Schopenhauer by Julian Young

Author:Julian Young
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Humanities
Published: 2011-05-07T19:59:25.100674+00:00

ART AND PHILOSOPHY

If one seeks to refute Plato’s denigration of art by describing it in the terms which he reserves for philosophy one runs the risk of obliterating the distinction between art and philosophy.

One possible response would be to simply accept the obliteration of the distinction, to deny that there is any absolute distinction between art and philosophy. This, I think, in outline, is what a modern ‘Continental’ philosopher would say. Schopenhauer, however, at least when thinking explicitly about the nature of philosophy and its method, believes it vital to maintain the distinction between the two. Methodologically (though not in terms of con-tent5), that is to say, he is what would now be called an ‘Analytic’

philosopher. Accordingly, he devotes a whole chapter of volume II, Chapter 34, to preserving and elucidating the distinction between art and philosophy.

He begins by making the problem seemingly worse. Great philosophy and great art both spring from the ‘objective’, will-free mode of contemplating the world, both overcome the ‘mist of subjectivity’ that envelops ordinary consciousness (WR II: 406–7). Moreover both work towards the same goal. ‘Not merely philosophy but also the fine arts work at bottom towards solving the problem of existence’. Like philosophy, that is, ‘every genuine and successful work of art answers [the] . . . question’ ‘What is life?’

(WR II: 406).

So art and philosophy deal with the same question and may give the same answer. They are, nonetheless, different, for while art

‘speak[s] the naive and childlike language of perception’, philosophy speaks ‘the abstract and serious language of reflection’ (WR II: 406).

While philosophy is an essentially conceptual activity, art is fundamentally perceptual; so far as art is concerned, ‘the concept is eternally barren and unproductive’ (WR I: 235).

What does this contrast between the conceptual and perceptual amount to? The answer to this question consists in a number of further distinctions Schopenhauer draws between art and philosophy, distinctions which are actually quite independent of Book I’s defective account of the conceptual/perceptual distinction which was discussed in chapter 2.

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