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Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?
Schopenhauer used Kant`s formulation of the aesthetic problem, although he certainly did not examine it with Kantian eyes. Kant thought he had honoured art when among the predicates of the Beautiful he gave priority to and set in the foreground those which constitute the honour of knowledge - impersonality and universal validity. This is not the place to explore whether or not this is for the most part a false idea. The only thing I wish to stress is that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of taking aim at the aesthetic problem from the experiences of the artist (the creator), thought about art and the Beautiful only from the point of view of the "looker on" and therefore without noticing it brought the "spectator" himself into the concept "beautiful." If only these philosophers of beauty were at least more knowledgeable about this "spectator" - that is, as a significant personal fact and experience, as a wealth of very particular, strong experiences, desires, surprises, and delight in the realm of the beautiful! But, I fear the opposite has always been the case. And so from the very start we get from them definitions like that famous definition which Kant gives for the Beautiful, in which the lack of a finer sensitivity sits in the shape of a thick worm of fundamental error. "The Beautiful," Kant said, "is what pleases in a disinterested way." In a disinterested way! Let`s compare this definition with that other one formulated by a true "spectator" and artist—Stendhal, who once called the Beautiful a promesse de bonheur [a promise of happiness]. Here the disinterestedness [désintéressement] which Kant made the single element in the aesthetic state is clearly rejected and deleted. Who`s right, Kant or Stendhal?
Naturally if our aestheticians never get tired of weighing the issue in Kant`s favour, claiming that under the magic spell of beauty people can look even at naked female statues "without interest," we can laugh a little at their expense. In relation to this delicate matter, the experiences of artists are "interesting," and Pygmalion was certainly not necessarily an "un-aesthetic" man. Let`s think all the better of the innocence of our aestheticians, which is reflected in such arguments. For example, let`s count it to Kant`s honour that he knew how to lecture on the characteristic properties of the sense of touch with the naïveté of a country parson.
This point brings us back to Schopenhauer, who stood measurably closer to the arts than Kant but who nonetheless did not get away from the spell of the Kantian definition. How did that happen? The circumstance is sufficiently odd: he interpreted the word "disinterested" in the most personal manner from a single experience which must have been something routine with him. There are few things Schopenhauer talks about with as much confidence as he does about the effect of aesthetic contemplation. In connection with that, he states that it counteracts sexual "interest" - and thus acts like lupulin or camphor. He never got tired of extolling this emancipation from the "will" as the great advantage and use of the aesthetic state. Indeed, we could be tempted to ask whether his basic conception of "Will and idea," the notion that there could be a redemption from the "will" only through "representation," might have taken its origin from his universalizing his sexual experience. (With all questions concerning Schopenhauer`s philosophy, incidentally, we should never fail to consider that it is the conception of a twenty-six year-old young man, so that it involves not merely the specific details of Schopenhauer but also the specific details of that time of life).
If, for example, we listen to one of the most expressive passages from the countless ones he wrote to honour the aesthetic stance (World and Will and Idea, I, 231), we hear its tone, the suffering, the happiness, the gratitude uttered in words like these:
That is the painless state which Epicurus valued as the highest good and as the condition of the gods. For that moment, we are relieved of the contemptible drive of the will. We celebrate a holiday [den Sabbat] from the penal servitude to the will. The wheel of Ixion stands motionless.
What vehemence there is in these words! What a picture of torment and long weariness! What an almost pathological contrast between "that moment" and the usual "wheel of Ixion," the "penal servitude to the will," the "contemptible drive of the will"! But if we assumed that Schopenhauer was right a hundred times about himself, what would that provide by way of insight into the essence of the Beautiful? Schopenhauer wrote about one effect of the Beautiful - the way it calms the will. But is there only one regular effect? Stendhal, as mentioned, a no less sensual person, but with a natural constitution much happier than Schopenhauer`s, emphasized another effect of the Beautiful: "the Beautiful promises happiness." To him the fact of the matter seemed to be that the will ("interest") was aroused by the Beautiful.
And could we not finally object about Schopenhauer himself that he was very wrong to think of himself as a Kantian in this matter, that he had completely failed to understand Kant`s definition of the Beautiful in a Kantian manner, that even he found the Beautiful pleasing out of a certain "interest," even out of the strongest and most personal interest of all, that of a torture victim who escapes from his torture? . . . And to come back to that first question, "What does it mean when a philosopher renders homage to the ascetic ideal," we get here at least our first hint: he wants to escape his own torture
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