Our last seminar covered two topics not addressed within The Fourfold Root. The student presentations were good and I regretted not having read the material which they were discussing. The first topic, moral awareness, got only a brief presentation and Schopenhauer's basic ideas seemed fairly predictable... just basing moral awareness on empathy - suffering with - rather than giving it any intellectual rationale (ala Kant). This familiar idea was elegantly wedded to his metaphysics: the individual psychological will is fundamentally an illusion; we are all really a manifestation of the singular unity that is the metaphysical Will. In moral awareness, then, we escape the bounds of subject-object cognition to perceive this fundamental truth in a primordial way.
On the second topic, it seemed like Schopenhauer was claiming that aesthetic contemplation opens up a new perceptual modality: one which is non-conceptual and somewhat 'purified'. I'm not sure why Schopenhauer choose the term 'purified' rather than simply 'less mediated' or 'less / non-cognitive'... the religious connotation of 'purification' worries me a little. Taken at face value, it suggests our normal existence is somehow impure. It sounds like we're reaching out to some kind of salvation which I'm not really attracted to. A student called it 'aesthetic nirvana'.
On the way home I wondered whether the term 'purified' might also be alluding to Kant's pure vs empirical distinction. This would relate to Schopenhauer's claim that the thing-in-itself is basically the realm of Platonic ideas; the perfect forms which appear to us imperfectly in normal experience. This latter claim is obviously quite interesting but I've read nothing of his writing on the topic, so I can't say anything right now.
Some of our discussion today seemed to further support the proto-Heideggarian reading I presented yesterday. In particular, there was brief mention of Schopenhauer's later views that (?existential) truth is best seeked not through philosophy, but through art and music. My impression is that Heidegger also said things in this spirit, and there'd also be a biographical parallel in so far as he too fell out of love with philosophy in the later stages of his intellectual life. Anyway, good news on this front is that Dina gave me the ok to write my long essay on this very topic (my proto-Heideggarian reading of his epistemology), so I will doubtless have an opportunity to explore all this further in the coming months. I'm also seriously excited about having the excuse to read Being and Time, especially as I'm now perfectly set to 'virtually' attend Tanja's Heidegger course back at Sussex, which begins next week!
It's been a great month, I feel like I've learnt a lot. I've enjoyed returning to transcendental idealism, and one of the important things I've taken from this course is, finally, the beginnings of a comprehension of how to think beyond subject and object.
Finally, this has been the first time I've kept a study journal, and I must say it's been an extremely useful exercise. In fact, I'm thinking of starting one for the Nietzsche course. I'll see how things go this weekend...
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