I'll get back to you..: 2023

6.1 Ethics and understanding

There are a number of connections that Schopenhauer explicitly (but more often inexplicitly) drew between aesthetic experience and both his ethics of compassion and salvation. In a strange but revelatory passage at the end of section 35 of Book III, Schopenhauer puts these words into the mouth of the ‘spirit of the earth’ [der Erdgeist]:

True loss is just as impossible as true gain in this world of appearance. Only the will exists: it, the thing in itself, is the source of all those appearances. Its self-knowledge and its consequent decision to affirm or to negate is the only event in itself. (WWR I, 207)

If one interprets this passage as espousing the view that the only really free choice an individual has is to affirm or negate the will to live after one has gained self-knowledge, then one can see a great ethical significance for art and aesthetic experience in its cognitive dimension in this thought, for it is only by way of aesthetic experience that one gains intuitive knowledge of the Ideas, or, in the case of music, of the nature of the will itself. Music especially involves feeling universal emotions, emotions shorn of particular context, motive or individual. In so far as we feel connected to all others on the level of feeling, then music has a direct connection with Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion, for the feeling that we are indeed not ultimately separate individuals but are rather unified in the in-itself of the world constitutes the basic intuitive knowledge at the root of the ethical attitude of compassion.

Since aesthetic experience is the only way to gain true understanding of the world and existence in all its multiplicity, this means that aesthetic experience is a necessary pre-condition for making the ethical choice as outlined in the quote above, to affirm or deny the will, the “only event in itself”. Thus the unique cognitive significance of art and aesthetic experience in general turns out to have crucial ethical importance.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer-aesthetics/