Chapter 41 Part Three Revisiting the World as Appearance §41

The progress of our investigation makes it necessary for us to insert a discussion of beauty here. In fact, the discussion of beauty is only half completed here, and only the discussion of the subjective side has been completed.But what distinguishes the sublime from the beautiful happens to be only a particular state determined by this subjective aspect.That is to say that the pure and willless state of knowledge which any aesthetic contemplation requires and presupposes is that when the object invites and attracts [one] to contemplate, without resistance, simply by the disappearance of the will from consciousness. It appears naturally, or it is obtained through voluntary and self-conscious detachment from the will, and [at this time] the object of viewing itself has an unfavorable and hostile relationship with the will. Abolition of [aesthetic] viewing;—that is the difference between the beautiful and the sublime.In the object, there is no essential difference between the beautiful and the sublime, because the object of aesthetic appreciation in both cases is not the individual thing, but the idea which tends to be displayed in the thing, that is, the will at a certain level. Appropriate objectivity.The necessary counterpart of this objectivity, freed from the principle of sufficient reason like it, is the pure subject of knowledge, just as the counterpart of the particular thing is the knowing individual man, both [but the individual thing and the individual man] It's all within the scope of the law.

When we call an object beautiful, we mean that the object is the object of our aesthetic appreciation, and this includes two aspects.On the one hand, it means that seeing this object turns us into an objective person, that is to say, when we appreciate this object, we realize that we are no longer individual persons, but pure and willless cognitive subjects; On the other hand, what we see in an object is no longer an individual thing, but an idea; and this is possible only because we observe the object without relying on the principle of sufficient reason, without following anything other than the object and itself. relationship (this relationship is always related to our desires in the end), but until the object is observed.For the idea and the pure subject of cognition always enter consciousness at the same time as mutual counterparts; when it enters consciousness, all temporal differences disappear at once, since both are completely ignorant of the principle of reason and all its forms, It is outside some relations established according to the law; it can be compared to the rainbow and the sun, both of which do not participate in the continuous movement of raindrops falling, and the previous point follows the subsequent point.So, for example, when I observe a tree aesthetically, that is, artistically, I do not know the tree, but the idea of ​​the tree; Whether the observer is this one or any other living individual at any time and any place, or its leafy ancestors thousands of years ago, it is immediately insignificant; With the abolition of the abolition of the will, there remains nothing but the pure subject of the Idea and of "knowing"; and these two together constitute the proper objectivity of the will on this level.And the Idea is freed not only from time, but also from space; for it is not the image of space that floats before my eyes, but what this image represents, its pure meaning, its innermost essence, reveals itself to me, The inner essence that beckons to me is the true Idea; and though the spatial relations of the figures vary widely, the Idea is the same Idea, immutable.

Since, on the one hand, we can observe any given thing purely objectively, outside of all relations, and since, on the other hand, the will appears in every thing at a certain degree of its objectivity, it is therefore a If it is the expression of ideas, then it can be said that everything is beautiful. —The fact that even the most insignificant things permit a purely objective and willless contemplation, and thereby attest to their beauty, is mentioned above (§ 38) in connection with the Dutch still lifes. confirmed.But the reason why one thing is more beautiful than another is that the object facilitates purely objective viewing, because it accommodates and caters to this viewing, and even seems to force people to do so. , then we say that the object is beautiful.This is so, on the one hand, because the thing, as an individual thing, [can] express the idea of ​​its class purely through a very clear, well-defined, and consistently meaningful relationship between its parts, This makes the transition from the particular to the Idea much easier for the connoisseur, by presenting perfectly the Idea of ​​this class by having in it all the possible manifestations of that class, and thus making pure contemplation easier. It's easy.On the other hand, the special beauty of an object lies in the idea itself that greets us from the object, which is a [very] high level of the objectivity of the will, so it is very meaningful and rich in connotations.Therefore, man is more beautiful than all other things, and the display of man's essence is the highest purpose of art.Human posture and expression are the most important objects of plastic arts, just as human behavior is the most important object of literature and art. —But everything still has its own unique beauty, not only in every organic and individual unit, but also in any inorganic, formless, and even any handicraft. beautiful].It turns out that all these represent the Ideas through which the will objectifies itself at the lowest level, as if composing the lowest, reverberating notes of nature.Gravity, solidity, fluidity, light, etc. are some of the ideas expressed in rocks, in buildings, in flowing water.Landscape gardening and architectural art can do little more than help rocks, buildings, running water, etc., to exhibit clearly, in many ways, fully their unique properties, and provide them with opportunities to express themselves purely, but they This invites [people] to appreciate them aesthetically, and eases the difficulty of appreciation.On the contrary, bad buildings and landscapes, or those neglected by nature or spoiled by art, have little or no such effect, but the general basic ideas of nature have no effect in them. may disappear completely.Here again the basic idea appeals to the observer who seeks it, and even bad buildings and the like can still be objects of appreciation, in which the ideas of the most universal properties of matter can still be seen. It turns out that the form that people deliberately give it does not become a means [to make appreciation] easy, but an obstacle, making appreciation more difficult.Therefore, handicrafts are also used to express ideas, but what is expressed from handicrafts is not the idea of ​​this handicraft but [only] the material that people have given this artificial form, its thought.In the language of the scholastics, this class is conveniently expressed by two words, that is, the idea of ​​its substantial form, not its accidental form, is expressed in the work of art; It leads not to any idea, but only to a human conception from which the form emerges.It goes without saying that the handicrafts we are talking about here clearly do not refer to works of plastic arts.Moreover, what the scholastics understood in the term substantial form is actually what I call the degree to which the will is objectified in a thing.We immediately come back to the term material idea when we consider the architecture of the fine arts. —According to our opinion, then we cannot agree with Plato (Republic X, pp. 284-285, and Parmenides, p. 79, double bridge edition), who maintains that tables and stools are signifies the Idea of ​​the table and the stool, and we say that the idea expressed by the table and the stool is the idea already expressed in their mere material.However, according to Aristotle (", Chapter 3 of Part Eleven), Plato himself only admitted that 284 things in nature have ideas, "Plato said that there are as many ideas as there are natural things", [Aristotle Dodd] also said in the fifth chapter of [the eleventh article of the same book] that according to the scholars of Platonism, there is no concept of houses and circuses.At any rate, Plato's disciples, - according to what Alkynos reports to us (Chapter 9 of "Introduction to Plato's Philosophy") - denied that crafts had ideas.Alkinos says: "They define Ideas as the timeless primordial images of natural things. For most of Plato's students did not admit that there are ideas in crafts, such as shields or lyres, and the opposite of natural things, such as fevers. or cholera, and individual beings like Socrates or Plato, and those trivial things like rubbish and fragments, and those relations like greater than [what] and beyond [what] have no Idea; for the Idea is God's Eternal, self-fulfilling thought."——Take this opportunity to talk about another point that our theory of ideas is very different from dry Latour.That is to say, he maintains ("Republic" X, p. 288) that the objects that art attempts to express, the models of painting and poetry are not ideas but individual things.The whole analysis we have hitherto asserted just the opposite, and the more this view of Plato is recognized as the source of the great man's greatest errors, the less it will confuse us here.His mistake was to belittle and spurn art, especially literature; he continued his erroneous judgment on literature and art directly after the above quotation.