On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 4.6)

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. Here 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 in the process, without anyone noticing it, brought the “spectator” himself into the concept “beautiful.” If only these philosophers of beauty had also been at least sufficiently knowledgeable about this “spectator”!— that is, as a great personal fact and experience, as a wealth of very particular, strong experiences, desires, surprises, and delights 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 one which Kant gives for the beautiful, in which the lack of a finer self-experience 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, at any rate, the very thing which Kant emphasises in the aesthetic state is clearly rejected and deleted: désintéressement [disinterestedness]. Who is 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 unclothed female statues “without interest,” we are entitled to laugh a little at their expense:—in relation to this delicate matter, the experiences of artists are “more interesting,” and Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily an “unaesthetic 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 naivete 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” in particular—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 a universalizing of that 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 particular 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 state (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 condition 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 in the words! What a picture of torment and long weariness! What an almost pathological temporal contrast between “that moment” and the usual “wheel of Ixion,” the “penal servitude to the will,” the “contemptible drive of the will”!—But assuming that Schopenhauer were 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 it a regularly occurring effect? Stendhal, as mentioned, a no less sensual person, but with a natural constitution much happier than Schopenhauer’s, emphasizes another effect of the beautiful: “the beautiful promises happiness.” To him the fact of the matter seemed to be precisely the arousal of the will (“ of interest”) 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 an “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 our 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 a torture.

Stendhal: pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle (1783-1842), a French novelist whom Nietzsche admired for his psychological acuity.

Pygmalion In classical mythology a sculptor who carved a woman so lifelike and beautiful, that he fell in love with it.

Ixion: In Greek mythology a mortal man who tried to seduce Zeus’ wife, Hera, and was punished in Hades by being bound on a fiery wheel which was always spinning.