Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tolkien on Music and Metaphysics

 

The last piece on music. 

    Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music begins from a what he takes to be self-evident but which is a root of what Heidegger called “the forgetfulness of Being”: Die Welt ist unsere Vorstellung; the world is our re-presentation. The world we ordinarily inhabit is the world as it appears to a subject, shaped by the forms (projected by our minds) of space, time, and causality and by the principium individuationis, which presents reality as the appearance of a field of separate individuals. From this standpoint the ego experiences life as a scene of competing interests and desires. Schopenhauer thinks this standpoint is already a distortion, because it mistakes appearance for what is most real. Beneath the world as representation lies the world as Will: a blind, restless striving that objectifies itself in all things and that never finds final satisfaction. Ordinary human life, governed by desire and zero-sum competition, moves endlessly between tension and frustration, pain and boredom, expressing ultimate reality from its point of view.

     Within this framework the arts have a liberating function. In everyday life we see things mainly in relation to our purposes and desires: useful or useless, pleasant or threatening. Art can suspend this ego-centered, desirous attitude and allow disinterested contemplation. A great portrait by Rembrandt, such as The Return of the Prodigal Son for example, frees us from concern with the particular person depicted and allows us to contemplate the universal character of humanity expressed in single faces. A landscape painting can transform an ordinary forest, normally experienced as a place to pass through, into an image of solitude or vastness, revealing the Idea of nature itself. Greek sculpture presents the Idea of the human body purified of accident; poetry and drama present universal patterns of pride, love, or suffering; architecture gives visible form to ideas such as upward striving or balanced repose. In all these cases the spectator is lifted, for a moment, out of the narrow world of private desire and brought into contact with universal forms.

   For Schopenhauer however, music stands apart from all these arts. It does not depict objects or present the Ideas of things at all. It has no images, no concepts, no spatial form. Yet it often moves us more deeply than any representational art. Schopenhauer concludes that music must therefore operate at a more fundamental level. While the other arts reveal what things are in their universal aspect, music expresses directly the inner movement that underlies all phenomena. It is, in his striking phrase, “a copy of the Will itself.” The patterns of musical tension, dissonance, resolution, and renewed striving mirror the structure of willing as we experience it from within. Music is not a representation of the world; it is a parallel manifestation of the same metaphysical reality that appears outwardly as the world. This explains, for Schopenhauer, why music seems to speak universally and immediately. It reveals the essence of existence without the mediation of concepts.

     The result is both powerful and bleak. Music offers temporary liberation from the ego’s interests, yet what it discloses is finally tragic: the endless restlessness of the Will. Works such as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde would have appeared to Schopenhauer as especially truthful because they heighten desire to the point where release seems possible only in extinction. The deepest art thus confirms his pessimism. The wisest response to what music reveals is not affirmation but detachment and, ultimately, negation of the striving self, what Iris Murdoch calls “the fat, relentless ego.”

 

      Nietzsche inherits much of this but turns it in a different direction. In his early writings he accepts that music reaches beneath the world of representation and that it touches something prior to individuation. He agrees that the ordinary ego is not the final measure of reality. But he rejects Schopenhauer’s interpretation of what lies beneath. For Schopenhauer, the depth disclosed by music is blind striving that ought finally to be quieted. For Nietzsche, that depth is not a curse but a source of creative power. He names this deeper dimension the Dionysian.

      Dionysian music, for Nietzsche, dissolves the narrow boundaries of the ego and reconnects the listener with the primal energies of life. (I think some heavy metal – Led Zeppelin, for example – is a good example of Dionysian music.) Yet this dissolution is not meant to lead to resignation. It is meant to enable affirmation. Tragedy is great, on Nietzsche’s account, because it unites Dionysian energy with Apollonian form, allowing human beings to confront suffering without turning away from it. The dithyrambic chorus does not reveal a world that should be denied; it reveals a world that can be embraced even in its terror. Music becomes the means by which life says Yes to itself. Later Nietzsche grows increasingly critical of Schopenhauer and of Wagner, whom he comes to regard as life-denying, but the essential contrast remains. Where Schopenhauer hears in music the tragic truth of a reality to be escaped, Nietzsche hears a call to intensify and affirm existence, to give form to the wild, cruel beast of life without deadening it.

 

       Tolkien’s vision in the “Music of the Ainur” departs from both thinkers at the most fundamental point. It does not begin from the suspicion that individuation is a metaphysical illusion, nor from the claim that the deepest reality is irrational striving. It begins from creation as intelligible gift. The many voices of the Ainur are not distortions produced by the ego; they are genuine participants in a single meaningful order. Creativity is not rebellion against a given theme but its free and imaginative development, as in a great fugue where independent lines remain faithful to a common subject. Evil, represented by Melkor’s discord, is not the revelation of a chaotic essence but a privation within an order that remains more fundamental than the rebellion itself. Even dissonance has meaning only because a deeper harmony precedes it.

      Seen in this light, Tolkien’s myth offers a metaphysical picture quite unlike that of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. The cosmos is imagined not as the objectification of a blind Will, nor as a field for heroic self-assertion, but as something like an immense symphony in which freedom and intelligibility belong together. One might think here of Bach’s polyphony, where many distinct voices create a single coherent whole, or of a great symphony in which conflict is real yet gathered into final resolution. Music becomes the most fitting image of a meaningful cosmos, a Creation: a world that includes horror and death but is ultimately directed toward meaningful fulfillment.

    

      The three positions reveal sharply different understandings of what music discloses about reality. For Schopenhauer, music is metaphysically privileged because it bypasses representation and reveals the tragic essence of existence as ceaseless striving. For Nietzsche, music reaches the same depth but transforms its meaning, becoming the means of affirming life beyond good and evil. For Tolkien, music suggests that the deepest truth is not striving at all but ordered and gifted Being, within which even discord remains intelligible. The contrast shows how profoundly music can function as a form of philosophy in sound, shaping and expressing the way a thinker imagines what it means for anything to be.