Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788 - 1860 (detail from "Willing," Spring 2000, Oil on Canvas)

I painted Schopenhauer's portrait from a photograph taken near the end of the Philosopher's life.  His work, The World As Will and Representation, is a conceptually flawed but grand and passionate account of existence and our being here.  It offers a deep reassessment and extension of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, claiming that the "thing-in-itself" (the hidden, transcendentally real nature of any given object or state of affairs) can indeed be understood (though not by the intellect): the thing-in-itself is like what we experience as the will.  What's the inner nature of a stone, a storm, a planet?  It's an unconscious, aimless, borderless striving.  But if objects are only spatial and temporal because our minds make them so (something Kant had claimed in 1781, and which the Hindu Vedas poetically suggested three thousand years before), then the Will isn't really fragmented into diverse objects.  It isn't plural (though our minds and our aims differ, my will and my neighbor's are really one; hence Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion); so the Will in me and that in a stone are really the same Will.

detail from Leaving and Arriving

Leaving and Arriving, Oil on Canvas 1999

HOME

NEXT PAINTINGS

For inquiries about purchasing the paintings on this site, contact Jamey Hecht at Avian801@aol.com.