Schopenhauer's Theory Of Sublime

Being a transition from epistemology to Voluntarismthe, the key issue of Schopenhauer's philosophy was the paradoxy between cognition and will, and was demonstrated by his theory of sublime. By analyzing the theory of sublime, we found that the will of Schopenhauer itself was a paradoxical concept that not only lusted for life but also yearned for death, and that not only yielded cognition from the necessity of existence but also woke up the will. In turn the will reflected on the 'mirror' of concept and leaded to the self denial. Schopenhauer was permisstics with the blind will, whereas Nietzsche discovered the tragic spirits within and revealed the greatness of life. The paradoxy between will and Cognition in Schopenhauer's philosophy narrowed down to the fact that Schopenhauer turned the will as a thing-in-itself but also tried to maintain will as ontology in metaphysics at the same time. This (dangeling) attachment to the conventional metaphyiscs was inherent in his theory hence was a major topic in this paper. Besides, another important aspect of this paper is to highlight Schopenhauer's theory of sublime by investigating the history of sublime theories where his theory on stressing the objectivity was an alternative but greatly influenced the following generations. In all, the main theme of this paper were two folds: first, we clarified the paradoxy between Cognition and will in Schopenhauer's philosophy by studying its theory of sublime, of which the essential causes were also explored ; second, we investigated Schopenhauer's theory of sublime in the scope of the history of sublime theories and therein pinpointed its importance.