(b Danzig, 22 Feb 1788; d Frankfurt, 21 Sept 1860). German philosopher. His masterpiece, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (‘The World as Will and Representation’), was written while he was in his twenties and published in 1818 (dated 1819). It was almost unsold, unreviewed and unread. But he remained convinced that it contained ‘the real solution of the enigma of the world’ and for the rest of his life continued to work on and develop the ideas contained in it without altering them in any essential. In his last decade he experienced the beginnings of fame. Since his death he has probably had greater influence on more creative artists of the front rank than any other philosopher.
Schopenhauer saw his philosophy as the correction and completion of Kant's. Kant had held that the entire world of experience is a world of appearances only: that objects as they are in themselves, unmediated by our sensory apparatus, are inaccessible to us, and must remain permanently unknown. Schopenhauer's point of departure was the assertion that there is one vital exception to this, one physical object in the world for each man which he has direct access to, and knowledge of, from inside: his own body. This gives him the key to the inner nature of the world. For what is experienced from the outside, like any other piece of matter, through the representations of sense, is experienced from the inside as a will to live. This leads to the insight that matter as such is the embodiment of blind, irrational will to exist, of mindless force. (Schopenhauer would have taken Einstein's demonstration of the equivalence of mass and energy as triumphant corroboration of this on the scientific level.) His whole system is devoted to a many-sided consideration of this one thought: that the world, which is experienced as representation, is, in itself, Will.
Schopenhauer took over Plato's doctrine of Ideas as the permanent forms of reality underlying phenomena, but saw them as standing between the one Will and its differentiated manifestations in the world of sense; so for him they were intermediaries, not ultimates. In his view Ideas (in Plato's sense) are manifested in works of art, which is how the arts, with one exception, come to express the unchanging realities below the surface of life. But Ideas are the permanent forms behind our representations, and there is one art which is inherently non-representational: music. This is, as it were, a super-art which, without the intermediacy of Ideas at all, directly articulates ultimate reality, which is Will.
In a language intelligible with absolute directness, yet not capable of translation into that of our faculty of reason, it expresses the innermost nature of all life and existence … the composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand.
If, per impossibile, we could put what music expresses into concepts, this would be the final revelation in words of reality as it is in itself, independent of all representation, and would thus be the true philosophy.
The philosophers most notably influenced by Schopenhauer were Nietzsche and Wittgenstein; the novelists, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Proust, Mann and Hardy; the composer, above all others, Wagner, who described his having read Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in 1854 as the most important event of his life. Everything he did subsequently was influenced by it; from that point his practice as an opera composer departed from the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk in which the various arts were to combine on equal terms, and he accorded music a dominating position (see J. Stein: Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts, Detroit, 1960). For the rest of his life Wagner's prose works abounded in passages which were little more than paraphrases of Schopenhauer (usually unacknowledged). Most important of all, his next wholly new artistic venture after his reading of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Tristan und Isolde, is almost an attempt to create the operatic equivalent of that book; Schopenhauer's philosophy is assimilated at every level, not only in the role of the music and in the detailed verbal imagery of the text but in the drama itself, and the whole view of life and death which that presents.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Frankfurt, 3/1859; Eng. trans., 1958)
A. Hübscher, ed.: Sämtliche Werke (Wiesbaden, 2/1946–50)
E. Sans: Richard Wagner et la pensée schopenhauerienne (Paris, 1969)
C. Dahlhaus: ‘Das unterbrochene Hauptwerk: zu Wagners Siegfried’, Das Drama Richard Wagners als musikalisches Kunstwerk (Regensburg, 1970), 235–8
C. Dahlhaus: ‘Ernst Blochs Philosophie der Musik Wagners’, JbSIM 1972, 179–88
E. Sans: ‘Wagner, Schopenhauer et L'Anneau’, L'avant-scène opéra, no.8 (1977), 4–13 [Die Walküre issue]
M. Gregor-Dellin: ‘Schopenhauer und die Musiker nach ihm’, Schopenhauer-Jb, lxiv (1983), 51–60
B. Magee: The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford, 1983, 2/1997)
C. Dahlhaus: Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber, 1988)
BRYAN MAGEE