music, freedom, and metaphysics 201affecting artists, writers, and thinkers of many kinds, but particularly
musicians, from Wagner, to Mahler, to Schœnberg, and beyond. This
might seem to support Schopenhauer’s philosophical case, but it actu-
ally supports the position I have sought to advance. Schopenhauer’s
cultural impact may best be construed in terms of the music which he
influenced, most notablyTristanand the later-composed parts of the
Ring,orparts of Mahler’s symphonies. A flawed, monolithic, philosoph-
ical approach to music, which reduces music to the one significance of
being an image of the movements of the Will, helps to give rise to
the most diverse kinds of musical expression, which cannot be artic-
ulations of the monolithic philosophical claim. The underlying issue
here is again music’s relationship to freedom. Schopenhauer’s desire
to salvage a timeless metaphysics from the vortex of modern temporality
leads him to repress the aspect of freedom I have sought to derive from
Schelling. Real freedom for Schopenhauer lies in the escape from tran-
sient individuated being, hence his attachment to the idea of Nirvana.^23
Paradoxically, the important cultural effect of Schopenhauer seems to
have more to do with his role in the undermining of metaphysics, on
account of his refusal to envisage any theological redemption from
the destructive and painful nature of existence, and his concomitant
attention to the importance of art. His reminders of the universality of
suffering lead him to an interesting ethics of universal compassion for
all sensuous beings. The weakness of this ethics lies once more in his
reliance on the idea of a timeless intelligible nature supposedly shared
by all individuated, self-conscious manifestations of the Will.
The best artists who respond to negative philosophical visions like
Schopenhauer’s do not just find symbolic ways of ‘saying the same
thing’. Life does not just consist of grim, relentless destruction – though
plenty of it does – and human responses to the horrors of life in tragedy
and music are not just a repeated reminder that ‘life’s a bitch’. Why
bother to go to all that trouble, especially if the appeal of Nirvana may
itself be mere self-deception? Schelling once again offers a contrast to
Schopenhauer, thus indicating a more appropriate way of considering
how music and philosophy might interact in this respect. It is not that
Schelling paints a rosy picture of human existence. Indeed, he talks of
‘a sadness which adheres to all life’ and of a ‘veil of melancholy which23 Idonot wish here to diminish Schopenhauer’s achievement in making Eastern philos-
ophy an issue for the West, but I do wish to question the conclusions he draws from
it.