at its own flesh. We are incarcerated in the excession of the Will through the ceaselessly repeated ritualisations of our attempted individuation. This is our situation until we die, and then there is nothing – nothing but Will. Suicide is dismissed as futile, as what is killed off is merely the mask, the makeshift dwelling that sheltered the Will for a season. As Sartre would later put it, there is ‘no exit’. If our existence is an anarchic battle of insatiable needs (and hence, a system of suffering, an impossible system), then existence itself, the life or flux of the Will, is essentially futile and should be halted. As long as we live, however, there is no escape from the facticity of primordial restlessness, from this drive. This Sisyphian ‘result,’ one which aspires to silence, will serve as the background sense or pre-understanding for our reading, one that will allow us to understand not only the twists and turns of the narrative pathway, but also specific decisions made along the way, especially as regards the valuation of phenomena encountered. We now return from the end to the beginning of The World to discover Schopenhauer's method. As we return to the path of Schopenhauer's questioning, in an effort to appreciate his ‘single thought’, we are engulfed by the richness of his text and its poetic logic. We orient ourselves amidst a narrative multiplicity that tells a story of something that is paradoxically singular and timeless. Though we will eventually understand our emergence from Will, we are now operating under the Principle of Sufficient Reason7 (hereafter, the Principle) and its network of relations that controls the surface of appearances. Extending his earlier study of the Principle in The Fourfold Root, the ‘prior’ of the ‘first aspect’ is, for Schopenhauer, as with the Kantian tradition per se, the universal form of representation, specifying a necessary relationship between the subject and object. The object is ‘there’ for a subject, and cannot exist without it as its ground. The subject can never be an object, but is rather itself outside all temporal ‘objectivity’. This is the ‘first’, the true subject, outside the labyrinth of representation. However, we do not know this immediately; we are rather inscribed within the domain of space-time and causality – abiding the individuality of the Principle (which in the first instance, we cannot know either), in its divisions of Being, Becoming, Ground and Will (in the sense of motivation). In this domain, we are always only projections on the surface; all accounts which rely on the Principle, such as causal explanation or aetiology, and thus science as such, concern only the surface. We excavate deeper levels, but still remain only on another surface, separated from the inner truth of existence. Indeed, with Kant we grow sceptical of there being any knowledge possible (though not a thinking) of such a deeper, inner truth. It is this experience of exteriority – exile and incarceration on the surface of existence – that to a pure gaze provokes the question of interiority, of an inner truth to existence. For if all is merely surface, if everything, including my own self, is merely a representation, a surface bounding a gaze, there could be no question of an inner truth to existence, or even of an ‘I’. I could not be aware of my ‘subjectivity’ or ‘body’ as abstract concepts or expressions of existence. Since I am, however, there must already be an elsewhere, a transcendence, that is somehow simultaneously here. There is for Schopenhauer something in the world that has a unique status with respect to the phenomenal/noumenal distinction; this is my own body. Of course this too, in its first aspect, is merely a representation, like any other object for a subject. There is another kind of awareness associated with the body, however, one that exposes a limitation to the Principle in its claim to exhaust the real. We must already have known about the possibility of such a departure from the labyrinth of representations merely to have regarded it as a labyrinth at all; it is our transcendence from embedded-ness in brute facticity that allows us to describe accurately our situation and to intimate some ground for transcendence beyond the Principle. We would never be able to formulate such a principle if we did not have an experience already of the beyond, that in this case is the inside, the inner truth of the world. We thus turn to Book Two to explore Schopenhauer's solution to this ‘riddle of existence’ in the body, the immediate object of the Will. We will discover, however, that the answers provoke still deeper questions. What for Schopenhauer is unique in each self amongst the plethora of things in the world is its own body. We may embrace another, caress her, but except perhaps for the intimacy of eroticism (as Bataille muses) or of laughter or sorrow we do not, from the perspective of exteriority, feel or know her inner truth; we do not know what she knows, feel what she feels. In the midst of the regime of individuality, we are not her, though this judgement never seems to satisfy. We grasp her, but within the horizons of the Principle. We still remain only on the surface.8 Everyday communication, from the perspective of this gaze, is still only another mirror, another surface. At the same time, however, we have privileged access and experience intimately our own bodies – more accurately, my body. I can thus penetrate to a sense of the inner truth of existence as my disposition and my feeling. We are initiated into the secret cult of the self that abides behind the mask of the body, amid its dissimulations and postures. It is these feelings for our own body, of the inside, that intimate the inner truth of existence. Moreover, we have the sense that others abide this secret as well. In contrast to the attempt by the German Idealists to transcend the limits of knowledge via an intellectual intuition, for Schopenhauer it is in the experience of intense pleasure and/or pain that something different emerges amidst the labyrinth of the gaze, something that disrupts the look, breaks open a new dimension of existence; a different truth is heard through this crack in the mirror of representation. Amid this bodily phenomenology of pleasure and pain, Schopenhauer asserts that the Will is stirred, aroused, provoked – summoned to reveal itself as the inner truth and being of existence. It signals its existence and communicates its power through the bodies of those who incite it. Thus the body as the immediate object of the will discloses itself as the topos of the Will, the site of its discovery as the inner truth of reality.9 We trace the link between the individual will amidst its body with Will as the primordial truth of the All.10 Amid the topos of existence, Schopenhauer surmises, through inference and reflection the will of the self can be universalised into the Will of each and All. Such a universalisation through reflection, however, remains at the surface level. Penetration below the surface, to the universal Will, calls for a different experience of ‘unity’ that transcends the theoretical dualism of representation and a Will, the latter regarded merely as an ‘object’. The practical experience of the originary unity of inner experience (Bataille) and the Will arises from the pragmatic event of de-individualisation in a phenomenology of desire, of giving oneself over to the Will (just as we will give ourselves up to the beautiful and sublime in aesthetic contemplation) – of feeling oneself to be an event in the life of the Will. Leaving the ‘idealism’ of Kant's treatment of the will in the Second Critique, it is now through the inner experience of willing, amid the body, that reflection can discover a passage from the specific will that I feel in myself to Will as the inner truth of all phenomena. The discovery of the will can thus be regarded in two ways – as a representation, communicated in language and gesture, and in the practical experience of the body and its experience of willing. Before and beyond the merely reflective universalisation of the will, therefore, there lies the practical, existential topos, an ontological rooting of the individual will in the Will itself.11 As a consequence of this rooting Schopenhauer postulates what we will call, for our purposes, a noumenology of the Will.12 This is where our previous reading of Book Four can be helpful: the blind striving of the will, through its longings becomes multiplied and distributed throughout the domain of the Principle – it becomes indeed a hydra at war with itself. The will to live, or more properly the will-to-phenomenality, is expressed as various grades of Will in its struggle amidst the phenomenal networks of the singular Will. This struggle takes place even prior to the Will's entrance into the domain of the Principle, as a clash for manifest-ness per se. The struggle for presence/power reveals an antagonism of the Will with itself, since it exists in contradiction with itself (bellum omnium contra omnes, as he nods to Hobbes). In its struggle for self-expression and self-knowledge, the Will becomes distributed via the Principle into momentary sites amid a mathesis of order (principle of individuation). It is not, however, tamed by this sublimation. The antagonism, in its initial captivity to individuation, manifests itself as the struggle of the ego against any resistance; it is facilitated by the presumption that everything and everyone else is only ‘there’ for the ego as representation – indirectly. In a critical allusion to Fichte's ‘egoism’, Schopenhauer posits that the individual regards itself as the seat of the knowing subject, whose representation is the phenomenal world. The ‘ego’ thus asserts that all representation is dependent upon its own being and its acts of consciousness. Further, this knowledge is regarded as immediate and certain for the ego through a direct experience of the will and of consciousness (given by Nature herself). Thus despite the radical finitude of each existent, the ego remains deluded, presuming itself the centre of the world and ready to ‘annihilate the world to maintain the self, this drop in the ocean, a little longer’.13 There is a tragic paradox expressed here: the ego as the seat of the individual will supposes itself the centre of all things. Yet, its ‘will-to-power’ empowers, expresses and fans the flames of the inner antagonism, threatening all things as its mere expressions.14 It is not sufficient to speak here only of representations, of bodies, individual will, universalisation of the will and the objectifications of the Will; this gives merely the ‘furniture’ of the Principle, bound to and powered by the striving of the Will conceived as an ‘outside’ (like Kant's description of the noumena as a raging sea around his safe island, or Wittgenstein's mystical at the limits of Welt). This depiction is inadequate not only because it fails to acknowledge the pragmatic disclosure of the non-rational depth to human existence, but also remains mute regarding the other knowing, beyond the Principle, of the adequate objectivities of the will, the so-called Platonic Ideas, of music as the direct representation of the Will, and finally the being of the Will itself. We must turn to Schopenhauer's aesthetic phenomenology to open these topics. An aesthetic phenomenology is one that concerns ‘representations’, and thus a typology of knowing, which are not determined by the Principle. This indicates that it is not an aesthetic within space and time, but rather a phenomenological aesthetics of human existence. The basic event in such a phenomenology is the transcendence of the Will through aesthetic contemplation – an ‘aesthetic method of consideration’ that Schopenhauer describes thus: In the aesthetic method of consideration we found two inseparable constituent parts: namely, knowledge of the object not as an individual thing, but as Platonic Idea, in other words, as persistent form of this whole species of things; and the self-consciousness of the knower, not as individual, but as pure, will-less subject of knowledge. The condition under which the two constituent parts appear always united was the abandonment of the method of knowledge that is bound to the principle of sufficient reason, a knowledge that, on the contrary, is the only appropriate kind for serving the will and also of science.15 Contemplation (and other methods) is the gateway through which we can shed the confines of individuality, of the Principle, and of the ‘noise’ of the strivings of the Will itself. It is through contemplation of Art that Ideas spring up and impinge on our awareness. A Cartesian picture that regards Ideas as ‘things’ that somehow gain entry into the closed ‘closets’ of our subjective minds does not do justice to the significance of Ideas and the topos of their emergence. Ideas do not come to us, as we incorrectly assume on analogy to ‘our own’ concepts of concepts for managing phenomena under the will-to-live. Instead we go or are thrown towards them, towards the things themselves. We here catch our first intimation of the meaning of the denial of the Will, and how Schopenhauer's ethical judgment has shaped this site of decision. It is through the loss of individual will that we begin to fathom the Will itself through a phenomenology of its deeper manifestations in Art and music; moreover, this expression has been sublimated through a quieting or suppression of the individual will, and thus of the Will itself.16 Ideas are the adequate objectivities of the Will (as distinct from the gradations of the objectification of Will that we saw in the last section). As with the Will itself, beyond the jurisdiction of the Principle, each idea retains only the universal form of representation, that of an object for a subject. These are distinct in that they are expressions of the primordial strife at the heart of the Will, a strife that in turn grounds the Principle (without itself being aware of this unconscious a priori, first intimated by Schelling). The pathway to this aesthetic phenomenology begins with a moment of ‘pure contemplation’, of forgetting all individuality, which allows us to breach the walls of the principle of individuation, or the individual will operating within the confines of the Principle. Indeed it is a forgetting of the Will itself, a quieting of its state of suffering amid the silent, soothing open-ness of contemplation, one that is associated with the perceptive body in one of its myriad ‘forms’. Such a pathway begins with the ‘genius’, an individual of unusual imagination and openness, who in the course of his aesthetic experiences becomes aware of himself as a pure will-less subject of knowing: Now according to our explanation, genius consists in the ability to know, independently of the principle of sufficient reason, not individual things … but the Ideas of such things, and in the ability to be, in face of these, the correlative of the Idea … no longer individual, but pure subject of knowing.17 The disclosure of the Ideas (as distinct from concepts of understanding or reflections of reason) occurs through the contemplation of beauty and the sublime (the latter explicitly related to the body, which as we have seen is the immediate object of the Will). Contemplation is the falling away of individuality, and, for Schopenhauer, cannot be taught through the procedures of the Principle, just as morality cannot be taught via commandments, catechisms and ethical codes. Instead, contemplation is seduced by the beautiful and the sublime in distinctive ways; it is openness to such seduction that is the measure of genius. While the Artist displays the Ideas in concreta, accessing them through the expression of his own character, the philosopher contemplates the work of art in such a way as to disclose individuality as merely the expression of Ideas through the prism of the Principle. Thus for the aesthetic phenomenologist, alongside or behind the Principle there are also the Ideas, intimated through ‘cracks’ in the phenomenon. This is a form of knowledge outside not only the jurisdiction of the Principle, but also of the Will itself – at least from a phenomenological perspective, for ontologically this individual and his moments of pure will-lessness must, tragically, come crashing down, returning him again to the Will. Contemplation thus intimates death, an anticipated, dramatised death perhaps, in its noumenological exploration of the destruction of individuality (Dionysus), conceived by Schopenhauer as a return to the pure subject as the unknown knower (Upanishads). The achievement of this pure will-less subject, the destruction of individuality, transforms the character of the a priori– for this experience is beyond space-time and causality. The object thus reveals itself anew as Idea (still as perception, as eidos), but as a non-rational representation, or the adequate objectivity of the will, disclosed through contemplating variously beauty or the sublime.18 To repeat, it is the genius who is distinguished in that she can see the thing in itself as Idea, outside the Principle, and she knows herself as a pure subject of knowing. Normally, the will serves the individual directly, or better, the individual serves the will, in a futile attempt to satisfy its desires. The individual remains locked inside this modulating network of relations, unable to know itself as the pure subject that underlies All, and not knowing the objects, representations, as in truth Ideas that have become trapped within the principle of individuation. It is the ‘genius’– and this can be anyone (to varying degrees) – who enters into a contemplation of existence, in the first instance through the beautiful. Through this event of contemplation, the individual is delivered from ‘knowledge in service of the will’, indeed she forgets or gives up ‘oneself as an individual’19– she comes to know herself as a pure subject of knowing. Corresponding to this subjective aspect of contemplation there is the objective aspect of the Idea. Schopenhauer remarks that the state of pure perception is facilitated by objects that by their ‘manifold’ and ‘strict form’20 are representative of Ideas, as is the case with natural beauty. The beautiful, which has the effect of quieting the will, is disclosed in apprehending a beautiful object as Idea. The beautiful affects us in either natural or artistic experiences in which Ideas ‘readily speak to us’ and invite us into aesthetic contemplation, wherein is born the self-awareness of the pure subject of knowing and the true objectivity of the Ideas. The beautiful allows for a significant transition to the topos of aesthetic contemplation and the realisation of pure subjectivity and objectivity, but still merely as a somewhat superficial phenomenology. We have abandoned ourselves so fully in the beautiful object that we have forgotten our very existence, overpowered by the objectivity of the Idea. We have lost sight of the facticity of our own embodiment. A phenomenology that considers merely the clarity and distinctness of beauty thus forgets existence with its radical temporality or finitude. It could lose sight also of the very event by which the subject of knowing becomes constituted as the condition for the network of representations; the sublime, however, allows us to restore this awareness. Schopenhauer contends the sublime remains dependent on the subjective aspect of contemplation, and is indeed a ‘modification of it’.21 Of course this is pure subjectivity and objectivity that is outside the Principle. As distinct from the beautiful which invites and transports us away, even to a forgetfulness of our finite existence, the sublime is an intimation of what is threatening and terrible in nature and art, of what is hostile to the ‘human will in general, as manifested in its objectivity, the human body’.22 In view of the inexorability of annihilation and death associated with the body, and the re-awakening of the Will amidst this contemplation, Schopenhauer p
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