TOWARD THE END of 1895 the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt was commissioned to paint three pictures for the great hall of a Viennese university — one for each of the university’s three main faculties: medicine, philosophy and law (jurisprudence). The board of trustees wanted something inspirational, something that communicated in every possible way that the combined forces of knowledge, reason, and intellect would, in the fullness of time, lead humankind out of the wilderness and into the light. Something modern as well — that went without saying — but not too modern. What they got was a shock — to say the least.
Klimt’s first effort, ‘Philosophy’, was an overwhelming avalanche of human joy and tragedy — birth, death, agony and ecstasy cascaded past the viewer, springing from nowhere and, it seemed, going straight back there. As Schorske says, ‘The ideal of mastery of nature through scientific work was simply violated by Klimt’s image of a problematic, mysterious struggle in nature.’1 The university politely asked for its money back.
A painting that represented the thing-in-itself as imagined by an Enlightenment philosopher would be harmonious and elegant. But Klimt had decided to give them Schopenhauer — so it’s little wonder the thing turned out looking nasty. For Schopenhauer, the thing-in-itself, the world as will, is senseless, destructive and evil. The university’s trustees worried that, faced with such a heavy dose of romantic despair in the great hall, students would simply throw their books in the air, turn around and go back home — there to spend the rest of their days in contemplation of the suffering of the world. This is actually not too far from Klimt’s intention, and very close to Schopenhauer’s idea of redemption — the one piece of good news in his otherwise gloomy philosophy.
Schopenhauer insists that as long as we’re pursuing our interests — food, shelter, sex, material possessions or power over others — we’re being driven by will, which can never be satisfied. For this reason, he dismisses the Rousseauian idea of a ‘natural’ state to which modern people can aspire. For Schopenhauer, our natural state is the problem — we’ve complicated matters by becoming as self-aware as we have, but the source of our unhappiness is the sheer pointlessness of life itself. We must pursue our interests, knowing that they must leave us unsatisfied.
But if we can somehow become disinterested, we are no longer willing — and the result is a feeling of bliss. This, Schopenhauer believed, is what art does for us.
When an aesthetic perception occurs the will completely vanishes from consciousness…this is the origin of the feeling of pleasure which accompanies the perception of the beautiful…2
As we contemplate art, we are able to see life — with all its striving and willing — in a detached, aesthetic way. We are freed, briefly, from the desiring that takes up so much of our time, and leaves us so unsatisfied, as we look at life from the artist’s point of view. In this way, the suffering of the world becomes bearable, and art, according to Schopenhauer, becomes our most important consolation for the pain of life. It’s little wonder that, of all philosophers, he’s the artist’s favourite.
Schopenhauer’s formula for redemption through aesthetics explains, among other things, how it is that a song about how life sucks can make us feel good. ‘How Soon is Now?’, ‘Blasphemous Rumours’, ‘Butterfly’, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ — these songs are full of bad news about the human condition, and all have the power to make us feel fantastic. Even as we recognise the sincerity of the artist’s view of life, and the honesty with which he’s portrayed it, the feeling we get as we listen to his song about how life is hell is not the same as the feeling of living in hell — quite the opposite.
It’s as though the singer, by giving us such an unflinching portrayal of the world as will, has shifted our position in relation to it. If life could be compared to a giant traffic jam, the song has the effect of lifting us high above the traffic in a helicopter. We can still see the chaos on the roads, but we’re no longer directly involved in the struggle — where previously we were interested (because we have to get to work on time), now we are disinterested — and from this new aesthetically detached point of view, the traffic jam becomes beautiful, a glittering mosaic winding its way around the city. We no longer experience the pain of the world as sufferers but as spectators.
The university trustees needn’t have been so worried about Klimt’s Philosophy mural after all. Far from spreading despair, a painting like that — in which the suffering of the world is presented as an aesthetic spectacle — would, if Schopenhauer was correct, become a means of redemption. This idea proved to be enormously popular and durable in the late nineteenth century. It formed the backbone of Wagner’s conception of music and opera as a substitute for religion in a fragmented modern world. And it gave a young philologist from the University of Basel — a man much admired by Klimt — the necessary foundation on which to build a career that would take romantic philosophy in undreamt-of new directions.