196 music, philosophy, and modernity
the nameless pain, the misery of humankind, the triumph of evil, the
mocking domination of coincidence and the hopeless fall of the just and
the innocent are presented to us: for in this lies a significant indication
about the nature of the world and of existence. It is the conflict of the
Will with itself that here, at the highest stage of its objectification, most
completely unfolded, emerges in a terrible manner.
(ibid.: 1 , 318 )Tragedy is closest to music, but still lacks what makes music philosophi-
cally decisive: ‘Music is not at all, like the other arts, the image (‘Abbild’)
of the Ideas, but theimage of the Will itself, whose objectifications are the
Ideas: that is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and pen-
etrating than that of the other arts: for these speak only of the shadow,
music of the essence itself’ (ibid.: 1 , 324 ).
A particular consequence which Schopenhauer draws from tragedy
is crucial to the interpretation of tragedy in relation to music. Because
the Will is the metaphysical ground of everything in the world of rep-
resentation, not least of the conflicting individuals in a tragedy them-
selves, the conflicts in tragedy are simply conflicts between differing
parts of the same whole. The tragic characters therefore attain their
highest insight when they give up their transient, Will-driven motiva-
tions and realise that these, like themselves as individuated parts of the
causal world, are mere appearances of a reality which dissolves all con-
ceptual differences, and which can ultimately only be understood via
affective differences. This new insight into the real essence of things
‘brings about resignation, the renunciation, not just of life but of the
whole will to life itself’ (ibid.: 319 ), so that ‘at the moment of tragic
catastrophe the conviction becomes clearer than ever to us that life is a
burdensome dream from which we have to awaken’ (ibid.: 4 , 511 ). The
aesthetic pleasure occasioned by the presentation of these things in the
tragic catastrophe therefore lies in their being a means for bringing the
spectators to turn away from the ‘will to life’.
Although tragedy points beyond the illusions of the world of repre-
sentation, it is still tied to representation. In music, on the other hand,
All possible strivings, excitations and expressions of the Will, all those
occurrences in the interior of people which reason throws into the broad,
negative category of feeling can be expressed by the infinitely many possi-
ble melodies, but always in the universality of mere form, without matter,
always only according to the in itself, not according to appearance, [it is]
as it were, the innermost soul of the appearance, without the body.
(ibid.: 1 , 329 )