Abstract

The main thesis of this article is that Arthur Schopenhauer was the first to formulate clearly the problem of corporeality as an essential problem of philosophical thought. Schopenhauer can be understood as a philosopher and even as a phenomenologist of corporeality. For the first time in the European thought he explicitly describes the relation between consciousness and the body and offers a phenomenological description of the experience of embodiment, bringing his thought closer to M. Merleau-Ponty’s future phenomenology. The article considers the role of the body in the formation of subjectivity as well as the correlation between the concept of body and the concept of will in the structure of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Both Schopenhauer and Merleau-Ponty understood the body as a key to the experience of the world and to overcoming the object-subject dichotomy. Hence, while Merleau-Ponty welcomes this conclusion, Schopenhauer considers it is a source of pessimistic sarcasm: the will of which I am the materialization is completely indifferent to my individual existence and uses me as material for its meaningless reproduction. The emphasis on corporeality has important intersections with the development of aesthetics in the 18th century. T. Eagleton thus suggests that Schopenhauer’s philosophy makes a crucial contribution to the modernist project of aesthetics by its “implicit” aesthetics, presupposed by the development of the theme of embodiment, to which he attributes the unexpected “comicality” of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, well suited to the interpretation of absurdist art. The article also considers the influence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on Beckett’s work, which S. Garner interprets through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, proving that their reflections on body and flesh can be correlated with Beckett’s theater where the bodily presence of actors is emphasised.