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This essay explores Schopenhauer's relationship to Kant, and stresses the extent to which the great pessimist's aesthetic philosophy relies on Kant's metaphysics even more than it does on Kant's aesthetics. It highlights the breadth of Schopenhauer's vision of the role of art and of the liberating aesthetic experiences it makes possible. It addresses the puzzle of how the art of music — which according to Schopenhauer presents us with blind, ceaseless, and hateful willing in its most unvarnished form — can yet provide aesthetic experience of the highest order, justifying Schopenhauer's according to music the foremost position among the arts.

This chapter examines the most intense philosophical controversies of the late nineteenth century: the Pessimismusstreit. According to some contemporary accounts, pessimism quickly overshadowed materialism as the most pressing and important issue of the age. Pessimism swiftly became the talk of the town, the subject of literary salons, and even the object of satire. The pessimism controversy had two main phases. The first phase arose in the 1860s with Schopenhauer's rise to fame, when many articles, pamphlets, and books were published attacking his pessimism. The second phase began in 1870 in reaction against Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten, which had reaffirmed but qualified Schopenhauer's pessimism.

This chapter discusses the “identity crisis” suffered by philosophers beginning in the 1840s, the decade after Hegel's death. They could no longer define their discipline in the traditional terms widely accepted in the first decades of the nineteenth century. So they began to ask themselves some very hard questions. What is philosophy? What is its purpose? And how does it differ from the empirical sciences? The remainder of the chapter covers the sources of the crisis, Trendelenburg's philosophia perennis, philosophy as critique, Schopenhauer's revival of metaphysics, the rise and fall of the neo-Kantian ideal, Eduard von Hartmann's metaphysics of the sciences, and Wilhelm Dilthey's conception of philosophy as a worldview.

This chapter examines Friedrich Nietzsche's early writings. It argues that his later views regarding the perspectival yet objective character of our knowledge were present in an embryonic form in his early thought, but these views struggled to emerge in the midst of his early immersion in the philosophical frameworks of both Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. It explains that in his 1873 On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche remained trapped within the appearance/reality distinction though he already had the conceptual resources to overcome it in his 1872 The Birth of Tragedy.

To consider hope as a virtue is a response, in part, to philosophical traditions that portray hope as something less; as either a mere emotion or even as a vice. This chapter argues that hope is a virtue not out of any devotion to Paul or Thomas Aquinas but out of a sense that early modern philosophy offered far too paltry an analysis of hope. It explores the ambivalence towards, indeed, at times the animus against hope in classical and Hellenistic culture. It looks at the status of hope in Attic poetry and tragedy and then at the philosophical traditions of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The philosophers do not have a great deal to say about hope but what little they say is fascinating and often disparaging. There is a huge gulf between the biblical valorization of hope and the Greco-Roman ambivalence towards and, at times, outright denigration of it. This chapter also examines the views of Benedict Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche on hope.

In her book, Marcel Proust: Théories pour une esthétique, Anne Henry places Proust in the context of the whole tradition of 19th-century German idealist aesthetics and its French adherents. This chapter argues that the novel itself goes beyond the explicit philosophical statements contained within it, although this movement away from received philosophical ideas is also at the same time a movement in Friedrich Nietzsche's direction. Henry herself later surreptitiously fills in what she had earlier analysed as a theoretical ‘confusion’ or aporia in Arthur Schopenhauer with the Nietzschean concept of the ‘eternal return’. This chapter shows that the complicated temporality of involuntary memory does indeed map the eternal return. Aside from Henry, the works of Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze comparing Nietzsche and Proust are examined.

This chapter discusses Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer, two individuals (a writer and philosopher, respectively) whom Joyce was deeply attached to. It looks at one of Wagner's works, Tristan und Isolde, which figures in the composition of Exiles. The story features the consequences of an adulterous love that found fertile ground. The discussion then looks at the connection of the works of Wagner and Schopenhauer to that of “A Painful Case.”

This essay discusses the various conceptions of freedom to be found in Kant's texts, analyzes the connection between them and Kant's moral theory and epistemology, explores the contrast between the empirical and the intelligible character of the will, and examines Kant's controversial views on the relation between freedom and causal determinism. In addition, it frames Kant's account of free will historically in relation to the views of his immediate predecessors, who exerted the most influence on him, and his idealistic successors, who strongly criticized him but were greatly influenced by his views. The former group includes Leibniz, Wolff and Crusius, and the latter Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.

Chapter 3, “Schopenhauer’s Musical Ecology,” takes its inspiration from the philosopher’s comparison of the registers of polyphonic musical textures (soprano, alto, tenor, and bass) to the “grades” of earthly existence (human, animal, vegetal, and mineral). Despite his reputation as a metaphysician, Schopenhauer thinks across and beyond conventional distinctions between humans and nonhumans (including nonliving matter). Schopenhauer’s recognition of the relatedness of all beings and the presence of multiple grades of “will” in human bodies makes his philosophy well worth revisiting at a time of burgeoning interest in vital materialism and the so-called nonhuman turn. By reading the aesthetic principles of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation against the metaphysical grain, so to speak, the chapter demonstrates that his remarks on music clearly delineate the art’s physical impact on listening bodies. The chapter shows that combining Schopenhauer’s ecological conception of music with his multilayered notion of the body generates a surprisingly pluralistic account of musical experience whose scope includes material, organic, and psychic facets of existence. The chapter closes by reflecting on the promising and problematic nature of Schopenhauerian transcendence in an era marked by global warming.

This chapter reports the biography of Arthur Schopenhauer and explores his particular thoughts on musical philosophy. Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788. With his philosophy in general, and more specifically with his philosophy of art, Schopenhauer has probably exercised a greater effect on artists and musicians than any other thinker or writer. His reflections on music were contributions that either focused on the metaphysical significance of the art form or made factual and normative statements about the factors and forms of musical composition. Schopenhauer's theory of redemption through art and of music's closeness to metaphysical origins was warmly received by Europe's cultivated bourgeoisie.

This chapter argues that the pessimistic doctrine that Schopenhauer does espouse is that (a) there is a preponderance of undeserved suffering in the world; (b) this is an extremely bad-making feature of existence that is not outweighed by any good-making features; and (c) this situation cannot get substantially better in time. The metaphysical and empirical reasons he adduces to support this pessimistic doctrine are then investigated. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the grounds for his pessimism are weak and become weaker as his philosophy develops in light of proto-Darwinian thought from 1818 to 1859. Two facets of this development are especially salient: First, Schopenhauer comes to rely less on the Platonic Ideas to explain the fixity of species and instead embraces proto-Darwinian evolutionary theory. This change has important ramifications for Schopenhauer’s system that he never works out. One of these is that from within Schopenhauer’s mature system, there emerge some grounds for hope that the human (and even non-human animal) condition can get significantly better. Second, Schopenhauer emphasizes more in his later work (WWR II) the hermeneutic nature of his metaphysics. Given the sort of metaphysical methodology he embraces, the identification of thing-in-itself with will cannot be used in a foundationalist manner, by the lights of his own theorizing, to support pessimism by demonstrating that the world cannot get substantially better. His hermeneutic metaphysics must always be responsive to the empirical evidence, and there may be actual evidence of progress.

That James Joyce maintained an interest in the famous philosopher of pessimism and religious atheist, Arthur Schopenhauer, is clear from Schopenhauer's appearance in Finnegans Wake, in one of the funniest open references amid a string of allusions to German romantic thinkers. Even in Ulysses, things no longer are as easy and straightforward for assessing what is streaming in a character's mind as when earlier we had our first encounter with Stephen in the A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This chapter constructs a persuasive and scrupulously argued riposte to the view that Joyce is a materialist and empiricist. It reveals the tangled interweave of philosophical references in “Proteus” and tracks the presence of Schopenhauer's account of the artist as a creator and mediator of ultimate truths in particular. In this account, Joyce emerges as an eclectic thinker who creates an independent aesthetic but nonetheless retains many of the key tenets of idealism and even of theosophy and cabalism.

According to Wagner’s autobiography entitled Mein Leben, Wagner made an effort to educate himself with concepts of philosophy because earlier, he took interest in this subject. This interest became evident in some of Wagner’s music dramas, which also includes the Ring. Although there were three philosophers who have greatly influenced his life, it was Friedrich Nietzsche with whom Wagner was able to form a personal relationship with. However, there is hardly enough evidence to prove that Nietzsche had any formative influence on Wagner. This chapter illustrates how the other two philosophers, Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer, despite how they had not known Wagner personally, have influenced Wagner through their writings about social and cultural change and a critique of religious and philosophical traditions. While Feuerbach had a more positive outlook on secular humanism, Schopenhauer took a more pessimistic approach on various matters.

The performative aspects of Zurich Dada (without which the inaugural formation would surely have passed unnoticed in the middle of the First World War) constitute the central interest of chapter 2 – the body, masks, puppets, dance, starting with what can be described from the few visual renderings that we have of the Cabaret Voltaire. With the masked face that dominates Marcel Janco’s painting Cabaret Voltaire, the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas is introduced in discussion of the face and its masking in relation to theoretical readings of otherness. The performative dimension of Dada activities allows deliberation of a philosophical fundament for the centrality of the body and of its surmounting face in cabaret fare – debated through Schopenhauer on will, with detours to more recent instances in the YBAs or in American Psycho. The masks of Marcel Janco, the contorting body of Emmy Hennings and the Dada dancers all deposit cultural leads that are here given contemporary continuity in their recontextualisation.

This chapter points to the limitations of the prevailing aesthetic theories, and argues that the sonic arts require an alternative, materialist theory. Drawing from the sonic metaphysics of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and developing this metaphysics via the notion of intensity developed by Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda, the chapter sketches this materialist alternative and introduces the notion of the sonic flux: an immemorial flow of sound that precedes and exceeds human contributions. It shows how sonic materialism undermines an ontology of objects and substitutes an ontology of flows, events, and effects—features central to the work of sound artists such as Maryanne Amacher and Chris Kubick & Anne Walsh. The chapter goes on to argue that this materialist account is not only relevant to the sonic arts but also provides an alternative model for conceiving artistic production and reception in general.

This chapter discusses the presence of four Continental writers who were themselves imaginatively engaged in “theologicophilological” questions. These indicate the presence of Arthur Schopenhauer both in Mr. Duffy's mind and in that of the implied narrator in “A Painful Case”. Two of these writers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gerhart Hauptmann, are discussed in this chapter, along with Schopenhauer's progeny.

This chapter focuses on philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's influence on the music of Tristan and Isolde. Wagner discovered the philosophy of Schopenhauer while conceiving the drama of Tristan and Isolde. Both composer and philosopher had been deeply influenced by Kantian metaphysics; both were drawn to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism; and both were pessimists who saw renunciation as the highest human goal. Schopenhauer was the only disciple of Kant to develop a halfway believable philosophy of music, and his theories had a profound impact on Wagner, whose reading of Schopenhauer fostered his conception of a drama that would unfold entirely through the inner feelings of the characters. These feelings, hinted at in words, would acquire their full reality and elaboration in music.

This chapter describes Richard Strauss’s brief flirtation with Wagnerism, and the role his reception of Wagnerian theories of sex played in shaping the trajectory of his own opera composition. Strauss started as a rabid anti-Wagnerian, but was converted to the cause around the same time as he began composing his first opera, Guntram. Guntram plays off Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of sex against Wagner’s, revealing fundamental incompatibilities, and pointing towards Strauss’s own attempts at overcoming the formal and erotic problems posed by Wagner’s oeuvre.

This chapter considers the Indian sources of Arthur Schopenhauer’s knowledge of Buddhist ideas. It begins with a discussion of Schopenhauer’s earliest contacts with Buddhism through the ethnography lectures of Arnold Heeren at Göttingen and works such as the Das Asiatische Magazin and F. Buchanan’s essay “On the Religion and Literature of the Burmas.” It then examines three major studies that describe forms of Buddhism belonging to East Asia, thus essentially giving Schopenhauer a view of Mahāyāna Buddhism: Jean-Pierre Abel Rémusat’s Mélanges Asiatiques, an essay on Buddhism in China by the French scholar M. A. Le Roux Deshauterayes, and I. J. Schmidt’s History of the East-Mongolians. The chapter also explores Schopenhauer’s personal attitude to Buddhism and the question of whether he, in his later life, may be regarded as a Buddhist.