Buch lesen: «Children of Prometheus: Romanticism and Its Legacy», Seite 3

A further instance of Mary’s identification with the Monster is found in their similar responses to maternal deprivation. Victor and Reginald are also motherless, and for both this loss is exacerbated by the deaths of other loved ones. Anne Mellor has described Frankenstein as “an analysis of the failure of the family, the damage wrought when the mother—or a nurturant parental love—is absent.”26 This is also the central theme of St. Leon, which is, as already suggested, a transparent redaction of the Godwin family experience, and Mary’s treatment of the orphan’s agony of the Monster illustrates Sigmund Freud’s view that “missing someone who is loved and longed for is the key to an understanding of anxiety.”27 John Bowlby, the English psychologist and biographer of Charles Darwin, modifies Freud’s observations on grief and separation anxiety to suggest a possible cause of Mary’s frequent bouts of anxiety during her many pregnancies:

States of anxiety and depression that occur during adult years, and also psychopathic conditions, can, it is held, be linked in a systematic way to the states of anxiety, despair, and detachment . . . that are so readily engendered whenever a young child is separated for long from his mother figure, whenever he expects a separation, and when, as sometimes happens, he loses her altogether.28

By virtue of a kind of sorcery akin to alchemy, Mary and the Monster seem to have been formed by a hermaphroditic father, who combines both the male and female principles of generation and whose powers of multiplication correspond to the recondite powers of the philosopher’s stone. As a descriptive term “hermaphroditic” is preferable to William Veeder’s “androgyne,” since androgyny refers only to proclivity or “sexual character,” while hermaphroditism actually has reference to actual sexual nature or capacity.29 Victor’s ability to create life from inanimate matter and Reginald’s multiple rebirths by means of the elixir vitae are methods of creating life that circumvent the female body but not the maternal principle. In a thinly veiled disguise for Godwin’s relationship to Mary and her half-sister Fanny, Reginald outlives his wife and appropriates the maternal role in his relationship to his daughters. The life-giving powers exhibited by Victor and Reginald correspond to Mary’s own birth in which the maternal principle was eliminated in Wollstonecraft’s death. Through their traumatic births and status as orphans the Monster stands revealed as her fictive other.

The main narrative and thematic vehicle in both novels—the perversion or misuse of science, old and new—is, in fact, a distortion of procreation, and the bridge between alchemy and natural philosophy is the discovery of the means of creating or perpetuating life by a subtraction of the female principle from procreation. Ironically, the stain of mortality is removed from persons not of woman born. The elimination of the female principle in procreation invites Mary’s critique of the monstrosity of neglectful parenting. Testifying to the power of environmental conditioning in childhood, which is a fundamental teaching in Godwin’s Political Justice, both motherless protagonists reveal themselves to be neglectful parents in their own right. And Victor’s feckless record as the “parent” of the offspring of his scientific labors is symbolic of the neglectful male parents in Mary’s personal life—Godwin and Shelley, Victor rationalizes the abandonment of his child on grounds not usually associated with maternalism, that is, aesthetic criteria, insisting “that no mortal could support the horror of that countenance”; even a “mummy endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch.” (43) There are strong parallels here to Godwin’s “monstrous” behavior as a parent, for we know that he not only opposed Mary’s decision to elope with Shelley, but he also refused to claim or identify the body of Fanny Godwin following her suicide on October 9, 1816. (Like her half-sister, this doubly orphaned young woman had, in her father’s view, indelibly stained the family’s honor.) The novel also provides subversive commentary on the egregious behavior of other parents in the Shelley circle: Percy, Claire Clairmont, Byron, and even Mary herself. Byron gained custody of his daughter Allegra only to have her placed in a convent where she died of neglect. The frenetic wanderlust (and the woeful traveling conditions they endured) of the Shelleys may be directly implicated in the deaths of their children Clara I (March 6, 1815), Clara II (September 24, 1818), and William on June 7, 1819. Perhaps of all acts the most reprehensible was Shelley’s abandonment of Harriet and their children when he eloped with Mary. In what can only be reckoned a display of astonishing insensitivity, Percy and Mary were then married less than three weeks after Harriet, who was pregnant at the time, drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Considering this monstrous record of neglect, which clearly contravened the teachings of Godwin by which the Shelleys claimed to be fashioning their lives, the Chancery judgment delivered on March 17, 1817 denying Percy custody of his children with Harriet could have come as no surprise and, respecting the moral universe of both St. Leon and Frankenstein, was certainly justified.30

With the appropriation and rewriting of St. Leon Mary attains independence, as a creator of texts, from both her father and her husband. For her husband, she serves as an extension of her father; her elopement and marriage to Shelley represent efforts on his part to attain consanguinity with her father, his great idol, through the instrumentality of her mind and body. At the same time, it reflects Percy’s attempt to usurp Godwin’s role as Mary’s primary educator and literary precursor. We can see this as an attempted exclusionary gesture whose objective is to assume control over her continuing development as a writer. In Frankenstein Mary therefore seeks to perform a double divestiture not only of parental influence, but also of authoritative discourse associated with both dominating literary figures in her life, her father and her husband. In this way the novel serves as a powerful reminder that literary texts function instrumentally. In Holquist’s phrase, “they serve as a prosthesis of the mind. As such, they have a tutoring capacity that materially effects change by getting from one stage of development to another,” and in its dual capacity as an enabling device and as a necessary stage in the dialectic of education leading to the attainment of a secure authorial identity, Frankenstein enacts for its author and protagonists a dual process of soul and voice formation.31 Emulating Reginald’s and Victor’s search for ideal companionship, empowering knowledge and opportunities for doing some action that is “great and good,” the Monster’s odyssey begins with the discovery that he lives in a hostile world and that he has been rejected by his “father” and denied the right to engender his own offspring. His odyssey or Bildungsreise ends with the murderous inversion of Godwinian altruism as he lashes out at Victor, destroying all those with whom he enjoys emotional intimacy in order to render his condition identical to his own. The rebellion of the Monster, which proceeds from inarticulate rage to the discovery of speech and the art of discourse, invites comparisons with Mary’s efforts, first, to assimilate and, secondly, to overcome her father’s authoritative discourse, a process which culminates in her marriage to Shelley and the nearly simultaneous inception of her novel.

Recognizing that even the most persuasive interpretation may fail to convince, I would hesitate to suggest that the genesis and development of Mary’s novel is fully explained as the result of intertextual dialogue with Godwin’s St. Leon. Neither would I reduce the text’s function to mapping her development as a writer. But, as I have attempted to show, such an interpretation brings us closer to the novel’s textual and psychological matrices and it delineates the central autotherapeutic function of writing. Moreover, by adopting Bakhtin’s dialogic framework we gain a more pronounced awareness of the struggle involved in moving beyond mere appropriation of another’s authoritative discourse to the production of discourse that is distinctly one’s own. In contrast to those critics who have inserted Frankenstein into or extracted the novel from a patriarchal tradition, the preceding discussion should make it is possible to reject both alternatives. The tradition into which we should place Frankenstein is that which makes apparent its structure and language as empowering psychological scaffolding. Godwin’s St. Leon provided Mary with a dialogic partner in the struggle for self-expression, and Frankenstein is a reflection of the will to articulate her own consciousness and to attain individuation apart from the discourse associated with the “strong precursors” in her personal and literary experience. What makes the intertextual dialogue forming Frankenstein of particular interest is that the authoritative discourse with which its young author contended was formed by the texts of her father, mother, and husband—a body of texts that she habitually and even ritually read at home and on her mother’s grave in the St. Pancras churchyard. This is the tradition formed by St. Leon. From this perspective Mary’s novel can be seen to replicate intertextual dialogue with a text that we can readily identify, St. Leon, and because of Shelley’s filial relationship with its author, it is possible to extrapolate from this process of intertextual dialogue to her development and growth as a writer. The end result of this process is the acquisition and exercise of genuine cultural power.

1 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 345.

2 In citing St. Leon but not pursuing the extensive thematic and plot correspondences with Frankenstein, recent studies follow Burton R. Pollin, “Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein,” Comparative Literature 17 (1965): 97–108. See, for example, Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 37; Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London: Routledge reprint, 1989), 85; and Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1991, paperback edition), 23–24.

3 Emily Sunstein takes a neutral stance in the dispute over the character of the second Mrs. Godwin as compared to the first and reminds the reader that Mary’s singularly possessive attachment to her father was such that “no woman under Heaven, not even Mary Wollstonecraft had she descended from it, would have been readily accepted as her father’s consort by the four-year-old Mary Godwin,” Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, 2.

4 The British Critic (July 1795), 95.

5 William Godwin, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, 4 Volumes (London: Printed for G.G. & J. Robinson, R. Noble, printer, 1799), Vol. I, ix. Hereafter all intra-textual references are to this edition.

6 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Third Edition, 1798), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 762.

7 Baldick, op. cit., 26.

8 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818 edition), in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (New York: Oxford UP, 1990), 30. All intra-textual references are to this edition.

9 Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York UP, 1969), 86.

10 Gary Kelly is persuaded that Mary’s father “felt himself to be in possession of great and terrible secrets: the philosophy of Political Justice which he could not use for the benefit of mankind, but which, on the contrary, made him an object of fear and loathing,” The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976), 209. Emily Sunstein (op. cit., 20) notes that Godwin’s contemporaries “compared him to a great, if failed explorer on humanity’s behalf, a Promethean paradigm that Mary Godwin would immortalize in her scientist, Frankenstein, whose confidant, Walton, is a polar explorer” and would-be altruist savior of mankind.

11 “The Female in Frankenstein,” in Feminism and Romanticism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1988), 224.

12 Journals of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Abinger MSS, 21 (October 1838).

13 Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, 38–39: “All the children were deeply influenced by him, but Mary was his star disciple, the most powerfully engaged and permanently affected, the one from whom he demanded and gave most. Her most felicitous, intimate, even thrilling intercourse with her father was that of pupil and teacher, and most inordinate as her later tributes to him might seem, it was homage to mentorship that few fathers gave their daughters.”

14 Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. M.K. and D. M. Stocking (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1968), 18.

15 Letter to W.T. Baxter, 8 June 1812 in Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Keith Neil Cameron and Donald H. Reiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1961–73), 3, 102.

16 Evidence for Mary’s idolization of her father is found in a letter: “Until I met Shelley, I may justly say that Godwin was my God,” The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennet (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), 1, 296.

17 Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 23.

18 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 82.

19 Barbara Johnson, “My Monster/My Self,” Diacritics 12 (1982): 8.

20 From the author’s introduction, Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, xxxi.

21 Bakhtin, op. cit., 348.

22 I.M. Lotman, “On the Reduction and Unfolding of Sign Systems,” in Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, ed. Henryk Baran (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, Inc., 1976), 302.

23 Bakhtin, op. cit., 345, 347.

24 All of these works figured prominently in Godwin’s scheme of education for his children, but Goethe’s Werther carried especially deep emotional resonance for the Godwin family because William was reading it at the time of Wollstonecraft’s death.

25 Regular visitors to the Godwin household included William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, S.T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Thomas Holcroft, Joseph Johnson, Samuel Rogers, John Flaxman, J.M.W. Turner, Maria Edgeworth, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith.

26 Mellor, op. cit., 39.

27 Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), Vol. XX, 136–137.

28 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Separation: Anxiety and Anger (New York: Basic Books, 1973), Vol. II, 4–5.

29 William Veeder, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein—The Fate of Androgyny (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1986).

30 See Chapter Six, “Deaths by Land and Sea,” in Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys, 1798–1879 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 66–73.

31 Holquist, op. cit., p. 83.

3 Tolstoy and the “Spiritual Delights” of Schopenhauer

In a letter to the lyrical poet Afanasy Fet (1820–1892) written on August 30, 1869, Lev Tolstoy waxes ebullient over his discovery of the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860):

Do you know what this summer has meant to me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I’ve never experienced before. I’ve sent for all of his works and I’m reading them (I’ve also read Kant), and probably no student ever studied so much for his course, and learned so much, as I did this summer. I don’t know if I’ll ever change my opinion, but at present I’m certain that Schopenhauer is the most brilliant of men. I’ve begun to translate him and won’t you also take it on? We could publish it jointly. As I read him, it’s inconceivable to me how his name can remain unknown . . .1

It would be easy to dismiss this enthusiasm and the opinion it engendered as just another example Tolstoy’s penchant for hyperbole. One could similarly ascribe this sentiment to the fleeting, but intense passion Tolstoy experienced in his encounter with the German philosopher and his major work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The World as Will and Representation] (1819, 1844), which was strong enough momentarily to becloud the Russian novelist’s judgment. But neither, in fact, is the case. Tolstoy’s infatuation with Schopenhauer was neither exaggerated nor ephemeral. On the contrary, we see from Tolstoy’s prose fiction and letters alike, that Schopenhauer’s influence on Tolstoy was profound, pervasive, and, like the impact Schopenhauer exerted on Nietzsche, lifelong. Of course, the important role that Schopenhauer’s thought played in the development of Tolstoy’s artistic, ethical, and religious Weltanschauung is acknowledged in passing by leading critics of Tolstoy, from Henri Troyat and R. F. Christian to John Bayley and Theodore Redpath. Few critics, however, have sounded the depths of Tolstoy’s affinity for Schopenhauer’s teachings on the “will” and even fewer have systematically traced the Schopenhauerian features of Tolstoy’s art and thought. While limitations of space prevent a thorough examination of these problems at this time, the aim of this essay is to offer some basic insights into this formative relationship.

No other philosopher in the nineteenth century assigned such an integral role for art in the workings of his metaphysical system than Schopenhauer. Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), J.C. Fichte (1762–1814), and G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Schopenhauer does not consider art merely an intellectual narcotic or, even worse, a frivolous deviation from the path of serious philosophical investigation. On the contrary, Schopenhauer accords to art and the artistic genius the highest distinction. For unlike the scientist, who is concerned with observing the phenomenal world and establishing laws for its behavior, the artist, whether his tools are paint and brush, blueprint and plumb, pen and paper, or string and bow, pursues higher, eternal truths. Accordingly, “every work of art really endeavors to show us life and things as they really are; but these cannot be grasped directly by everyone through the mist of objective and subjective contingencies. Art takes away this mist.”2 And, the mist cleared, the observer is momentarily relieved of his attachment to the will and is free to contemplate his relation to the world as will as a disinterested, will-less subject of knowledge.

If, among Kant’s disciples and immediate heirs, F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854), a contemporary and friend of the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Ludwig Tieck, consistently made the most far-reaching claims for the transcendental possibilities of artistic contemplation, Schopenhauer’s seductively elegant style and central doctrine that escape from the tyranny of the will-driven life is possible by means of either artistic creation or aesthetic perception exercised far greater influence among philosophers and practicing artists. Starting in the 1890s, widespread disenchantment with “professional” systems of thought, such as Hegel’s, led to an embrace of Friedrich Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s ideas. Intense enthusiasm for Schopenhauer also coincided with the rise of other aesthetic, pessimistic, and anti-rationalist credos. Some well-known examples include Richard Wagner’s dramatization of what he mistakenly believed was Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of sexual love” in the opera Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Thomas Hardy’s conflation of Schopenhauer’s “will” and Hegel’s “world historical individual” in The Dynasts (1904, 1906, 1908).

Besides Nietzsche, Wagner, and Hardy, a short list of Schopenhauer’s admirers in those years could serve as a reliable guide to the dominant figures in the chief cultural centers of Europe, from London and Paris to Vienna and St. Petersburg—George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, August Strindberg, Ivan Turgenev, and Lev Tolstoy. In fact, veneration for Schopenhauer is one of the features which otherwise dissimilar minds of European culture have in common, from proponents of Naturalism and Symbolism, from The Birth of Tragedy to The Interpretation of Dreams. Schopenhauer’s impact upon the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century is such that it is difficult to imagine the shape of early modernism without him, especially in such areas as music, philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology.

At this point, before moving forward with a discussion of Tolstoy’s affinity for Schopenhauer, it might be useful first to offer a description of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of “disinterested” contemplation, that is, the manner in which a will-less subject of knowing must necessarily behold a work of art or an object in nature. Never does Schopenhauer, in proclaiming the virtues of disinterested contemplation, have in mind the same kind of disinterestedness that Kant insists is essential in making aesthetic judgments. And yet, when Schopenhauer speaks of the withdrawal of the will and the submergence of individuality as being essential to the realization of aesthetic experience, it is clear that his starting point is Kant’s foundational idea. At the same time, it would be incorrect to treat Schopenhauer’s adaptation of Kant’s teaching on disinterestedness as merely a kind of restatement of the Kantian position in Romantic terms. While in The Critique of Judgment Kant is chiefly interested in determining the status of aesthetic judgments and of eliciting their basis or ground in order to draw a sharp dividing line between aesthetic awareness and our ordinary or scientific knowledge of empirical facts, Schopenhauer, in a manner that is typically Romantic in orientation, argues that aesthetic awareness constitutes knowledge affording insight into reality of a higher order than that available through scientific inquiry. Similarly, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), a nearly exact contemporary, in the year before his death, ascribes to poetry a power that

awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar . . . . The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively . . . . The great instrument of moral good is the imagination . . . . Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man . . .3

Schopenhauer gives the notion of disinterested contemplation a wider significance than that granted to it by Kant, so that it encompasses not only beauty, but also what Schopenhauer identifies as “the sublime.” The nature of purely objective perception is such that it admits not only those objects which “accommodate themselves” to it, “when by their manifold and at the same time definite and distinct form they easily become representatives of their Ideas, in which beauty, in the objective sense consists,” but also things positively “unfavorable to the will.” (I, 205) Schopenhauer explains that the sensations evoked by the sublime are identical to the feelings associated with the contemplation of the beautiful, of the experience of pure will-less knowing, and knowledge of the eternal Ideas. “The feeling of the sublime is distinguished from that of the beautiful,” only by the addition, “namely the exaltation beyond the known hostile relation of the contemplated object to the will in general.” (I, 204–205) The feeling of the sublime varies according to the degree of danger that the beheld scene poses to the will:

of the spectator. It is at its weakest when we behold a stark winter landscape and strongest when we are abroad in the storm of tempestuous seas . . . . [I]n the unmoved beholder of this scene the twofold nature of his consciousness reaches the highest distinctness. Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual, as the feeble phenomenon of the will, which the slightest touch of these forces can annihilate, helpless against powerful nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in the face of stupendous forces; and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing, who as the condition of every object is the supporter of this whole world, the fearful struggle of nature being only his mental picture or representation . . . . This is the full impression of the sublime. (I, 207–208)

In a famous scene in Chapter 14 of War and Peace Tolstoy illustrates the experience of the sublime that is just as forceful as Schopenhauer’s, even if it lacks his terrifying mystery:

High up in the light sky hung the full moon. Forests and fields beyond the camp, unseen before, were now visible in the distance. And farther still, beyond those forests and fields, the bright, oscillating, limitless distance lured one to itself. Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its far-away depths. “And all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I!” thought Pierre.

The last sentence is nearly a verbatim extract from Schopenhauer: tat twam asi—“This is you”—his borrowing from the Upanishads—the recognition that there is no difference between I and Thou, or between the subject of pure will-less knowing and the contemplated world of phenomena. This is the pantheistic epiphany that Pierre experiences in the moonlight.

To see through the principium individuationis [the distinction of one object or being from all others], to divine its illusory, truth-shrouding character; to experience the emotional intuition that the will is the same in the one and the all: this is the knowledge that lies at the heart of Schopenhauer’s ethics—knowledge that is obtained primarily through aesthetic contemplation. Similarly, only in the aesthetic state, reached through purely objective contemplation, is it possible to attain knowledge of the Ding-an-sich, “the thing-in-itself,” the foundation of reality, which Schopenhauer asserts is the will. The will is the ultimate, irreducible primeval principle of being, the source of all phenomena, the begetter present and active in every single one of them, the impelling force engendering the whole visible world and all life—for it is the will to live. It is this through and through; so that whoever says “will” is speaking of the will to live, and if you use the longer term you are guilty of a pleonasm. The will always desires but one thing: life, and more life. And why? Because the will finds life priceless? Because the will affords the experience of any objective knowledge of life? Of course not. All knowledge alike is foreign to the will; it is something independent of knowledge, it is entirely original and absolute, a blind urge, a fundamentally uncausated, utterly unmotivated force; so far from depending on any evaluation of life, the converse is the case, and all judgments are dependent upon the strength of the will to live.

The will, then, this “in-itself-ness” of things, existing outside of time, space, and causality, blind and causeless, greedily, wildly, ruthlessly demands life, demands objectification, and this objectification occurs in such a way that its original unity became a multiplicity—a process that receives the appropriate name of the principium individuationis. The will, avid of life, to wreak its desire objectifies itself into the myriad parts of the phenomenal world existing in time and space; but simultaneously, the will remains in full strength in each single and smallest of those parts. The world, then, is the product and the expression of the will, the objectification of the will in space and time. But the world is at the same time something else besides: it is the idea, my representation, mine and yours, the idea of each one and each one’s idea about himself—by virtue, that is, of the discerning mind, which the will created to be a light to it in the higher stages of its objectification, namely, the higher primates and human beings. Thus, in the upper stages of its individuation, even in animals and especially in humans, the highest and most complicated of all creatures, the will, to give itself aid, comfort, enlightenment, and security, kindles the light of the intellect which should make an idea or representation of the world—a kind of three-dimensional projection map of phenomena. It is noteworthy that, for Schopenhauer, it was not the intellect that brought forth the will; the converse was actually the case, the will brought forth the intellect. It is not intellect, mind, knowledge, that is the primary and dominant factor in experience; it is the will that dominates, and the intellect serves it. In a world entirely the work of the will, of absolute, unmotivated, causeless, and unvaluated life-urge, intellect occupies, of course, only second place.

Will, as the opposite pole of passive satisfaction, is naturally a condition of perpetual unhappiness; it is unrest, a striving for something that never leads to satisfaction or fulfillment—it is want, craving, avidity, demand, and ceaseless suffering; and a world or will can be nothing else but a world of suffering. As a writer ceaselessly tormented by insatiable passions and by the knowledge of humankind’s irremediable sinfulness, Tolstoy concurred with Schopenhauer in the view that the ever striving will ought to enjoy the ascendant position over the intellect. Tolstoy’s much vaunted notion of the “natural man” has at its root precisely this knowledge of the will’s primacy over the intellect, of the superiority of humanity’s savage instincts over the civilizing urge. And Tolstoy found an antidote to his own miseries and hope for the redemption of humankind in Schopenhauer’s prescription of art and Christian, quietistic oblivion as the only means to achieve victory over the will. Art, or rather the contemplation of a work of art, has the power to free the intellect from its original subservience to the will, so that it rises above the trammels of everyday existence and beyond the illusory and only temporary satisfactions granted by the world of appearances. By the power of the artistic genius, whose talent consists in perceiving “not individual things which have their existence only in the relation, but the Ideas of such things,” the mist is cleared. The “veil of Maya” is torn back and the inner meaning of reality is revealed in the eternal Ideas, existing outside space and beyond time. Thus, as Nietzsche writes, “the heroism of truth consists in ceasing one day to be time’s plaything. In becoming, all is hollow, deceptive, superficial and contemptible; the riddle which man is to solve can only be solved in the unchangeable, in being, in being such-and-no-other.”4 At this point, the subject ceases to be merely individual and becomes the pure will-less subject of knowledge, the “clear eye” and “mirror of the inner nature of the world”: