The poetic exposition (Darstellung) in Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of the beautiful

Abstract

For Schopenhauer, poetic art presents a differentiated nature when it comes to its relations to other arts, not only in the matter of ways established by the philosopher for its representation (Darstellung) and of its relations between representation and the genial intuition that preceds it. After all, how admit that for poetry also worth the conception that, being essentially intuitive, the Ideas would be by it expressed in a clear and lively form, if the materials that the poet works on are nothing but abstract concepts? In other words, how to conciliate this poetic arts' condition with the assumption from the Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Beauty, according to which “knowledge of the Ideas is necessarily knowledge through perception, and is not abstract”? The present article intends to show how Schopenhauer, in the beggining of §51 from the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, put an effort to indicate some alternatives for the question. The main one is a defense that the poet could only make his reader intuit the Ideas of life with some help from the reader's own fantasy. The philosopher also presentes others reflections about the way that concepts would have to be combined for that the reader's fantasy could be set in motion, as well as about the rhythm, the rhyme etc., questions of poetic exposition that are more specified in the Lessons about Metaphysics of Beauty (1820).