Chapter 38 Part Three Revisiting the World as Appearance §38

In the mode of aesthetic perception we find two inseparable elements: [one is] the knowledge of objects not as individual things but as Plato's Ideas, i.e. as inhabited forms of whole classes of things, and then It is the self-consciousness of the pure and willless subject who recognizes the subject not as an individual but as a knowing subject.The condition for the frequent appearance of these two elements together is the freedom from the mode of knowing which is tied to the principle of sufficient reason, which, contrary to the mode of knowing here, is the only suitable mode of knowing in the service of the will and of science. —We shall see that the pleasure due to aesthetics also arises from these two elements;

All desire is born out of need, and therefore out of want, and therefore out of pain.Once this desire is satisfied, it is over; but on the one hand, one desire is satisfied, and on the other hand, at least ten are not satisfied.Besides, desire is endless, and demand can be endless.But the satisfaction [obtained] is very short-lived, and the weight is tightly held.What's more, even this final fulfillment itself is false; in fact, the fulfilled desire immediately gives way to a new desire; the former is a recognized error, the latter an unrecognized error.None of the acquired objects of desire can provide lasting, unfading gratification, but such acquired objects are forever only like alms thrown to the beggar, sustaining the life of the beggar today so that tomorrow[again] prolong his suffering. —For this reason, if our consciousness is still filled by our will, if we are still at the mercy of our wishes, with the constant anticipation and fear in them; if we are still the subjects of our desires; There is neither lasting happiness nor peace.Whether we are chasing, or fleeing, or fearing disaster, or striving for pleasure, this is essentially the same thing.In either form, such cares about the will that is constantly making demands will always be full of agitated consciousness; but without tranquility there can never be true euphoria.In this way, the subject of desire is like lying on the hot wheel of Ixion forever, like drawing water from Thanaid's bottomed bucket forever, like being shoulder-deep in a tank that never drinks a drop. Danus.

But when external factors or inner moods suddenly lift us out of the endless stream of desire, when knowledge throws off its shackles in the service of the will, when attention is no longer fixed on the motive of desire, When grasping things through the relationship between them, it means that there is no interest, there is no subjectivity, and when observing things purely objectively, only when they are naked appearances and not as motives, and when they are completely committed to them; then, in The peace that is always sought and never found on the first path of desire will come automatically in a blink of an eye and we will get full joy.This is the state of mind without pain, which Epicurus called the highest good, the state of mind of God. It turns out that at such a moment we have been freed from the shameful will, and we are free from the slavery imposed by desire. Celebrating the holiday, when Ixion's hot wheels stopped spinning.

But this is exactly the state of mind I have described above, the state required to know ideas, pure contemplation, immersion in intuition, loss of self in the object, forgetting of all individuality, following The abolition of the method of knowing according to the law and only grasping the relationship; at this time, the individual thing in the intuition has risen to the idea of ​​its species, and the cognitive individual has risen to the pure "knowledge" without will. The subject, both are simultaneous and inseparable, so that the two [respectively] as Idea and pure subject are no longer in the flow of time and in all other relations.In this way, it makes no difference whether people watch the sunset from the prison cell or from the palace.

The inner mood, the perceived superiority over desire, can evoke this state of mind in any circumstance.Those brilliant Dutchmen pointed this out to us.Their focus of this purely objective intuition on the least ostentatious objects set up in still life a permanent monument to their objectivity and spiritual tranquility.The aesthetic audience cannot be indifferent when seeing this kind of monument, because it brings the artist's quiet, silent, and will-free mind to the audience; Such a mind is necessary in order to observe so attentively and to reproduce this intuition so thoughtfully.And when the picture also provokes him [the viewer] to empathize with that state of mind, his emotion is often intensified by contrasting this state of mind with his own restless mood blurred by violent desires. .In the same spirit, landscape painters, especially Lewis Dale, painted natural scenes of very little importance, and by doing so were able to produce the same effect all the more comfortingly.

The inner strength of the artistic mind alone can achieve this, but this purely objective mood can also be obtained from the outside because of pleasant objects, because of the beauty of nature that moves people to appreciate, the richness that flocks to people. Funding is easier.The richness of nature, when it unfolds before our eyes at once, though only for a few moments, almost always succeeds in freeing us from subjectivity, from the slavery to the will, and into The state of pure awareness.So a man tormented by passion, or by poverty and care, can so suddenly regain his strength, cheer up, and straighten his spine, if he lets himself look at nature; Immediately, all pain [caused by] desire subsides in a wonderful way.It turns out that we have at that moment freed ourselves from desire and committed ourselves to pure willless knowledge, as if we had entered another world where nothing [everyday] moved our will and thus strongly shocked us. up.Knowing is thus freed, just as sleep and dreams are.Can completely liberate us from all the above, luck and misfortune disappear.We are no longer that individual person, but only the pure subject of knowing, and the individual person has been forgotten.We only exist as the eye of the world. All cognitive creatures [of course] have this eye, but only the eye of man can be completely liberated from the drive of will.With this emancipation all distinctions of individuality are completely lost, so that whether the judging eye belongs to a powerful king or to a tortured beggar is irrelevant but the same thing.This is because neither happiness nor pain is brought here together when we cross that line.A realm in which we can be completely free from all suffering is often at hand, but who has the strength to stay long in it?As soon as this pure object of appreciation re-enters our awareness of our will, of any relationship we have with man, the magic is over.We are back to the knowledge governed by the Law, we no longer know the Idea, but the individual thing, a link in a chain, to which we also belong, and we surrender ourselves to our pain. . —The majority of men, by virtue of their complete lack of objectivity, that is, of genius, almost always stand on this standpoint.So they don't like being alone with nature, they need company, at least a book.This is because their cognition is always in the service of the will, and therefore they only seek the relation of the object to their will; As if playing the bass, there would be a constant, helpless voice: "It's no use to me".Therefore, in their view, even facing the most beautiful environment in loneliness, this environment also has a desolate, gloomy, strange, hostile meaning.

Overlaying such a beautiful phantasm over the past and distant [scenes], making it appear before us in a beautifying light, is at last the fear of willless contemplation. Joy.This is due to a masturbatory hallucination [caused], for when we bring back to us days long past, experienced in distant lands, our imagination recalls only [the ] object, not the subject of the will.The subject of this will suffered then, as it does today, with indelible pains, but these pains have been forgotten because they have long since given way to other pains.Thus, if we can do it ourselves, commit ourselves without will to objective viewing, then the objective viewing in memory will play the same role as the present viewing.So there is also such a phenomenon: especially when any kind of difficulty makes our apprehension more than usual, suddenly recalling the past and distant scenes, it seems that a lost paradise is drifting before us again. .What the imagination recalls is only the objective, not the individual subjective, and we therefore think that the objective also appeared before us purely, unobscured by any relation to the will. , as it now appears in our imagination, but in fact it was at that time that those objects were concerned with our will, and caused us pain just as they do today.We can free ourselves from all pain through objects before us, as through objects at a distance, if only we rise to a purely objective contemplation of these objects, and thereby be able to have the illusion that there are only those objects before us and not ourselves. up.Then we, freed from the sinful ego, are completely one with those objects as pure subjects of knowledge, and just as our difficulties are irrelevant to them, so at such a moment they are irrelevant to ourselves. that's it.Then all that remains is the world as appearance, the world as will has disappeared [nothing left].

As a result of all these considerations, I hope to have made clear what and how much the subjective conditions of aesthetic pleasure play; and the so-called subjective conditions are the emancipation of knowledge from the slavery of the will, the forgetfulness of The individual's self and consciousness also rise to a pure, willless, timeless, cognitive subject outside of all relative relations.And the subjective aspect of aesthetic appreciation, as an indispensable counterpart, is the objective aspect of appreciation, that is, the intuitive grasp of Plato's ideas.But before we examine this point in more detail, and before examining the achievements of art in this respect, it is more appropriate to dwell a little longer on the subjective side of the pleasure of the aesthetic sense, in order to discuss that which depends on the subjective side, because The sublime impression produced by the restriction of this subjective aspect is used to complete the investigation of this subjective aspect.After this, our discussion of aesthetic pleasure will gain its full integrity by examining it objectively.

But first of all, the following point [should] still belong to the above.Light is the loveliest of things: light has become the symbol of all good things and blessings.In all religions it signifies eternal good, while darkness signifies perdition.Emmad lived in pure light, Ariman lived in eternal night.In Dante's Paradise it looks somewhat like the Crystal Palace of Foxhall in London, for there also the Holy Spirit appears as points of light which in turn converge into regular figures.The absence of light directly makes us sad, and the return of light makes us happy.Colors immediately evoke vivid joy, which is at its highest when it is transparent.All this simply because light is the counterpart and condition of the perfect intuitive mode of knowing, the only mode of knowing which never directly excites the will.It turns out that vision is different from other sensory sensations, and it is impossible for itself to have a feeling of discomfort on the organ directly or through the sensory effects of vision, that is to say, it has no direct connection with the will; but only the intuition produced in the understanding can If there is such a connection, then this connection is the relationship of the object to the will.Hearing is already different: sound can directly cause pain, and can also be directly sensual pleasure, without involving harmonics or musical tones.The sense of touch, being the same as the sensation of the whole body, is all the more subject to this direct influence of the will; but there is also a painless and pleasureless sense of touch.As for the sense of smell, it is often pleasant or unpleasant, and even more so for the sense of taste.So these last two are also the senses most in tune with the will, and thus the lowest, which Kant calls the subjective senses.Since light is the objective possibility of the purest and most perfect mode of intuitive knowledge, the delight in light is in fact only delight in this objective possibility, and as such delight can be derived from pure, The most gratifying extension of [this fact] is the freeing of all desire, the knowledge of being free from desire, and as such already occupies a large place in aesthetic pleasure. —[We] in turn deduce from this view of light why we regard the reflection of things in water as having an unbelievably high degree of beauty.This easiest, quickest, and subtlest mode of interaction between bodies is to which we owe, to a greater extent, our most perfect and purest perceptions, to which it takes place by the reflection of light. The] action:—here this action is perfectly clear, unobstructed, perfect, in cause and effect, and at best before our eyes; therefore we have aesthetic delight in it, and The root of this joy is primarily entirely in the subjective ground of aesthetic pleasure, and [that is] the joy of pure knowledge and its approach.