MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

194 music, philosophy, and modernity

Schopenhauer: music and the illusion of freedom

Nietzsche characteristically maintains inEcce Homo that ‘It is pre-

cisely tragedy which is the proof that the Greeks were not pessimists:

Schopenhauer got it wrong here, in the way he got everything wrong’

(ibid.: 2 , 1108 – 9 ). Nietzsche’s evaluations of Wagner begin with his

appropriation of Schopenhauer in the early 1870 s, when he did not

think that Schopenhauer had got everything wrong. He subsequently

rejects Schopenhauer, not least because of his thoroughgoing pes-

simism, and this goes along with his critique of Wagner. Schopenhauer

himself does not, to my knowledge, make anything of the idea of Diony-

sus. Indeed, he claims that ‘theBacchaeof Euripides is an outrageous

confection in favour of heathen priests’ (Schopenhauer 1977 : 4 , 512 ),

and generally sees Greek tragedy as inferior to Shakespeare, and mod-

ern German and French tragedy. He does, though, regard tragedy as

highly significant for his vision, for reasons closely associated with music,

and this will bring together aspects of the preceding discussion.

Schopenhauer places tragedy immediately below music, which is

the highest form in the hierarchy of the arts, that he considers to be

‘objectifications of the Will’.^20 The ‘Will’, in his particular sense, takes

the place of Kant’s ‘thing in itself’. It is, though, not inaccessible in

the way the thing in itself is, being instead manifest in pain and desire,

etc., as ‘an endless striving’ (ibid.: 1 , 218 ). The Will is, however, never

finally objectifiable, because that would contradict its essential nature.

In theBirth of TragedyNietzsche will equate the Will with Dionysus.

Like Schelling’s universe of expansive and contractive forces, Schopen-

hauer’s universe is constituted by opposition within the totality of the

Will between aspects which strive to be absolute, but are doomed not

to succeed because they can never fully realise themselves by wholly

overcoming the Other. The objectifications of the Will are an ascend-

ing series of ‘Platonic Ideas’, i.e. of timeless forms which manifest the

essence of transient empirical phenomena, from the basic forms of mat-

ter, to thinking organisms. Art manifests the essence of an object, which

is accessible only to disinterested aesthetic contemplation. This sepa-

rates the subject’s aesthetic responses from those driven by its intrinsic

sense of lack which derives from its also being itself a manifestation of

the Will. Consequently, unlike the natural sciences, which aim at an

ever-receding goal in their pursuit of chains of explanation generated

20 I will for the sake of clarity capitalise ‘Will’ when referring to Schopenhauer’s specific
doctrine.