– ‘were not the inner essence of things confessed to us elsewise, dimly at least and in our Feeling. For that essence cannot be gathered from the Ideas, nor understood through any mere objective knowledge; wherefore it would ever remain a mystery, had we not access to it from quite another side. Only inasmuch as every observer [lit. knower or perceiver – Erkenner] is an Individual withal, and thereby part of Nature, stands there open to him in his own self-consciousness the adit to Nature’s innermost; and there forthwith, and most immediately, it makes itself known to him as Will.
{SCHOP} {FEUER} If we couple this with what Schopenhauer postulates as the condition for entry of an Idea into our consciousness, namely ‘a temporary preponderance of intellect over will, or to put it physiologically, a strong excitation of the [P. 67] sensory faculty of the brain (der anschauenden Gehirnthaetigkeit) without the smallest excitation of the passions or desires,’ we have only further to pay close heed to the elucidation which directly follows it, {pre-SCHOP} namely that our consciousness has two sides: in part it is a consciousness of one’s own self, which is the will; in part a consciousness of other things, and chiefly then a visual knowledge of the outer world, the apprehension of objects. ‘The more the one side of the aggregate consciousness comes to the front, the more does the other retreat.
{SCHOP} {FEUER} After well weighing these extracts from Schopenhauer’s principal work it must be obvious to us that musical conception, as it has nothing in common with the seizure of an Idea (for the latter is absolutely bound to physical perception of the world), can have its origin nowhere but upon that side of consciousness which Schopenhauer defines as facing inwards. (…) If this consciousness, however, is the consciousness of one’s own self, i.e. of the Will, we must take it that its repression is indispensable indeed for purity of the outward-facing consciousness, but that the nature of the Thing-in-itself – inconceivable by that physical [or ‘visual’] mode of knowledge – would only be revealed to this inward-facing consciousness when it had attained the faculty of seeing within as clearly as that other side of consciousness is able in its seizure of Ideas to see without.“ [766W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 66-67]
[767W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 68-69]
[P. 68] {SCHOP} {FEUER} “For as in that phenomenon [“Clairvoyance”] the inward-facing consciousness attains the actual power of sight where our waking daylight consciousness feels nothing but a vague impression of the midnight background of our Will’s emotions, so from out this night Tone bursts upon the world of waking, a direct utterance of the Will. As dreams must have brought to everyone’s experience, beside the world envisaged by the functions of the waking brain there dwells a second, distinct as is itself, no less a world displayed to vision; since this second world can in no case be an object lying outside us, it therefore must be brought to our cognisance by an inward function of the brain; and this form of the brain’s perception Schopenhauer here calls the Dream-organ. Now a no less positive experience is this: besides the world that presents itself to sight, in waking as in dreams, we are conscious of the existence of a second world, perceptible only through the ear, manifesting itself through sound; literally a sound-world beside the light-world, a world of which we may say that it bears the same relation to the visible world as dreaming to waking: for it is quite as plain to us as is the other, though we must recognise it as being entirely different. As the world of dreams can only come to vision through a special operation of the brain, so Music enters our consciousness through a kindred operation; only, the latter differs exactly as much from the operation consequent on sight, as that Dream-organ from the function of the waking brain under the stimulus of outer impressions.
