Schopenhauer takes much trouble to differentiate his ideas from
intellectual concepts. He calls the idea "unity which has become
plurality by means of space and time. It is the form of our intuitive
apperception. The concept is, on the contrary, unity extracted from
plurality by means of abstraction, which is an act of our intellect. The
concept may be called _unitas post rem_, the idea _unitas ante rem_."
The origin of this psychological illusion of the ideas or types of
things is always to be found in the changing of the empirical
classifications created for their own purposes by the natural sciences,
into living realities.
Thus each art has for its sphere a special category of ideas.
Architecture and its derivatives, gardening (and strange to say
landscape-painting is included with it), sculpture and animal-painting,
historical painting and the higher forms of sculpture, etc., all possess
their special ideas. Poetry's chief object is man as idea. Music, on the
contrary, does not belong to the hierarchy of the other arts. Schelling
had looked upon music as expressing the rhythm of the universe itself.
For Schopenhauer, music does not express ideas, but the _Will itself_.
The analogies between music and the world, between fundamental notes and
crude matter, between the scale and the scale of species, between melody
and conscious will, lead Schopenhauer to the conclusion that music is
not only an arithmetic, as it appeared to Leibnitz, but indeed a
metaphysic: "the occult metaphysical exercise of a soul not knowing that
it philosophizes.
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