Pleasure and knowledge in Schopenhauer's aesthetics

Abstract

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE PLEASURE Schopenhauer is famous for his characterization of aesthetic experience in purely cognitive terms, as an experience in which consciousness of the manifold and ever-changing particulars of ordinary experience is superseded by cognition of the unique and timeless forms of objects of experience or objectifications of the Will, which Schopenhauer calls “Platonic Ideas.” In his words, aesthetic experience Is just the state that I described above as necessary for knowledge of the Idea, as pure contemplation, absorption in perception, being lost in the object, forgetting all individuality, abolishing the kind of knowledge which follows the principle of sufficient reason, and comprehends only relations. It is the state where, simultaneously and inseparably, the perceived individual thing is raised to the Idea of its species, and the knowing individual to the pure subject of will-less knowing, and now the two, as such, no longer stand in the stream of time and of all other relations. It is then all the same whether we see the setting sun from a prison or a palace. ( WWR 1, 38, 96–97) However, on first glance the pleasure of aesthetic response associated with this cognition of Platonic Ideas is entirely negative, consisting in relief from the incessant pain of the inevitably unfulfilled desires associated with ordinary consciousness of the manifold particulars of quotidian experience, and in nothing but that relief.

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