Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime

by Bart Vandenabeele

Much has been written on the relationship between Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Much remains to be said, however, concerning their respective theories of the sublime. First, I shall argue against the traditional, dialectical view of Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime that stresses the crucial role the sublime plays in bridging the wide gap between aesthetics and ethics. Although this traditional interpretation is definitely influenced by Nietzsche, I do not maintain it is exclusively Nietzschean as such. Second, I would like to offer some points of contention concerning their accounts of the feeling of the sublime. I will try and show that, although Nietzsche's account of the Apollonian and the Dionysian is highly influenced by Schopenhauer's analysis of the sublime feeling, his analysis of Dionysian intoxication cannot be taken to simply develop out of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Moreover, by way of (a not so innocent) example, it is shown that Nietzsche's philosophy of music — although highly influenced by Schopenhauer's — cannot as easily be reconciled with Schopenhauer'stheory as is commonly believed, due to their differing accounts of the nature of the feeling of the sublime.

Schopenhauer on the Feeling of the Sublime:
Pleasure and Pain
When one tries to describe the exact relationship between the aesthetic feelings of the beautiful and the sublime in the philosophy of "Nietzsche's educator," many interpretation problems arise. 2 The main problem can be compared to a similar issue in Kant: if one agrees with Kant that the theory of the sublime is "a mere appendix to our aesthetic judging," then it is possible to restrict the Kantian critique of the aesthetic appreciation to the Analytic of the judgment of taste 2 — that is, if one neglects the subtle displacements and gaps in Kant's text. In this way, as one can read in its introduction, the [End Page 90] Critique of Judgement serves as the sought-after "bridge" between the theoretical and the practical, spanning the gulf previously created between the knowledge of objects according to the conditions of possible experience and the realization of freedom under the unconditional of moral law. Moreover, if one notices that Schopenhauer too, in his aesthetics, stresses the fact that "in the main" the feeling of the sublime "is identical with the feeling of the beautiful" and "is distinguished from that of the beautiful only by the addition, namely the exaltation beyond the known hostile relation of the contemplated object to the will in general,then the option for a similar unifying and pacifying reading seems evident. 3 I shall argue that things are far more complicated and that such a "dialectical" interpretation is far from evident.

In the appendix to his The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer had stressed — long before Jean-François Lyotard — the enormous importance of Kant's analysis of the sublime, when he wrote that "the theory of the sublime" is "by far the most excellent thing in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" (WWR, I, 532). That theory, Schopenhauer says, is even "incomparably more successful than that of the beautiful" and "gives not only, as that does, the general method of investigation, but also a part of the right way to it, so much so that, although it does not provide the real solution to the problem, it nevertheless touches on it very closely" (WWR, I, 532).

According to Schopenhauer, the main difference between the sublime and the beautiful is that, while in the case of the latter,

pure knowledge has gained the upper hand without a struggle...and not even a recollection of the will remains [with the sublime] that state of pure knowing is obtained first of all by a conscious and violent tearing away from the relations of the same object to the will which are recognized as unfavorable, by a free exaltation, accompanied by consciousness, beyond the will and the knowledge related to it (WWR, I, 202).
The objects can be hostile to the human will in general, the body, in two different ways: by their immensity or by their threatening power. Schopenhauer thus retains Kant's distinction between the mathematically and the dynamically sublime.

At first sight, the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime seems to be reduced to a passive, will-less and serene contemplation and a troublesome, violent, and conscious elevation beyond that which threatens the will, respectively. The will-lessness and disinterestedness, two typical characteristics of the Schopenhauerian aesthetic spectator, seem to be absent from his account on the feeling of the sublime: Schopenhauer stresses the activity of the aesthetic subject in the sublime, that tears itself violently away from the relations of the object to the own will "by a free exaltation," which "must not only be won by consciousness, but also be maintained." 4

The question is, "How can such a conscious elevation take place, if it is [End Page 91] an elevation beyond the will? In what way can something that threatens or scares the will become the object of aesthetic contemplation, if one agrees with Schopenhauer that only the will can urge an organism to act, think, or perceive? Even "in all abstract employment of the mind the will is also the ruler. According to its intentions, the will imparts direction to the employment of the mind, and also fixes the attention" (WWR, II, 369). This problem is less pressing in the context of the beautiful: the feeling of the beautiful is rather passive and poised and happens on the basis of the Entgegenkommen of the objects, which transform the willing subject without any resistance or struggle into a pure, will-less subject:

The change in the subject required for this, just because it consists in the elimination of all willing, cannot proceed from the will....On the contrary, it springs only from a temporary preponderance of the intellect over the will, or, physiologically considered, from a strong excitation of the brain's perceptive activity, without any excitement of inclinations or emotions" (WWR, II, 367).
In the sublime, a purposive [absichtlich] turning away from what threatens the will, takes place. The feeling of the sublime emerges through the contrast of the meaninglessness and dependence of us as a willing subject and the consciousness of ourselves as a pure subject of knowing. The importance of the spontaneous and free activity of the intellect can hardly be overestimated. As Paul Guyer rightly remarks, the question remains how this activity can be explained in terms of Schopenhauer's own philosophical system — that one actively wills to free oneself from his or her own will is, to say the least, rather paradoxical:

Yet it seems difficult to understand such decisive mental acts except as at least in part products of the individual will. Thus there seems to be an air of paradox about Schopenhauer's account. It is not mere contemplation, which passively frees us from our will; rather we actively will to contemplate in order to free ourselves from our will. Not that there is actually a logical contradiction in such an idea — one could, after all, inflict a great pain upon oneself now in order to be free of all pain later, or freely choose to enslave oneself now and thus loose all freedom later — but there does seem to be something unsettling about it. 5
Schopenhauer suggests, however, that there is a kind of purposiveness that is not produced by the will. He speaks of an aesthetic self, which is spontaneously and purposively operative in aesthetic reflection. Outside the context of aesthetics, the self and the will were put on one and the same level. On the basis of his postulate of the aesthetic will-lessness and the identification of the purposiveness with will, the acceptance of an aesthetic, hence will-less purposiveness [Absichtlichkeit] seems to be a contradictio in adiecto. 6 Still, Schopenhauer talks more than once about aesthetic knowledge [End Page 92] that is "operative without purpose, hence will-less" and he contends that aesthetic knowledge is connected with "pure intelligence, without aims and purposes." 7

Compared with the many remarks about an aesthetic will-lessness and "aimlessness," the suggestions for an aesthetic Absichtlichkeit in the feeling of the sublime are rather marginal. The conception that the "will-free activity of the intellect" is the condition for a pure objectivity is still irreconcilable with the requirement that the intellect turns itself away from the will and "emancipates itself from that service in order to be active on its own account" by being "detached from its root, the will, by its being free to move and being nevertheless active with the highest degree of energy" and "forgetful of its own origin, is freely active from its own force and elasticity" (WWR, II, 386, 384, 388). How should one understand this autonomous elasticity within the framework of Schopenhauer's theory of the dependence, and even submissiveness, of the intellect to the will? (WWR, I, 290; II, 199-202, 214, 225). Aesthetic contemplation is founded on the unconscious activity of the will, but this coincides with a specific form of self-consciousness, which warns the Gemüt of the aesthetic character of the experienced state of consciousness.

How can Schopenhauer distinguish qualitatively between the beautiful and the sublime? This question has become more urgent due to the just signaled problems concerning the freedom of the intellect and the aesthetic self. Despite all his remarks on the dynamics and the violence with which the sublime feeling is necessarily connected, a number of excerpts state that the aesthetic subject in the sublime "may quietly contemplate, as pure, will-less subject of knowing, those very objects so terrible to the will" (WWR, I, 202, 209). He may comprehend only their Idea that is foreign to all relation, gladly linger over its contemplation, and consequently be elevated precisely in this way above himself, his person, his willing, and all willing" (WWR, I, 201). The eventual result — the serene contemplation of the Platonic Idea — appears to be identical in the beautiful and the sublime. This hampers a well-founded distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. 8 In the case of the sublime, the violent elevation above that which threatens the will and its interests shall eventually result — as in the beautiful — in the quiet contemplation of that which can be joyfully apprehended despite its hostile and perilous character.

This interpretation is dialectical (in the Hegelian, not in the Kantian sense): what scares and threatens the will can be contemplated aesthetically on a higher level (so more intensely), by neutralizing the negative affects and elevating oneself above them [Erhebung]. What results is a kind of disassociation or depersonalization. Although the subject has an experience of fear or even of terror it is not an emotion he or she regards as belonging to him or herself. 9 Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime testifies to what Hans [End Page 93] Blumenberg calls "transcendental pride": 10 one enjoys his or her own independence, one finds pleasure in the fact that something that would destroy someone as a willing individual would not even appear if it were not represented by the pure subject of knowing. Moreover, the difference between the beautiful and the sublime is often based on specific characteristics of the object. In the case of the beautiful, an object invites us to become an object of an aesthetic appreciation, whereas in the sublime the object becomes an obstacle through its unfavorable, hostile relations with the will of the subject. Schopenhauer wants to postpone a clear and straightforward definition of the aesthetic feelings.

The larger part of § 39 in The World as Will and Representation is devoted to concrete situations in which the transitions [Übergänge] from the beautiful to the sublime are sketched. With much feeling for drama, Schopenhauer sketches the gradual transitions from the beautiful to the feeble forms of the sublime and, eventually, the stronger examples of the feeling of the sublime.

"Now of in the depth of winter, when the whole of nature is frozen and stiff, we see the rays of the setting sun reflected by masses of stone, where they illuminate without warming, and are thus favorable only to the purest kind of knowledge, not to the will, then contemplation of the beautiful effect of light on these masses moves us into the state of pure knowing, as all beauty does. Yet here, through the faint recollection of the lack of warmth from those rays, in other words, of the absence of the principle of life, a certain transcending of the interest of the will is required....precisely in this way we have a transition from the feeling of the beautiful to that of the sublime. It is the faintest trace of the sublime in the beautiful [der schwächste Anhauch des Erhabenen am Schönen]" (WWR, I, 203).
A very lonely and silent region, under a perfectly cloudless sky, without animals or human beings is "as it were a summons to seriousness, to contemplation, with complete emancipation from all willing and its cravings; but it is just this that gives to such a scene of mere solitude and profound peace a touch of the sublime [einen Anstrich des Erhabenen]" (WWR, I, 203).

But "let us imagine such a region denuded of plants and showing only bare rocks; the will is at once filled with alarm through the total absence of that which is organic and necessary for our subsistence. The desert takes on a fearful character; our mood becomes tragic" (WWR, I, 204). As it demands more effort to raise oneself above the interests of the own will, the feeling of the sublime appears more intensely. Schopenhauer is often closer to Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime, than to Kant's. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke connects the sublime feeling with "anguish," "terror," and "privation." 11 In the above-quoted example, a feeling of silence and emptiness is evoked, which fills the willing individual with terror. Terror is, as Lyotard rightly remarks, closely related to privation. 12 The feeling of the sublime originates in deep terror or [End Page 94] desolation, which is always what Burke calls a violent emotion. The sublime feeling is delight and not pleasure: it is "pleasure, which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain." 13 The sublime delight is negative pleasure, "the sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger." 14 It is pleasure, one can say, that is connected with the removal of pain or the escape from danger or threat. This is analogous to Schopenhauer's description of the feeling of the sublime as the feeling of the liberation from that which overwhelms or endangers the willing subject, although Schopenhauer does not mention Burke in this context.

Schopenhauer's examples of the stronger degrees of the sublime — the sublime is, it seems, and contrary to Kant, more a question of intensification than of elevation — join in with Burke's contention that "a mode of terror, or of pain, is always the cause of the sublime." 15 The clearest example of the (dynamically) sublime in nature occurs, Schopenhauer maintains,

when we are abroad in the storm of tempestuous seas; mountainous waves rise and fall, are dashed violently against steep cliffs, and shoot their spray high into the air. The storm howls, the sea roars, the lightning flashes from black clouds, and thunder-claps drown the noise of storm and sea" (WWR, I, 204).
What makes this terrible scene enjoyable? According to Burke (and Lyotard), this has to do with being deprived of the privation of light, life, or language. 16 Our personal need [persönliche Bedrängnis] cannot gain the upper hand: the clearest and strongest impression of the sublime lies in the twofold sensation of terror or pain and calm superiority at the same time:

Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual, as the feeble phenomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can annihilate, helpless against powerful nature...and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing....This is the full impression of the sublime (WWR, I, 204-5).
When Schopenhauer speaks about a transition from the beautiful to the sublime in a description of a landscape, one may wonder in what way the specificity of the feeling of the sublime can be guaranteed. Confronted with a desolate region, a certain elevation beyond the interest of the will is required, because the will cannot find any objects that can satisfy it. But this is not a question of a really hostile relationship to the will. Some examples point to the fact that Schopenhauer abandons the strict distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. This impression becomes even stronger when we take into account Schopenhauer's remark about the beneficent, soothing effect of the moon: "The moon is sublime....it induces in us a sublime mood [stimmt uns erhaben], because, without any reference to us, it moves along eternally foreign to earthly life and activity, and sees everything, but takes part in nothing" (WWR, II, 374). There is by no means [End Page 95] a hostile relation to the individual will. On the contrary, the will with its needs and sorrow, "vanishes from consciousness, and leaves it behind as a purely knowing consciousness [läßt es als ein rein erkennendes zurück]" (WWR, II, 375). A well-founded distinction between beauty and sublimity seems impossible (See for example, WWR, I, 433, 49). 17 This leveling of the two aesthetic categories is linked with the Platonic inspiration of Schopenhauer's aesthetics: it stresses the cognitive importance of aesthetic perception. Yet one should not, as is typical in most commentaries, overestimate this Platonic strand in Schopenhauer's aesthetics. 18 It is too far-fetched to not leave room for any differentiation between the beautiful and the sublime. In his hierarchy of the arts and especially in his interpretation of tragedy, Schopenhauer clearly acknowledges the importance of the distinction between those aesthetic feelings. The Widerständigkeit — which is essential in the experience of the sublime — is irreconcilable with Schopenhauer's contention that the capacity of the objects to enhance the state of pure perception in the subject is parallel to the grade of beauty they reach. The sublime cannot be called extremely beautiful in this sense, as the sublime precisely hampers such an easy transition from willing subject to pure subject of knowing.

Schopenhauer seems to take a lot of trouble to minimize the modification in the subject prone to the feeling of the sublime. Why? When the violence and incommensurability is stressed, the architectonics of Schopenhauer's work is shaking. At the end of the third book (on aesthetics) of The World as Will and Representation, he prepares a transition [Übergang] to the fourth one, the book on ethics, from a momentary liberation from the will to a permanent escape from it. If the harmony and will-lessness, promised in the feeling of the beautiful, turns out to be illusory, then a smooth transition from the aesthetic to the ethical domain becomes highly problematic. This is, however, just the problem, which emerges in the feeling of the sublime.

The Sublime and Music:
Between the Apollonian and the Dionysian?
The serenity and harmony of the feeling of the beautiful, which holds the promise of a unified, will-less subject, has totally disappeared in the feeling of the sublime. It is, of course, still a question of exaltation above the will [Erhebung über den Willen] and a feeling of purity (WWR, I, 201, 209). That is what renders it a purely aesthetic feeling. It does not form the particularity of the feeling of the sublime, though. When we acknowledge the importance of violence and ambivalence in the sublime feeling, it cannot be maintained that the feeling of the sublime helps to fulfill the preparatory role of the beautiful in the perspective of the denial of the will (WWR, I, 200-7). 19 The sublime reveals the fundamental twofold nature [Duplizität] of human consciousness in an ambivalent and painful way: [End Page 96]

Then in the unmoved beholder of this scene the twofold nature of his consciousness reaches the highest distinctness. Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual, as the feeble phenomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can annihilate, helpless against powerful nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in face of stupendous forces; and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing, who as the condition of every object is the supporter of this whole world (WWR, I, 204-5).
The subject is confronted with something boundless that completely overwhelms him — this is, as Nietzsche would say, the Dionysian — but at the same time it manages to contemplate this in a serene, disinterested, "Apollonian" way.

There is more to it: ontologically speaking, the will struggles against the individual it has created itself. In this sense, the sublime is completely unnatural [naturwidrig]. The sublime is an excessive feeling: either originating in qualitative excess (dynamically sublime) or in quantitative excess (mathematically sublime). The subject is confronted with something that surpasses its imaginative power. Hence the transformation into a pure, will-less subjectivity that knows how to turn this ravished scene into an enjoyable picture. This subjectivity is naturwidrig: it is pure objectivity — a term which Nietzsche is to use again in The Birth of Tragedy, one which Schopenhauer identifies with genius, and which borders on madness (WWR, I, 188-94; II, 399-402). In the sublime the incessant battle between presenting and willing, between knowledge and drive, between the ideal and the empirical, or — in Nietzschean terms — between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, takes place: "With sublime gestures he [Apollo, BV] reveals to us how the whole world of torment is necessary so that the individual can create the redeeming vision, and then, immersed in the contemplation of it, sit peacefully in his tossing boat amid the waves." 20 The individual will feels threatened and wants to turn away from the perilous and the immeasurable, but the contemplating faculty does not surrender. It tries and presents the "unpresentable." It pains itself to apprehend that it can apprehend. It is this terrible violence that reveals the need to transcend individuality. Thus the excessive threat becomes the excess of presentation: the individual faculty of presentation reaches its limit and a desire for the boundless announces itself. This sounds almost perverted: one is threatened and scared to death [bedroht und geängstigt], humiliated and annihilated [verkleinert und vernichtet], and still one persists in his state of pure perception or contemplation.

The beautiful and the sublime can be interpreted as extremes on a gradual axis. This interpretation is explicitly supported by many passages in Schopenhauer's work (WWR, I, 203; II, 374, 433, 449). The beautiful as well as the sublime are felt by a "pure" subject; in both cases the power to apprehend in a disinterested manner is enjoyed; 21 the pleasure [Wohlgefallen] or joy [Freude] is accompanied by the contemplation of an Idea; and an exaltation [End Page 97] above the will is demanded. The differences are essential, however. The beautiful is an Apollonian feeling of harmony, discipline, and measure: the objects invite us to feel disinterested pleasure. The sublime, on the contrary, originates in a boundless and immoderate scene that threatens the individual will. The importance of this fundamental difference cannot be overestimated, whatever J.E. Atwell may say. 22

What is at stake is the life of the individual. The throbbing heart of subjectivity itself, the will, is threatened to death. The moment at which consciousness tears itself loose is not just a detail but is exceptionally fundamental. In the sublime, the subject is attracted and rejected at the same time: as a willing subject it is ravished and withdraws, as a presenting subject it persists in its own activity. The gap in subjectivity is sublime. In the sublime, the extremely paradoxical possibility is maintained to enjoy aesthetically of the deep gap that characterizes consciousness. This is not to be confused with Nietzsche's concept of Selbstentzweiung; in Schopenhauer, no Dionysian loss of the self or violent auto-destruction is taken into consideration. According to Schopenhauer, there is a conscious subject divided between a passively experienced affection of the will and the active will-less contemplation: either one takes refuge or one wants to remain contemplative. The feeling of the sublime is no sensation or a series of sensations that can be reported to an Ich denke. Still, it is felt! Not as a lucid insight, a feeling that can be enjoyed serenely as is the case in the beautiful. It is the felt "presence," as Lyotard would say, of the incommensurability of subjectivity itself. It can only be felt as the paradoxical and strenuous mixture of pleasure and pain which is the sublime.

This (aesthetic) feeling can only occur if the exaltation is "accompanied by a constant recollection of the will [von einer steten Erinnerung an den Willen begleitet]" which contaminates the so-called will-lessness, typical of the beautiful (WWR, I, 202). So no Erhabenheit, as in Schiller for instance: the elevation above the will never succeeds completely. There is no room for happiness and harmony in the sublime. In this way, and this is crucial for a thorough understanding of Schopenhauer's philosophy, it is rather the beautiful than the sublime that prepares a successful ethical escape from the torments of willing. 23 The transition to the so-called quieter (of the will) is, in a way, easier from the beautiful — which is closer to the spiritual serenity of the saint — than from the restless and painful feeling of the sublime. The sublime is not a purely spiritual feeling, as it is essentially "accompanied by a constant recollection of the will...of human willing in general, insofar as it is expressed universally through its objectivity, the human body" (WWR, I, 202). In this way, an interpretation that considers the aesthetic and the artistic as a route to a kind of Buddhist liberation from all willing and suffering, is highly problematic. 24 The sublime functions as an aesthetic border crossing-point that hampers a smooth passage to the realm of ethics. [End Page 98]

This does not alter the fact that Schopenhauer's remark about the permanent recollection of the will in the sublime remains fairly enigmatic. It cannot mean that the individual will is affected, since if this happened we would end up in the contrary of the sublime: the charming or attractive (das Reizende): "Since opposites throw light on each other, it may here be in place to remark that the real opposite of the sublime is something that is not at first sight recognized as such, namely the charming or attractive" (WWR, I, 207). In the charming, one is merely passive and no really cognitive activity or purely aesthetic affection of the mind [Gemüt] takes place. The charming is sensual pleasure and not liking [Wohlgefallen] or joy [Freude]. Every confusion or mixture on this level would destroy the particularity of the aesthetic. In the charming, the individual will is affected, because immediate satisfaction is being promised. This immediately disturbs the purity of the aesthetic feeling (WWR, I, 207). That every beautiful thing of a cheering nature is usually called charming or attractive is "due to a concept too widely comprehended through want of correct discrimination," and Schopenhauer objects to it (WWR, I, 207). The charming or attractive "draws the beholder down from pure contemplation," which is crucial to a purely aesthetic feeling, and thus he "becomes the needy and dependent subject of willing" (WWR, I, 207). No such Genuss is present in the feeling of the sublime, but there is still the constant recollection of the will, or, rather, of human willing in general [sondern an das menschliche Willen überhaupt] (WWR, I, 202):

If a single real act of will were to enter consciousness through actual personal affliction and danger from the object, the individual will, thus actually affected, would at once gain the upper hand...the impression of the sublime would be lost, because it had yielded to anxiety, in which the effort of the individual to save himself supplanted every other thought" (WWR, I, 202).
What is the exact meaning and status of the steten Erinnerung an den Willen? It has to be remarked, first, that "recollection" is closely connected to the aesthetic in Schopenhauer's work:

it is also that blessedness of will-less perception which spreads so wonderful a charm over the past and the distant, and by a self-deception presents them to us in so flattering a light. For by conjuring up in our minds days long past spent in a distant place, it is only the objects recalled by our imagination [Phantasie], not the subject of will, that carried around its incurable sorrows with it as much then as it does now....We can withdraw from all suffering just as well through present as through distant objects" (WWR, I, 198-99).
The same blessed will-lessness can be found in remembrances as in the aesthetic contemplation. Our memory is a form of self-deception: we imagine that reality was as pure and untouched by the will as is the image in our imagination now. 25 This, Schopenhauer argues, explains the wonderful [End Page 99] flattering light that accompanies the images and the distant scene flits across our minds "like a lost paradise" (WWR, I, 198).

In the feeling of the sublime another kind of recollection takes place: it is a constant recollection — it lasts as long as the aesthetic perception continues. One notices here a remarkable sort of temporality: the aesthetic consciousness is, according to Schopenhauer, timeless after all. Aesthetic contemplation does not seem to take time and yet a constant recollection takes place, which is clearly temporal. The will is present in the (will-less) consciousness, but it is not experienced as "being present at the moment"; it is "only" a recollection and, hence, a product of our imagination. A constant oscillation takes place, which has far-reaching consequences for the interpretation of the sublime. This intricate issue can only be dealt with summarily.

First of all, if the fact that it is (only) a recollection is secondary, then the distinction between the sublime and the charming (the attractive) is blurred. If its status as recollection is subordinate, then there is no purely aesthetic feeling; every actual presence of the will disturbs the purity of the aesthetic feeling. That is the danger of Atwell's interpretation of the sublime feeling. He contends that the will does not disappear as such, but that only "consciousness of the will disappears." 26 How else, however, can a constant recollection of the will be interpreted than as a mode of consciousness?

But second, if it is unimportant that the will is present as recollection — so if the presence of the will in consciousness is accidental — the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful is blurred. In the feeling of the beautiful, the will is completely absent from consciousness, not even present as a faint memory! Something is beautiful, if it invites us to become the object of a disinterested contemplation and it is very beautiful, if it forces us to contemplate it aesthetically. In the sublime, however, "a constant recollection of human willing as such" occurs, which is difficult to grasp. A moment of displeasure cannot be absent and that pain remains there, so long as the aesthetic feeling remains. This aesthetic feeling should not take any time. All this is very enigmatic as it is. Schopenhauer wanted to avoid the Dyonisian "trap" of "becoming a work of art" that Nietzsche seems to glorify: the complete self-forgetfulness and total self-destruction by becoming one with the whole of reality: "Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of the whole of nature reveals itself to the supreme gratification of the primal Oneness amidst the paroxysms of intoxication" (BT, I, 18).

In Schopenhauer's aesthetics there can be no such thing, not even in the experience of music, since a kind of self-awareness — be it pleasurable or not — is the strict condition to speak about an aesthetic feeling. One should not, however, as Atwell seems to do, try and avoid the complexities of Schopenhauer's account by reducing the aesthetic and the ethical to the dichotomy: [End Page 100]

liberation from the individual will/liberation from the noumenal will altogether....I suggest then that contemplation is liberation from the individual will but not from will altogether (else contemplation would not be knowledge in which the will knows itself), while saintly resignation is liberation from the will altogether (thus from every trace of knowledge). 27
The feeling of the beautiful is the promise of pure inner blessed serenity and harmony. The sublime feeling is pleasure and displeasure at the same time. The feeling of the sublime is to be situated in the contrast, the fissure, the resistance [Widerstand] and the differend; it is joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, exaltation and terror at the same time. It is paradoxical and thoroughly ambivalent. It cannot be identified with the feeling of immortality, as Julian Young thinks: "The experience of the sublime is, we may say, an intimation of immortality, an experience which, as Kant puts it, makes us 'alive to the feeling of the supersensible side of our being.'" 28 It cannot be considered as the harmonious feeling of the beautiful, in which one enjoys its own undisturbed serenity. The beautiful is cheerful and serene. In the sublime this happy quietness and cheerfulness is permanently threatened by the constant recollection of the will, which causes deep pain and violent emotion.

However different Schopenhauer's account of the sublime is from the one of the feeling of the beautiful, it is perhaps even more different from Nietzsche's analysis of the Dionysian. In Schopenhauer's description of the sublime feeling, the subject seems to be divided between willing and pure perception, or between unconscious drive and conscious contemplation, whereas in Nietzsche the (Dionysian) subject has become intoxicated and is "joyfully penetrating the whole of nature" (BT, I, 17). As in the Kantian account of the sublime feeling, the sublime sets one shuddering, casts one into the movement of Erschütterung, overwhelming and exceeding one in such a way that one is drawn beyond narrow individuality to a universal destination. Yet, for Nietzsche that destination would be, not moral, but aesthetic: "for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified" (BT, V, 32). It has nothing to do with Kant's discovery of our ethical destination nor with Schopenhauer's premonition of the denial of the will. Nietzsche writes of the tragic spectator which "shudders at the sufferings that will befall the hero and yet anticipates in them a higher, much more overpowering joy. He sees more extensively and profoundly than ever and yet wishes he were blind" (BT, XXII, 105). As with dissonance in music, there is desire to hear and at the same time longing to get beyond all hearing. 29 True, Nietzsche almost literally repeats Schopenhauer when he argues that "subjectivity becomes a complete forgetting of the self" and "each man feels himself not only united, reconciled, and at one with his neighbor, but one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been rent and now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primal Oneness" (BT, I, 17). [End Page 101] But it remains very anti-Schopenhauer to claim that one feels "like a god... enraptured and elated" in aesthetic experience and "man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art" (BT, I, 18). Nietzsche goes still further than Schopenhauer does, when he maintains — in one of the very few passages where he literally mentions the sublime [das Erhabene] — that the sublime is "the mantle of the ugly." 30 In Schopenhauer — contrary to what is often assumed — the sublime is not a kind of protection against or a masking of the pain and horrors of the world. It is an ambivalent confrontation with the horrid or threatening aspects of the world.

Nietzsche, or the young Nietzsche, seems still very much influenced by Aristotle's idea of catharsis, when he writes that the sublime is "the taming of horror through art [die künstlerische Bändigung des Entsetzlichen]" (BT, VII, 40). According to Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, in the sublime one experiences courage in the face of "horror and terror of existence," and one is able to "say Yes to life even in its strangest and sternest problems." 31 This is so because, in the experience of art, one shares in the artist's "Dionysian," "orgiastic" transcendence of individual subjectivity. One identifies with the "will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility." 32 Julian Young's claim that Nietzsche's account of the sublime effect is truly Schopenhauerian, is incorrect. 33 According to Schopenhauer, in the sublime feeling no "Yes to life" is possible. The sublime is, as I have argued, an ambivalent mixture of joy and pain and the subject retains its contemplative stance, instead of completely disappearing and fusing with what Nietzsche calls "primal Oneness" (BI, I, 17, 18; IV, 25). Although both philosophers seem to believe that life and suffering are inseparable — though for different reasons — Nietzsche stresses that art is to be of service to life, whereas Schopenhauer stresses that art enhances, among other things, pure "objective" perception of the Ideas (or, in the case of music, of the will as such). Instead of a complete destruction of the subject, as seems to be the case in Nietzsche's Dionysian sublime, the Schopenhauerian aesthetic subject attains an exceptional state of purity that allows it to discover the (transcendental) conditions of life. 34 It perceives at a glance what makes life possible: will. Therefore, Schopenhauer feels the need to stick to Kant's "disinterestedness" in aesthetic appreciation. In describing aesthetic perception as disinterested — something Nietzsche cannot agree with — Schopenhauer means that in the aesthetic state normal categories and concepts of perception are suspended, thereby enabling us to become alive to usually unnoticed aspects, to the "significant form" of the object.

This is completely different from what Nietzsche means when he states that the subject is completely transformed or transfigured in the aesthetic stance. Nietzsche's Dionysian rapture [Verzückung], transgression, overflowing energy, Rausch, and ecstasy should not be confused with theSchopenhauerian aesthetic transcendence of our ordinary mode of perceiving [End Page 102] the world. According to Schopenhauer, art is by no means "a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming" but (at best) merely offers some insight in the deep structure of reality and frees us momentarily from the thralls and boredom of the ordinary world (BT, XXIV, 14). The subject is not destroyed, not swallowed by the whole of reality; its self-awareness has radically been transformed so that it can discover the conditions of its own existence.

It is often claimed that Nietzsche remains true to Schopenhauer's philosophy of music. Despite Nietzsche's sustained homage to Schopenhauer's doctrine of music, Nietzsche, from the first versions of The Birth of Tragedy is radically opposed to this doctrine. 35 Music is the sublime art par excellence. Schopenhauer situates music "completely outside the other arts" (WWV, I, 256). Music is the direct copy [Abbild] of the thing in itself, the will. Music speaks of being. It does not simply imitate being, but the intimate essence of the phenomena, their affective essence. It is "the copy of an original that can itself never be represented directly" (WWV, I, 257). Schopenhauer argues that music does not express a particular joy or affliction. It delivers these affects in abstracto or it presents them as they essentially are.

Nietzsche's (admittedly speculative) theory breaks with the idea that music imitates, even if it be most immediately and with the most penetrating intuition, the will. 36 There is no possible distinction or division between a pure eternal will and its musical phenomenalization, just as there is not, on the one hand, the One, and on the other, its multiple appearances or manifestations. The will is music, as the One is its splitting into images. Music does not speak of being, as Schopenhauer would have it, does not recount its vicissitudes in the processes of nature. 37 It is "an originary melody of pleasure and displeasure." The question is, however, why one would still call this pre-melodic and pre-harmonic event music? It is silent. It is the still unheard tones of the world that the composer gathers. This latent musicality is not a symbol, but the thing-in-itself, that is, a plurality of pulsations in the process of concordance and discordance. In Schopenhauer, the will manifests itself directly in the sublime tuning of the instruments before the orchestra starts performing. It enhances our insight in the deep structure of the world. According to Nietzsche, however, the music of the world is "a rather chtonian music, a music of elements, winds, waters, of trees and rocks, both deep and light; it is cosmic, in circular expansion rather than the Platonic concentric music of the spheres, music of the sky before it resonates through beings." 38 It is music that can never be played on an instrument. Nietzsche claims that the incessant rush of affects that oscillate from joy to pain and from pain to joy, which is at the heart of Schopenhauer's account, only yields an approximation of the song of the earth. This primal chaos is only intelligible and can "only be immediately grasped through the wonderful significance of musical dissonance; just as music alone, placed [End Page 103] next to the world can give us an idea of what we might understand by 'the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon'" (BT, XXIV, 115). It is the magic of music as "the very voice of the abyss" that transforms the spectacle of annihilation into superior pleasure. 40 Music and tragedy "play with the sting of displeasure," and both "use this play to justify the existence even of the 'worst world'" (BT, XXV, 116-17). Schopenhauer would never have drawn such a close analogy between music and tragedy: tragedy is the highest poetic art and music is completely different, as it is simply beyond his hierarchy of the arts. At least one of the important reasons for that, if not the most important, is his completely different idea of what sublimity is.

According to Schopenhauer, the feeling of the sublime is the inseparable intertwining of joy and sorrow, which enables the subject to encounterthe will without being destroyed. The "worst world" cannot be justified, Schopenhauer maintains, only contemplated. Yet according to Nietzsche, a split subject dwelling in two no matter how different worlds does not experience Dionysian sublimity. It is the unbridled and self-destructive jouissance — as Jacques Lacan would say — of excessive intoxication, a creative state that finds itself jubilant and anguished to the point of death. 38 Perhaps the pupil is least faithful to his master when he believes to be following him closest.

Bart Vandenabeele is Research Fellow in the Institute of Philosophy (Center for Logic, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Language) at the Catholic University Leuven. He is also the current Vice-President of the Dutch Association of Aesthetics. He has published in aesthetics, philosophy of language, and history of philosophy.

Notes
1. See C. Janaway, ed., Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). See also Philippe Granarolo, "Le maître qui permet à Nietzsche de devenir ce qu'il était," [The master that permitted Nietzsche to become what he was] in Schopenhauer, ed. J. Lefranc (Paris: L'Herne, 1997), 277-92.

2. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, § 23, AA, 246: "einen bloßen Anhang zur ästhetischen Beurteilung" [A mere Appendix to our aesthetic judging].

3. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation [Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung] vol. I, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 202. Schopenhauer's magnum opus will be cited in the text for all subsequent references as WWR, followed by the volume and page numbers. I have altered the English translation where it seemed appropriate.

4. Here I paraphrase some arguments used in Bart Vandenabeele,"Schopenhauer on the Beautiful and the Sublime: A Qualitative or Gradual Distinction?" Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 82 (2001): 99-112.

5. Paul Guyer, "Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer's Aesthetics," in Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Dale Jacquette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 116 and Barbara Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität. Kritische Analysen zu Schopenhauers Ästhetik im Horizont seiner Willensmetaphysik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 365-85.

6. See Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität, 371: "Auf der Basis von Schopenhauers Postulat ästhetischer Willenlosigkeit einerseits und der Zuordnung von Absicht zum Willen andererseits scheint die Annahme einer ästhetischen Absichtlichkeit also eine contradctio in adiecto zu implizieren." [On the basis of Schopenhauer's postulate of aesthetic will-lessness on the one [End Page 104] hand and the placement of the orientation [Absicht] to the will on the other, the acceptance of an aesthetic purposiveness [Absichtlichkeit] seems to imply acontradiction in adiecto].

7. See Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena (Darmstadt: Löhneysen edition, 1989) V, 494, 491.

8. See Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität, 377: "Dem Erfordernis spezifischer und damit qualitativer Differenz zwischen den 'beiden Arten der ästhetischen Auffassung' wird auf diese Weise wohl schwerlich genüg geleistet." [The need for a specific and hence qualitative difference between "both kinds of aesthetic perception" has hardly succeeded in this way].

9. See Julian Young, Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 90.

10. See Hans Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979) 58-69.

11. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; reprinted, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 36, 42, 65, 79, 121, 124.

12. See Jean-François Lyotard, "Le sublime et l'avant-garde," in Idem, L'inhumain. Causeries sur le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 110: "Or les terreurs sont liées à des privations: privation de la lumière, terreur des ténèbres; privation d'autrui, terreur de la solitude; privation du langage, terreur du silence; privation des objects, terreur du vide; privation de la vie, terreur de la mort." [Terrors are linked to privation: privation of light, terror in darkness; privation of others, terror of solitude; privation of language, terror of silence; privation of objects, terror of emptiness; privation of life, terror of death].

13. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas, 33.

14. Ibid., 34.

15. Ibid., 124.

16. See Lyotard, "Le sublime et l'avant-garde," 105.

17. See also Der Handschriftliche Nachlass (Frankfort am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1966), I, 45; Der Handschriftliche Nachlass IV, 249.

18. Typical examples of this overestimation are Chris Janaway, "Knowledge and Tranquility: Schopenhauer on the Value of Art," in Jacquette, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, 39-61; Clèment Rosset, L'esthétique de Schopenhauer (Paris: PUF, 1969); and Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität. One had better keep in mind Bertrand Russell's remark in History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1996), 722: "He acknowledges three sources of his philosophy, Kant, Plato, and the Upanishads, but I do not think he owes as much to Plato as he thinks he does."

19. See the frequent use of terms such as Gewalt, Widerstand, Bedrängnis, Kampf, Kontrast, Losreissung, and Vernichtung.

20. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (London: Penguin, 1993), 26. This book will be cited in the text as BT for all subsequent references.

21. See Bart Vandenabeele, "On the Notion of Disinterestedness: Kant, Lyotard, Schopenhauer," Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2001): 99-112.

22. J.E. Atwell defends the view that the sublime is the extremely beautiful, and that both aesthetic feelings prepare for a complete liberation from willing (that is completed in ascetic renunciation). See J.E. Atwell, "Art as Liberation: A Central Theme of Schopenhauer's Philosophy," in Jacquette, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, 81-106.

23. See Bart Vandenabeele, "Wij wenen maar zijn niet gewond. Het sublieme gevoel in Schopenhauers esthetica," Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 61 (1999): 663-95.

24. I am thinking of, for example, D.W. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 111 and passim; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990): 162-63; A.L. Cothey, The Nature of Art (London: Routledge, 1992): 70-71; Atwell, "Art as Liberation," 81-106. [End Page 105]

25. On the importance of imagination in art and aesthetic contemplation, see Cheryl Foster, "Ideas and Imagination, Schopenhauer on the Proper Foundation of Art," in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Chris Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 213-51.

26. See Atwell, "Art as Liberation," 100.

27. Ibid, 91.

28. Young, Willing and Unwilling, 100. This equalization of the intimation of immortality with the awareness of the super-sensible side of our being is highly disputable as such.

29. John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 100.

30. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Penguin, 1969), 74.

31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1992), 50-51; "Affirmation of life in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types — that is what I called dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet."

32. Ibid.

33. This is not minimizing Schopenhauer's significant influence on Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, as Julian Young seems to believe. See Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1992, 26.

34. See also Michel Haar, "The Joyous Struggle of the Sublime and the Musical Essence of Joy," Research in Phenomenology 25 (1995): 68-89, for typical Apollonian types of the sublime in Nietzsche.

35. See Haar, "Joyous Struggle of the Sublime," 75.

36. Ibid., 76.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., 77.

39. Contrary to Schopenhauer's contention, temporality plays a crucial part in the sublime. See also E.P. Miller, "Sublime Time: Nietzsche's Tragic Re-Thinking of Kant's Aesthetic Temporality," Eidos 14 (1997): 49-68.

40. The importance of Nietzsche's connection between creativity, eros and art cannot be stressed enough. See B.E. Babich, "Nietzsche and Eros between the Devil and God's Deep Blue Sea: The Problem of the Artist as Actor-Jew-Woman," Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 159-88.

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