/lit/ - Literature

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