14. On Aesthetics

All thinking seeks the spirit in nature; for science, the world of reality is a thing that it cannot dwell on, a point of passage through which it must go in order to arrive at the essence of things, which can only be grasped as /dee. Only by transcending this reality, breaking open the shell and penetrating to the core, does the human spirit reveal what holds this world together at its core. We can never find satisfaction in the individual natural event, only in the law; never in the individual, only in the generality. In his mind, [man] builds a world that meets his spiritual needs, that has the harmony his spirit craves, that inherent strict logic he strives for. Never is external nature, as it presents itself to us directly, in a position to fulfill this for us. Only the penetrating gaze of the sun-like eye sees the spiritual sun that lives and reigns behind appearances. The immediate appearance appears to us to have been divinized. That is why times with a predominantly theologizing direction could never establish an aesthetic.

Aesthetics can only be the child of those times when man sees in the cultivation of art a high calling, when art becomes for him the high daughter of heaven, who has a divine mission to fulfill. If in every single manifestation of nature the divine reign appears to us already in all its intensity, what task can art fulfill?

The divine must be recognized in its most exalted form as an idea, so that each individual manifestation may be assigned its proper place in the system of our world view. The intuitive mind sees the general in the particular, the idea in the individual, but only because, while its gaze remains completely in the real, it sees more in it than the mere senses are capable of. The idea arises for him in the individual phenomenon because he does not stop at the individual as such.

The artist transforms the individual, he gives it the character of the general; he turns it from a mere accident into a necessity, from an earthly into a divine. The artist's task is not to give form to the sensual, no, but to allow the real to appear in an ideal light. The what is taken from reality, but that is not what matters, the how is the property of the creative power of genius, and that is what matters.

By being torn out of the fabric of the world as a whole and now being able to unfold its free ideality, the individual appears to us essentially different from how it is in reality, and although it appears to us in its truth, this truth of natural law is nevertheless an appearance. What is necessary in nature becomes ethical in the drama, since the work of humanity must be called not ethical but historical. Beauty is not a microcosm, nor would such a microcosm be beautiful. For it is precisely in the surpassing of itself in the individual, in terms of qualities and greatness, that beauty lies. We perceive this as a perfection that cannot elevate us in the universe, because it is simply taken for granted there.

Only the realization that the idea, freed from the bonds of nature, is the truly divine, makes us humans appear truly free; [text breaks off]