Chapter 45 Part III The World as Representation Revisited §45

Finally, directly and intuitively expressing this idea, the idea in which the will can achieve its highest objectification, is the great task of story painting and [portrait] sculpture.Here the objective side of appreciation absolutely prevails, while the subjective side recedes into the background.Note also that at a lower level than this, in drawing animals, feature and beauty are one and the same; and the lion, the wolf, the horse, the sheep, and the steer are always the most beautiful when the features are most expressive. .The reason here is that animals have only family characteristics and no individual characteristics. [Art] When expressing people, the characteristics of the race can be separated from the characteristics of the individual. The former is now called beauty (completely in the objective sense), while the latter retains the name of "characteristic" or "expression", so a new The difficulty, that is, how to perfectly express the two in the same individual at the same time [problem].

The beauty of man is an objective expression, which marks the highest level of knowledge and the most perfect objectification of the will. It is basically the idea of ​​man fully expressed in the form that can be seen directly.Although the objective aspect of beauty is so prominent here, the subjective aspect is still the permanent companion of this objective aspect.And just because no object can move us into the aesthetic intuition so quickly as the face and figure of a beautiful woman, as soon as we see this face and figure, we are immediately controlled by an indescribable pleasure, which makes us feel beautiful. We are above ourselves, above everything that causes us pain, so that this is possible only because the possibility of the clearest and purest cognition of the will also [can] be most easily and quickly Move us into a state of pure awareness; in this state, as long as the pure sense of beauty remains, our personality, our desires and their constant pain disappear.So Goethe said: "Whoever sees the beauty in man, nothing evil can offend him; he feels that he is in harmony with himself, himself and the universe."—As for [how] nature [is] successfully [produced] A beautiful figure of the human body, we must describe thus: that when the will at this highest level objectifies itself in an individual, by fortunate circumstances and by its own strength [it] completely overcomes all obstacles and resistances, The lower phenomena of the will often set these obstacles against resistance and will,--to which the various forces of nature belong.The will must first wrestle and win from these resistances the matter which belongs to all phenomena.Furthermore, the phenomena of the will in the higher orders are always varied in their form.A tree is already a systematic assembly of countless repeating, growing fibers.This combination increases indefinitely at higher levels, and the body is the most complex system of very different parts; each of which has.Lives a life that belongs to the whole, yet is unique.As for all these parts being subordinate to the whole in just the right way, cooperating with each other in the right way, conspiring harmoniously together for the expression of the whole, with no excess and no intrusion—all this is Such rare conditions mean that its consequence is beauty, a completely delineated caste. ——Nature is like this, but what about art?The opinion is that [art is] by imitating nature [to create beauty]. —But if the artist does not anticipate beauty before experience, where is he to recognize what has succeeded in nature for us to imitate?And how to find these successful works from those unsuccessful works?Has nature ever created a person who is perfect in all parts? ——So people once thought that the artist should gather the different beautiful parts scattered on many people, and put them together into a beautiful whole,—[this is] an upside-down and unthought-out opinion.Because here we have to ask the artist team how to identify exactly this form is beautiful and which form is not beautiful? —Have we not seen those ancient German painters imitating nature?But how far did they go in the [sphere] of beauty?Just look at their nude portraits! —It is impossible to know beauty purely a posteriori and only from experience, the knowledge of beauty is always, at least in part, a priori, but of a completely different type than that which we are aware of a priori According to the various forms of the law.These forms concern only the attainment of phenomena as phenomenal, their universal forms, and how these forms are fundamentally the basis of the possibility of cognition, insofar as they are universal and without exception, from which, for example, mathematics and pure natural science derive. departed.The other transcendental way of knowing, the way of knowing that makes the appearance of the beautiful possible, is, on the contrary, concerned not with the form of phenomena but with their content, not with how they appear, but with what appears. what.We all know beauty in the human body if we see it, but in the true artist he knows it so clearly that he expresses beauty that he has never actually seen , [the beauty we see] has surpassed nature in his expression.And this is possible only because the will - its proper objectification, at its highest level, is here to be judged, to be discovered - is ourselves.Due to this alone, we in fact have an anticipation of what nature (that is, the will that constitutes our own essence) strives to express. In true genius this anticipation is combined with a high degree of insight. Accompanied, that is to say, when he recognizes the idea of ​​the thing in a particular thing, it seems that he has already experienced the half-spoken sentence of nature. He said it frankly. He carved the beauty of form on hard marble after nature tried thousands of times but failed. Putting it in front of nature seems to be calling out to nature: "This Just what you meant to say! ’ And the echo from the expert connoisseur was: ‘Yes, that’s it! "—Only in this way could the genius of the Greeks discover the original type of the human figure and establish this type as the canon of the art of sculpture [of the human body]. Nature recognizes beauty where it really succeeds in individual things. This "anticipation" is the ideal type. As long as the idea, at least half is known a priori, and as this idea supplements the large a priori. When things provided by nature a posteriori have practical significance for art, ideas are also ideal models. Artists have such a priori expectations of beauty and connoisseurs have a posteriori appreciation of beauty. The possibility lies in the fact that the artist and the connoisseur are themselves nature in itself, the will to objectify itself. As Empidocles said, the like can only be known by the like; so only nature can Understanding itself, as only nature can understand itself, so the spirit can only be understood by the spirit.

It is believed that the reason why the Greeks found the ideal model of human body beauty is entirely due to experience, it is due to collecting different beautiful parts, here a knee is exposed, pay attention to it, and an arm is exposed there, pay attention again The erroneous view also has a completely similar view in literature and art, that is, the view that so many complicated, so authentic, so carefully handled, and so carefully drawn characters in Shakespeare's plays are He noticed it from his own life experience, and then copied it and wrote it.There is no need to analyze the impossibility and absurdity of this view.Obviously a genius, just as he only created works of plastic art out of an imaginary expectation of beauty, so his literary creation also stems from such an anticipation of character traits, but both creations require Experience is a kind of blueprint, and only on this blueprint can the transcendentally vaguely conscious things be drawn into completely clear [things], and then the possibility of leisurely creation appears.

Human beauty has been explained above as the most perfect objectification of the will, on the highest level at which it can be known.This kind of beauty is expressed by form, and this form is only in space, and has no necessary relationship with time, unlike sports, which have such a relationship.From this point alone, we can say that the proper objectification of will due to pure spatial phenomena is beauty in the objective sense.Vegetation is nothing else than this spatial phenomenon of will alone, since no movement, and therefore no relation of time (aside from the development of the plant), is needed to express its essence; It has expressed its entire essence, has revealed its essence.But in animals and in man a series of actions is still necessary for the full manifestation of the will which is manifesting in them; through actions the phenomena in them acquire a direct relation to time.These are all expounded in the previous article, but because of the following point, they are tied to our current investigation.Just as the purely spatial phenomenon of the will can objectify it perfectly or imperfectly at every fixed level—and this is what constitutes beauty or ugliness—so the objectification of the will in time, that is, the act , and the direct act, that is, the action [of the body], can also correspond purely and perfectly to the will objectified in the action, without foreign mixture, without superfluity or deficiency, but just Express every definite act of will;—it can also be the opposite of all this [, that is, there is more than enough or not enough, etc.].In the former case the action is performed with dignity, in the latter it is not.So just as the root is the corresponding expression of the will through its appearance in pure space, so, similarly, the manner is the corresponding expression through its appearance in time, that is, every act of the will is expressed through its appearance in time. The perfectly correct and proportionate expression of the will in objectified gestures and gestures.Actions and postures both presuppose the body, so Winkelman's statement is very correct and pertinent. He said: "Elegance is a special relationship between the person who acts and the act." ("Complete Works" Volume I, No. 258 Page) The result is naturally: We can say that plants have beauty, but we cannot say that plants have elegance; if we want to say this, it can only be in an anthropomorphic sense.Animals and people are both.Grace, according to what has been said, consists in the fact that every movement and gesture is carried out in the most relaxed, proportionate, and serene manner, that is, purely in accordance with the intention of the movement, in accordance with the expression of the will.There is no excess, and excess is against the purpose, meaningless movements or awkward postures; there is no deficiency, and deficiency is rigidity.Grace presupposes symmetry of all limbs, a correct and harmonious figure, for only by means of this is it possible to have complete ease and apparent purpose in all gestures and movements.So elegance is by no means possible without a certain degree of physical beauty.The combination of grace and physical beauty is the clearest manifestation of the will at the highest level of objectification.

As already mentioned, what distinguishes man is the separation of his racial and individual characteristics, so that each!As mentioned in the previous article, a special idea is shown within a certain limit of 300 degrees.The arts, therefore, which aim at the expression of the human idea, have as their task the individual character as well as the beauty which characterizes the species.Personal traits are best called character.However, the character can only be expressed within such a range, that is to say, the character cannot be regarded as something accidental and absolutely exclusive to such a person, but the idea of ​​character as a person is precisely in this area. A particularly prominent aspect of the individual, so that the description of the character helps to show the concept of the person.Therefore, character, as a character, is individual, but it still needs to be grasped and described according to ideal models, that is to say, it must be described basically in terms of human ideas (character helps the objectification of adult ideas in its own way). Highlight the special meaning of character.Beyond that, the description is also a person, as a portrait, a reproduction, of an individual, including all that is accidental.And even a portrait, as Winkelmann says, should be the [most] ideal type of the individual.

That character which is to be experienced as an ideal type, that is, the prominence of a particular aspect of the human idea, which is made visible partly by a constant appearance and figure, partly by the feeling of changing circumstances. And enthusiasm, due to the mutual influence of "knowledge" and "will", all of which are expressed in facial expressions and behaviors.Since the individual always belongs to human beings, on the other hand, human nature is always revealed in the individual and includes the typical meaning unique to the individual; therefore, beauty can neither be eliminated by character nor by beauty. Personality; because it is a caricature to cancel the characteristics of the family with the characteristics of the individual, and to cancel the characteristics of the individual with the characteristics of the family, the result will be [empty] meaningless.Therefore, artistic expression with beauty as its purpose—mainly sculpture—always modifies and limits this beauty (that is, racial characteristics) in some respects with individual characters, and always emphasizes a certain aspect of human ideas. On the other hand, human ideals are expressed in a certain and individual way; this is because human individuals, as individuals, have to a certain extent a unique ideal [such a] dignity, and as far as human ideals are concerned, The most important thing is to express itself in the individual of special significance.Therefore, we often see in ancient works that the beauty they clearly experienced is expressed not by one, but by many images with different characteristics, which means that they always experience it from a different aspect, so Apo Lo shows one thing, [Dionysus] Bacchus another, [Hercules] another Hercules, [the typical youthful beauty] Andinos another. like.Moreover, the special aspect of character has a limiting effect on beauty, and this aspect of character can even appear as ugly, such as the [drunkard] Xilun after being drunk, such as Faun, the satyr god, and so on.If the aspect of character goes so far as to truly cancel the racial characteristics, that is, to the extent that it is unnatural, it will become a caricature. —But compared with beauty, elegance is less susceptible to the erosion of character.Whatever gestures and actions are required by the expression of character, they must be accomplished in the most congenial, most purposeful, and most expedient manner to the person.This is not only for sculptors and painters, but also for every good actor, otherwise there will be caricatured images due to improper posture and awkward movements.

In sculpture, the posture of beauty is still the main thing.The spiritual characteristics that appear in the interaction of feeling, passion, knowledge and intention can only be expressed by facial expressions and postures, [so] the spiritual characteristics are the best subjects for painting.It turns out that the [expression] of the eyes and the [application] of color are both outside the scope of sculpture. These two techniques can certainly promote beauty, and they are even more indispensable for the [expression] of character.In addition, beauty is more fully exhibited when appreciated from several points of view; in contrast, if it is expression or character, it can be fully grasped from one point of view.

Since beauty is clearly the main purpose of sculpture, Lessing has attempted to explain Laocoon's non-exclamation by saying that exclamation and beauty are incompatible.Since this object has been the subject, or at least the turning point, of one of Lessing's own books, and has been dealt with in so many writings before and after him, allow me to say here, as an interlude, that I Opinions on this matter, although such a particular discussion should not belong to the scope of our investigation, because our investigation has always been aimed at "universal".