The result, however, is that the genius is forced into isolation, and sometimes into madness; the extreme sensitiveness which brings him pain along with imagination and intuition, combines with solitude and maladaptation to break the bonds that hold the mind to reality. Aristotle was right again: “Men distinguished in philosophy, politics, poetry or art appear to be all of a melancholy temperament.”117 The direct connection of madness and genius “is established by the biographies of great men, such as Rousseau, Byron, Alfieri, etc.”118 “By a diligent search in lunatic asylums, I have found individual cases of patients who were unquestionably endowed with great talents, and whose genius distinctly appeared through their madness.”119
Yet in these semi-madmen, these geniuses, lies the true aristocracy of mankind. “With regard to the intellect, nature is highly aristocratic. The distinctions which it has established are greater than those which are made in any country by birth, rank, wealth, or caste.”120 Nature gives genius only to a few because such a temperament would be a hindrance in the normal pursuits of life, which require concentration on the specific and immediate. “Nature really intended even learned men to be tillers of the soil; indeed, professors of philosophy should be estimated according to this standard; and then their achievements will be found to come up to all fair expectations.”121
3. ART
This deliverance of knowledge from servitude to the will, this forgetting of the individual self and its material interest, this elevation of the mind to the will-less contemplation of truth, is the function of art. The object of science is the universal that contains many particulars; the object of art is the particular that contains a universal. “Even the portrait ought to be, as Winckelmann says, the ideal of the individual.”122 In painting animals the most characteristic is accounted the most beautiful, because it best reveals the species. A work of art is successful, then, in proportion as it suggests the Platonic Idea, or universal, of the group to which the represented object belongs. The portrait of a man must aim, therefore, not at photographic fidelity, but at exposing, as far as possible, through one figure, some essential or universal quality of man.123 Art is greater than science because the latter proceeds by laborious accumulation and cautious reasoning, while the former reaches its goal at once by intuition and presentation; science can get along with talent, but art requires genius.
Our pleasure in nature, as in poetry or painting, is derived from contemplation of the object without admixture of personal will. To the artist the Rhine is a varied series of bewitching views, stirring the senses and the imagination with suggestions of beauty; but the traveler who is bent on his personal affairs “will see the Rhine and its banks only as a line, and the bridges only as lines cutting the first line.”124 The artist so frees himself from personal concerns that “to artistic perception it is all one whether we see the sunset from a prison or from a palace.”125 “It is this blessedness of will-less perception which casts an enchanting glamour over the past and the distant, and presents them to us in so fair a light.”126 Even hostile objects, when we contemplate them without excitation of the will, and without immediate danger, become sublime. Similarly, tragedy may take an esthetic value, by delivering us from the strife of the individual will, and enabling us to see our suffering in a larger view. Art alleviates the ills of life by showing us the eternal and universal behind the transitory and the individual. Spinoza was right: “in so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect it participates in eternity.”127
This power of the arts to elevate us above the strife of wills is possessed above all by music.128 “Music is by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas” or essences of things, but it is “the copy of the will itself”; it shows us the eternally moving, striving, wandering will, always at last returning to itself to begin its striving anew. “This is why the effect of music is more powerful and penetrating than the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, while it speaks of the things itself.”129 It differs too from the other arts because it affects our feelings directly,130 and not through the medium of ideas; it speaks to something subtler than the intellect. What symmetry is to the plastic arts, rhythm is to music; hence music and architecture are antipodal; architecture, as Goethe said, is frozen music; and symmetry is rhythm standing still.
4. RELIGION
It dawned upon Schopenhauer’s maturity that his theory of art—as the withdrawal of the will, and the contemplation of the eternal and universal—was also a theory of religion. In youth he had received very little religious training; and his temper did not incline him to respect the ecclesiastical organizations of his time. He despised theologians: “As ultima ratio,” or the final argument, “of theologians we find among many nations the stake”;131 and he described religion as “the metaphysics of the masses.”132 But in later years he began to see a profound significance in certain religious practices and dogmas. “The controversy which is so perseveringly carried on in our own day between supernaturalists and rationalists rests on the failure to recognize the allegorical nature of all religion.”133 Christianity, for example, is a profound philosophy of pessimism; “the doctrine of original sin (assertion of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is the great truth which constitutes the essence of Christianity.”134 Fasting is a remarkable expedient for weakening those desires that lead never to happiness but either to disillusionment or to further desire. “The power by virtue of which Christianity was able to overcome first Judaism, and then the heathenism of Greece and Rome, lies solely in its pessimism, in the confession that our state is both exceedingly wretched and sinful, while Judaism and heathenism were both optimistic”:135 they thought of religion as a bribe to the heavenly powers for aid towards earthly success; Christianity thought of religion as a deterrent from the useless quest of earthly happiness. In the midst of worldly luxury and power it has held up the ideal of the saint, the Fool in Christ, who refuses to fight, and absolutely overcomes the individual will.136
Buddhism is profounder than Christianity, because it makes the destruction of the will the entirety of religion, and preaches Nirvana as the goal of all personal development. The Hindus were deeper than the thinkers of Europe, because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual; the intellect divides everything, intuition unites everything; the Hindus saw that the “I” is a delusion; that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the only reality is the Infinite One—“That art thou.” “Whoever is able to say this to himself, with regard to every being with whom he comes in contact,”—whoever is clear-eyed and clear-souled enough to see that we are all members of one organism, all of us little currents in an ocean of will,—he “is certain of all virtue and blessedness, and is on the direct road to salvation.”137 Schopenhauer does not think that Christianity will ever displace Buddhism in the East: “it is just the same as if we fired a bullet against a cliff.”138 Rather, Indian philosophy streams into Europe, and will profoundly alter our knowledge and our thought. “The influence of the Sanskrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek letters in the fifteenth century.”139