Of all Schopenhauer’s theories, except his pessimism itself, this theory of art has become the most widely known and influential. As he stated it, it was, indeed, evidently the notion, not of the systematic student of any art, but of the observant amateur of genius and sensibility. It lacks the professional tone altogether. Its illustrations are chosen whimsically from all sorts of directions. The opposition between will and contemplation reaches for the first time its height at this point in the system. On one side, the world of passion, throbbing, sorrowing, longing, hoping, toiling, above all, forever fleeing from the moment, whatever it be; on the other side, the majesty of artistic contemplation, looking in sacred calm upon all this world, seeing all things, but itself unmoved. Plainly, in this contemplative intellect the will has capriciously created for itself a dangerous enemy, who will discover its deep irrationality.
This enemy is none other than that Wagnerian Brünhilde, who is destined to see, through and through, the vanity of the world of the will, and who, not indeed without the connivance of the high gods of the will themselves, is minded to destroy the whole vain show in one final act of resignation. There arise from time to time in the world, thinks Schopenhauer, holy men, full of sympathy and pity for all their kind, full of a sense of the unity of all life, and of the vanity of this our common and endless paradox of the finite world. These men are called, in the speech of all the religions, saints. Whatever their land or creed, their thought is the same. Not the particular griefs of life, not the pangs of cold and hunger and of disease, not the horrors of the baseness that runs riot in humanity, — not these things do they weigh in the balance with any sort of precision or particularity, although these things, too, they see and pity. No, the source of all these griefs, the will itself, its paradox, its contradictory longing to be forever longing, its irrational striving to be forever
