Art, the true work of genius, is nothing more than the communication of the knowledge of the Ideas.[1] Furthermore, genius itself is nothing but the ability to know, outside the principle of sufficient reason, the Ideas which make up the particular things given to the realm of representational knowledge.[2] Firstly, we will take as our point of departure the special status of the Idea, which points toward, or opens a third way between the will and representational knowing. The way of Schopenhauer’s Ideas are a turning point in his philosophy, that is to say, they are essential to the development of his critique of science and reason as ways of engaging with the world, and allow him to insert art as a better way of knowing. Without the Ideas Schopenhauer’s account would remain solely within the knowledge of causal realm as such; we would have no sense, or access to the notion of permanence, everything being relative, or relational, in the realm of change. It is through aesthetic perception that the subject can come to know the permanent unchangeable Ideas, which give access to what Schopenhauer calls “better knowledge.” The genius, the gaze of a knowing perception, however, grants access to this realm of permanence, in a kind of absolute passivity of the pure subject of knowing. Better knowledge consists in knowledge of the ideas, knowledge of the permanent behind the veil, knowledge of the light, which casts a shadow, the reality behind the curtain. Or perhaps, this better knowledge consists in knowing, through the Ideas that there is no reality behind the curtain.
Schopenhauer’s use of the Ideas is without doubt a messy affair—that is to say that the ‘inner agreement’ which Schopenhauer claims to have made manifest between Kant and Plato, is tenuous at best—this does not diminish their philosophical importance.[3] The Ideas enjoy a special status, that is to say they are objectifications of the will at a low grade, however, they are objectifications, which remain outside of the realm of appearances as such. We cannot access the Ideas through recourse to etiology, the study of causes in nature, the study of connections between things,[4] for the ideas are not subject to the principle of sufficient reason, and are therefore outside of the causal matters of space and time. It is therefore the case that the Ideas do not change, they are not of the order of changeable things, rather, they are the unchangeable essence of all changeable things. That is not to say that the Ideas are something substantial, rather they are archetypes for the order of change.
…The Platonic Idea is necessarily object, something known, a representation, and precisely, but only, in this respect is it different from the thing-in-itself. It has laid aside merely the subordinate forms of the phenomenon, all of which we include under the principle of sufficient reason; or rather it has not yet entered into them.[5]
The Ideas are a special type of representation[6] in the sense that they are something knowable, hence they are necessarily an object for a subject, however, at the same time they remain prior to the principle of sufficient reason into which they are eventually subsumed as matters in a causal world. Schopenhauer makes the even stronger claim that: “…it alone is the most adequate objectivity possible of the will, or of the thing-in-itself; indeed it is even the whole thing-in-itself, only under the form of the representation.”[7] The Ideas, Therefore, hover somewhere between the invisible world of the will in-itself, and their articulation into the world of representations as matters in the realm of causal affairs.
We must pose the question of how it is that we come to know these Ideas, which have their own special way of being. If the Ideas are the most ‘adequate’ objectification of the will then it seems to follow that if we have access to the ideas themselves we would most closely approximate the truth of the will as such. Better knowledge, in this case, would appear to be a kind of knowledge able to take stock of the Ideas themselves, before bringing them into contact with the principle of sufficient reason. This kind of knowledge remains an exception, the work of genius, which, as we claimed earlier, is the capacity to know outside the principle of sufficient reason. Even further, genius is the ability to apprehend the universal, the ideational content, of the Idea from the broken particularity of its appearance. The Ideas are encountered, or uncovered through, a particular engagement with the world; a situation far different from the Kantian concept, which is totally constituted by the existing subject. This capacity to know, or encounter the Ideas through a particular intuition requires the suspension of the subject’s particularity, of that which individuates the subject as such.[8]
In other words genius is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world; and this not merely for moments, but with the necessary continuity and conscious thought to enable us to repeat by deliberate art what has been apprehended…[9]
The true genius resides in the capacity to uncover the objective underneath the appearance.
The gaze which encounters the Ideas in the world, is an aesthetic seeing; a seeing which is at the same time a knowing. It is a gaze, which recognizes its distance from the appearances, from the representational content of seeing as such. It is an enlightened gaze which presents every particular appearance in the world as a mask, or an illusion behind which the invisible resides with equal force. Better knowledge is the result of the aesthetic gaze, which recognizes the futility of its own particular will which can never be satisfied:
All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering…
Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.[10]
Better knowledge is informed by the lack, by the vacuity of appearances, by the veil Maya pulled over the eyes. As such the aesthetic gaze peers beyond the appearance, without interest in the affects they case, toward the objective Ideas, which lie beyond it. Informed by the aesthetic gaze we are, as it were presented with a choice, either we go along with the illusion, even though we know it to be illusion, or we attempt to moderate our own will and achieve a kind of stoic distance.
While the Ideas are presented in a somewhat misguided fashion, they are an essential component in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Schopenhauer attempts to make being emerge from non-being, by making his Ideas representational, in the sense that they are objects for a subject, but at the same time prior to the realm of representations in general.
Without the Ideas there would be no way beyond the veil of Maya, no way outside of the absolute relativity of the realm of non-being.
[1] Arthur Schopenhauer. The World As Will and Representation, trans E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. pp. 184-185.
[2] Ibid., pp. 194.
[3] Schopenhauer. The World As Will and Representation. pp. 174.
[4] Ibid., pp. 177.
[5] Ibid., pp. 175.
[6] Ibid., pp. 175.
[7] Schopenhauer. The World As Will and Representation. pp. 175.
[8] It seems noteworthy to point out that the body itself individuates the subject and is therefore that which makes the encounter necessary, for as Schopenhauer himself states: “Consequently, our world would be a nunc stans, if we were not, as subject of knowledge, at the same time individuals, in other words, if our perception did not come about through the medium of the body, from whose affections it starts.” Ibid., pp. 175.
[9] Schopenhauer. The World As Will and Representation. pp. 186
[10] Ibid., pp. 196.
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