Third Section: Beauty in Nature and in the Human World

Chapter 8: The Living Human Being as a Thing of Beauty

a) Human beauty as appearance

The last problem discussed, which concerned the limits of the relation of appearance, will become very significant when we pass from art to beauty external to art. An artwork is a human work, one that is made to serve the aims of beauty. Clearly, the aim of the artist is to present, by means of an outward construction, something different. Nature works without such intentions; it is without any sort of aim, and without consciousness. It can therefore put nothing in its productions in order that something may shine forth from it.

The same is true of humankind, as it is and lives. It is true also of the entire world of events, upon which we stand and with which we work to form objects. Man is not the work of man, and the world that we construct is only to a limited degree the work of man.

Is there an aesthetical relation of appearance outside of works of art?

In the sense that nature might want to “intimate” something to us with it – half concealing, half revealing what it is – that can obviously not be. (133) But a state of being intimated even without a will to intimate, a self-concealing and a self-revealing without intention and purpose, is found in limitless ways everywhere.

This is well known from human life. Every person betrays something about himself in everything he does and lets be, in his speech and behavior, even when he does not desire it and even when he fails to notice it. In that way he may become transparent to an experienced or disinterested observer – down even to his secret and purposely concealed intentions and attitudes.

These are things that are usually difficult to express in concepts, at least not with the peculiar nuance with which they appear. That means, however, that these are matters that are revealed to us only intuitively, that is, to a higher vision and not to the senses. He who is experienced in the ways of men is practiced in this kind of vision, and has gathered many experiences; to him a picture of the soul of a man is always given along with his external appearance.

This capacity for seeing through a man, tested in practical life, which is always directed at the practical evaluation of others, may develop without any practical aim. And then it comes close to aesthetical beholding. Before the intuitive eye there occurs an appearance of the psychic inwardness of a man in his face and behavior, which rises up above all practical interests of the observer: something like the shining-forth of honesty, simplicity, mental purity, or perhaps kindness and a willingness to self-sacrifice.

These are of course purely moral values. But the way they appear to us is different from what they are in themselves. They can be clear, obvious or impressive; they can dominate the general impression of a personality, they can penetrate or transfigure his face and figure. Such an appearance, intuitively present, of what is noble and good about a person, we experience as the beauty of the whole person. And that is beauty in the relation of appearance in its genuine aesthetical sense. The appearing values are of course not the value of the appearance, but only their material presupposition. Thus they do not coincide with them and, when they appear elsewhere, they can be understood in a different, more rational form.

In this context one thing must be made clear from the outset: what “appears” here is not reducible to the relation of appearance, it exists even without the relation in the actual person; it exists even when no one recognizes it, either intuitively or otherwise. For this is a matter of the real moral character of a person, and exists in fact along with its value-qualities: it is a matter of his real attitudes, his real inner demeanor. Whether these characteristics needs must appear in some manner we may leave unsettled. What is alone of importance is that if they appear, they are not reducible to this appearance, but exist in themselves independent of their becoming visible.

But then the relation of appearance is different in this case from the work of art. In the work of art what appears is unreal and exists only for the one who beholds it; (134) in the case now under consideration something really existing reveals itself. But the appearing in something else, in something external that is given to the senses, is, as such, the same. And just for that reason this is a genuine relation of appearance. That alone establishes the connection between human beauty in a real living person and beauty in art. And, on the other hand, if that is true, the relation of appearance is not other than that in the work of art. What is different is only the mode of being of what appears. But for the phenomenon of appearance as such that makes no difference.

Therefore, it is not necessary in this case to relearn from the beginning the nature of the relation of appearance. It lies in the nature of appearing that what is real can appear as well as what is unreal. In life that makes a great deal of difference, but in the aesthetical context the difference is less, because here we are not concerned with understanding what is real (knowledge), but rather with the concrete intuitibility of the appearance itself and also with the close tie it possesses to what is sensibly given.

The test of this example of the understanding of human beauty will be the disturbance of such an impression by the appearance of characteristics that betray something quite different. Take, for example, the case in which a face that otherwise arouses our sympathy breaks into a laugh or begins to speak and thereby causes a movement of the lips that reveals treachery, resentment, malice, or even just dullness. Such things as these are sufficient to convey an inharmonious impression; the movement breaks through the harmony of the stationary features and disappoints us, for, beneath the clear lines of the general impression, pettiness or weakness has become visible.

Again, these are moral elements. But the appearance in the visible is not an ethical matter but one that disturbs the sensible impression as such; it is therefore a negative aesthetical event. This disconnect in a person’s appearance we experience as not beautiful, and when it forces itself upon us, as ugly. A harmony has then been disturbed, a unity broken that we had already discovered within it and welcomed aesthetically. And this broken unity is precisely that of an appearing background – of course one that is real, but one that presents itself in the external form. This self-presentation is the appearing. The break in unity operates in the sensibly visible foreground and it breaks its unity and also even disturbs its harmony.

Ugliness is when there is a disconnect between the inner man and his external appearance, so far as it betrays itself.

b) Beauty in relation to moral and to vital values

The problem in this relation is not quite as simple as it appears at first sight. It is clear that the content of what appears here of the inner life cannot be confined to what is morally valuable. What is contrary to value must also be considered; after all, it is not upon the ethical values themselves that what is aesthetically valuable depends, but (135) only their appearance to the senses. Why should negative ethical values not also play a role in appearance, if they too belong to the same sphere of human inwardness?

We are always in danger here of repeating the errors of ancient aesthetics and confusing aesthetical and ethical values. The ancients made this error in their concept of . They said also “Animus sanus in corpore sano,” a naturalistic turn of phrase, meaning a beautiful soul in a beautiful body. Here the beautiful as such is already assumed, and in fact in both levels. It cannot itself therefore be traced back in this manner to something more fundamental that underlies it. Least of all can it lie in a relation of appearance.

We should not speak at all of the soul as beautiful. One refers by such beauty to moral worthiness alone. Originally, genuine beauty is visible appearance in the transparency of physical form and in the dynamics of the living body. And, in general, we possess a fine sense for it.

Moreover, even a person whose morals are questionable can be beautiful. It is what we find so irritating in the phenomenon of human beauty. One may think of Alcibiades, a highly gifted man but also wanton, selfish, and unfaithful, and of the strange love of Socrates for him. He was in his way a quite unified character, a character that is marked distinctly as integrated and easy to understand in his outward demeanor. One may also think of the beauty of the youthful Nero. And the Homeric figures already demonstrated such discrepancies; not all of them were like Hector, fully accomplished both in his external appearance and in the depth of his inward stance.

Strength, heedlessness, or frivolity may express a pleasant devil-may-care attitude in a human face, while moral scruples are seen in dullness, being overburdened, or restrained. Beauty is not the expression of moral qualities; it is far more the expression of inner unity and wholeness. Yet both, the highest moral greatness and unity, may also not be stamped upon one’s external appearance, but hidden under an appearance that does not measure up to them. In this very simple and unambiguous sense, Socrates was the ugliest of men.

The beauty of a human face is entirely a question of the relation of appearance. And in this case, the relation – since what appears is something real –consists in the relative adequacy of the inner and outer form, in the becoming-visible of the one in the other.

Nevertheless, we have even now not yet plumbed the depths of the nature of human beauty. We must extend our vision over the phenomena, and we must carry over what is fundamental about the relation we have discovered to other things that can appear in a person externally as surely as moral values. To these belong above all the vital values. Man is not only a moral being, but also – and even before all else – an organic being. (136)

It is easy to forget this obvious fact when one assumes it to be merely trivial. But for aesthetics it is nothing less than trivial. Vital qualities can at times be obscured, but they can also be convincingly expressed by external appearance so as to seem to be given through the senses. Nothing in the entire field of aesthetics is so vulgar and common as the concept of human beauty as a well-shaped body (by no means only the face); perhaps this is even the oldest and parent concept of beauty.

This vulgar concept of beauty is largely connected to the sexual response. In the case of feminine beauty, it emphasizes the element of softness, tenderness, and youth; in the masculine form the elements of strength, firmness, and fearlessness (the last not understood morally as yet, but as the feeling of power). It would be quite false to reject such dependence as external to aesthetics. It is a necessary constituent of the natural feeling of beauty. But it is just as little identical with beauty as are the elements of moral value; they are rather preconditions of it, a mere element of the content of the appearance in the aesthetical relation of appearance. Aesthetic value lifts itself above them and is of another kind. Of course, the confusion of them by an unenlightened or immature aesthetical consciousness is quite common. We must gradually learn to make distinctions here just as we must in the case of our feeling of moral value.

The parent concept of human beauty may well be tied entirely to the impression of the strength and fullness of life. These elements make up the preponderance of what has remained in the concept up to highly cultivated epochs. A strong vital feeling lets itself be heard in it, even where it is no longer sexually determined. Only slowly do we come to separate the feeling of form and movement from the natural feeling of life and from the opposition of the sexes; that then awakens a sense for spiritualized beauty, for the face of old age, marked with richer lines of experience and the voice of destiny. The ancients found this kind of beauty early on in the masculine face and only much later in the feminine face.

All that can be understood only from the long and uncontested dominance of the vital feelings and the relation of appearances based upon them. The richness of form of faces cannot justify it. For it the face of old age is simply richer in articulate forms.

c) The appearance of the type

But this is not a matter only of a man as an individual; it is just as much a matter of a man as a representative of something else.

Each person represents a kind of human being also; whether pure or mixed, he bears characteristics held in common: those of his time and of his people, of his social class or of a more narrow human kind or type or milieu. (137)

These more universal elements usually play an obtrusive role in his outward appearance, at least insofar as they are distinctly marked on him. For that reason, they are also essential in the relation of appearance that bears the opposition of beautiful and ugly.

We must remember also that we normally see the individuality of people only superficially, and are satisfied with a relatively general impression of the people whom we meet (think of our tendency to look rapidly for marginal “similarities”). This role of the typical then becomes quite understandable: we always attempt to “fit in” the individual person somewhere, to place him in a ready-made filing system.

In itself, that tendency has only a practical purpose, and is a kind of economizing. But it predisposes an observer in an aesthetical way also. A person is inclined to remain fixed on what is familiar to him or on what seems to him to have a certain universal validity, thus on what vaguely appears to be typical.

The supposed typical features of a person need not always be what we think to be essential characteristics; quite contingent associations may play a role here. But unknown and dimly suspected generic features of humankind may also strike an observer, perhaps a distant ancestral type that is unfamiliar but that announces itself in the face and demeanor of a person – in certain circumstances even in those of a child – and makes us take notice.

The question of the typical forms of human faces – similar to a person’s build, his manner of moving, etc. – is peculiar: we have no concepts for such things, no words; we can communicate such things to others usually only by quiet suggestion (only creative draftsmen can reproduce them). And yet such things accompany our sense of human individuality even in its details; indeed, that fact is so universally valid that they determine our feelings from the outset when we “encounter” a person unknown to us, whom we see for the first time. Once we have a type in mind, it anticipates actual experience; we immediately expect a corresponding way of speaking, of gestures, facial expressions, even a certain way of behaving: in short, a character of a certain type. And, despite all, we are often quite right. The psychic type usually corresponds in some way to the outward form.

Since these formal types announce themselves purely intuitively, and are in no way tied to the practical interests of the observer, their appearance in an individual easily obtains an aesthetical character. This means that the appearance itself is the main motif. The individual with all his peculiarities affects us as a foreground that becomes transparent for the beholding of something else. This something else is the type, and it is all the same whether it is the type of a people, of an epoch, or of a more narrowly defined human type. The type shines through the peculiarities of the individual and gives to it a super-individual significance. (138)

In this manner, the workingman appears to us in palpable concreteness as type: the miner, the farmer, the sailor, the businessman, the officer, the intellectual: he appears even when we have no further interest in him. So also with the representative type of some people: the Englishman, Spaniard, Romanian, Chinese, or Indian. Incalculably many features belong to such national types: the character of the form of life, the style of life, the milieu, and even definite social circles. That all appears in a certain dependency upon one’s own sensibility; it appears even where it is felt to be alien and perhaps personally disapproved of by the observer.

But always something forces itself upon us in these cases, something we respect for itself alone as appearance, and, no doubt, just because it makes an impression upon us as a strongly defined and closed formal whole, while the individuality itself with its superabundance of individual characteristics easily slips away from us. When we stand before such a complete character, the details may seem to us to be nothing more than “extraneous and secondary.”

This last judgment may be a rather subjective devaluation. But we humans are liable to it, because we cannot do justice to the limitless multiplicity of the individual. Most men penetrate in their concept of the human only rarely to the individuality of a person.

A sharp distinction between the practical and the aesthetical concept of humanity is therefore hardly possible, but it is also not necessary. The one passes into the other without our taking notice of it – just as is the case with the boundary between the vital and aesthetical attitudes towards the physical human body.

Characteristic of both the practical and the aesthetical in our concept of humankind is the continuous transition from the non-aesthetical to the aesthetical. We begin with practical intent, and we are drawn by the weight of what comes to appearance into the aesthetical stance. The practically interested man becomes an observer; he open-mindedly partakes in what appears, and in that partaking loses himself. He experiences a change in his perspective to one of “disinterested pleasure.”

There is nothing astonishing in this. Something similar occurs always in the passage to the theoretical point of view; there too in the detection of what is typical we forget our immediate purposes, and turn to the appearance just for its own sake. With the aesthetical attitude, this is far more often the case.

Here we have one of the essential points at which the foundation of the aesthetical attitude – and its object, the beautiful – becomes tangible in the context of life. Not all aesthetical beholding is entirely pure, for there are transitional forms of all kinds. We encounter such transitional forms in other areas of beauty also. Only in the arts is the separation clear and distinct. (139)

d) Situation and drama in life

There are other things that “appear” on human beings – of course not in their personal appearance alone, also not in the individual person as such, but rather in the community of several persons in their planned and unplanned meetings. When one realizes that there is a kind of dramatic art that consciously stages such things (even the epic ones), it seems almost obvious that even in life itself this being-together must appear objectively, although situations and conflicts are not perceptible in the strong sense (are not given to the senses), just as little as are the mental states of individuals.

We may call this the “drama of life.” The expression is taken from literary works, but that is quite proper, for the poets first discovered it; – “discovered” it, in the sense that they first taught others to see as such what was always there and sensed in various ways, and therewith made the aesthetical element in life tangible.

For it is nothing less than obvious that this drama is seen as such, still less, perhaps, than the landscape about us is obvious. A very definite point of view is essential to seeing it, one with a certain distance from the hustle-bustle of human affairs, which the man immersed in practical life does not have and cannot appropriate very easily. One may call this point of view the art of aesthetical experience. The experience is not equivalent to perception, although it is carried by it throughout and is dependent upon it. But aesthetical experience passes also beyond it, because it reaches beyond vulgar experience. For the latter is experience in harness; it is drawn along by practical interest or by one’s participation in the witnessed events.

In everyday experience a man is harnessed to a situation, he has a role in it or accepts a role with all subjectivity and passion, and with his own sympathies and aversions. In aesthetical experience he leaves all that behind, lifts himself above it; he leaves, as it were, the realm of practical interest and his role in it. Beholding, he takes his place “next” to life, to which he of course is existentially tied, and takes it all in “from the sidelines.”

Much belongs to this state, to the achievement of which a man rarely can bring himself. Two quite distinct talents are required. A distance from one’s own fortune and misfortune is only one; the other gives him the capacity for seeing events in the round. The first makes him an observer of life, the second gives him clear-sightedness, comprehension, and penetration. There may of course be causal connections between the two. But that does not cancel the essential difference in these two capacities, and their meeting occurs not as frequently as one would think. For that reason most of the drama of life that surrounds us passes us by along with the fullness of its appearance – not because we stand too far away (140) but because we are too close to it. For from the first we stand right in the middle of it.it.

The infrequency of the aesthetical stance in life and toward life, the isolating heights of the state of serenity it presupposes, should not hinder a person from recognizing in them the great aesthetic object that lies always at the ready before him and awaits only the maturing of his receptive consciousness. For the drama of life consists in the unbroken chain of the situations in which a person finds himself and in his efforts to master them.45 All human plans, all success and failure, all ephemeral activity with its consequences, which themselves cause unanticipated situations, all foresight and all failure of foresight, all understanding of the situations and attitudes of others, as well as all misunderstanding of them, all entangling of oneself in the interests and undertakings of others, all guilt and innocence, true and false, censure and apology – up to the far greater developments that approach us like strokes of fate – all belong to the drama of life.

The richness of this tremendous multiplicity, which makes life what it is, is not calculable. All of moral life, understood as both positive and negative, belongs here. It reveals itself as the “stuff” of an inexhaustible aesthetical realm. But what this is as an aesthetic object is not what it is as a moral one. For example, it is precisely the small, the petty, the hollow, that which is ethically meaningless or despicable, that which is too shallow to spend even a second in contemplating, that can become aesthetically meaningful when it casts a ray of light upon the inner life of a person, or upon current tensions between man and man. And that occurs with what is small and negative just as with what is morally great and positive. That depends upon the force of the letting-appear.

The manifold of a man’s inner life that appears in such cases is no less than what appears in his external appearance (in the face and demeanor of an individual person). It is in fact still larger, for it has grown with the dimensions of the community.

In these matters we must hold to the following: it is not human value that is beautiful, not fate, tragedy, the greatness of a man or his struggles; and the comical is not smallness, weakness, or triviality, but entirely and only the appearance of all such characteristics in some given experience. One may thus say: only the transparency of what is immediately experienced in all of these things, which are not in themselves aesthetical (they are rather practical, for the most part), makes up the aesthetical element with which we are concerned.

One matter is to be especially noted: it is not only a rare talent to be able to see life dramatically, it is also a talent that cuts two ways. It turns easily into unkindness when it pursues (141) ruthlessly its own aesthetical enjoyment. The aesthete who “enjoys” for its own sake every conflict in life (usually not his own), or the humorous person with a developed sense for what is comical, behaves toward what is in fact happening as an audience toward a stage play. He is able to forget, for the most part, that this is not play but something serious and bitter, and the struggle and suffering of the involved parties is genuine; he who stands so amused before it is heartless. And a man who goes through life with this aesthetical attitude and enjoys all the activity about him as mere play is disoriented; his feelings are not morally healthy. Indeed, he lacks the precondition of all genuine aesthetical evaluation of life and therefore he destroys in the end precisely what he is seeking: the precondition of it is just the intact and inerrantly correct moral sense, that is, the correct evaluative response to everything we experience.

In this way, the inward attitudes of persons turn themselves towards immorality and cold-heartedness, towards mockery and scorn, and take on a pretense to superiority and cheap skepticism. The true humorist does not feel this way. Even while laughing he does not forget the earnestness of life, indeed he senses it, perhaps with greater warm-heartedness just because of its contrast with humor. Here, too, maturity and moral strength is required, and a bit of genuine superiority.

To see and to sense the comical in life is relatively frequent; often we find it even in the immature child who heckles his teacher and is amused at the sight of his weaknesses. Such crudity is no doubt morally wrong, but the taste for the comical in what appears (let us say in the indignation of a pedantic teacher) can be entirely genuine. Even for the mature man it is not always easy to fix the proper limits of his amusement at the all-too-human in life. But that changes nothing regarding aesthetical enjoyment and the appearance of human weakness as a matter of fact.

The aesthetical enjoyment of what is serious in human life, of what is tragic in it, or of moral greatness and heroic overcoming, is much less frequent. It is more difficult to achieve, because we are ourselves drawn toward and into such serious events by our own responsiveness to them, by our sympathetic interest, by pain, or by becoming uplifted by them. Whoever has in such cases the proper moral attitude cannot at the same time easily become an impartial observer of them. On the other hand, a man who keeps his distance from them and achieves a state of quietude from which he can observe them passively must still also maintain a morally open heart for men and situations, because both are real and not play-acted. Thus he must – here is the antinomy – simultaneously take part and not take part, must be drawn into the events and yet stand over against them as an observer, be able to evaluate them morally and yet to evaluate them aesthetically.

This posture is close to the superhuman. It demands two souls in one breast, two heterogeneous kinds of experiencing. Such capacity is perhaps given only to poets, whose art respects the earnestness itself of what is seen and justifies itself in that way. But that is precisely art, and is no longer the beauty that is contained in life itself.

(142) Such a posture is not impossible in life. For does not man have essentially the wonderful freedom to be able to see himself from the outside even while immersed in his struggles, his actions and passions, to laugh and to cry and at the same time keep the eye of self-knowledge alert? How could he not have just as essentially that same eye for other persons and their lot?

Chapter 9: Beauty in Nature

a) The beauty of living things

When one thinks of beauty in nature, it is tempting to think of lovely “scenery,” that is, of sea and land, of mountains and valleys. But it is precisely there that difficult aesthetical problems are to be found, because the forced entry of subjectivity, that is, of what imagination has added to the scene, is so much stronger than with natural objects, and also because mixed within our responses to such scenery are feeling of repose and recreation, which are no doubt pleasant but not aesthetical.

For those reasons we must begin with a different phenomenon, one in which the character of the aesthetic object is more easily understood. This is the beautiful as it appears to us in almost all living things.

We must hence step back one level in the series of aesthetic objects that are not the products of art, from human beauty to the beauty of fauna and flora. This is no mere pedantry; the process is the natural entranceway to the problem. Man is also an organism, and all the beauty delivered by the vital feelings that we see in him is itself the beauty of the organism. We can hardly say that the organic beauty of an animal speaks to us less softly than that of man. The pleasure we take in a beautiful animal is something that is universally human. We often enjoy beauty in animals in a less inhibited manner than we do with men, because in the former we rarely meet with features that repel us. With animals the entire question of morality is lacking; we not only know that animals are innocent, we feel their innocence in our immediate apprehension of them.

No doubt here too we have a case of purely vital enjoyment, a kind that is in no way aesthetical. The soft fur of a kitten addresses itself to us vitally in our touch, so too the attentiveness of a faithful dog, the touching way he openly keeps to his master, his joy and exuberance when his master responds to him, all speak to us in a no less purely vital manner. In such cases we lack the distance needed to look upon them as objects, which is a condition of aesthetical enjoyment.

But in the very center of this situation, which is a vital phenomenon or very close to vitality itself, distance of the right kind can also set in, and suddenly the pictorial conditions of the aesthetic object are fulfilled: a movement, or a phase of movement, the grace of a leap, an (143) expression of tension in the stance of the animal strikes us, and lets us peer beyond it to something different that is really there but invisible. This other phenomenon is nothing less than the natural miracle of organic life itself – and indeed in its peculiar nature: its kinship with us, and yet its foreignness.

For in fact both are contained in such a looking-through at what is well known to us, what our own vital feelings deliver to us, and what is different from us, that is, uninhibited animality disturbed by no conflict. One might also say that we see what is convincingly instinctual and certain of the accuracy of its response, where the animal is superior to human beings.

The sensing of these things usually takes the form of a dark premonition of profound interconnections, not to say of a great wisdom in the structure, the organization of the members, and in the way the animal nature acts and reacts. And, if we pursue this thought further, then – expressed theoretically – we may say we contact in feeling an amazing and, by its perfection, superior matching of means and ends that expresses itself in the whole of organic nature.

The truth in this is precisely the objective element: the aesthetical enjoyment of animals quickly leads, oddly enough, to a deep astonishment before the great metaphysical puzzle of organic life. For this puzzle lies in the inward adaption of means and ends, which holds together all the parts and all the expressions of a living thing and appears to us as an extraordinary harmony. This at first has nothing to do with theoretical investigations or reflection, although scientific inquiries may also begin with such impressions. Rather the impression is given to us immediately and intuitively, and the feeling of standing before the miraculous is involuntary; it forces itself upon us just in the sense perception of it. We do not reflect, for our standpoint is nothing more than one of free surrender, and, often enough, what is decisive about it is the element of surprise. A man cannot escape the feeling of standing suddenly face to face with the miracle of creation.

Sensations of this kind are a genuine aesthetical enjoyment in beholding, one given through a relation of appearance that is also quite perceivable by us. At the same time the depth of enjoyment varies to different degrees depending on the objective inscrutability of what appears to us. One can feel the miracle of organic nature profoundly or superficially, but it is always a case of seeing-through what is sensibly given and a feeling-through to something that is not sensibly given.

Further, it is important that the attitude of admiration not be confined at all to cases where we start with the vital feeling of sympathy. The examples taken from our trusty house pets may lead us astray in this matter. But they are one-sided. The same attitude extends equally well to cases that are distant and strange. The (144) perfect elegance in the leap of the squirrel at the tops of the trees high above us can bring it about. The flight of the swallow, the circling bird of prey, the energetic movement of the trout as it glides through the water, the playfulness of the dolphin as it leaps from the water – they all affect us in the same way. But they are foreign to urban man today; he does not get to see them so often. The deepest impression is perhaps made by what comes as a complete surprise when one first glimpses it – for example, the floating of the pelican as it glides upon waves of air, drawing himself along with the waves of the sea below. One does not grasp all at once what is happening in such a sight. The pilot of a glider knows the entire process, but the pelican carries it out with infinitely greater virtuosity.

But the phenomenon reaches even further into the alien and strange. There are creatures that seem sinister and threatening to men, to which they frequently feel a vital aversion, whether they display or conceal it: snakes, frogs, spiders, and great lizards. Behind such feeling are concealed instinctive fears that arose in early human history, when the threat from such creatures was real. And now that we have learned to distance ourselves from them and to look upon them objectively, there may arise in us a joyful admiration of what is alien and strange. The feeling itself turns about, and we see the kingly pose in the snake’s erect head and neck (even fairy-tales speak of it), and we feel some satisfaction in the movement of the garden-spider as she weaves her web. Herder believed that the “essentially ugly” forms of animal life were botched natural creations (“the hideous crocodile”), but in truth there is nothing to that belief beyond our incapacity for creating distance between them and us, and the remaining traces of ancient fear. Nature is, in the end, not created for man.

In this way one descends further into the organic world. The same relation returns ever again. It is the same with the magnificence of butterflies, of jellyfish and medusas, of radiolarians and infusoria. The miniature world of organic life is full of “artistic natural forms.” And naturally that is so also for the entire vegetable kingdom. Here beauty in general is given to human feeling in a more uninhibited way – although, or perhaps because – plants stand at a greater distance from the vital emotions of man. The contact with familiar organic life possessed by the human heart is much weaker in the case of plants, and for that reason aesthetical distance from them is correspondingly less disrupted by our vital feelings.

One need not think immediately of the fabulous glory of flowering plants –added to that is much vital joy in their colors or their adventurous shapes and also a bit of all-too-human symbolism – rather, within certain limits we seem to sense in every plant in its developed form something like a work of art. That is true of the slender reed with its golden spikes hanging obliquely from it, or the flossed form of a spruce, beech, or birch-tree, of the “angry” veins in the bark of an old oak, of the massive flowery stem of the agave, its leaves (145) protected by needles. Something of the mysterious purposefulness of living things reveals itself here also; something of the systematically arranged and mutually attuned organic functions and its unfolding; its life-urge, its capacity to assert itself, and its independence, adapted to the inorganic forces of its environment.

We see the same again in entire groups of members of some species, collected together: the mossy lawn, a bed of thyme, the meadow, the heath, a copse, and the forest. Here aesthetical feeling passes into another kind, however; it becomes joy in landscape.

An elevated aesthetical charm is formed about the obvious vulnerability, endangerment and exposure of an entire realm of organic forms – in their relation to the harmless indifference and, as it were, the ignorance of the organism, to their precarious hold on life. They offer themselves imperturbably to fate, become by the thousands its victims, and another thousand blossom in their place. One has a deep and dark sense of the cruel severity that rules the lives of species –severity towards the individual in the name of the species-life – and one feels amazed, involuntarily, at nature’s waste of its own precious works.

This too is a relation of appearance, and has nothing to do with reflection or understanding. For what is strange about it is that we also sense intuitively the balance and harmony in the economy of living nature.

The calm naturalness by which the individual, beautiful in its form, bears this lethal severity has for human feelings something touching, something requiring love as a response. And in fact it is a kind of love in which the human heart, by means of aesthetical experience, embraces the grandiose richness of form in living things.

b) Beauty in dynamic structure

It would seem possible that one could, with the same principles, probe even further – to inorganic structures, to the point, therefore, where there are no longer living things. There are many thing-like forms that offer us genuine aesthetical enjoyment, if not as many as one may think. For most of the “things” that surround us in life have been worked over artificially, and thus of course no longer count among things of natural beauty.

Here we find one of the reasons why beauty is not as familiar in inorganic nature as in the organic world. Moreover, the primary and most independent among those dynamic structures that might be first to capture our aesthetical sense are normally not available to us because of their order of size; they are either much too big or too small to be given to our vision through the senses. Examples of these are the stars in the skies and their star-systems, on the one hand, atoms and molecules on the other. The median spheres, those that can be directly perceived, (146) are almost entirely swept clear of them. Nonetheless, there are also a few examples of them within this sphere. The most familiar are the peculiarly regular structures of crystals. When we do not know the geometric laws of these structures (the system of their coordinates), in simply looking upon them we still have a clear sense of the presence of such laws and of a hidden tendency of the parts to “line up” with each other according to those laws. In this there is unmistakably a relation of appearance.

The class becomes larger if we include in it some ephemeral phenomena. For example, we have the mirror-like surface of water, the closed shape of a drop with its natural spherical form (no doubt in many cases it is hardly visible); there are the circles of waves that extend themselves concentrically upon the surface of the water, the symmetry of a vortex whose flow is restricted, or even the phenomenon of the bounce of a drop upon ending its fall. More familiar is the regular play of the waves and that of the light-rays borne by them; not even to speak of such striking phenomena as thunder, the rainbow, or cirrus clouds wafting in the blue sky.

With phenomena of the last kind, it is no longer a question of dynamic structure. But even among these there are some that can be made visible, even if indirectly (as by a telescope or a camera). Even then, they do not lose their power to impress us aesthetically. Among these belongs the lunar system of Jupiter, with its four great moons, and Saturn with its wonderful rings. In these figures something of an interrelated dynamic of things appears in their external form; an inward one, that is not visible in itself, becomes apparent. Observers have always sensed as much, and said so.

In his idea of “world harmony,” Kepler went much further. The relations of size, which he established by observation and calculation, were organized within a general theory, which he experienced as the great beauty of the (invisible) planetary system. The optical techniques we have today have filled out the content of this system. They have made the spiral galaxies visible, whose outward forms have no doubt allowed us to recognize the unity of their dynamic structure. The same is true for star-clusters and for cloud-forms. Notable in these examples is that these structures are not validated just by science; intuition, specifically immediate aesthetical intuition, anticipated them.

If we pursue Kepler’s way of thinking further, we find our aesthetical vision extended to all natural dynamic structures. It remains tied only to certain conditions of preliminary scientific inquiry, which no doubt the majority of men do not meet. Thus, for example, the laws of atomic physics can fit nicely into the aesthetical way of beholding, although they are entirely mathematical in nature and abstractly formulated; the consequence of this is that the construction of atoms is itself brought closer to intuition. (147) This is of course expressed with an almost excessive clarity in what are no doubt hypothetical atomic models. Mathematicians no doubt say that these models are at some distance from intuition, but only because, as intuition, they do not allow anything to count in them as sensible beholding. That is one-sided. All indirect knowledge has a tendency towards a higher form of beholding and realizes it; even the concepts that it makes use of are nothing more than helpful means to that higher vision. Concepts become alive only when they are genuinely filled out by intuition. For that reason the element of intuition in them at all times makes again manifest its aesthetical side.

In general, relations of size happen to have an intuitive-aesthetical side that is well known in geometry. What is it about the beauty of an ellipse that so many have called attention to it? Only this, that a law becomes visible in its form, and we can sense it intuitively without grasping it with the mind. It contains a relation of appearance.

The mystery of mathematics’ attraction for us may lie here – reaching all the way to the myth of the “most perfect science,” which has always surrounded it: the unification of pure play with form and with the relation of appearance that intrudes from within it.

c) Beauty in landscapes and related phenomena

The last observations anticipated what was to come. They wandered off, moreover, into derivative phenomena and into the border regions of the aesthetical –whose placement can be disputed on principle. We must return to more immediate phenomena, which form the central elements of the entire series. In the realm of natural beauty, that would be beautiful scenery, the landscape. After that, there is of course much more: the rough sea, the clouds scudding across the sky, the ever constant starscape.

It happens that “our hearts rise up” before such things, we rush to them from our everyday business, from the noise of the great city, and, so to speak, throw ourselves into them up to our necks; we try to lose ourselves in them.

But just for that reason, these things are not simply aesthetic objects; they are just as much – and perhaps primarily – objects of our vital feeling, and, in that respect, must be sharply distinguished from aesthetic objects. To do that is not easy, since we are beholding the selfsame objects. Moreover, in this context, vital feeling tends to change into aesthetical enjoyment without any specifiable limits –exactly as we have just seen happen in the case of the beauty in organic life. The difference is only that in beholding organic life our vital feelings identify something that is objective, but in the case of the landscape there is much that is subjective, that is, what is felt in the object is influenced by what is peculiar to the observer and to what goes on within him.

The yearning of urban man reaches after the cow stall and the vegetable garden, as much as for the heath or the mountain snow (148), but they generally do not rise to the rank of aesthetic objects. A limit must be drawn here, even if it cannot designate a sharp distinction. Yet one cannot draw such a limit that follows the object alone, because even in the cases of mountain and valley, forest and meadow, vital feelings are close by – the yearning to escape from the sea of houses and buildings, the noise of the city and its grey everydayness. The wish to immerse oneself in nature and to be absorbed by it has the same vital character. This is, quite obviously, taking vital joy in oneself, not to speak of indulging the need for fresh air, relaxation, and for variety through contrast.

In all these cases, the element of distance from the object is lacking. The observer rather feels himself as standing in the landscape, and not merely in the spatial sense. That standing-within is apparently essential for his sensibility; he sees himself taken in, welcomed, surrounded; he seems even to bring with him a tendency to become one with nature. Therewith is cancelled not only the aesthetical quality of the experience, but the entire environing nature loses even its being as an object.

Only over against this primitive entering into nature does the aesthetic objectivity of the landscape begin to appear. How this happens is secondary. But it comes to pass, and a primary element in this process is the observer’s dwelling upon individual picture-like impressions. For example, a perspective opens up framed by nearby reeds and branches. The dimensions of the heights above us reveal their structure; a village lies in the hollow of a valley. The whole affects us as a “picture,” without any effort or desire on our part, and perhaps completely surprises us.

In this state, the beholder has been lifted out of the landscape and stands opposite it. He is only now genuinely a beholding observer, and thus enjoys the scene aesthetically. This happens to him also with respect to a segment of forest interior – now he sees objectively the dark green shadows, the playful rays of the sun – or it happens at a clearing, at a group of people, at a spring, at a cluster of trees rising before a sheer cliff. The essential in this is the pictorial character, the boundless view, and the separation from it. What comes to pass in the mind is a different kind of absorption and affection, a different kind of pleasure and enjoyment.

As difficult as it may be to isolate completely this stage – the vital feelings do not have to be disengaged to do it – we can at least demonstrate clearly the presence of one proper feature of aesthetic objectivity – the relation of appearance.

But what appears in this case? Is there something that could reveal itself to us as a unity and wholeness in what, seen objectively, are only random bits and pieces? Could, for example, that something reveal itself in the way in which the secret of purposive organic life can reveal itself and does in fact reveal itself when a living thing is beheld?

We may answer simply: yes, there is such a thing. For in the whole of nature too all things are adapted to each other; what occurs in concert is only what can so occur; (149) clearly not just anything can occur in concert with anything else. Species of plants may displace each other; they compete with each other, and that is essential for their way of being and the forms they take. The forest and meadow grow only when the soil allows, and they are dependent upon the available measure of rainfall. Lacking it, they are replaced by naked rock or dry sand. Of course, the observer knows nothing of the relation of mountains to rainfall, and cares little for it, and the changes in plant life determine the scene that offers itself to him, but these features stamp themselves upon his view of the landscape as that which in his eyes is not understood. He comes to sense these interconnections intuitively, precisely through the changes in the scene-like segments.

Whoever is accustomed to viewing landscapes exclusively from the perspective of painting – or even from specific examples of landscape art – is far from experiencing what we have just described. He looks at nature from an art-historical perspective, and lacks the natural attitude towards landscape. It is far otherwise when a person who has freed himself from a poor education approaches the inexhaustible pictorial riches of form and color that the face of the earth displays to us. To such a person, these pictures speak in an erudite language; they reveal and conceal, they tell stories and pose riddles. Light, the azure, the far distance, are all active in them long before their activity is understood as such. For man does not first look upon landscapes as upon a painting, but as an object.

Think of the landscape of a coastline with sparsely grown dune-grass and a low wood whose branches are bowed by an ocean wind, of shifting dunes with their undulating profiles, the sharp angle of the sides of them that face the land, and of their traces of now-lost woodlands. Or think of the tree line of the dark timber-forest in the high mountains and the snow stretching above it. It is not otherwise on land with dome-shaped polished rocks left by ice-age glaciers, or with the flat lake-country with its many islands created by those glaciers. One step more and we are at a uniform landscape of marshes left by ancient lagoons but now displaying scanty trees, heath and meadow.

Added to all of this is the fact that human life is imbedded in a landscape of individual farmhouses and villages. They bear witness to man’s struggle with the forces of nature and with natural conditions. In this context belong the peaceful scenes of well-tended farmland (as Schiller described in his poem “Spaziergang”), the kind of scenes that suggest work, happiness, and both achievement and failure in the struggle for life and sustenance. At the same time there is the more profound sense of a native people becoming one with the land upon which they work, produce, and thrive, of home and of feeling at home.

The further the uprooted urbanite has distanced himself from it, the more the sense of home becomes a kind of hidden yearning in the back reaches of his mind. But even without such portentous yearning, the case is everywhere the same in principle: in the sight of the modest fishing-village with run-down huts and boats and nets on the beach; (150) the same when one gazes at mountain pastures and herds of cattle.

It would be quite wrong to separate the appearing content from the pictorial and sensible element, as though it were a question of two distinct things, just as it would be wrong to separate the dominant scenes of castle-ruins in the west of Germany, with their impressive recollections of a kind of life that has vanished, from the gently sloped hills in the surrounding landscape. For it is just this entanglement of the two that is characteristic. But in this intertwining, the relation of appearance between what is given through the senses and what is not –even for the observer who knows nothing – is essential.

In such cases the pictorial element, possessing only the character of a segment, is not at all isolating, but adds emphasis and intensity. The changing perspective, the alteration of the scene with every change in standpoint, the changes in light and season, produce concreteness and immediacy as they produce in us always an accompanying consciousness of appearance as such.

d) Natural beauty and art

It has been said perhaps too often that art first discovered beauty in nature. That is the claim made by the history of ideas. One thinks primarily of painting, for it first opened the eyes of humankind to the aesthetical secret of the landscape.

There is no doubt that painting achieves that opening by “painting” the landscape, that is, it represents it. In this way it teaches us to see. The ancients did not see it as yet, the Italians built their representations of scenes in their frames – in that art, landscape is grasped only slightly and secondarily (and, correspondingly, often in an artistic manner) – the Dutch made of it an independent theme, and the French Impressionists won for it the autonomy of light and color. To every stage in this process corresponds a new stage in the human capacity to see the actual landscape.

Stated in this form, the observation is quite right. It is strictly analogous to the discoveries made by art in other realms: the dramatic poet discovered the dramatic element in life, the comic playwright the comical, the satirist the ridiculous and perhaps even the amusing. One might ask whether the epic poet discovered heroism, or the religious poet the gods and religion.

Yet it is precisely the last analogies that remind us that we must not beat the principle to death. Highly intellectual thought can cause confusion when one exaggerates its function; one must reduce it to its appropriate dimensions, just in order to evaluate it correctly. Heroes are admired even without their poet, and men pray to gods, also, without their presence. But the heroes are idealized and made eternal by the poet; they are brought into the realm of the visible (151) and are humanized. But that is not the same as being discovered.

In all of these matters we must not mistake the enormous influence of the artist upon the development of the aesthetical way of apprehension itself, whatever object he is concerned to represent and in whatever material he works. The leading role in opening up our aesthetical sense for the human body must be attributed to the art of sculpture and, at a much later phase of its development, to the nude. Perhaps portraiture plays a similar role for the aesthetical sense of human physiognomy. But how we are to mark the dimensions of this role, which extends through all areas of representation, is a quite different question. To say that the arts alone have discovered the aesthetic object would be to say too much.

But why, precisely, is that to say too much? Surely not only because there are areas in which the proposition no longer applies. There must rather be here some fundamental principle that puts a limit upon it. We find such a principle in the simple reflection that the eyes of the creative artist must already be awake to a new kind of object if he is to make it the theme of his efforts to represent it; afterwards he may well be able to teach others to see it. The natural object as an aesthetic object must therefore have already presented itself to the artist if he is to be able to discover features in it that he will work to emphasize as essential in his representation – in the drawing, painting, or poetizing – of it. This means that in the artist’s beholding and in his enjoyment in beholding he must become conscious of what he can objectivize in the act of creation and present to his contemporaries.

This is a relation of dependence that one cannot upset for the sake of a theory. If one does that, one falls into a [“later before,” a rhetorical device] that will someday avenge itself as inconsistency. This is not contradicted by the fact that the artist is constantly experimenting, that is, there is a reciprocal effect of seeing and creating. Even in its individual stages of development, the artist’s progress must lead his observation, or else experimentation would be reduced to blind hit and miss, and that would be just the opposite of the activity of a genius.

Understand this rightly: it is quite true that the artistic eye discovered the landscape and made it aesthetically accessible to others. But it is by no means true that artistic creation discovered it. In the artist himself there is no creating; it is rather observation that is primary and decisive, and simultaneously with that, the intentional act of enjoyment. Perhaps one may put it better in this way: in the artist what is primary is the aesthetical attitude towards the environing world. He is creative only secondarily; primarily he is a discoverer. And his discoveries come only within the limits of his time, or just a step ahead and beyond them. The means and the avenues of creation are, in comparison, only the vehicles of the execution of the work. (152)

If there is an antinomy here, it must lie in the nature of the artist and neither in his relation to the laity nor in his creative standpoint on the object. But at bottom there can be no antinomy. We are too accustomed to see the man of genius simply in terms of his capacities as a painter, and our habit of looking upon art from the standpoint of its history has led to reducing that capacity to the mastery of a variety of techniques. But then we forget that the techniques rest upon the ways of beholding, and that genius essentially consists in the manner of seeing. Every new manner of seeing, even those that seem merely to concern themselves with technique, produces new ways of letting things appear.

A wonderful example of this phenomenon taken from painting is the discovery of light – with its transformative effects upon the use of color and, in the end, with the disappearance of contour (the latter, for example, in the later Rembrandt). Here especially we can comprehend the extent to which new ways of seeing allow new things to be brought to appearance: the shading and “mood” of a landscape, dark interiors, even the peculiar qualities of human character. The concreteness of the represented objects and the selection of the details in the picture that have been drawn from life become as such fundamentally different. And that is achieved in part with the scantiest of means. From these facts we can explain the phenomenon of the “leaving out” of details that would have been given in everyday perception – or simply letting them disappear.

The same is true of the poet as the discoverer of the human. We have for too long considered the poet to be doing nothing more than forming and shaping his materials, in some case primarily as one who shapes and creates language. The poet is primarily a “seer,” the clear-eyed one, the discoverer, the man with an open eye for all that is active in life, for whom therefore the conflicts and the characters on the stage of life take their places as objects seen from an aesthetical distance.

Chapter 10: On the Metaphysics of Natural Beauty

a) Formal beauty in nature

Among the ranks of the arts the beauty of appearance presented itself alongside formal beauty. The former was covered over by the latter in all great creations and, with that, disappeared behind it. On the lowest stratum, however, where the relation of appearance itself disappears – in ornamental work – it stands for and achieves for itself a certain independence. It will be shown again in the more detailed analysis of the strata that it retains its independence in all cases.

This formal beauty also plays an integrating role in the aesthetical natural object; human beauty no doubt also plays such a role, but it is still more concealed. We have already indicated what it consists in: it announces itself in a kind of free play with pure form of a visual and spatial kind, (153) but also of a tonic-audible kind, their play with color and tonal color, with rhythms, etc. So, at least, in the arts.

In nature it is no otherwise, at least in principle, only that here it is not a case of the mind disporting itself. The play with forms is involuntary, but not for that reason entirely random. Just for that reason we take note of it, it surprises us, it attracts our attention, it demands that we pause and take it in. We refer here primarily to the numerous forms that possess a remarkable regularity, as we noted above in the case of organic beauty. These are striking in heifers [Equiseti-nae] and shave grass, in grasses and conifers, just as in starfish, jellyfish and cuttlefish; they show themselves in the streamlined forms of fish and birds, in the forms and design of insects. In those cases it was, of course a question of the appearance of the organic purposiveness, or of its unknown lawful behavior; now it is a question of the play and effects of forms themselves. No doubt it is not possible to separate the one from the other. Nonetheless, we must distinguish between them; for neither does the variety of forms reduce to what is expedient, especially for the person who considers the matter unreflectively, nor can the line be effaced between the diversity of elements that are within themselves indivisibly intertwined and the different quality of aesthetical effects.

What is perhaps more important is that in these cases we are not dealing at all with special forms of peculiar regularity, but precisely with those that are lacking some ordering principle, or that are entirely opaque, possessing irregular forms that are scattered and seemingly random. The great example of this is the starry sky, such as one sees it naively, without a purpose to one’s observations and without instruments. And yet, perhaps, there are very few things in nature that have so often stimulated the hearts of man to aesthetical beholding as the night sky; that it alone is the “most beautiful and perfect” of all things that the eyes of man can behold is a very ancient idea.

The truth of such assessments can be disputed, but not the fact of their occurrence. What are they based upon? One turns here to the many traditional metaphysical interpretations of the stars (where gods were seen within them) only with hesitation; these theories are no doubt determined by the aesthetical idea of sublimity. We may turn instead with more confidence to the movements of the fixed stars, which, long before the beginning of scientific observation, were thought to possess the highest perfection. But this too is most likely of secondary importance for these assessments.

The primary factor is, without doubt, the wonderful scene of groupings of the luminous stars themselves and their quiet undisturbed passage through the night sky – an unknown realm to nearsighted persons or to those men who never leave the big city. What is essential here is the complete lack of any kind of regularity of form. Regularity is so much lacking that humankind ordered the groups arbitrarily, ascribing to them the shapes of animals (154) or of heroic figures. These, of course, varied with the conceptions of peoples and epochs.

That is the same lack of lawful order that occasionally speaks to us from landscapes in curious tones, for example a landscape with pools and groups of trees in a marsh. In general, we must assign a positive aesthetic value to this element of irregularity in nature. Just the impression of “randomness” – not to speak of irrationality – can have its own charm. This is so notwithstanding the fact that regularity is also a positive aesthetic value. The formal value-elements in natural aesthetic objects are in fact diverse; they need not encroach upon each other, even when they are antithetical to each other. That fact coheres well with the formal elementary categories of unity and diversity, which always and only appear in and with each other, and may be seen to be just as fundamental in aesthetics as in ontology. The opposition of regularity and irregularity as such can, just an affirmative structural element, affect us with its peculiar charm.

Another good example of this state of affairs is the “song” of the birds. A great effort has been made to find musical accords in it – music in the human artistic sense, with its peculiar nature, an order grounded in musical scales. All was in vain. There are no doubt certain analogies here, if one isolates individual intervals; but genuine musical principles are entirely lacking.

Yet the character of each species of bird is marked upon the sound of its song. The figures, the rhythms, the melody, however nicely formed they may be, still do not make any musical unities; they are in fact comparable to the scattered constellations. The songs are a play sui generis with forms of sound. But as such they possess great aesthetical charm.

b) Indifference, quietude, unconsciousness

Play with pure form and the enjoyment taken in it make up in themselves a metaphysical element in natural beauty of which we are also sensible as such. For form is not in nature for the sake of play, and play is not there for the sake of enjoyment, as is always assumed in the case of works of art. All three simply coincide, as though we had organic purposefulness without a purpose. Even when one believes in a cosmic creator as a great architect, the being so conceived remains unknown and unimaginable; its notion in this context is merely an anthropomorphic expression for what is metaphysical in natural beauty.

But that is only a prelude. The metaphysics of beauty in natural structures, which are not there to provoke an aesthetical impression, goes much further. This metaphysics has nothing to do with the philosophical metaphysics of beauty that has so often been drawn up, neither of the idealist kind nor of the Platonic-Schopenhauerian kind (metaphysics of ideas), nor even with theological metaphysics. Rather the backgrounds that are decisive here lie very close to the phenomena, (155) and are necessarily given along with them to aesthetical feeling.

To begin, there is the wonderful indifference of natural objects to human beings and to our feelings – even precisely when they are aesthetic objects and thus awaken certain feelings in us. While we perhaps are consumed by suffering or yearning, spring blossoms out all around us; while blows of personal and historical destiny shake and overwhelm us, the stars in the sky still float by in their entire splendor. At times, we experience this contradiction almost like an antagonism against us. For we relate the beauty of natural appearances to ourselves. In the strict sense, we have a right to do so, for their beauty as such exists only for us. We exceed that right only when we extend what exists for us to the shapes and qualities that exist in themselves. And yet we know with equal immediacy of their immense indifference to us. We sense that indifference as a kind of barrier against us, as their alien quality, and this indifference is, perhaps, painful to us, yet we sense it also as the sublimity of the great theater of the world in which we stand.

We may call this the self-sufficiency [Autarchie] of nature, self-sufficiency in everything it offers to us. For the offering itself is made indifferently, unconcerned whether what it offers finds a subject to whom it may function as an aesthetic object. When a person senses something of this kind within the offering and takes it as the elevation of nature above the inconstancy of human life and feeling, a relation of appearance of a grand kind comes into its own and asserts itself in aesthetical beholding as a general cosmic feeling. Something very subjective and something very objective are mixed in that feeling in a peculiar way, yet without disturbing each other. A feeling for nature and a feeling of oneself are tied together in a unity that does not weaken their opposition, but takes it into itself as its essential condition. As man humanizes everything, so too does he humanize even the indifference of nature and thereby in a certain sense its inhumanity. Man experiences this indifference as a kind of attitude, specifically an attitude towards himself. But at the same time, this attitude is alien to him in the very depths of his soul. For he, man, is not capable of such indifference. And thus he senses this attitude of nature as directed against himself – that is, the inhumanity he senses in the act of humanizing it – as its foreignness and opacity, as something in nature’s attitude that he cannot sympathetically experience.

That phenomenon stands in sharp opposition to the ancient mythological sensibility according to which nature – naively humanized – in all its manifestations “wants to do something to man” (wants to inflict something upon man): in the storm, the lightning, in the sunshine and rain, in the spring and the fruits of the earth. It is opposed also to the belief, manifest in early world-views, that found a telos in nature and fancied that nature both manifests and conceals itself. Both the mythical view of nature and the teleological view, which latter lasted long after the former had vanished, are really quite far from being what people very often mistakenly took them for – as an aesthetical view of nature. But it lacks saturation with the sublime indifference of nature. (156) Man has purposes, man manifests or conceals himself, man puts on masks and poses so that he may strike from a position of concealment; man lies. Men attributed all of that to nature. But nature knows exactly nothing of those things. Men were endlessly distant from natural aesthetic objects, indeed much further than from theoretical objects.46

This is not a matter of mature insight – realizing that nature does not lie, does not conceal itself, wears no purposes on its coat of arms – but only a matter of our feeling ourselves free from all such sensibility, even unreflectively, in our way of looking upon nature. This is the mystery of its indifference, a mystery for which we must have an immediate sense along with the two opposed elements that are contained within it. Nature must, unavoidably and unwaveringly, be present to our mind, indifferent and uninterested.

Of course the person who beholds nature aesthetically need not know this. That is a matter of insight. Insight can also lead him to the aesthetical way of beholding, but he does not need it at all. The beholding and appreciating observer, giving himself over to what he sees, has only a dark sense of the constancy of nature, or perhaps a reverential suspicion of it. Yet it is a suspicion that makes him feel blessed, just because of his consciousness of nature’s indifference to him.

A further element in the natural aesthetic object is its unobtrusiveness, its stillness, and its gift of peace – that is, that nature leaves man in peace when he has no practical intentions of his own towards it.

That too is where nature stands in a palpable opposition to man, in its foreignness and its distance. Man is talkative, busy, and intrusive; he can hardly keep to himself. Language, the great tool of community and of the spirit, is also the most dangerous instrument for coming too close to things and imposing upon them. And not only does the silence of nature stand in opposition to the living human being, but also to the eloquence of human artifacts, to the objectivation of spirit. This objectivation speaks of itself, of creation and of the creator; in it are contained treasures of the spirit, which demand recognition; with these treasures objects present their demands to the living spirit.

The natural object approaches man with no demands. That too, is part of its indifference, stillness, and unobtrusiveness. There is in fact just no intellectual content in it that might be recognized. For there is no one placed or represented within it; therein consists its radical difference from the work of art. Instead it shows humankind something else, the face of a puzzle, as it were, which anyone who has once given himself over to it in beholding it feels compelled to solve. But solving the puzzle does not seem to him to be a task for reason, but more as a miracle (157) for human feeling, one that we accept while beholding it and reverentially losing ourselves in it, so that we may remain before the miracle and enjoy it as such.

This element of stillness comes in degrees. It appears first on the faces of people, especially young people, people, that is, where speech inadequately expresses what is within them. It is intensified in animals, who do not have speech; it is dominant in plant life and present in its entirety in organic structures. But even in landscape there is perfect stillness; the whisper of the wind in the forest or above the sea is not experienced as speech directed at us, and what we perhaps otherwise call the “eloquent” in the shape of a landscape is a metaphorical expression for one’s fantasy, which thinks itself inspired by it.

Moreover, it is peculiar how much men confuse silence and eloquence in their feelings for nature. Think of a thousand-year-old oak in a forest that has outlived generations of younger trees. A contemporary man stands before it, imagining past peoples who gathered about it, perhaps to dance and to celebrate festivals, and it occurs to him that the old trunk “tells stories” of those days. That is all very poetic of him. But the tree remains silent; it tells him nothing. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York there is a huge section of a redwood tree with two thousand rings, one for each year of its life, and the dates of historical events are inscribed upon them. Towards the center, inscribed at a rather narrow ring, is the “birth of Christ.” This causes the illusion that the tree could tell the story of history and what it has “experienced.” The tree experienced nothing; it tells us nothing. It is wonderfully silent.

With that, we have arrived at the third element of the natural object. This is unconsciousness, in most cases even the absence of feeling, which – from the perspective of a person – is so alien to him, and he cannot quite enter its nature empathetically, for it is prohibited to him to enter into naked, harmless being-in-itself that is not being-for-itself.

This is not to say that anything simply as a being in itself is an aesthetic object, or just an “object” as such. The general law of objects – that is, no existing thing in itself is for that reason an object, but only “for” a subject that apprehends it and that brings that determinate perspective to it – is especially visible in the case of natural beauty, because the figured objects of nature display such a wonderful indifference to the subject that apprehends it.

It is just because they are silent and closed in upon themselves, although they are not actively closing themselves in, that they seem to have so much to say: not just about themselves, but about us and our relation to them, and not only about what is objective in that relation, but also about what is subjective there also. (158)

The paradox is only apparent. The valid law here is that just where an existing thing is devoid of all meaning, it is given meaning by its opposed number, i.e., by the third element in the relation of appearance: that is the mentally observant, comprehending subject, who values as he enjoys.47

In “being for us” the natural construct achieves a completion that it does not have as a mere being in itself. Nature in the aesthetical sense – that is, in the higher sense of beauty – first arises through man, arises “for him,” by means of his enjoyment of it as an object. For that reason it is perverse to ascribe to nature as an ontological category all of what first comes to it through man as its “being-for-him”: consciousness, mood, shades of feeling, animation. What is entirely alien in its nature is the fundamental condition.

c) Perfection, security, unfreedom

From its very beginnings, aesthetics connected the concept of perfection to that of beauty. It appeared that the highest completeness of a thing must be beauty just in itself. So the ancients thought, and so too Leibniz48. However, the equivalence goes too far. It implies that every realization of some other value – a vital or moral one – would also have aesthetic value. And that would obviously mean a confusion of the realms of value as well as of the kinds of satisfaction.

Yet there remains some truth in the relation of perfection to beauty. One must simply analyze it correctly. The first point is to see that we are not dealing with perfection itself, but with the “sensible appearance” of perfection; better stated, not with an understanding or cognitive grasping, also not with any appearance whatever, but with one that is only sensible – thus in a genuine relation of transparency, in which the foreground is the one that is perceptible, but the background is communicated by it.

If we base ourselves upon this concept, the real world manifests a well-known series of steps in which man stands at the top as the highest being, and the inorganic objects at the bottom. Between them are extended the ordered steps of flora and fauna. We may now say about this widely extending series – and of course (159) still from this side of all aesthetical beholding – that they are steps upward to higher levels of being and downward to decreasing perfection.

This is a thesis that is usually misunderstood; indeed, it is often turned around completely. People believed the height of being itself to be a mark of perfection; they thought that plants are more perfect than an atom or a crystal, an animal more perfect than a plant, man than an animal. But the reverse is the case. Man is certainly the highest link in this chain, but not the most perfect. The reason for this, if we were to express it in a brief formula, is that the simpler the existing entity, the more easily does perfection (completeness, finish, self-sufficiency) come to it. The more complicated it is, the more difficult for all of its conditions to come together. The strictest natural laws apply to inorganic nature; thus we have in nature the lowest but nonetheless the most perfect creations. In the organic world, there is already great freedom of movement, especially when considered phylogenetically. For that reason we also have the detours and dead ends in the history of species of animals and plants under varying conditions of life. Man is, however, even as an individual, “free” in his decisions; as an individual he does not fall under laws of his species that would decide for him. Thus he is in his nature the most endangered species, because he is the most loosely tied, indeterminate and imperfect being. Freedom itself, his highest capacity, is what endangers him.

Let us now apply this relation found within the ontic series of created things to the “appearance” of perfection. We see immediately that it is not so easy for perfection to appear in man, not, at least, as specifically human, for example as a moral being; it appears more readily, perhaps, in a natural being. But as we go further downward through the levels of beings, perfection increases. It makes itself apparent in the forms of unity that become more integrated as they become more simple, under which unity a collective multiplicity of elements, though manifesting conflict, is kept under control. We do not see this relation when we behold natural forms aesthetically, but all the more we sense the perfection in the appearance without any reflection – we sense it as an internal peace, as constraint, security, infallibility and unfreedom; and the last strangely affects us in a comforting way, as exactly the opposite of our own nature, which possesses none of this infallibility. For our freedom is our insecurity, or hesitation, or constant liability to error and failure, our ability to be deterred in our projects.

Man is always immediately sensible of these things, but far from all comprehension of them: the instinctual certainty of the animal, its safe home within the domain of the laws of its species – perhaps felt even more strongly in the plants –but not so obtrusively, because they are more distant from him. This phenomenon is just as forcefully present in inorganic forms, whose lawfulness we sense without knowing what it is. In contrast, this standpoint does not extend to the “processes” of nature. For only “constructs” affect us aesthetically, a series of events usually does not, or does so simply in connection (160) with such constructs. But it is only such constructs that are given directly to the senses and as an intuitable unity. Out of them alone, even if they are given to us only in segments, the harmony of the whole speaks to us directly.

Behind this last phenomenon there is much else that the sciences have taught us to see: the special ways in which the sensible forms are conserved, the principle of their construction, the attunement of energy and function to each other. In the stability of most forms in nature not subsistence but rather a mysterious consistency reigns, which asserts itself through shifts in energy or in elements, and which contrives its own forms of self-regulation. The man who beholds aesthetically senses some of this behind the phenomena, without knowing just what it is. But it touches him as the miracle that it is.

The aesthetical theories of the Romantics held to an inward quality of nature that appears in nature’s expressiveness. But it also held that we re-encounter in this inward quality man’s own nature. Think, for example, of the veiled painting or of the youths of Sais [Friedrich Schiller]. That is surely poetry, but it is the poetry of an anthropomorphic metaphysics of nature, whose errors were presented above: it does not ever touch the genuine demonstrable appearance-relation in the aesthetical feeling for nature.

Of course we cannot defend ourselves from the metaphysical shapes that appear in the aesthetical beholding of nature. But the genuine demonstrable act of beholding takes different routes. It is more modest and yet also richer in content than the poeticizing imagination, which is, in truth, just a play with ideas after the fact. The phenomenon makes precisely the opposite apparent: in the unshakeable feeling for the complete otherness of nature, its foreignness, and its perfection, denied to humans.

For this is the remarkable thing: only where perfection as the secure being-in-itself of some construct “appears” in its external form and becomes apparent, only where it is visible, perceptible, and accessible to feeling, there alone in the world is this appearance experienced as beauty, and indeed without any regard for its distance from or closeness to humankind.

To be sure, the desire for a metaphysical revelation continues ceaselessly its inquiry into what in fact has been experienced as beautiful in such objects. There is a simple ontological answer to it that is sufficiently clear, although it will hardly satisfy that metaphysical curiosity: what is experienced as beautiful is everything whose sensible exterior presents itself intuitively to the beholder as the simple expression of an inner constitution. It is just in such objects that we sense a perfection that has grown naturally.

What is decisive here is that it is not necessary to understand the ontic situation in order to do this. One senses the inner meaning of the form, even without reflection, directly (as in the case of the organism) from what is visible. That was what was intended in an anticipatory way by the ancient doctrine of the Eidos as the form of perfection in every living kind. It presupposed erroneously however that this “inner form” was comparable to the external one. Because of this invalid reasoning, the ancients failed to find the solution to the puzzle. (161)

d) Creations of nature and creations of art

We see clearly from all of this that the relation of strata in the aesthetic object, which we developed above, has proven itself true for the entire series of phenomena. There is first a foreground, given to the senses, which is physically real, and then an appearing background. To be sure, in the natural object the latter is equally real, at least when we understand by it the determinative inner constitution of the object that gives expression to the outward form.

To that we may yet add: it is just this real inward constitution that appears, but not precisely as that which it is – not as a lawfulness, consistency, or adaptation – but usually as something quite different, for example as ideal form, as purposefulness, as secretive meaning, yes, even as intelligence. And just for that reason we must note once again: the appearing background is not real at all, but is merely appearance.

For that reason it is appropriate to formulate matters more carefully – we cannot of course easily dispense with formulas –: the dark awareness of being ignorant of the true nature of the background is just itself essential for the specific quality of the aesthetical impression, despite its appearance in a determinate form. Of course we sense that the background has its reality in the object, but for us its spectrum lies between complete indeterminacy and an appearing arrangement of elements, while we, even at that very moment, sense the definite real nature in it. And just that belongs with the peculiar appeal of natural beauty. It is the appeal of what is hidden, what will not let us go, and what still lets us find peace because it offers us further tasks for aesthetical beholding.

Here a yawning gap opens between the creations of nature and those of art. But from another perspective the two may approach each other again. It is characteristic of the arts that in the beholding of the object the beholding person disappears from his own view. He still feels himself in a state of enjoyment, but at the same time he is, just in his enjoyment, given over to the art object and is, as it were, lost to himself.

More precisely, the situation is as follows: the subject’s stance must place him over against the work of art, it must put him at a distance from it; if he melted into it, his enjoyment would no longer be an aesthetical one, indeed it would approach an enjoyment of oneself. But in standing over against it, the subject can still forget himself and in this way disappear from his own view. One may now ask whether this is also true for the act of beholding the natural aesthetic object.

Some have believed that this question must be answered in the negative, because the natural object does not have the same power to draw the observer into the aesthetical realm, to distract him from himself, and concentrate his attention upon the pure play with forms and the relation of appearance. Is that true?

What is alone quite true is that in the case of the natural object we lack the artist, who leads the eyes of the beholder; the natural object is not concerned with making an aesthetical effect. (162) It is also true that there are natural objects that have far more power to seduce the observer into enjoying his own self, that is, to the enjoyment of his own feelings, than do works of art, and thus they work against the act of aesthetical beholding. Among such things are, first, landscapes and things similar to them, especially when one enjoys oneself while strolling within one. Here too the disappearance of the self need not be lacking, yet it is only too easy for a state of contentment to assert itself that engages even the purely vital feelings.

We have already spoken of the impossibility of drawing sharp lines between these phenomena. But in the end, is this not a question of the sharpness of the edges? Even those items that are not entirely separable from others maintain their unique qualities. As soon as the pictorial seeing arises the transformation is achieved and the act of beholding approaches that of the kind we find in the case of painting, that is, artistic beholding. The beholding subject vanishes from consciousness, it falls victim to the same forgetfulness of self before the work of art – and no doubt because the subject turns itself over to the object beheld. The subject is, as it were, overwhelmed and extinguished by it. The distinction between it and artistic beholding is weakened, and can finally disappear entirely.

The metaphysics of natural beauty is of course the aim of reflection, but just for that reason it is not simply a reflection after the fact. Kant brought reflection entirely into aesthetical beholding itself (“reflecting judgment”). He may have gone too far with that idea; but to exclude entirely the participation of reflective thought in beholding also goes too far. In fact the line between the two is again a blurry one. Aesthetical beholding not only challenges our reflective capacities, it contains often enough in itself its initial elements – and, provided that this is so, reflection belongs to the natural aesthetical phenomenon.

The unusual parallels between nature and art have occurred to philosophy down through the years. Creations of both kinds are able to offer us a veritable cornucopia of beautiful objects. And if their beauty is merely something for a human intellect that has learned adequately to look at them, there still must also exist something in themselves that offers itself to this intellect in an analogical way.

This is the problem that led Kant not only to treat the power of aesthetical and teleological judgment together, but also to place them together under one and the same regulative principle – perhaps he understood them too narrowly, but, in essence, he expresses correctly the metaphysical problematic that lies at the foundations of these phenomena.

As a result, many things that can be read off from the phenomena have manifested themselves, and what stands behind the relation of appearance in the natural aesthetic object may be seen: the determining inward side, the consistency, and the dynamic and organic features of the structure with its lawfulness and formal arrangement.

In olden times, people believed that God stood immediately behind the forms of natural objects as their creator; and with that, the situation appeared to suggest that art was the means by which man became like God. For here (163) man too becomes creative – even if essentially only imitative – and thus in fact God in miniature.

Today we tend to turn this theme around, for we begin with man’s aesthetical creativity as the only warranted one: the non-artistic aesthetic object is the only point at which unconscious nature is equal to the inventive and creative human spirit. Stated in this way, we see the paradox more clearly. For what is truly amazing is the arising of structures in which the relation of appearance exists in full transparency for a human observer, although in its arising it was not destined for such a function. (164)