Everybody knows with what lack, shall we say, of _phlegma philosophicum_ Arthur Schopenhauer fought against Schelling, Hegel and all the "charlatans" and "professors" who had divided amongst themselves the heritage of Kant. But what was the artistic theory accepted and developed by Schopenhauer?
[Sidenote: _Ideas as the object of art._]
His theory, like Hegel's own, turns upon the distinction between the concept which is abstraction and the concept which is concrete, or Idea; although Schopenhauer's Ideas are by himself likened to Plato's, and in the particular form in which he presents them more nearly resemble those of Schelling than the Idea of Hegel. They have something in common with intellectual concepts, for like them they are unities representing a plurality of real things: but "the concept is abstract and discursive, entirely indeterminate in its sphere, rigorously precise within its own limits only; the intellect suffices to conceive and understand it, speech expresses it without need for other intermediary, and its own definition exhausts its whole nature; the idea, on the contrary (which may be defined clearly as the adequate representative of the concept) is absolutely intuitive, and although it represents an infinite number of individual things, it is not for that any the less determined in all its aspects. The individual, as individual, cannot know it; in order to conceive it he must strip himself of all will, of all individuality, and raise himself to the state of a pure knowing subject. The idea, therefore, is attained by genius only, or by one who finds himself in a genial disposition attained by that elevation of his cognitive powers inspired usually by genius." "The idea is unity become plurality by means of space and time, forms of one intuitive apperception; the concept, on the contrary, is unity extracted from plurality by means of abstraction, which is the procedure of our intellect: the concept may be described as _unitas post yewi_ the idea, _unitas ante rem._"[1] Schopenhauer is in the habit of calling ideas the genera of things; but on one occasion he remarks that ideas are of species, not genera; that genera are simply concepts, and that there are natural species, but only logical genera.[2] This psychological illusion as to the existence of ideas for types originates (as we find elsewhere in Schopenhauer) in the habit of converting the empirical classifications of the natural sciences into living realities. "Do you wish to see ideas?" he asks; "look at the clouds which scud across the sky; look at a brooklet leaping over rocks; look at the crystallization of hoar-frost on a window-pane with its designs of trees and flowers. The shapes of the clouds, the ripples of the gushing brook, the configurations of the crystals exist for us individual observers, in themselves they are indifferent. The clouds in themselves are elastic vapour; the brook is an incompressible fluid, mobile, transparent, amorphous, the ice obeys the laws of crystallization: and in these determinations their ideas consist."[3] All these are the immediate objectification of will in its various degrees; and it is these, not their pale copies in real things, that art delineates; whence Plato was right in one sense and wrong in another, and is justified and condemned by Schopenhauer exactly in the same way as by Plotinus of old, as well as by Schopenhauer's worst enemy, the modern Schelling.[4] In consequence, each art has a special category of ideas for its own dominion. Architecture, and in some cases hydraulics, facilitate the clear intuition of those ideas which constitute the lower degrees of objectification--weight, cohesion, resistance, hardness, the general properties of stone and some combinations of light; gardening and (most curious association) landscape painting represent the ideas of vegetable nature; sculpture and animal painting those of zoology; historical painting and the higher forms of sculpture that of the human body; poetry the very idea of man himself.[5] As for music, that (let him who can justify the logical discontinuity) is outside the hierarchy of the other arts. We have seen how Schelling considered it to be representative of the very rhythm of the universe;[6] differing but slightly from this, Schopenhauer affirms that music does not express ideas but, parallel with ideas, Will itself. The analogies between music and the world, between the fundamental bass and crude matter, between the scale and the series of species, between melody and conscious will, led him to the conclusion that music was not, as Leibniz thought, an arithmetic but a metaphysic: _exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi_.[7]