what is actually present, and also of certain particulars of the past, but
that he mistakes the connection, the relations, and therefore falls into
error and talks nonsense. Now this is exactly the point at which he comes
into contact with the man of genius; for he also leaves out of sight the
knowledge of the connection of things, since he neglects that knowledge of
relations which conforms to the principle of sufficient reason, in order
to see in things only their Ideas, and to seek to comprehend their true
nature, which manifests itself to perception, and in regard to which _one
thing_ represents its whole species, in which way, as Goethe says, one
case is valid for a thousand. The particular object of his contemplation,
or the present which is perceived by him with extraordinary vividness,
appear in so strong a light that the other links of the chain to which
they belong are at once thrown into the shade, and this gives rise to
phenomena which have long been recognised as resembling those of madness.
That which in particular given things exists only incompletely and
weakened by modifications, is raised by the man of genius, through his way
of contemplating it, to the Idea of the thing, to completeness: he
therefore sees everywhere extremes, and therefore his own action tends to
extremes; he cannot hit the mean, he lacks soberness, and the result is
what we have said. He knows the Ideas completely but not the individuals.
Therefore it has been said that a poet may know mankind deeply and
thoroughly, and may yet have a very imperfect knowledge of men. He is
easily deceived, and is a tool in the hands of the crafty.
§ 37. Genius, then, consists, according to our explanation, in the
capacity for knowing, independently of the principle of sufficient reason,
not individual things, which have their existence only in their relations,
but the Ideas of such things, and of being oneself the correlative of the
Idea, and thus no longer an individual, but the pure subject of knowledge.
Yet this faculty must exist in all men in a smaller and different degree;
for if not, they would be just as incapable of enjoying works of art as of
producing them; they would have no susceptibility for the beautiful or the
sublime; indeed, these words could have no meaning for them. We must
therefore assume that there exists in all men this power of knowing the
Ideas in things, and consequently of transcending their personality for
the moment, unless indeed there are some men who are capable of no
æsthetic pleasure at all. The man of genius excels ordinary men only by
possessing this kind of knowledge in a far higher degree and more
continuously. Thus, while under its influence he retains the presence of
mind which is necessary to enable him to repeat in a voluntary and
intentional work what he has learned in this manner; and this repetition
is the work of art. Through this he communicates to others the Idea he has
grasped. This Idea remains unchanged and the same, so that æsthetic
pleasure is one and the same whether it is called forth by a work of art
or directly by the contemplation of nature and life. The work of art is
only a means of facilitating the knowledge in which this pleasure
consists. That the Idea comes to us more easily from the work of art than
directly from nature and the real world, arises from the fact that the
artist, who knew only the Idea, no longer the actual, has reproduced in
his work the pure Idea, has abstracted it from the actual, omitting all
disturbing accidents. The artist lets us see the world through his eyes.
That he has these eyes, that he knows the inner nature of things apart
from all their relations, is the gift of genius, is inborn; but that he is
able to lend us this gift, to let us see with his eyes, is acquired, and
is the technical side of art. Therefore, after the account which I have
given in the preceding pages of the inner nature of æsthetical knowledge
in its most general outlines, the following more exact philosophical
treatment of the beautiful and the sublime will explain them both, in
nature and in art, without separating them further. First of all we shall
consider what takes place in a man when he is affected by the beautiful
and the sublime; whether he derives this emotion directly from nature,
from life, or partakes of it only through the medium of art, does not make
any essential, but merely an external, difference.
§ 38. In the æsthetical mode of contemplation we have found _two
inseparable constituent parts_—the knowledge of the object, not as
individual thing but as Platonic Idea, that is, as the enduring form of
this whole species of things; and the self-consciousness of the knowing
person, not as individual, but as _pure will-less subject of knowledge_.
The condition under which both these constituent parts appear always
united was found to be the abandonment of the method of knowing which is
bound to the principle of sufficient reason, and which, on the other hand,
is the only kind of knowledge that is of value for the service of the will
and also for science. Moreover, we shall see that the pleasure which is
produced by the contemplation of the beautiful arises from these two
constituent parts, sometimes more from the one, sometimes more from the
other, according to what the object of the æsthetical contemplation may
be.
All _willing_ arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore
from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that
is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the
desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and
scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only
apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one; both are
illusions; the one is known to be so, the other not yet. No attained
object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting
gratification; it is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him
alive to-day that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow. Therefore,
so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are
given up to the throng of desires with their constant hopes and fears, so
long as we are the subject of willing, we can never have lasting happiness
nor peace. It is essentially all the same whether we pursue or flee, fear
injury or seek enjoyment; the care for the constant demands of the will,
in whatever form it may be, continually occupies and sways the
consciousness; but without peace no true well-being is possible. The
subject of willing is thus constantly stretched on the revolving wheel of
Ixion, pours water into the sieve of the Danaids, is the ever-longing
Tantalus.
But when some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out
of the endless stream of willing, delivers knowledge from the slavery of
the will, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing,
but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus
observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely
objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas,
but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once the peace which we
were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of
the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us. It is
the painless state which Epicurus prized as the highest good and as the
state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free from the miserable
striving of the will; we keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of
willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.
But this is just the state which I described above as necessary for the
knowledge of the Idea, as pure contemplation, as sinking oneself in
perception, losing oneself in the object, forgetting all individuality,
surrendering that kind of knowledge which follows the principle of
sufficient reason, and comprehends only relations; the state by means of
which at once and inseparably the perceived particular thing is raised to
the Idea of its whole species, and the knowing individual to the pure
subject of will-less knowledge, and as such they are both taken out of the
stream of time and all other relations. It is then all one whether we see
the sun set from the prison or from the palace.
Inward disposition, the predominance of knowing over willing, can produce
this state under any circumstances. This is shown by those admirable Dutch
artists who directed this purely objective perception to the most
insignificant objects, and established a lasting monument of their
objectivity and spiritual peace in their pictures of _still life_, which
the æsthetic beholder does not look on without emotion; for they present
to him the peaceful, still, frame of mind of the artist, free from will,
which was needed to contemplate such insignificant things so objectively,
to observe them so attentively, and to repeat this perception so
intelligently; and as the picture enables the onlooker to participate in
this state, his emotion is often increased by the contrast between it and
the unquiet frame of mind, disturbed by vehement willing, in which he
finds himself. In the same spirit, landscape-painters, and particularly
Ruisdael, have often painted very insignificant country scenes, which
produce the same effect even more agreeably.
All this is accomplished by the inner power of an artistic nature alone;
but that purely objective disposition is facilitated and assisted from
without by suitable objects, by the abundance of natural beauty which
invites contemplation, and even presses itself upon us. Whenever it
discloses itself suddenly to our view, it almost always succeeds in
delivering us, though it may be only for a moment, from subjectivity, from
the slavery of the will, and in raising us to the state of pure knowing.
This is why the man who is tormented by passion, or want, or care, is so
suddenly revived, cheered, and restored by a single free glance into
nature: the storm of passion, the pressure of desire and fear, and all the
miseries of willing are then at once, and in a marvellous manner, calmed
and appeased. For at the moment at which, freed from the will, we give
ourselves up to pure will-less knowing, we pass into a world from which
everything is absent that influenced our will and moved us so violently
through it. This freeing of knowledge lifts us as wholly and entirely away
from all that, as do sleep and dreams; happiness and unhappiness have
disappeared; we are no longer individual; the individual is forgotten; we
are only pure subject of knowledge; we are only that _one_ eye of the
world which looks out from all knowing creatures, but which can become
perfectly free from the service of will in man alone. Thus all difference
of individuality so entirely disappears, that it is all the same whether
the perceiving eye belongs to a mighty king or to a wretched beggar; for
neither joy nor complaining can pass that boundary with us. So near us
always lies a sphere in which we escape from all our misery; but who has
the strength to continue long in it? As soon as any single relation to our
will, to our person, even of these objects of our pure contemplation,
comes again into consciousness, the magic is at an end; we fall back into
the knowledge which is governed by the principle of sufficient reason; we
know no longer the Idea, but the particular thing, the link of a chain to
which we also belong, and we are again abandoned to all our woe. Most men
remain almost always at this standpoint because they entirely lack
objectivity, _i.e._, genius. Therefore they have no pleasure in being
alone with nature; they need company, or at least a book. For their
knowledge remains subject to their will; they seek, therefore, in objects,
only some relation to their will, and whenever they see anything that has
no such relation, there sounds within them, like a ground bass in music,
the constant inconsolable cry, “It is of no use to me;” thus in solitude
the most beautiful surroundings have for them a desolate, dark, strange,
and hostile appearance.
Lastly, it is this blessedness of will-less perception which casts an
enchanting glamour over the past and distant, and presents them to us in
so fair a light by means of self-deception. For as we think of days long
gone by, days in which we lived in a distant place, it is only the objects
which our fancy recalls, not the subject of will, which bore about with it
then its incurable sorrows just as it bears them now; but they are
forgotten, because since then they have often given place to others. Now,
objective perception acts with regard to what is remembered just as it
would in what is present, if we let it have influence over us, if we
surrendered ourselves to it free from will. Hence it arises that,
especially when we are more than ordinarily disturbed by some want, the
remembrance of past and distant scenes suddenly flits across our minds
like a lost paradise. The fancy recalls only what was objective, not what
was individually subjective, and we imagine that that objective stood
before us then just as pure and undisturbed by any relation to the will as
its image stands in our fancy now; while in reality the relation of the
objects to our will gave us pain then just as it does now. We can deliver
ourselves from all suffering just as well through present objects as
through distant ones whenever we raise ourselves to a purely objective
contemplation of them, and so are able to bring about the illusion that
only the objects are present and not we ourselves. Then, as the pure
subject of knowledge, freed from the miserable self, we become entirely
one with these objects, and, for the moment, our wants are as foreign to
us as they are to them. The world as idea alone remains, and the world as
will has disappeared.
In all these reflections it has been my object to bring out clearly the
nature and the scope of the subjective element in æsthetic pleasure; the
deliverance of knowledge from the service of the will, the forgetting of
self as an individual, and the raising of the consciousness to the pure
will-less, timeless, subject of knowledge, independent of all relations.
With this subjective side of æsthetic contemplation, there must always
appear as its necessary correlative the objective side, the intuitive
comprehension of the Platonic Idea. But before we turn to the closer
consideration of this, and to the achievements of art in relation to it,
it is better that we should pause for a little at the subjective side of
æsthetic pleasure, in order to complete our treatment of this by
explaining the impression of the _sublime_ which depends altogether upon
it, and arises from a modification of it. After that we shall complete our
investigation of æsthetic pleasure by considering its objective side.
But we must first add the following remarks to what has been said. Light
is the pleasantest and most gladdening of things; it has become the symbol
of all that is good and salutary. In all religions it symbolises
salvation, while darkness symbolises damnation. Ormuzd dwells in the
purest light, Ahrimines in eternal night. Dante’s Paradise would look very
much like Vauxhall in London, for all the blessed spirits appear as points
of light and arrange themselves in regular figures. The very absence of
light makes us sad; its return cheers us. Colours excite directly a keen
delight, which reaches its highest degree when they are transparent. All
this depends entirely upon the fact that light is the correlative and
condition of the most perfect kind of knowledge of perception, the only
knowledge which does not in any way affect the will. For sight, unlike the
affections of the other senses, cannot, in itself, directly and through
its sensuous effect, make the _sensation_ of the special organ agreeable
or disagreeable; that is, it has no immediate connection with the will.
Such a quality can only belong to the perception which arises in the
understanding, and then it lies in the relation of the object to the will.
In the case of hearing this is to some extent otherwise; sounds can give
pain directly, and they may also be sensuously agreeable, directly and
without regard to harmony or melody. Touch, as one with the feeling of the
whole body, is still more subordinated to this direct influence upon the
will; and yet there is such a thing as a sensation of touch which is
neither painful nor pleasant. But smells are always either agreeable or
disagreeable, and tastes still more so. Thus the last two senses are most
closely related to the will, and therefore they are always the most
ignoble, and have been called by Kant the subjective senses. The pleasure
which we experience from light is in fact only the pleasure which arises
from the objective possibility of the purest and fullest perceptive
knowledge, and as such it may be traced to the fact that pure knowledge,
freed and delivered from all will, is in the highest degree pleasant, and
of itself constitutes a large part of æsthetic enjoyment. Again, we must
refer to this view of light the incredible beauty which we associate with
the reflection of objects in water. That lightest, quickest, finest
species of the action of bodies upon each other, that to which we owe by
far the completest and purest of our perceptions, the action of reflected
rays of light, is here brought clearly before our eyes, distinct and
perfect, in cause and in effect, and indeed in its entirety, hence the
æsthetic delight it gives us, which, in the most important aspect, is
entirely based on the subjective ground of æsthetic pleasure, and is
delight in pure knowing and its method.
§ 39. All these reflections are intended to bring out the subjective part
of æsthetic pleasure; that is to say, that pleasure so far as it consists
simply of delight in perceptive knowledge as such, in opposition to will.
And as directly connected with this, there naturally follows the
explanation of that disposition or frame of mind which has been called the
sense of the _sublime_.
We have already remarked above that the transition to the state of pure
perception takes place most easily when the objects bend themselves to it,
that is, when by their manifold and yet definite and distinct form they
easily become representatives of their Ideas, in which beauty, in the
objective sense, consists. This quality belongs pre-eminently to natural
beauty, which thus affords even to the most insensible at least a fleeting
æsthetic satisfaction: indeed it is so remarkable how especially the
vegetable world invites æsthetic observation, and, as it were, presses
itself upon it, that one might say, that these advances are connected with
the fact that these organisms, unlike the bodies of animals, are not
themselves immediate objects of knowledge, and therefore require the
assistance of a foreign intelligent individual in order to rise out of the
world of blind will and enter the world of idea, and that thus they long,
as it were, for this entrance, that they may attain at least indirectly
what is denied them directly. But I leave this suggestion which I have
hazarded, and which borders perhaps upon extravagance, entirely undecided,
for only a very intimate and devoted consideration of nature can raise or
justify it.(51) As long as that which raises us from the knowledge of mere
relations subject to the will, to æsthetic contemplation, and thereby
exalts us to the position of the subject of knowledge free from will, is
this fittingness of nature, this significance and distinctness of its
forms, on account of which the Ideas individualised in them readily
present themselves to us; so long is it merely _beauty_ that affects us
and the sense of the _beautiful_ that is excited. But if these very
objects whose significant forms invite us to pure contemplation, have a
hostile relation to the human will in general, as it exhibits itself in
its objectivity, the human body, if they are opposed to it, so that it is
menaced by the irresistible predominance of their power, or sinks into
insignificance before their immeasurable greatness; if, nevertheless, the
beholder does not direct his attention to this eminently hostile relation
to his will, but, although perceiving and recognising it, turns
consciously away from it, forcibly detaches himself from his will and its
relations, and, giving himself up entirely to knowledge, quietly
contemplates those very objects that are so terrible to the will,
comprehends only their Idea, which is foreign to all relation, so that he
lingers gladly over its contemplation, and is thereby raised above
himself, his person, his will, and all will:—in that case he is filled
with the sense of the _sublime_, he is in the state of spiritual
exaltation, and therefore the object producing such a state is called
_sublime_. Thus what distinguishes the sense of the sublime from that of
the beautiful is this: in the case of the beautiful, pure knowledge has
gained the upper hand without a struggle, for the beauty of the object,
_i.e._, that property which facilitates the knowledge of its Idea, has
removed from consciousness without resistance, and therefore
imperceptibly, the will and the knowledge of relations which is subject to
it, so that what is left is the pure subject of knowledge without even a
remembrance of will. On the other hand, in the case of the sublime that
state of pure knowledge is only attained by a conscious and forcible
breaking away from the relations of the same object to the will, which are
recognised as unfavourable, by a free and conscious transcending of the
will and the knowledge related to it.
This exaltation must not only be consciously won, but also consciously
retained, and it is therefore accompanied by a constant remembrance of
will; yet not of a single particular volition, such as fear or desire, but
of human volition in general, so far as it is universally expressed in its
objectivity the human body. If a single real act of will were to come into
consciousness, through actual personal pressure and danger from the
object, then the individual will thus actually influenced would at once
gain the upper hand, the peace of contemplation would become impossible,
the impression of the sublime would be lost, because it yields to the
anxiety, in which the effort of the individual to right itself has sunk
every other thought. A few examples will help very much to elucidate this
theory of the æsthetic sublime and remove all doubt with regard to it; at
the same time they will bring out the different degrees of this sense of
the sublime. It is in the main identical with that of the beautiful, with
pure will-less knowing, and the knowledge, that necessarily accompanies it
of Ideas out of all relation determined by the principle of sufficient
reason, and it is distinguished from the sense of the beautiful only by
the additional quality that it rises above the known hostile relation of
the object contemplated to the will in general. Thus there come to be
various degrees of the sublime, and transitions from the beautiful to the
sublime, according as this additional quality is strong, bold, urgent,
near, or weak, distant, and merely indicated. I think it is more in
keeping with the plan of my treatise, first to give examples of these
transitions, and of the weaker degrees of the impression of the sublime,
although persons whose æsthetical susceptibility in general is not very
great, and whose imagination is not very lively, will only understand the
examples given later of the higher and more distinct grades of that
impression; and they should therefore confine themselves to these, and
pass over the examples of the very weak degrees of the sublime that are to
be given first.