Chapter 48 Part III The World as Representation Revisited §48

In addition to beauty and elegance, story painting should also take the character of [characters] as the main object.This is fundamentally to be understood as expressing the will at the highest level of objectification of the will.At this highest level, the prominence of a particular aspect of the idea of ​​the individual as a person has its own special meaning.And this meaning is not only recognizable in the body, but is due to the various actions that can be seen in the facial expressions and gestures, and promotes this action, and coexists with this action, due to knowledge and desire. impact can only be realized.Since human ideas are to be expressed within such a range, the multifaceted development of human ideas must be seen by our own eyes through individuals with special meanings, and these individuals with special meanings can only be seen through A variety of backgrounds, stories and actions make them obvious.The way that story painting solves these countless tasks is to put various scenes of life, regardless of significance, [one by one] before [us].Neither an individual nor an act can be meaningless.The concept of human beings is gradually unfolded in and through all the behaviors of all these individuals.Therefore, there is absolutely no life process that can be excluded from painting.So if one [preconceivedly] admits only great events in the history of the world or stories in the Bible to be of great significance, to the painters of the Dutch school only their technical aspects are valued and they are despised in other respects, thinking that they probably only write some everyday life. It's just the objects in the painting, that's too unfair to these excellent painters.One should first consider that the inner meaning of an action is quite different from its outer meaning.The two also often appear separately [without conspiring with each other].The external meaning is the importance of an action to the actual world and its consequences in the actual world, so it is [determined] according to the principle of sufficient reason.The inner meaning is [our] deep understanding of the concept of human beings.This perception manifests the Idea of ​​Man by virtue of the conditions properly arranged for the purpose, which allow those expressing definite and firm personalities to exhibit their peculiarities and thus reveal those aspects of the Idea which are not common to them.Only inner meanings have a place in art, while outer meanings have a place in history.The two are completely independent and can appear together, but can also appear separately.An act of great historical importance may well be, in its inner sense, a mundane and vulgar act.On the contrary, [any] scene in everyday life can have a great inner significance if the individual man and his actions, his desires, down to the most hidden details, can be revealed in this scene.And the external meaning can be very different, but the internal meaning can still be the same or nothing but the same meaning; for example: or the cabinet ministers are at each other on the map for land and subjects, or the peasants are in the tavern. There is no difference in the inner sense between using cards and dice to bet against each other and bickering, just as people play chess, whether the pieces are made of gold or wood, it is a game.Moreover, for this reason alone, these scenes and events, their deeds and endeavors, their miseries and joys, which constitute the content of the lives of millions of men, are of sufficient importance to be the subject of art; The richness and variety must also provide enough material to exhibit the many facets of the human mind.Even the fleeting smoke and cloud, once mastered by art and fixed on the picture (now called life sketch), will also arouse a slight and meaningful touch, originally in some individual, but can represent In the overall state of affairs, it is the achievement of painting art to fix this ever-changing and constantly changing world on a long-lasting picture.By virtue of this achievement, the art of painting seems to have stopped the turning of time itself, in raising the individual to the idea of ​​its species.Finally, historical and externally meaningful subjects in painting often suffer from the disadvantage that the meaning of such subjects [sometimes] just cannot be directly expressed and must be supplemented by taking things for granted.On this point, we should distinguish the title meaning of a painting from its real meaning; the former is external, but only has the meaning as a concept; A picture is shown intuitively.For example, the former is that Moses was discovered by an Egyptian princess, which is an extremely important key in history, but the actual meaning here, what is really presented to the intuition, is the opposite, it is just a noble lady rescued an abandoned baby from a cradle floating on the water Come on, it's a thing that can happen often.Here, the attire alone is enough for a scholar to recognize the historical koan; but the attire is useful only in the sense of name, not in the sense of substance, because the latter only recognizes the person himself. , but don't recognize [clothes, don't recognize] the form picked at random. Themes that [art] derives from history have no distinct advantage over those that are derived from pure possibility, i.e., which are not individual but can only be called general; What is significant is not that other, not the individual state of affairs itself, but what is general in the individual state of affairs, an aspect of the human idea expressed by the state of affairs.Therefore, on the other hand, certain historical themes are not to be blamed, but when viewed from a truly artistic point of view, neither the painter nor the connoisseur cares at all about the individual and single things in these themes, which happen to constitute the history. Rather than sexual things, he cares about the universal things expressed in the subject matter, and cares about ideas.And only when the theme can really be expressed, and there is no need to supplement it with "taken for granted", historical themes can be used, otherwise the meaning of the name and the meaning of the object will be too far apart, and what is thought of on the screen will become the most important [something] ] to the detriment of [something] seen intuitively.It is no longer appropriate on the stage (as in French tragedies) to have the action of the subject take place behind the scenes, and it would obviously be a great mistake to do so in painting.Historical subject matter is definitely disadvantageous only in so far as it confines the painter to a field chosen not for artistic purposes but for other purposes arbitrarily.The absolute disadvantage is that this range lacks pictorial and interesting subjects, for example, if the range is weak, isolated, obstinate, ruled by church legislation, that is, dominated by false delusions, for things. The history of humble peoples such as the Jewish nation that the major contemporary nations despise. —Since between us and all ancient peoples there was a great migration of peoples, as a past change of the bottom of the sea stood between the two crusts of the present day and the structure of which we now know only from fossils; It is our great misfortune, then, that the peoples whose past culture provides the basis for our culture are not the Greeks, the Indians, or even the Romans, who happen to be the Jews.But it was especially unfortunate for the Italian painters of genius in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who were artificially confined to a narrow circle in their choice of subjects, and had to catch all sorts of wretches.It turns out that the New Testament, as far as the historical part is concerned, is even worse as a source of painting subjects than the Old Testament. As for the history of the martyrs and church ministers that followed the New Testament, it is even worse. .But [it cannot be generalized] among these paintings one has to distinguish between those that deal exclusively with the historical or mythological parts of Judaism and Christianity, and those that make the real, that is, the Christian, ethical spirit possible. The painting that can be seen intuitively, and the method used is to draw characters full of this spirit.The latter picture is in fact the highest and most admirable achievement in the art of painting, and only its greatest masters, especially Raphael and Gonecchio—the latter largely in its infancy Only in the works—— can we achieve such success.This kind of painting can't be counted in the historical story painting, because most of these paintings don't describe the process of a situation, don't describe any behavior, but just put together some holy figures, often the savior himself, Mostly 310 is still in infancy, with his mother and angels and so on.We see the expression and reflection of the most complete "knowledge" in their faces, especially in their eyes.This is not concerned with individual things, but grasped those ideas, that is, fully grasped the understanding of the whole essence of the universe and human life.This knowledge, when it comes back to affect the will in the minds of the divine, is, unlike other knowledges, merely furnishing motives for the will, but, on the contrary, has become a tranquilizer which annuls all desire.From this tranquilizer comes absolute desirelessness—the innermost spirit of Christianity and Indian wisdom—the renunciation of all desires, the restraint of the will, the annulment of the will, and with the abolition of the will the final relief.It is in this way that the eternally admirable masters of art express this highest wisdom intuitively in their works.So here is the highest peak of all art.Art traces the will in its proper objectivity, in the Idea, through all grades, from the lowest, first by the cause, then by the stimulus, and finally by the motive, so that the will is propelled in many ways, unfolding its essence, until the Only now does it come to an end with the self-sublation which expresses the freedom of the will [self].This self-ablation is brought about by a powerful tranquilizer which the will acquires in its fullest knowledge of its own nature.