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For Schopenhauer, as for his idealist predecessors, art is beatific. It
is the flower of life; he who is plunged in artistic contemplation
ceases to be an individual; he is the conscious subject, pure, freed
from will, from pain, and from time.
Yet in Schopenhauer's system exist elements for a better and a more
profound treatment of the problem of art. He could sometimes show
himself to be a lucid and acute analyst. For instance, he continually
remarks that the categories of space and time are not applicable to art,
_but only the general form of representation_. He might have deduced
from this that art is the most immediate, not the most lofty grade of
consciousness, since it precedes even the ordinary perceptions of space
and time. Vico had already observed that this freeing oneself from
ordinary perception, this dwelling in imagination, does not really mean
an ascent to the level of the Platonic Ideas, but, on the contrary, a
redescending to the sphere of immediate intuition, a return to
childhood.
On the other hand, Schopenhauer had begun to submit the Kantian
categories to impartial criticism, and finding the two forms of
intuition insufficient, added a third, causality.
He also drew comparisons between art and history, and was more
successful here than the idealist excogitators of a philosophy of
history. Schopenhauer rightly saw that history was irreducible to
concepts, that it is the contemplation of the individual, and therefore
not a science.
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