Julian Young

Willing and unwilling : a study in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer

I Idealism.- II Reason.- III Metaphysics.- IV The Limits of Natural Science.- V The Individual Will.- VI The World as Will.- VII Art.- VIII The Metaphysics of Morals.- XI The Denial of the Will.- X Pessimism.- Notes.

Heidegger’s Heimat

Nietzsche calls the philosopher the ‘physician of culture’. Heidegger implies something similar when he points out that philosophy of art only began (with Plato) when art (and so life) began to decline.1 Both are making the point that it is the task of authentic philosophy to respond to the needs of the times. The condition Heidegger responds to, it seems to me, is first and foremost the loss of place in the age of modern technology: place not in the sense, merely, of a bounded region of space but in the sense of dwelling- place; Heimat or ‘homeland’. Homeland, says Heidegger, that which is ‘near’ to us. Yet nearness implies farness, fails to appear if ‘remoteness ... remains absent’. In the age of jet travel, television, the internet and the cell- phone, however, everything is being reduced to a ‘uniform distanceless- ness’2 in which nothing is ‘remote’, and so nothing ‘near’, and so nothing a dwelling-place.

Richard Wagner and the Birth of The Birth of Tragedy

Abstract Nietzsche writes that the ‘real task’ of The Birth of Tragedy is to ‘solve the puzzle of Wagner’s relation to Greek tragedy’. The ‘puzzle’, I suggest, is the intermingling in his art and writings of earlier socialist optimism with later Schopenhauerian pessimism. According to the former the function of the ‘rebirth of Greek tragedy’ in the ‘collective artwork’ is to ‘collect’, and so create, community. According to the second the function of the artwork is to intimate a realm ‘beyond’ this world of pain and death. The audacity of The Birth is that it attempts to show that Wagner can have his cake and eat it: the ‘Dionysian’, musical, element provides a ‘metaphysical comfort’, while the ‘Apollonian’, verbal, element draws a ‘veil of oblivion’ over the metaphysical, thereby allowing the artwork to solidify community. Contrary to the standard Anglophone view, this perspective on The Birth shows that Nietzsche’s intimate association with Wagner during the period of its creation lies at the heart of its philosophical content.

The World as Will

In the previous chapter we saw it argued that in one’s own case, at least, forces, those which manifest themselves in one’s voluntary behaviour, are to be identified with will. And in the chapter before that we saw that whatever can be discovered about forces is to be accounted a discovery about the metaphysical reality underlying the world-representation constructed by commonsense and natural science between them. So we initiated, in the last chapter, the process of bringing to light the metaphysical character of nature. In this chapter I shall be concerned with Schopenhauer’s completion of the process; with his claim that in its “inner”, metaphysical being, the character of every natural phenomenon is “homogeneous” (WR I p.105) with one’s own, so that it is not just one’s own metaphysical nature, but the metaphysical nature of everything else too, that is will.