Schopenhauer is an idealist but of a rather different sort than Schelling and Hegel. (So, even though some of the same terms will show up as in Schelling, don’t assume Schopenhauer means the same thing by them.) Although his views, especially those concerning music, are interesting in their own right, we are reading him primarily as a prelude to Nietzsche.
Your assignment is divided into a number of selections that are outlined below.
• Selection from supplements to the first book, ch. 1, HK 448-451. This provides an introduction to Schopenhauer’s general philosophical framework. The beginning of the editors’ introduction (HK 446f) is also helpful. It is vital to notice Schopenhauer’s distinction between, on the one hand, the self or intelligence, which is an aspect of the phenomenal world, and, on the other hand, will, which he calls a thing-in-itself. (The Latin phrase from Descartes, cogito ergo sum, is usually translated as “I think therefore I am.”)
• Selection from §38, HK 456-460. This selection describes the general character of aesthetic pleasure. Schopenhauer uses the phrase “principle of sufficient reason” to refer to modes of explanation—of events by causal laws and of human actions by motives—and also to refer to the location of objects and events in space and time. This principle is a key manifestation of the will in the phenomenal world, so the sort of escape from the will that is found in aesthetic contemplation is associated with an escape from the principle and from the associated individuation of particular objects and of ourselves as particular subjects (something in connection with which Schopenhauer later uses the phrase principium individuationis, which means “principle of individuation”). Think about the brief comparison with dreaming (HK 458); it will reappear in Nietzsche.
• The first three paragraphs of §49, HK 480-2. Here Schopenhauer here fills out his view of Ideas by contrasting them with concepts. (He goes on after this, in the rest of §49, to make comments on genius similar to ones you’ve seen in Kant and Schelling.)
• Three selections from §52, where Schopenhauer discusses music.
• HK 486-488. Think about the difference between music and other arts for Schopenhauer; the distinction will be central in Nietzsche. Schopenhauer begins by posing the problem as he sees it; the solution he proposes is stated in the first full paragraph of HK 488. (The Latin phrase from Leibniz on HK 486 can be translated as “an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting.”)
• HK 488-490. The analogy Schopenhauer speaks of on HK 488 is continued through HK 490. (His comments on the significance of melody on p. 490 could be misleading; to guard against this look also at the paragraph spanning HK 491-2.)
• HK 495. This is the final paragraph of the third book of Schopenhauer’s work, and it gives a hint of its relation to what follows. The most thing for our purposes is the metaphor of the play.
Think about your own views concerning Schopenhauer’s basic claim about music, that in the character of its relation to the world “it stands alone, quite cut off from all the other arts” (HK 486). Notice that one alternative is Hegel’s view (HK 443) that music is the central example of a certain kind of art, of which painting and poetry are also examples (just as sculpture is the central example of all the fine arts).