schopenhauer + post-metal

last term i was studying Hegel (and i've nearly finished writing my dissertation about Hegel's Absolute - Aristotle or Fichte or something like that).. anyway after the genius of Immanuel Kant last year and beginning to get into Fichte (the bridge, along with Schelling, between Kant & Hegel), i figured i probably needed to complete my education in German Idealism by reading some Schopenhauer over the Christmas holiday.. wow.. Schopenhauer blew my mind (but note: along with Fredrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, I've found myself unconvinced by pretty much everything almost every single one of these great Germany philosophers of the 19th century said, as well as being able to see some of the deeply destructive consequences of their thought in the world around me - but hey)..
anyway the main thing I want to comment on is Schopenhauer's philosophy of music.. really the point needs to be made against the background of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, so briefly:

Schopenhauer is easier to understand if you first take a crash course in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.. essentially Kant thinks the human subject constructs the world of experience around him by applying space and time as well as certain categories (substance, causality etc.) to the matter of objects in an a priori manner (i.e. we do so before we have had any experience of the external world).. in effect it's an Idealistic version of Aristotle's Form/Matter divide - the Form of an object being, simply, its shape/nature and its Matter the part of the object that sensibly affects us (i'm pretty sure Kant would rather his philosophy of been called Formal Idealism, as opposed to the Transcendental Idealism it has since become labelled).. an easy analogy is to think of our a priori subjective activity as a kind of 'cookie cutter' in which dough (ie an object's matter) is placed and given a certain shape by the cutter (in this case a spatial-temporal/causal shape).. Kant thinks that we cannot know objects as they are 'in-themselves' i.e. stripped of these subjective conditions we bring to bear on them a priori.. this divide means that there are almost two objects to consider when contemplating reality - the object as it is for us (or 'phenomena') in space and time and subject to causality and the object as it is 'in-itself' (or 'noumena'), stripped of space, time and the categories we apply to them.. for Kant we can know nothing of this realm of noumena, or objects as they are in-themselves - agnosticism is the default position here..

in essence this is the background Schopenhauer inherits and, with a few modifications, he remains a Kantian Idealist - the twist being that he thinks we can know the thing-in-itself.. he thinks this because all of our representations are in space, time etc. but at least one part of our experience is non-spatial and not subject to the categories - namely our own subjective existence - our existence as will.. this is in essence the idea of his most famous philosophical work The World as Will & Representation.. he agrees with Kant that the thing-in-itself cannot be in space or time or subject to the categories and if one of these categories is substance and through it we divide the world into many discrete individual substances then the thing-in-itself must be a non-plural undifferentiated spaceless, timeless unity.. so the thing-in-itself thus becomes in effect a monistic Will, which at root we are all manifestations of in some way.. the Will is also a purely objectless striving because, as a thing-in-itself, it has no object to will or desire (due to there being no seperate individual substances for it to aim at), but due to the spatio-temporal world of our creation the objectless striving becomes a ceaseless striving for the objects of the phenomenal world..

this means that we are almost condemned to will incessently for things that will never ultimately satisfy us - because the Will constantly strives for its desires to be satisfied and, once they are satisfied, it will begin desiring a new object once again and so on indefinately..

as you can probably guess this is the root cause of all our suffering in the world and schopenhauer thinks that the reason there is pain and suffering is because our transcendentally constructing intellect imposes division and multiplicity on the thing-in-itself when there is nothing but the absolute unity of the Will.. once this division is imposed upon it the Will, in effect, turns upon itself with its conflicting desires and strivings and causes the strife and suffering we see in the world around us. essentially it is we humans who are responsible for all the pain that is in the world because it is we who, through our a priori construction of the phenomenal world, fragment the Will and set it against itself by creating discrete individual substances which act in such a selfish manner..

as you can probably see his philosophy has somethings in common with certain strands of eastern thought - Hinduism and Buddhism especially, though it appears he arrived at these somewhat similair conclusions independently.
Schopenhauer's ultimate answer to the escape of suffering is to deny the Will via ascetic living and self-denial. we should all recognize that as we are all at root identical, nothing but manifestations of the Universal Will, we should have compassion on those suffering around us as if it was we ourselves who were suffering. but before all that he suggests that temporary release from the Will is to be found in aesthetic appreciation which allows the individual to leave behind his desires and enter a state of disinterested contemplation. Schopenhauer sees music as the highest form of aesthetic experience because music allows us to, as it were, see our emotions in an objectified form which then allows us to reflect upon the very nature of the Will without having to experience it directly and, thus, experience the suffering that comes with it.

now suffice to say i don't agree with much of Schopenhauer's metaphysics as obviously it implies atheism (actually i think alot of what he says is somewhat contradictory - but thats another matter), but the scope and sweep on his ideas are breathtaking and his idea of music objectifying our emotions as a temporary release of our suffering has always struck a chord with me (no musical pun intended)..
he would have been referring to classical music and i believe Richard Wagner took alot of inspiration from Schopenhauer's writings on this point and, indeed, Nietzsche's first great work The Birth of Tragedy is based around his love of Schopenhauer and Wagner..
for me this point has resonated mostly when listening to the genre known as post-metal.. ive also found something similair in some post-rock and also some classical music.. i'm sure the experience has probably come to me from other forms of music too, but it seems especially to originate in that kind of epic, intense and emotional music.. for me it is emotion objectified pure and simple: it is dense, crushing and beautiful all at once (who'd of thought beautiful and metal would of gone in the same sentence?)..
for me Isis' two albums Oceanic and Panopticon embody this more than anything else.. its as close as i've come to having a spiritual experience whilst listening to music and, it goes without saying, is impossible to truly capture in words.. i know alot of people, even those that are into metal, won't get what the whole Isis/post-metal thing is about - boring, too repetitive etc. but thats ok, not everyone's perfect :)