1 - Schopenhauer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2009
Summary
1 Nietzsche's thought about art is, I suggested in the Introduction, deeply rooted in the philosophy of Schopenhauer; in Schopenhauer's philosophy of art but in his general philosophy too. Accordingly, in this chapter, I provide a brief sketch of Schopenhauer's philosophy as a whole, first a highly impressionistic account of his general philosophy and then, in somewhat greater detail, an account of his philosophy of art. In doing so I shall try to present him as Nietzsche saw him, through his eyes and sometimes in his words. Of the several images which might be offered of that clear yet ultimately ambiguous structure which is Schopenhauer's philosophy, this chapter tries to present the Nietzschean image.
2 Schopenhauer's metaphysics, propounded mainly in the first two books of his main work, The World as Will and Representation (1819), is a version of Kantian idealism. The everyday world, the world given in sense-perception, is ideal, mere “representation,” “phenomenon,” or “appearance,” a creation of the human mind quite different in character from the reality, the world “in itself” that underlies it.
In the main, Schopenhauer takes this, as simply a datum, as something established beyond all doubt by Kant's great Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Yet he does provide one original and quite un-Kantian argument for (a kind of) idealism. This consists in an elaboration of the observation that, as a survival mechanism, the human brain can be expected to present the world to us in a useful rather than – a by no means coincident notion – truthful manner (see especially, WR II, ch. XXII).
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- Information
- Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art , pp. 5 - 24Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992