Schopenhauer on the Power of Music

Music is at once the most wonderful, the

most alive of all the arts, Susan Sontag
wrote, and the most sensual. A century
earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche put it even
more bluntly: Without music life would be
a mistake. The question of why music
holds such unparalleled power over the
human spirit is an abiding one and, like all
abiding existential inquiries, it holds
particular appeal to philosophers.
Another century earlier, Arthur
Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788

September 21, 1860), a compatriot of

Nietzsches and a major influence on him,
contemplated this very question in the first
volume of his masterwork The World as
Will and Representation (public library)
one of Oliver Sackss favorite books,
cited in his magnificent Musicophilia.

Schopenhauer writes:
Music stands quite apart from all the [other arts]. In it we do not recognize the copy,
the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and
exceedingly fine art, its effect on mans innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so
completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely
universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception
itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae
occultum nescientis se numerare animi [an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in
which the mind does not know it is counting] which Leibniz took it to be We must
attribute to music a far more serious and profound significance that refers to the

innermost being of the world and of our own self.

At this intersection of world and self is the will and, Schopenhauer argues, musics unique
power lies in its ability to capture precisely that:
Music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is,
indeed as the Ideas are, the multiplied phenomenon of which constitutes the world of
individual things. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of
the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this
reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that
of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.
[]
The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise
quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so
inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost
being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain. In the same way, the
seriousness essential to it and wholly excluding the ludicrous from its direct and
peculiar province is to be explained from the fact that its object is not the
representation, in regard to which deception and ridiculousness alone are possible, but
that this object is directly the will; and this is essentially the most serious of all things,
as being that on which all depends.

Illustration by Isabelle Arsenault from Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois by Amy Novesky

Long before contemporary psychologists came to study the psychology of repetition and
how it enchants the brain, Schopenhauer adds:

How full of meaning and significance the language of music is we see from the
repetition signs, as well as from the Da capo which would be intolerable in the case of
works composed in the language of words. In music, however, they are very
appropriate and beneficial; for to comprehend it fully, we must hear it twice.
Schopenhauer summarizes the singular power of music:
Music expresses in an exceedingly universal language, in a homogeneous material, that
is, in mere tones, and with the greatest distinctness and truth, the inner being, the initself, of the world, which we think of under the concept of will, according to its most
distinct manifestation.
Complement this particular portion of the wholly invigorating The World as Will and

Representation with other great thinkers on the power of music, Wendy Lesser on how
music helps us grieve, and Aldous Huxley on why music sings to our souls, then revisit
Schopenhauer on style and the significance of boredom.