Relevance of Schopenhauer’s Aesthetic Experience

Hey there! I am an aesthete. Don’t panic, I’ll tell you what an aesthete means. It simply refers to someone who appreciates beauty both in nature and works of arts. Suffice it to say I am an appreciator of beauty. Of course I fell in love with Aesthetics during my pursuits in philosophy. I was quite enthralled when I stumbled on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics experience and how he vehemently asserted that it can breeds aesthetic enjoyment and delivers humanity from the sufferings in the world. Actually, I did my Long Essay on this and I find it worth sharing. The aim of this brief write-up is to look into Schopenhauer’s aesthetic experience to unfurl what it is amid the diverse conceptions of aesthetic experience and to evaluate how he employed it to solve the existential problem of suffering. Let’s move on.

The world is endowed with fascinating beauty untold. This beauty is both evident in nature and man-made works of art. Aesthetics is one philosophical concept that permeates the entire field of human endeavours. It explores the nature of art, beauty, and taste with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It explains and covers how works of art are created, imagined and performed by artist. It studies how art is being used, enjoyed and criticized by people and what happens in their mind when they look at, listen to or read works of art and understand what they perceive. Moreover, when we talk about how people feel about art, why they prefer some works of art and not others and the manner in which art can affect people moods, beliefs and attitudes towards life, we talk of aesthetics.

            No doubt the study of the history of aesthetics may appear quite challenging and having a better grasp of the history of aesthetics as a process of developing philosophical knowledge appears even more difficult, reasons being that aesthetics is concerned with beauty and how it is perceived, whether in the comic, the tragic or the sublime system. Obviously, issues relating to aesthetics are relatively admitting. Hence the famous aphorism “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”. This implies that what is beautiful is beautiful only for the individual. What is beautiful for one man may be ugly for another. Little wonder Idang asserts that, “man is occupied with the aesthetics appeal of his environment, and he tries to make judgements whether favourable or not, about what appeals to his sensory organs” (15). Such gives rise to aesthetic experience which pertains to the perceptual level of human experience. People differ widely in their capacity for appreciation of beauty. And man, as a feeling being has a wide range of responses. It is in this sense we can navigates aesthetics from the ancient through the medieval to the modern period of philosophy. Of course, aesthetics is quite difficult to define because different philosophers define it in different ways. Aesthetics could be said to be as old as philosophy itself, but it is thoroughly dealt with under the strata of axiology. In the 18^th century, aesthetics as a philosophical field of the arts, value and judgement was given a perfect place in the study of arts and related discipline by Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant. It is for this reason Blocker and Hannaford complains that “it is often difficult to delimit its scope and to specify its content. Many want to know whether aesthetics is an art or science or whether it is a branch of psychology or simply a loose assortment of philosophical issues related to art” (cited in Ozumba, 2).

Life is vast, complex, diverse and dynamic. Virtually every Tom, Dick and Harry is in want or desire of something. In fact, whether small or great, rich or poor, free or bound, young or old, low or high and white or black, in desire, all humans are equal. These desires have triggered the persistent efforts and dogged pursuits to satisfy or meet these desires. These desires tend to be the source of sufferings, pains, tragedies and troubles in the world as many persons engaged in all manner of atrocities one can ever dare to imagine in the process of fulfilling their ambitious cravings. It is to liberate and deliver one from the yoke of desire, the source of sufferings in the world that led Schopenhauer to unveil the essence of his aesthetic experience. For this reason Ezedike categorically state that, “Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is an attempt to break out of the pessimism that naturally comes from the Buddhist philosophy” (130).

The Man: Arthur Schopenhauer 

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a German Philosopher born in Hanseatic, free city of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation (expanded in 1844), wherein he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable will. He is the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, a successful merchant and one of Danzig's leading citizens and Johanna Schopenhauer, a popular writer. That is to say he was reared in a merchant oriented and well-to-do family.

Relevance of Schopenhauer’s Aesthetic Experience

Though there are quite some numbers of criticisms leveled on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, the significance of his view to both humanity and arts can never be downplayed. There are all sorts of sufferings and tragedies in the world as uphold by Schopenhauer, no doubt, which are all the product of endless desiring and willing. Now, imagine a world devoid of desires and cravings, imagine that there are no living souls in dire pursuit of anything what so ever. What do you think? How do you think the world would be like? What can you predict? The truth is such a change would produce harmonious and peaceful world. It would terminate almost all, if not all kinds of evils and establish happiness in the lives of its habitant. To achieve this, Schopenhauer recommends his aesthetic contemplation or pure contemplation which refers almost exclusively to a cognitive state in which the object of cognition is a Platonic Idea, and the subject of cognition is a pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition. In contemplation, the individual has no sense of being distinct from the object of cognition, and Schopenhauer claimed that the cognizer becomes a pure mirror of the object of cognition. The point is this, if humans will channel their energy towards pure contemplation of works of art or any overt creation of the world, there would be an enormous reduction in the rate of depression and sufferings in the world as our will  would be transform into an unadulterated realm.

Another thing we can see in Schopenhauer’s aesthetic experience is that it promotes the notion of contentment which is a good attribute for humans to have and exhibit.  Contentment encourages peace, cooperation and happiness. If humans can control their desire to some reasonable extent, it would strike out unhealthy competition, thereby curtailing the evils that go with it. This obviously, is a benefit to humanity. Schopenhauer’s aesthetic experience teaches us how and why we should and ought to experience and appreciate object of nature and works of arts.

The idea of the Schopenhauerian artistic genius is a clarion call for artists to key into, that is, if they want to create superb works of arts that are beautiful in themselves and can transcends the subject experiencing it. Genuine art cannot be created by anyone who merely follows standard artistic rules. A genius is required, that is, a person who creates original art without concern for rules.  Most importantly and despite exaggeration, Schopenhauer taught us again the necessity of a genius and the value of art. He saw that the ultimate good is beauty and that the ultimate joy lies in the creation or cherishing of the beautiful. The personality of the artist which is to be less subject to will than most tends to allow his intellect to have exceptional predominance over his will thereby producing arts that lead to mental pleasure or enjoyment. Over the years, as an appreciator of beauty, I have come across people who stand in awe of aesthetic phenomena. A friend once told me, “Joe, anytime I feel depressed and weary of life, I just channel my little energy in listening to music and that does the magic”. The other one did say, “Joe, every evening, I often make sure I leave the comfort of my room to go experience the moon and starry night. I feel good doing so”. Some it might be just sitting beside the ocean is enough to elevate them from their troubles; others might be a piece of art work. Of course, that’s a creative product of an artistic genius. Indeed, some people never ceased to appreciate the beauty that lies in nature. Mere setting their eyes on the stars, moon, water, pasture, mountain top, rain to mention a few, can happily spur their lives for the better. The aesthetic enjoyment derived from this experience doesn’t just temporarily deliver us from the cares of life, but it goes as far as to tell us the significance of aesthetic experience to our existence. 

The high value placed on music in Schopenhauer’s aesthetic experience seems too metaphysical and transcendental when he argues that Music is ‘a copy of the will itself’. However, the affective, revelatory and gratifying status of music can never be downplayed. Testimonies abound of how music has healed some broken hearts, ignited some good old memories, provoked tears to fall from one’s eyes, transcended one into eternal encounter through worship and bestowed one with celebration and joy unspeakable. Virtually no occasions or ceremonies there isn’t music to spice up the events. For Schopenhauer, Music replicates the structures of emotions without however furnishing their contents, enabling us to feel the emotions without feeling or fearing the pain that they are normally associated with. In today’s world, music is a character with deliverance and breakthrough from many life chains we can ever dare to imagine. All we need to do is to tap into it purely contemplatively.

Arts according to Schopenhauer, also provides essential knowledge of the world’s object in a way that is more profound than science or everyday experience. As in so many nineteenth-century theories, epistemology – the science of knowing – here becomes aestheticized, and the aesthetic becomes a privileged category of human perception, elevated from being just one more discipline to a final resource for seeking harmony, unity, and order in the world.

Talking about the practical import of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic experience, Ome asserts;

It can release us from the cycle of constant suffering, since we stop experiencing our wills in any way. Aesthetic contemplation also helps us deal with very real, very difficult situations. If we start to think about the world, other people, and ourselves, then we will stop being angry, resentful, or sad (though we will also stop being excited or happy). We will instead see things that cause pain as manifestations of the Idea of humanity, as nothing new or special. To put it a slightly different way, we will stop taking things personally. The vicissitudes of life will become just that, simply fluctuations through which we can have real encounters with ideas (57).

The point Ome is trying to make is that Schopenhauer’s aesthetic experience tends to help us look at every creation for what they really are other than what we stand to gain doing so. That is to say, other than apportioning blames to ill-happenings; we channel our energy to unfurling the essence of such happenings. 

Works Cited

Idang, Gabriel E. “Aesthetics: A Brief Historical Survey”. In. Ozumba, G. O and Salami Y. A., (Eds.). Landmarks in Aesthetic Studies. Microteacher and Associates, 2007.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Trans. R. B. Haldane and John Kemp. London: Trubner. 1883.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Volumes I and II, trans. E. F. J. Payne. Dover Publications, 1969.

Ozumba, G.O. “What is Aesthetics”. In. Ozumba, G. O and Salami Y. A., (eds.). Landmarks in Aesthetic Studies. Microteacher and Associates, 2007.