Art has always been fascinating throughout human history. Ever since our ancestors started painting on cave walls, art has been around and has always been reflecting our everyday lives. There have been very few things in history as inlfuential as art. Art is what makes us human. It's irrational, yet beautiful. No other species would make something only because it's beautiful.
I'm not talking about a specific piece of art. I mean art in general. If you go back in time, painters, musicians, sculptors, architects and photographers have always been special. They were always the odd ones in society, the sensitive ones, the fragile souls, the ones that had something to say and wouldn't conform. Artistic personalities have always had a strong appeal in them.
We are the only species out there that has an innate desire to create. We want to create art, create companies, create buildings, create roads and make something truly ours. Little children like playing in the sand, making sand castles or playing with Lego, or drawing, or making pillow fortresses. As long as they can make something out of nothing, they'll do it.
Arthur Schopenhauer's Outlook on Life
Arthur Schopenhauer lived the majority of his life in the 19th century. He had a difficult childhood, with his mother resenting him and his father killing himself. That led to Schopenhauer living his life in isolation. He never had a lot of friends and spent a big part of his life alone, in a gloomy apartment in Frankfurt. The perfect recipe for a tortured artist, one might think.
While Schopenhauer was indeed fascinated by art, he was a philosopher. He is known as one of the most pessimistic philosophers to have ever lived.
He believed that everything in the universe had the so-called will. That means not only people or animals and plants but even the rocks, the sun and the sea. The will is what keeps everything going. For living creatures, the will keeps them alive, for what's not live, it keeps it whole.
In humans, he believed, the will was more complicated. Just surviving wouldn't suffice. He wrote that the human existence can be divided in two states: pain and boredom. The will always made us want more, do more and then again want more. It is an endless cycle. Once we achieve something, we are either disappointed by the result or have a short moment of happeniess. Then we just go onto satisfying the next desire.
The disappointment can be understood as boredom. We have the thing that we wanted, or achieved what we were striving for, now we have nothing to do. We have nothing to strive for. That is boredom and it leads to suffering.
Schopenhauer believed that happiness was just the short moments of satisfaction that were doomed to pass. His understanding was that satisfaction was simply suffering in the making.
Schopenhauer's solutions to suffering
Arthur Schopenhauer thought there were only three possible solutions to not live in suffering.
Asceticism
Asceticism is the denying of all pleasures. These include sex, food, alcohol and anything else that would make us feel good. It is the most extreme solution.
He was inspired by the Buddhist monks and wrote that giving up all of life's pleasures was the only way to silence the will. He concluded that the reason for man's suffering was caused by the will and this was the best cure for suffering.
Schopenhauer understood that the human being is flawed and weak. He knew that very few of us could actually give up life's pleasures, admitting that the majority wouldn't have the discipline to be true ascetics and would never overcome the suffering of life.
Compassion
As previously stated, Schopenhauer believed that not only living creatures had the will. Anything has the will to stay as a whole and procreate.
In other words, the will is present in everything that surrounds us. The will is the organic and the inorganic world, so there must be no distinction between the two. Not between individuals and not between species. There is no distinction between the grass and the dirt beneath it.
From there, he believed that it makes sense that we treat everything around us with compassion. As we have will and everything around has will, everything is us. Thus, the only logical thing to do is to treat everything, including ourselves well. Schopenhauer accepted that the whole reality is will and the only way to disconnect from it is to be compassionate.
Art
Arthur Schopenhauer was fascinated by art. He even saw it as one of the ways to stop the eternal suffering. He believed that it helps those who consume it detach from the will. The consumer of the piece of art, loses himself in it, everything else seizes to exist. It is all art, there is no will.
Schopenhauer believed that art was the most honest and platonic way to capture the essence of whatever is being written about, or painted (or photographed). The good artist only showed the essence of the object, and not of himself. It was all about the object. Thus, consuming art was the most efficient way to get to the real nature of things and understand what reality is composed of.
By consuming art, we disconnect from the will. There is no pain and no boredom, just art.
Street Photography as Schopenhauer-ian Art
The essence of street photography is that it shows life as it is. Street photography is reporting when there is nothing to repot. It is showing life as it is. Nothing more, nothing less.
It is a very wide concept. It can be anything from images of crowded streets, to dead alleys, to life indoors. Street photography doesn't need to be on the street. It can be on the field, or in the metro, or even in an elevator. As long as it reports the mundane, everyday life, it is street photography.
The purpose of street photography is to capture the essence of the subject. Show them who they are in this fraction of the second that the shutter opens. Take a glimpse into their world and their minds. This is exactly what made Schopenhauer love art. It lets us disconnect from who we are and be someone else. It lets us leave the will behind.
This glimpse into someone else's life is the reason why street photography is often times not perfect. It is actually encouraged that street photos are imperfect. It is often out of focus, the composition is off, there is motion blur and loads of grain. But it takes us somewhere else, lets us be someone else.
If we are the ones doing street photography, the story doesn't change a lot. We have no control over what we see and what happens in front of us, we simply show it as it is. We are supposed to tell our subjects' stories in 1/125th of a second. There is no us, there is only them and an interpretation.
Final Thoughts
Art is fascinating and there is no doubt about it. It lets us feel things we never felt, lets us suck in other people's pain and suffering and forget ours. There is no simple explanation of art, it is a concept that we simply feel but don't need to explain. This is why we should do as much of it as possible. Make it, consume it, just interact with art to leave the will behind.
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