Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung : zweiter Band

Zweiter Band, welcher die Ergänzungen zu den vier Büchern des ersten Bandes enthält

On the Matter and Intelligence of the Architectural Model: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Psychophysiological Theory of Architecture and Konrad Wachsmann’s Design of a Space Structure

During the last decades of the twentieth century, the modernist concept of ‘space’ in architecture became a subject of inquiry for architectural critics and historians. One curiosity arising within the discourse suggested that the thinking of the nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was foundational for the concept of ‘space’ that developed in German aesthetics throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, eventually informing modernist architectural theory. This essay looks at the way Schopenhauer used architectural models, not only to clarify his understanding of space, but also to demonstrate what was for him the much more important notion of ‘Idea’. It then turns to the German modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann, who was most famous for his seminal book, The Turning Point of Building (1961), which advocated the industrialization of building as a project for architecture. The essay asks if Schopenhauer’s distinction between ‘space’ and ‘Idea’ can illuminate the new ‘understanding of space’ that Wachsmann thought would arise as a consequence of a systematic industrialization of building. Discussion will focus on a particular section of Wachsmann’s book that gives an account of his design of a space structure commissioned by the US Air Force in 1959, taking that project as exemplary of his thinking, working methods and values. It will also take note of the way in which the space structure stimulated the imagination of the American artist, Robert Smithson, who began to envisage the entire planet as encapsulated in an enormous virtual grid – one that was, like a Schopenhauerian ‘Idea’, supposedly constituted out of mind and matter. To end the essay looks briefly at the notion of ‘field,’ which, many architects argued at the time, would supersede ‘space’ as the conceptual mainspring of theory and practice

Composition is not research

Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015Composers in academic institutions are increasingly required to describe their activities in terms of 'research ' - formulating 'research questions', 'research narratives', 'aims' and 'outcomes'. Research plans and funding applications require one to specify the nature of the original contribution that will be made by a piece of music, even before it is composed. These requirements lead to an emphasis on collaborative work, technology and superficial novelty of format. Yet the very idea that musical composition is a form of research is a category error: music is a domain of thought whose cognitive dimension lies in embodiment, revelation or presentation, but not in investigation and description. It is argued here that the idea of composition as research is not only objectively false but inimical to genuine musical originality

Schopenhauer on suicide and negation of the will

ABSTRACT Schopenhauer's argument against suicide has served as a punching bag for many modern-day commentators. Dale Jacquette, Sandra Shapshay, and David Hamlyn all argue that the premises of this argument or its conclusion are inconsistent with Schopenhauer's wider metaphysical and ethical project. This paper defends Schopenhauer from these charges. Along the way, it examines the relations between suicide, death by voluntary starvation, negation of the will, compassion, and Schopenhauer's critiques of cynicism and stoicism. The paper concludes that there may be gaps in Schopenhauer's system, but not where the aforementioned commentators tried to locate them

Sobre o suicídio

Translation and footnotes by Rosana Jardim Candeloro (UNISC)

Sobre a essência íntima da arte

Não só a filosofia mas também as belas artes propõem-se, no fundo,a solucionar o problema da existência. Pois em cada espírito que uma vez se entregou à pura contemplação objetiva do mundo, ativou-se, mesmo se inconsciente e oculto, um esforço para compreender a verdadeira essência das coisas, da vida, da existênci