The article presents Sergei Prokofiev's philosophy not only as a concentration of his creative experience, but also as the result of a deep study of the works of the great philosophers – Kant and Schopenhauer. Prokofiev distinguishes between a priori philosophy of music and a posteriori philosophy in his work. The first is represented by thoughts about music (creative will); the second is actually musical works (creative views). Musical will is primary and unique; musical representations are secondary and variable. Kant's antinomies of pure reason served for Prokofiev as a system of his vital and creative coordinates. Thus, the composer's symphonic creativity develops as a chain of binary structures representing semantic antinomies; opposite judgments about reality, correlated with each other as a "thesis" and an antithesis." Prokofiev's symphonies, linked in pairs, – about the revolution, about the relations between Europe and Russia, about the Great Patriotic War, about creative survival under ideological pressure – capture the history of the first half of the twentieth century as a tragic rift in the world between the forces of good and evil, creation and destruction, freedom and cruel necessity. The artist, who is in the midst of the struggle of opposites, is called to be a philosopher – the focus of humanism, harmony and creative will.
philosophy of music; Kant; Schopenhauer; antinomies of pure reason; will and views; thoughts about music; musical composition; a priori and a posteriori philosophy; binary macrostructures of music.