In Person Event: Schopenhauer on Art as Transcendental Disclosure

(Note this is an in person event. [An online event is posted here.](https://www.meetup.com/philadelphia-philosophy-meetup/events/316307904/)) The complicated relationship between philosophy and the arts begins with Plato, a literary genius who was suspicious of art as a potential siren song, but who nonetheless found an important role for beauty in his conception of the philosophical life. Last month we explored both Plato's celebration of beauty and his suspicion of poetry. Now it turns out that there is a major philosopher whose work is in direct dialogue with that of Plato's, that nonetheless comes to the opposite conclusion about the arts. Where Plato despaired of Art's ability to communicate anything about ultimate reality, given its preoccupation with particulars and appearances, the strange and irascible Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the most influential of 19th century German philosophers, celebrated the arts and especially music as both providing us knowledge of universals, and as forms of disclosure of the ultimate nature of reality. Born the son of a wealthy merchant, Schopenhauer’s iconoclastic and morose temperament never easily integrated with academic life, nor did his contempt for the ascendant star of Hegel, and like Kierkegaard, he was able to write by living relatively simply on the proceeds of an inheritance. Inspired both by Kant, and by works of Hiindu and buddhist philosophy, Schopenhauer developed a metaphysics In which Kant's conception of the world as we know it as being partially constructed by the structures of the human mind, was united with the suggestions found in Hindu philosophy that the world as we know it is a sort of mirage concealing the reality of a single kind of substance, the nature of which is clouded by our physical lusts and desires. Schopenhauer identified this substance, which can only be intuited and not directly represented, with an irrational striving and forceful energy that he identified as the will. The tragedy of existence is that this striving is essentially doomed to dissatisfaction since all the objects that it can pursue are actually self-generated manifestations of itself and are likewise striving towards nothing in particular, are blind striving and effort itself. The result is that we are doomed to dissatisfaction and even to war with others, as long as we imagine that our desires can be satisfied. To recognize this, and to realize the futility of desire, is the highest ethical realization available for human beings. One of the prime means of temporary liberation from the suffering of existence is to be found in art. For Schopenhauer argues that art, and it's disinterested contemplation of the structure of existence, liberates us from our individuality and our endless desires and allows us to experience a contemplative state where we experience reality and its structure, thus ultimately the will and its patterns of manifestation, without desire. It is this structure of reality that Schopenhauer associates with Platonic forms and making contemplative contact with such forms and their unfolding constitutes the essence of aesthetic contemplation This peculiar kind of perception which allows us to be liberated from a futile world of violence, struggle and suffering, finds its culmination in music, which Schopenhauer claims to be the most perfect expression of the reality of the will, and therefore the symbolic means of communication of the deepest truths of existence. And it is this peculiar emotionally charged vision of art as as a vehicle of metaphysical transcendence and truth, and this peculiarly bleak vision of a universe that is a manifestation of a desolate and futile kind of restless energy that would have a profound influence on future 19th century Culture, from the works of Nietzsche and Wagner, to Leo Tolstoy, to modern culture critics, the early Wittgenstein, and the early existentialists and nihilists. In this Meetup, we wish to explore this vision of…