Music and the Peculiarity of Existence

It appears as though congenital to Schopenhauer’s concept of the will there exits the conception that the world itself is irrational. That in meditating on existence, there derives no greater sense of unity to be found within the phenomenal world, no etiological explanation as to the root of our representation. The world itself is infinitely mysterious for this reason. For Schopenhauer, logic has its limits; the extent of our understanding of the phenomenal world begins to break down within a purely etiological explanation of things. He claims that the objects of our perception may stand as “hieroglyphics that are not understood,” (The World as Will and Representation, 62). It is for this reason that Schopenhauer praises music as a phenomenal vehicle for epistemic understanding; sans reason, sans logic. To explanatory extent, Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship” from the album Another Green World demonstrates this phenomenon, both in its title and its musicality.