• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.139
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• pp.265-313
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• 2016

This research aims to reconstruct the philosophical content and essence of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of music in his book, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, particularly in paragraph 52, and to pay close attention to its theoretical account of music in the context of traditional musical aesthetics. The question whether Schopenhauer's theory of music is about aesthetics of feeling or about absolute music is dealt with at the end of this paper. It can be answered only within the whole system of his philosophy, because Schopenhauer's theory of music is the result of his philosophical reflections, and plays an important part in his metaphysics of the will. Schopenhauer's music theory, or rather his metaphysics of music, thus cannot be treated separately from Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will, and is connected organically with it. As the metaphysics of the will lies in suspense between the traditional metaphysical philosophy and the non-metaphysical philosophy after Nietzsche, between the idealism and the philosophy of the body, the music aesthetics of Schopenhauer oscillates between the (romantic) aesthetics of feeling and the modern idea of absolute music.