music, freedom, and metaphysics 195by the principle of sufficient reason, art has always already reached
its goal because it provides satisfaction in itself, rather than demanding
ever-renewed effort.^21 The hierarchy of aesthetic objectifications begins
with architecture, as the lowest form, which is most tied to materiality,
and eventually reaches music, which symbolically manifests the essen-
tial nature of reality. Schopenhauer connects the very notion of such
a hierarchy to music, claiming that ‘animal and plant are the descend-
ing fifth and third of man, and the inorganic real is the lower octave’
(ibid.: 1 , 205 ). The underlying reality of the Will is what leads to the
competing manifestations of the empirical world. Instances of a partic-
ular objectification will inevitably be destroyed, but the objectification
will later be manifest in new instances, as that aspect of the Will strives
to assert itself again.
Schopenhauer’s hierarchy of the arts actually shares much with
Hegel’s conception of degrees of animation of material objects byGeist.
Acommon orientation towards Platonic metaphysics and aspects of
Schelling largely explains why this is the case, despite their consider-
able differences in other respects. The basis of their differences lies
precisely in Schopenhauer’s rejection of teleology. Hegel conceives
of the absolute as the result of the progressive self-negation of every-
thing finite, so that there is no dualism of the empirical world and
the intelligible truth about the empirical world. This truth is realised
in time, even though it is timeless, timelessness only being intelligi-
ble via its opposite. Schopenhauer, in contrast, separates the meta-
physical truth of the world from the transient empirical world. He
argues that his conception of Ideas is the correct explanation of what
Kant intended with the idea of the ‘thing in itself’, which lies out-
side the temporal realm of cause and effect. The difference between
the Idea and the thing in itself is that ‘the Idea is only the imme-
diate and therefore adequate objectivity of the thing in itself, which
itself, though, is theWill, the Will insofar as it is not yet objectified,
not yet representation’ (ibid.: 1 , 227 ). Music therefore relates more
directly to the Will, because, unlike the Idea, it does not represent
anything.
Music’s proximity to tragedy can be understood via Schopenhauer’s
description of the ‘aim of this highest poetic achievement’, namely ‘the
presentation of the terrible side of life’, in which
21 This idea is first advanced by Schelling in his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism.