First Section: The Aesthetic Values

Chapter 26: Peculiarity and Multiplicity of Aesthetic Values

a) The divisions within the problem and the basis of their classification

If a scientific aesthetics were so advanced today that the way stood open for an analysis of aesthetic values, then it would be appropriate to enter upon it immediately. In the chapters of the previous section, we encountered continually the expression “artistic quality” – in contrast to the truth-content. But what this “quality” might be, with which, after all aesthetic value proper is denoted, we have yet said very little. We must at least attack this problem and attempt to clarify it; we must put to a test what yet may be discerned about it, despite the difficulties that arise from it.

The state of aesthetics is not favorable to such an attempt, as was already shown in the Introduction. But fundamentally, the analysis of values in aesthetics, in contrast to ethics, is hindered by the fact that we cannot extract individual general values – such as would correspond to the classes of “goodness” – but instead have to do with a large number of highly individualized values. For every work of art, and almost all other things that are beautiful, have their own peculiar value, upon which, no doubt, more universal characteristics (value-elements) can be found, but that value is not the sum of its elements, for it is something quite different.

Beyond this, there exists the universal element in the entire class of values, that is, the aesthetically valuable as such, in contrast to the values of the useful and of goods, of vital values and moral values. Here is a task that is solvable within certain limits, if one begins upon the foundation of the analysis of objects that was set forth in the two previous Parts. At the very least, we can indicate now the essential differences of the aesthetic values from other classes of values. Further, it will turn out that it is also possible to demonstrate a few essential laws concerning the value-relation between aesthetic values and certain other classes of value. (323)

The situation is different for the “special” values in the domain of the beautiful, which are neither those of individual works of art nor the universal of aesthetic values. There are definitely such things; but as classes of values, they do not play the same role as the classes of goods values or of moral values. One must try to grasp, classify, and categorize or describe them according to where they belong within certain types of object.

Up to now as a whole, what has been achieved is only a vague outline. This outline stands just in the middle between the universal and the entirely individual aesthetic values. While the two extremes are relatively easy to grasp – the one by means of the understanding and analysis, the other by means of the entire inviolable clarity with which aesthetic objects are beheld and enjoyed – the middle of the scale is not accessible by way of either means, and it can be reached, as it were, only by detours.

These values obviously represent a group of values, the classes proper of the beautiful, and they press themselves unceremoniously against the classes of the object or those of the arts and their special subdivisions, but finally against the kinds of aesthetical feelings and aesthetical responses. This results in three kinds of customary classifications. All of these have limits and contain an element of one-sidedness.

The first type of classification (according to the object) is the natural one for beauty in nature and the humanly beautiful: One distinguishes the beauty of a face or a figure from that of a location or of a scene that one has observed; in the case of the latter it would be better, no doubt, to speak of drama. Such distinctions, of course, may be transferred informally to the arts, as far as these arts, for their part, represent such diverse objects. In the case of painting, we speak of a “seascape,” a “landscape,” or a “character study,” but we mean their representation. We distinguish strictly the kinds of value in them by analogy to those values possessed by the object. That means, in these cases, an analogy to the sujet.

The second type of classification follows the arts and their subgroups. The one-sidedness here consists in the exclusion of natural and human beauty. Otherwise – within the arts – the classification is entirely justified. For there can be no doubt that, depending upon the specificity of the art form – in music, e.g., upon whether we are dealing with a minuet, an aria, a saraband, etc. – the specific kind of artistic value will vary. This could not be otherwise, for the specific art forms are nothing other than tried and tested types of form, in which things of beauty may be shaped. They remain valid even if their multiplicity should turn out to be of a non-uniform or a merely external kind.

The third type of classification causes far greater difficulties. And yet it is the one that does the most justice to the problem of aesthetic values in all their multiplicity. It renounces all external support in the object, and relies exclusively on the value-response given by a consciousness that beholds its object adequately. In this way, this classification follows the method of the analysis of values that we are (324) familiar with in ethics, and which achieved very tangible results there. The principle behind it is the distillation of unique qualitative shades of tone (nuances) from the living reactions to felt values, and their treatment as a direct and immediate witness to similarly differentiated nuances of value. As to the justification of this procedure, there is fundamentally no dispute. We have no other source of knowledge of aesthetic value and disvalue than our feeling of values. Whether one calls this feeling of value delight, enjoyment, affirmation, or pleasure, nothing of its import is affected.

Yet something has been forgotten here: there is also a classification according to the main empirical-historical developments that have dominated – or predominated – in the arts. We usually call these main forms of development “styles” but we mean by that term only those styles that are sufficiently widespread formal types, thus primarily those that extend over several arts and characterize what is similar in each of them.

We are in general familiar with this usage at least from the standpoint of art history, and we cannot deny that this standpoint, too, is justified. But the notion of style shares with the second principle of classification, that according to the forms of art, an exclusion of natural and human beauty; yet it finds itself related to other cultural forms of the same historical epochs that no longer fall in the domain of the aesthetical, or at least are not absorbed into it. One speaks, for example, of the Gothic style of life, or the human types typical of the Rococo.

The concept of style is in one way too narrow, in another too broad, to enable us to grasp the differentiations of aesthetic value proper. To this must be added the consideration that the concept of style itself must first be determined, something that has up to now not been achieved without a preparatory analysis of value. Moreover, the concept of style has to be called upon everywhere that a fixed and similarly unique and definite idea of value has attached itself to the tastes and the vision of a specific style. In fact, there are various examples of that.

b) Differentiations according to the qualia of value feeling

It is necessary before all else to say a few things about the genera of beauty according to the third method of classification – that is, according to the type of the value-response and enjoyment. The multiplicity of aesthetic value viewed from this standpoint is quite considerable, but only a very few of this multiplicity are given clear designations; the most are , that is, our language is not able to extend itself to them. Even the few designations that one can apply here always have something strangely indeterminate and blurry about them, partly because colloquial speech has eroded their meanings, partly because the concept of nuances of values was unclear or wavered in its meaning from the outset.

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant thought one of these genera of the beautiful, viz., the sublime, to be so fundamental that he treated it, on the same level as and alongside of, the idea of beauty itself, in a special “Analytic.” (325) If we take a closer look at this analytic, we find that he himself, on the basis of his inquiry, would have been confident to count it as a variety of beauty. What prevented him from doing so was the somewhat too narrowly defined concept of the beautiful that emerged from his earlier Analytic of Beauty. (Compare in reference to this the Introduction, §3, where some of these genera were first enumerated.)

There was an early objection: why should not a similar special place be also given to the graceful and the charming, to the pleasing and moving, to the idyllic and the comical, to the humorous and the tragic? Then one would have to carry out an “analytic” for each of these genera. One could of course add to the list many other genera of beauty that raise the same claim, such as the grotesque, the fantastic, the capricious, etc. One could even suggest that in the same way the “lyric,” the “romantic,” the “classic” belong here, also. Of course, one would no doubt observe that one has gone astray regarding the forms of art, on the one hand, and in the types of style on the other – both of which no longer touch upon the immediacy of our feeling for aesthetic values.

When one shines a light from this position backwards upon the first-named genera, one sees that among these some have already been borrowed from specific art forms, especially from those of the poetic arts: for example, the comical and the tragic, but also the idyllic and the humorous. More specific poetic forms lie at the basis of the grotesque, the fantastic, etc. Apart from the sublime, there remains only the graceful, the charming, and the pleasing, as genera that have been derived solely from the feeling of value; for even the emotionally moving stands quite at the limits of artistic form.

The fact that precisely these three remaining value-genera are extraordinarily pale and blurry is calamitous. It is not even possible to demarcate them unambiguously with respect to one another; they flow over, one into the other. If we take them all together, they no doubt contrast sharply with the sublime. And if we take this contrast as our point of departure, we will discover also that it continues in the emotionally moving, the idyllic, the comical, and the humorous. This continuation does not, of course, proceed on a straight line.

This contrast with the sublime divides itself instead into several subgroups arranged in parallel fashion. It branches out. That develops in such a way that the subgroups lose their weight and independence, while the sublime, as the contrary common to each, gains considerably in weight.

Nonetheless, we should note that one of the value-genera that we enumerated approaches the sublime, and, in a certain version of it, could almost count as a species of it: the tragic. Without question, a genuine tragic effect cannot be achieved without at least a trace of the sublime. This is significant, because the tragic is not simply an art form; it is a value-genus that also appears in other arts than tragedy. A clear case is music, where it is notably bereft (326) of all drama. Then, too, it appears in painting (in certain portraits, etc.). The special position of the sublime is thereby once again considerably strengthened, and precisely in the Kantian sense.

We will then also submit the sublime to another investigation. In many respects it will be more essential than those of the other value-genera. But those too, each and all, demand their special study, regardless of whether one belongs in this or that classification.

It has already become obvious that a clearly arranged classification and comparison of aesthetic values cannot be obtained in this manner. There are no doubt genera of values to which a seemingly foundational feeling of values bears witness; yet they are neither derived from the feeling of values, nor are they in the same way identified and distinguished from each other by it. A secure foothold for a genuine entry into the realm of aesthetic values is not to be won in this way.

One may convince oneself even more of this impossibility when one recalls that there exist artistic values that do not fit into this series: the value of the drama is of this kind. It is not tied as firmly to the art of drama as one might think; it also belongs to certain forms of the novel, and we encounter it even outside of art in life itself, in the area of what is beautiful in man, if we bring an open mind to it.

Finally, we must recall that we also meet in life many of the genera we have enumerated even apart from their aesthetical coloring. The tragic and the comical are good examples of this. Terrible events easily seem tragic to us even when we attach no aesthetical meaning to them; much of what we witness by chance seems comical to us – in life, we laugh over many kinds of petty but all-too-human events, and often we laugh at ourselves. Both such events are on the near side of art. Most frequently a moral judgment is expressed in them. But that too is very distant from the sphere of aesthetic values.

The case is similar with the idyllic and the emotionally touching, perhaps even with the charming and the pleasing. For there exist “charms” that are of an entirely different kind than the aesthetical, even if they are related to them, or are distinct from them but not sharply so.

Very many things in life may seem idyllic to us without our actively enjoying them. A thing can be very touching without possessing the slightest touch of aesthetic value. Think how a scene where others are touched by something may easily appear comical to us. It is sufficient that the response be ever slightly too strong – relative to a more sober sensibility.

That does not prevent us from taking up and analyzing one of the other of these value-genera. People have tried repeatedly to analyze the sublime on the one hand, and the humorous on the other. Much of significance has been discovered by these efforts. Only we must not fall victim to illusion: we are always inclined to expect great things of analyses of this kind – new disclosures (327) about fundamental interconnections in life, and the like. Metaphysical aesthetics of the idealists and later thinkers have given impetus to dreams of this kind. For it readily seems self-evident that we are touching ultimate things when we have at the ready a metaphysics of spirit, in whose structures the role of bringing together and concluding widely interwoven threads of theory falls to Beauty, Art, Beholding, and Enjoyment.

Such unspoken metaphysical motives infect many theories, even up to our times. From that perspective, every more sober effort will seem unsatisfying, even superficial. Nonetheless, aesthetics must today take a more modest path. Studies of the object, the stratification, and the conditions in which form is bestowed have demonstrated that unambiguously. Our deficient orientation within the problem of value, typical of our situation today, only serves to confirm further this necessity.

c) The range of beauty

If we lay to rest the difficulties in the classification and arrangement because we can come to no final conclusion regarding them, there still remains another option: we can approach empirically, as it were, the individual genera of aesthetic value, as far as they present themselves and can be grasped. In this way, indeed, all past aesthetics has proceeded in practice.

We may hope along the empirical “way from below” to encounter those universal fundamental determinations of the beautiful, which our analysis of the object has produced. Where the two roads meet, we should at best meet with results.

But our expectations must be limited. It is still very questionable whether the beautiful is congruent with the sum total of all these value-genera. Its range as the foundation of general aesthetic values could extend far beyond them.

That is indeed the case. It is a simple matter to assure ourselves of this, even though we have no insight into the additional value-genera. Such an insight is not necessary for that assurance. We must not forget that we possess an enormous multiplicity of individual cases, each having an immediately evident character that is aesthetically valuable. The individual cases are the works of art themselves.

If we take one or another work that is recognized as a masterpiece and ask ourselves under which of the enumerated classes it falls, given the character of its aesthetic value, we will rarely find one that is exhausted entirely only by one of the genera. For example, under what genus should we place The Brothers Karamazov? Neither the sublime, nor the charming, nor the moving, is sufficient to cover it; not even the tragic, which extends a very thin thread throughout the work. What will we say of Growth of the Soil [Hamsun, 1917], Wanderers [1922], etc.? The ready categories of aesthetics are simply insufficient for them. Or [Ibsen’s] The Wild Duck [1884], Pillars of Society [1877], J[ohn] G[abriel] Borkman [1896]? Even Shakespeare’s major dramas cannot be placed under one genus. Are (328) things any different with Rembrandt’s self-portraits? Or with the Dutch landscapes and seascapes?

What are the consequences of this? There is much “beauty” in the strictest sense of the word that is not exhausted by any determinable value-genera of beauty. In the place of these value-genera we speak instead of qualities that we think associated with a particular form of art, or we simply take from this art form the name for it and use it to refer to the artistic excellence of the work within that form. So we speak of the value of a “picturesque” quality, of the “dramatic” quality, the quality of the “staging,” of the “narrative representation,” or of the “sculptural” quality. Such terms may have a certain justification, but with these characterizations we refer only obliquely to what our value feelings tell us, and they do not say in what that feeling consists.

If we also set aside weak attempts to exhibit such differentiations among values, the basic fact remains that the quality of “being beautiful” – understood as the state of being aesthetically valuable – is not exhausted by all such genera, but that rather a multiplicity of beauties without number exist inside and outside of the arts, which are not to be accommodated “in that way.” But this is with what we are really concerned when it is a question of the basic value and the value-genera of beauty.

In this context, it is by no means unimportant to attempt to make clear that this is not, let us say, a question of a broader concept of beauty, but rather solely a question of the aesthetic values in their strict sense. Such broadening is nowhere closer to us than where we are now, because in life we are accustomed to characterize a limitless number of things as “beautiful” that are merely useful for some given purpose, are useable, cause fun, are pleasant, or also are morally “good.”

This misuse is so vulgar that it is not worth a single word to set it straight. Two things are present here that deserve special consideration. The one concerns the strange turning of meaning to the moral realm. How does it happen that a form of behavior – let us say a high-minded or a generous act – comes to be called “beautiful,” while the predicate that really belongs to it is that of the morally “good”? And the same when we call the opposite of these acts “ugly”?

Three things are hidden behind this practice.

1. The tendency to conceal or to weaken the earnestness of morality;
2. The habit of allowing what is external and visible in the behavior of a person to substitute for what is inward and moral; for naturally the moral tenor, the dispositions, even the general and fundamental attitudes of a man stamp themselves directly upon his typical visible appearance, his gestures, movements, manner and bearing;
3. The old prejudice, which traces to Plato, of the identity of the and [the good and the beautiful]. This point has been continuously strengthened through the expectation that groups and classes of values should all be traceable to an identical fundamental value. Such a value was understood e.g., by Aristotle as the . When he argues, “ [for the sake of the beautiful],” the value of final appeal is meant, which is counted as the only one. (329)

It is not easy to confront such deeply rooted misuse. Another such misnomer is hidden even deeper, i.e., calling the psychic inner processes “beautiful” and “ugly” in themselves. We do this in a moral sense, calling a wicked act “ugly”; but in an extramoral sense we also speak, for example, of the “beautiful” peace and mellowness of an aged person, or of the “beauty” of the awakening of the love life in a young person, the blossoming of the understanding of the conflicts and conditions of the life of other persons. One may object: all of that is really beautiful, also, and precisely in the narrow aesthetical sense. One may wish to insist that there is a “beauty in old age,” and, even more, the “beauty of youth.”

The latter must be entirely conceded. But it is no objection. The beauty in youthfulness does not lie in its emotional excitation, its awakening, etc., but rather in its appearance in the external man, in his gaze, in the cut of his physical features, etc. So it is too with the beauty of old age: not the mellowness, but its appearance in the face and bearing, is where this beauty lies. The case of the “ugliness” of an action is different: in the action, there appears, no doubt, something of the inner man, precisely as a moral agent, but we refer in such case more to the moral deed itself, and there we go astray. It is erroneous in a strong sense to speak of a “beautiful soul,” or of a beautiful heart, beautiful feelings, or sentiments. These epithets are false.

We may say in general: beauty is and remains tied to sensible appearance –or, as in literature, to an analogy with the sensible, that is, to our highly concrete and vivid feelings. The beautiful is not what appears, but only appearance itself. No doubt the appearance-relation can grow considerably in substance by means of various other value-contents – perhaps of a moral kind – of what appears and with that the state of beauty may increase in fullness of its meaning and its resonance; but such value-contents can never replace appearance or render it superfluous, and therefore can also never constitute the aesthetic value. The facts just established are no longer new ones. They are the precise implications of what was discovered above (Chaps. 4–10) about the nature of beauty. But of course, the significance of these statements becomes apparent only gradually.

Chapter 27: The Situation Today in the Problem of Value

a) Classes of values and value-aporia

Aesthetics does not stand alone as an inquiry into values. It attaches itself to other sciences of value, which were developed prior to it. Only ethics stood with real energy in the vanguard, and that too only in the last decades. For if aesthetics, which (330) had not yet gotten its bearings, had at least found a linkage to ethics, it would have received a significant help. The relative position of beauty to the other classes of values is easier to find, but that fact is rather strange, since these classes are still little defined. Yet the situation is more transparent here. The first thing to do is to cast an eye into the realm of values in general, at least so far as it has opened itself to philosophical analysis up to this moment.

The classes of values we normally take into account have no systematic principle and are examined partly empirically. For that reason, they also do not make up an uniform series – such as a clear set of stages – but fluctuate between precedence and co-subordination, even though there are only a few of them. Even the demarcations between them have not been indisputably established.

If we begin at the bottom, we can distinguish the following classes in the following manner:

• I. Goods values, including all values of the useful and the instrumental, but also many entirely independent areas of values (those genuinely intrinsic); among such things, the broad class of the situational values.
• II. Values of pleasure, or what in everyday life is usually characterized as the “pleasant.”
• III. Vital values – those are the ones associated with living things, and are arranged in a series according to height, development, and life force. All vital value has instrumental worth for whatever promotes life; vital disvalue, worth for what harms life.
• IV. Moral values: Collected under the heading of the “good.”
• V. Aesthetic values: Collected under the heading of the “beautiful.”
• VI. The value of knowledge: Really only one value, the “truth.”

It is easy to see that this series is heterogeneous. The three last classes of value stand in a kind of parallel arrangement to each other; this does not exclude the possibility that differences in rank are also found among them. For each of these classes of value, except for the last, contains an entire scale of values, some higher and some lower, as we know well from ethics. Similarly, there are also higher and lower aesthetic values. The consequence is that it is just as possible for there to exist ethical values that are “higher” than specific aesthetic values, as for there to be aesthetic values that are higher than specific ethical values.

These three last classes of values have been gathered together as “spiritual” values. So said Scheler. But not much is thereby achieved. One can attach still another class to them, that of religious values. But their actuality [Bestehen] depends on certain metaphysical presuppositions that cannot be demonstrated: without the existence [Existenz] of a divinity, those values would be illusory. It is therefore better to leave them out of consideration here – although in the history of humankind an entire domain of culture corresponds to them.

Among the first three classes of values, that of the values of pleasure [Lust] is not without ambiguity. In part, the group may be congruent to the class of goods values, for what is “pleasant,” e.g., warmth in winter, is just for that reason a “good.” The difference between the classes becomes clear only when we understand (331) the value of pleasure strictly subjectively, that is, as the value of the sensation of pleasure, not as the value of whatever produces pleasure, or what we usually also call “pleasant.” But that is difficult to maintain, because we consciously understand pleasure almost exclusively as a sign of certain qualities of an object and then call it after what arouses it.

This is not the place to clarify and correct these and similar inconsistencies. Here it is a question only of how matters currently stand, and we find that even the borderline between the value of the pleasant and vital values is not clear. Specifically, the pleasant is in part unambiguously related to the functions of life; in part, it founds and expresses immediately something that promotes life – the way that the good taste of food teaches us what is nourishing and digestible – and in part it is something quite different, and what is pleasant can seduce us to actions that are destructive of life. The latter we find in all cases of excess, or in drugs, in alcohol, and the like.

The relation of goods values to the vital values is significantly simpler. Here we have at bottom a simple relation of foundation; specifically the goods values are founded upon the vital values, thus the lower upon the higher. A “good” is not a thing in itself, but only a good “for” someone; here we do not have to understand by “someone” a person, i.e., an intellectual being. There can be goods “for” an animal or a plant, i.e., for a living thing into whose possession it comes. But it must always be a good “for someone”; outside of this relation there are no goods. Everything that stands in a relation of utility to some creature has a goods-value, a usefulness for it, but also only “for” it, not in itself – thus a grain of seed is a goods-value for the bird that feeds on it, thus also air and light and the circulation of water for all life on earth.

In this way, the “for” is to be understood objectively: it is not tied to any knowledge of “being good,” even when the creature for “whom” it is a good possesses consciousness and intelligence. Those enable him to understand it and to mark it paid by a responsive feeling of its value. Just so are for man air, light, water and much else like them the most necessary goods for life, but they can be felt by us only when they are withheld; even our “daily bread” – how few of us enjoy it with the feeling of thanks that its high value deserves!

We must not forget that this “being for us” of the goods of value to man has nothing to do with a crass value-relativism; it does not mean a dependency of value upon our holding things to be valuable, thus (332) also not upon our feelings of value or even upon our knowing about them at all. It suffices for something to be “good” for us, that it is to our benefit, even that it could benefit us if we thought to put it to use or just simply to discover it. The earth’s storehouses of coal were a great good for man, even before men discovered and understood them as such; these goods were lying there at the ready; they had only to wait upon their exploitation.

Goods values for man are primarily those that relate to him and are to his benefit, but in no sense accessible to his intellect. This conclusion is important, because goods values play, for their part, a leading role in moral values. We must therefore modify the above thesis of foundation, such that the goods values are values only “for” living beings or persons – thus relative to bearers of vital and spiritual values – and for that reason founded upon the higher classes of values entirely, and not simply upon vital values. No doubt, the moral values are the primary ones that come into consideration here. Yet the reverse relation begins precisely with them.

We must note here also that in a certain sense it is correct to say that the values of pleasure are founded in the same way upon vital value. The pleasant does not genuinely exist in itself, but only as something pleasant to “me”; more accurately, pleasant to some living thing. The difference is only that here it is a question of pure values of subjectivity, of sensation as such, and not of values inhering in an object.

The class of goods values is very large. It begins with the lower values of usefulness for vital functions, but it climbs upward to the highest spiritual goods, where only persons or persons in relation to other persons can have them: friendship, benevolence, love, such as may accrue to us. These values are essentially conditioned by ethical values that relate to our behavior toward others; they are the goods values attached to moral values.

In part, these extend beyond the lower moral values in the general scale of values according to their relative height. This is one reason more not to distinguish the classes of values according to their relative height alone, a distinction correct only as a whole, not for individual cases. Here we must also recall that even aesthetic values display in large measure the characteristics of goods values.

Finally, we must say a word about situational values. There were just now counted among the goods values, but that is true only in an extended sense. “Goods values” were once defined (and were still so by Scheler) by the ontological character (the stratum of being) of their bearers. The thought was: only things, states of affairs, or natural states akin to things could be bearers of goods values. To these latter would belong, for example, the external conditions of life, those of human life, and of other organisms.

This definition has turned out to be too narrow. It is sufficient only for the narrowest needs, that is, as long as we have to do (333) only with the usefulness of things. It does not serve for the higher goods values; every configuration of events can have the value – or disvalue – of a good, and similarly every behavior of another man, regardless of whether it has moral significance or not. That is even true for every “chance” event, that is, one without purpose, and of every situation and state of affairs.

For entities to be valuable that do not count as things, but rather above and beyond things constitute entire sets of conditions, phenomenologists have coined the appropriate concept “situational values” – without any suggestions of an independent class of values. In fact, situational values belong under the rubric of goods values, if only one does not insist on understanding “goods” narrowly as things. Otherwise, it would not be possible to count such values as happiness and power among the goods values. For what constitutes “happiness” is rarely included in just one thing – as, in fairy-tales, a piece of jewelry, a gem, or a magic mirror – almost always happiness is tied to definite circumstances in life, that is, to situations. That is of great significance for ethics. For moral values are unambiguously referred back to the goods values that bear them, and indeed precisely to the situational values.

b) Kinship and contrasts among the classes of values

We can see from what has been said here and elsewhere that the attempt to define the classes of values according to their types of bearer of value is highly questionable. For the goods values, in any case, the situation is hopeless; one would have to say that anything at all can be a bearer of a goods-value, from things to the most refined behavior of persons. Something similar is found among the “spiritual values.”

So, at least, when one considers the three classes of value together: moral, aesthetical, and epistemic. No doubt they all have ample latitude in the domain of the mind, but they do not have the same bearer. In the case of moral values, the human being as a person is the barer of values; only for him is it possible to be “good” or “bad” morally, as also only to him belongs the freedom necessary to be one or the other.

In the case of epistemic value, man is by no means its bearer, not even as a person, not even as a being that knows. For neither man nor the knower is “true” when his ideas correspond to the facts or “false” when they fail to do so; only his ideas themselves, his judgments, or whatever he deems to be his knowledge may be true (in reality, it is knowledge only when it is true, otherwise it is erroneous). That a man can “be true or untrue” means something quite different; its meaning is entirely ethical in nature.

For aesthetic value, the reverse holds true. Here “man” as the bearer of values is given not too broad a role, but one too narrow. No doubt a man can be beautiful or ugly, but then too, an animal or a landscape can be beautiful or ugly; indeed, the same holds of every object, every natural or living (334) phenomenon. To these we must add the rich multiplicity of art objects, which are of course all objectivations of the human mind, but not living, personal mind, not men!

Accordingly, we may say about aesthetic values something similar to what was said about goods values: any possible thing in the world can be their bearers –things, organisms, persons, world-systems or individual segments of the real world, but especially those things created by men to bear them. “Things” is for the latter much too narrow: fantasies, purely imaginary notions, all are such bearers also. However, they must be somehow anchored in things, that is, objectified.

If, on one side, aesthetic values display similarities to goods values – so much so that one might be tempted to count them among the highest goods values; after all, they often fall like gifts to humankind “from heaven!” – still, we cannot mistake their kinship on the other side with the values of pleasure. Has not aesthetics attempted often enough to carry over the shadings of the pleasant and the unpleasant to those of the beautiful and the ugly?

This kinship obtains grater traction if one recalls that the act of beholding and presenting values aesthetically is decidedly a pleasant one. Of course, for the feeling of pleasure itself that responds to these acts the value is not tied to pleasure, but rather to its object. But, after all, this objectification is just as characteristic for everything “pleasant and unpleasant”: we call what causes pleasure “pleasant,” not pleasure itself, what causes pain “unpleasant” (that which is bad tasting, painful, bitter).

What distinguishes them is the kind of pleasure and the kind of object. The act of aesthetical receptivity is sensual as looking, not in its pleasure. Pleasure begins only with the second act, that of beholding, the one that is higher, supersensible. Accordingly, the aesthetic value of the object is not tied to the sensibly given, as with the pleasant, but to the appearance-relation – or to a formal relationship equivalent to it.

Now here is the point at which it is important to count aesthetic value among the “spiritual” values – by means of which it is drawn onto the level of the value of truth and the moral values. But for this it is not enough to hold onto the schematic form of the higher act of beholding. Here, precisely, we can give a better account on the basis of the analysis of the object.

What, specifically, do we mean here by “spiritual value”? It obviously does not mean that aesthetic value accrues to the human spirit; that may be granted to be so in the case of works of art, because they are “objectified spirit,” but it does not hold for all other beautiful things in the world. The spirit is not in this case the bearer of value. What sense of “spiritual value” yet remains to us? In order to answer that question, let us recall what was said in Chapter 5 about the “law of objectivation,” in particular about the role of the living (335) spirit in the being of the objectivated spirit, and also about the latter’s “being for us.”

What was in fact striking about these matters is the triadic relation – at bottom, it has four members – in the nature of the objectivizing spirit: the appearance-relation between the real foreground and the unreal background, which exists, however, only “for” a living spirit to whom something can appear –regardless of whether we understand the spirit as personal or as “objective.” The “fourth member,” then, is the creative spirit of the artist, who, of course, may belong to a long-ago past, yet be present behind the objectivation and can, to a certain degree, “appear” within it.

This last matter, however, plays no role here. It is absent from natural beauty and from human beauty. In contrast, the living spirit as the third member is essential for all aesthetic value, for this value of an object always pertains “to someone,” but not in itself and without reference to a beholding subject. The essential role of spirit in the triadic relation of all things that can lay claim to being “beautiful” constitutes the character of spiritual value in beauty.

There remains to be said that here, too, there is an obvious kinship with goods values, and specifically a second kinship next to the first one presented above. There, as here, there is a reference back to a subject whose presence is a condition of the value. Only a secondary distinction is made by the fact that for the values of goods by a living thing, even without intellect, “for” which the value exists, must be present. The main matter is still the correlation: the “for” itself, without which the value cannot exist.

The difference is that only in the case of goods values it is a question of a real relation to a subject, without any concern for the relation being conscious. But here, in contrast, it is a question of a characteristic relationship of a consciousness. That means: a “good” thing is such for A, when it is to his benefit, or even could be such, without A knowing and appreciating it; but a “beautiful” thing is beautiful for A, when “for” his beholding and feeling there exists the appearance-relationship. Otherwise put: when the real foreground of the object becomes transparent to him and the series of strata of the background appears to him from within it.

The second “for” is characteristically subjective; it pertains to an intellectual consciousness. In that respect aesthetic value is as dissimilar as possible from goods values. We see from this how the weightiest distinctions are rooted in the unique and most nuanced relationships among the essential conditions that lie at their foundation.

c) Goods values and moral values

These last characterizations concerned, in a preliminary way, the place of aesthetic value. But nevertheless we have as yet entered only the front courtyard. To examine these values in earnest, we need to take a larger detour: we must bring, above all, the (336) moral values into the discussion, for the aesthetic values have again a special relationship to them. To that end, we need to start with a fundamental definition of the essence of the moral values themselves.

For the justification of what follows, we must of course refer to the Ethics. We can enumerate only the main elements here and recall the essential standpoints relevant to them. The primary points are the following:

1. Moral values and disvalues have only persons, or the actions, attitudes, and dispositions of persons as their bearers. They are decidedly the values of persons and their actions. The basis of this exclusiveness is that only persons have freedom, and their freedom becomes active only in their acts, attitudes and dispositions. For only that behavior has moral value that is not forced –perhaps by natural necessity – to be as it is, but rather could have turned out differently than it did.
2. Moral values are not relative to someone “for” whom they are valuable, as is the case with goods values. The “for” pertains merely to the goods values that are tied to them; these are values only for the one who benefits from them. But one must not confuse them with the moral values themselves: the honesty of A is a “good” for B, who has to live with him. B is the recipient of this good; the value of honesty itself belongs to A. This value exists independently of whether B makes use of it, sees it, recognizes it, indeed whether or not he understands it.
3. Moral values and disvalues accrue only to such acts, attitudes, and dispositions that have to do with persons in addition to things. They are thus tied not only to persons as subjects and as bearers of value, but also to persons as objects; as, accordingly, all actions that can be morally evaluated are “actions on persons,” or more accurately: all control exercised over things with reference to the persons affected by them. The objection that one can treat animals lovingly or heartlessly changes nothing. For in that objection the opinion obviously functions that creatures other than man possess a certain degree of personhood.

More important than these basic essential facts is the relationship that governs goods values and moral values. This relationship is not exhausted in the distinctions and contrasts we noted above; similarly it is not exhausted by the appearance, just noted (in point 2), of the goods-value that is tied to them. This is rather a salient positive essential relationship, one that is constitutive of the moral values themselves. We can express it in the following formula: all moral values are founded upon goods values, and, moreover, every moral value has a specific kind of goods-value as its presupposition. Nonetheless, their own peculiar nature is entirely autonomous with respect to the goods values that found them.

One may call this the law of foundation of moral values. It still demands a justification. The first part of the law is easy to (337) establish. In what way does the action of the honest man differ from that of the thief with respect to the unprotected property of others? In this way: the first man respects the possessions of others, while the second man does not. But the presupposition here is that the objects possessed by another have a value, specifically a goods-value, for which one may desire them. If this is lacking, the urge to steal them is lacking also, and the behavior of the honest man is in no way different from that of the thief. The moral values, and likewise the moral disvalues, are thus conditioned by the goods-value, that is, they are founded upon it.

The situation is the same when I do a favor for someone, or please him: the favor or the pleasure signifies a goods-value for the other person. Usually that value has the form of a situation-value; for example, when I help someone or give him a present. The intended value does not lie in the value of the object alone, but lies rather in the fact that it benefits the person – it lies in a typical situational value. The conditional relation extends no further than the goods-value. The latter must be present and must lie at the foundation of the moral value, but otherwise the moral value is independent.

This fact touches the second part of the law of foundation. It may be summarized in three theses:

1. The moral value that is “founded” upon the goods-value does not contain the latter as a component (as an element of value) in itself. Otherwise expressed: The founding value does not recur in the founded one. The goods-value of some desirable object is not contained in the value of honesty, for that value belongs to the person of the honest man, and he cannot be desirable in the same way as the object. The moral value is thus autonomous with respect to its content.
2. The height of the moral value is independent of the height of the founded goods-value. The example of the “copper coins of the widow”104 shows precisely why that is so. The highest moral value – the greatest capacity for sacrifice – can rise upon the slightest goods-value, and the reverse is also true – the greatness of the sacrifice is not identical to the magnitude of the goods-value.
3. The realization of moral values is independent of the realization of the goods-value (provided that one comes into question at all). More accurately: Independent of the realization of the situational value.¹⁰⁵

A special explanation is required for the third thesis. When I want to give pleasure to someone and surprise him with something, but fully miss the mark, that is, I instead do something that is quite at odds with him, the situation is as follows: what I had intended (the pleasure that I wished to give him) does not occur, but the will, the purpose, the intention, is and remains morally valuable – just provided that it was genuine. (338)

This last point nonetheless implies that I had willed in earnest and not just wished. What matters is the real intention, the engagement. The result, in contrast, can turn out differently. To be “affectionate” as one readies a pleasure is entirely a matter only of the purpose, the disposition. The moral value can be completely realized by just that, without the intended situational value being realized successfully.

The outcome is that the entire dependency of the moral value in the foundation-relation is limited to the bare existence of the goods-value in the intention; but again the content of the moral value is determined neither by it, nor by its degree of value, nor by its realization.

d) Intended value and the value of the intention

This result is very strange. It carries with it a string of consequences that extend at first only to ethics, but later also touches aesthetics. To obtain an overview of these consequences is not easy, but for its sake we will have to treat of the first of these consequences, although they have nothing to do with aesthetics directly.

The foundation-relation demonstrated that in every ethical intention or action two quite different values are involved, a goods-value and an ethical value, and furthermore they stand in a definite relation of dependency. These two values apparently never coincide. But that, too, is only half true, and the other half lies in a second law.

In every action, in every act of will, in every ethical situation, the moral value or disvalue does not lie in the direction of the intention, i.e., it is not an intended value, not the aim of the action, but it appears first on the intention as its bearer, and is thus its value, the value of the intention. This law, Scheler’s law, can be enunciated as follows: the aim of the action is not moral value, but rather the goods-value, or, more accurately the situational value. The moral value appears “on the back of the act.” In this relation the intended value is the “founding” value, the value of the intention is the “founded” one. And since the latter is the moral value, this agrees exactly with the law of the foundation-relation.

The justification of this law is simple, but it does not coincide with the three forms of independence of the foundation-relation; it has a purely ethical character. A man who wants to give pleasure to someone does not act in order to be affectionate – to see himself crowned, as it were, with this value-predicate, but solely to give pleasure to the other person, perhaps to benefit him with the gift. He does not think of himself, but of the other, and desires also nothing for himself; and he is affectionate precisely insofar as he thinks of the other. If he thinks privately in some way of himself – whether on his advantage or on the way he poses himself morally – then his action is no longer affectionate. (339)

If a person acts for the sake of his own virtue, he normally does not achieve it. Virtue belongs to him who possesses the right intentions. To do so is to be oriented toward the situational value (the right kind, of course). A direct intention to realize the moral value will rather in fact destroy [zerstören] it, because the intention that has tied itself to moral action becomes disrupted [gestört]; in extreme cases it leads to the agent seeing himself reflected in a mirror, and to pharisaism. No doubt we should not carry this idea to extremes. For the direct intention of a moral value is not impossible in principle.

One can easily see one’s way to this idea. Moral values are directly intended in all attempts at moral education. Whether education in morals can extend itself to all moral values is an entirely different question. Courage, love, the capacity for self-sacrifice are difficult to teach; hard work, constancy, love of order, self-control and discipline may, to a great extent, surely be attained pedagogically, and, within certain limits, surely also trustworthiness, fidelity, a sense of justice, etc. Thus, the number of moral values that may be directly intended is not small. The same is true even for all kinds of self-discipline, which may be done by an adult. It is true also for every kind of self-criticism, repentance, self-reflection, conversion, and for all kinds of conscious “discipleship.” A man “wills” to become like his model.

Nonetheless we must also consider one more thing: the law is in force as long as the moral value that is striven after is not – or not completely – identical with the moral value of this striving. The teacher, perhaps, trains his pupil out of his awareness of duty, out of love, or out of some philosophical devotion to the people and the state. Those are not the same moral values that he seeks to create in his pupil – perhaps constancy, the love of order, etc. Here, too, the value of the intention is different from the intended value. And the same thing holds, to a great extent, for self-discipline.

At this phase of the discussion, all of that is not a mere digression. Rather, it shows how deeply the heterogeneous classes of values are tied to each other. And that is also essential to the problem of aesthetic value. For they, too, do not just float in the air, but are tied to other classes of values in a strangely tight and peculiar way.

One final point about moral values should therefore be mentioned. Although it does not lie in the nature of ethical behavior to be intended [intendiert], it is yet always intentional [intendierend] or purposive – morality is, after all, a collection of commandments that prescribe where our intentions should be directed. But then three questions remain to be answered:

1. What moral values can be commanded?
2. Which can be striven after in a meaningful way?
3. Which can be realized through striving after them?

The answers cannot be given summarily. Rather, they are differentiated according to individual values and groups of values. That means that already at this point no lawfulness within the realm of values is available to us; we are left empty-handed. (340)

To 1: Apparently only those of the values listed above that were teachable can be commanded – i.e., they are capable of taking the form of ought-to-do – such as hard work, constancy, orderliness, to a great extent also self-discipline, self-governance, and even honesty. Values that cannot be taught may be love, trust, etc.

To 2: Most of the moral values can in principle be striven after, but there is a danger in striving after them directly. The ethos can in such cases turn into its contrary, and they should not in general be striven after. What is really not attainable through effort is the value of individuality. That value must be realized by itself if it is to be realized at all in life. Whoever strives after it as a goal is always in danger of failing to reach it. It is more likely that other men will lead him to it. There are parallels in such cases in the domain of the goods values: for example, happiness can be striven after, but cannot be realized in striving. Whoever strives for happiness destroys his chances for it almost necessarily.

To 3: With the exception of purity of heart, almost all moral values can be achieved; purity of heart, or innocence, is not in any case to be realized in acts of striving after it. One can only lose it, but not recover it. The same holds for a few goods values of great magnitude: youth, beauty, and unaffectedness.

e) The metaphysical problem of value

We must state with complete clarity that in all these reflections we have taken pains to abstract from the metaphysical problem of value. This problem consists in the question of the nature of the being of values, of the meaning and the origin of their validity, and their absoluteness or relativity. This is not to say that these are not important questions, but they are just not decisive for the context of the questions we were discussing; they are indifferent to it.

The questions of being and validity are, for the lower classes of values, unambiguously rooted in the conditions of real being. A “good” is a thing that benefits a creature or a man, and an “evil” is what is detrimental or threatening to him. These are clear, objective conditions; man, whom they surround on all sides, is not able to change any of them. True, some goods can become evils if circumstances change, and vice versa. This claim appears to be relativism, but it is not. For when an entire set of its conditions has changed, a thing is not the same thing. This is true even more for situations. All things in life depend ontically on all others, and the single object is, what it is, not for itself.

This is the case with the goods values. Nothing like pure utility “for” a subject lies at its foundation. It makes no difference whether the utility is aimed at achieving something or not; it is the former in those few cases in which conscious activity stands behind it; the latter is the more usual, the accidental expediency – as in the way the seeds of certain grasses are not invented for man, but, when he grasps their nutritional property, they became for him one of the greatest “goods.” (341)

The question of the being of the values of enjoyment is just as harmless. These lay in no way a claim to objectivity; in their subjective sphere, however, as pure values of feeling, they are sovereign and not subject to any relativity. For here any kind of relatedness can be only to the real stimuli of enjoyment and distaste; and the degree of pleasantness and unpleasantness varies considerably with the condition or disposition of the subject that experiences them. This relativity – that in the external relation – is immediately obvious; it in no way endangers the peculiar quality of the value of pleasure, or its autonomy and independence.

Even in the case of the vital values the question of being raises no difficulties. That such things as health, strength, elasticity, quick and sure reflexes, or firm and secure instincts have great value for the life of creatures, is as simple a condition of being and purposefulness as that of the goods values, and it requires, like the latter, no further demonstration. Taken strictly, these properties are nothing other than the inner natural goods of creatures. We could also count them among the goods values. At least we see from this how entire classes of values can pass into one another without sharp boundaries between them.

A genuine metaphysical problem appears only when one asks what it is that makes life itself valuable – so valuable that it is impossible to deny it, but to the contrary, all other existing things in the world are divided into goods and evils by reference to life. A thing that is valuable in that way is an intrinsic value. But intrinsic value can no longer be derived from ontic conditions; also not from considerations of utility. Intrinsic values cannot be derived from any others. And if they are truly intrinsic, then they are absolute.

Now there has been a lot of guesswork about this matter. The simplest seems to be a teleological justification: an upward-ranging foundation is given to life-values, such that one founds the life-values on the spiritual or intellectual ones, so in fact upon the intellectual life itself. But it is not very satisfying for ontology that life exists only “for the sake of mind,” for life is there a thousandfold without mind, and it is entirely independent of mind.

For questions of this kind there are no further phenomena from which an answer could be derived. The truth is: we have no other argument for the value of life, we have no other evidence for it except our feeling of value, which affirms life unambiguously, while it denies death and destruction.

That is a fact that one may interpret subjectively just as well as objectively. Subjectively, because we are living beings, and all that is alive has an essential tendency toward self-affirmation; objectively, because living beings constitute the higher stratum of being as opposed to the stratum of the non-living, and it is also quite conceivable that the height of the value carried by some ontic entity keeps in step with the “height” that belongs to that entity.

But such attempts at interpretation are child’s play in comparison to the bottomless difficulties which one encounters with moral values as soon as one asks the question about their ontological status and their validity. For here it is (342) no longer a question of the values that arise out of ontic contexts and are apparently the reverse side of them, but rather of those that posit themselves over against being and assert an Ought, and make demands that require absolute compliance by men, but which cannot be traced back to anything else.

And here, too, we have nothing but our feeling for values to stand upon. Yet the feeling of value does not speak under all conditions; it stirs itself only when it is awakened, when the maturity of men reaches the domain of values. It bears a different witness in youth and in maturity, in various peoples and milieux, but especially in different historical epochs. The relativity of this, our sole reliable witness to values, seems in the end to transfer itself to the existence and validity of ethical values and make these fluctuate. This assessment appears to be given justification by the plurality of “moral systems.”

Here we find the metaphysical problem of value in all its earnestness, for the ethos of men stands and falls with the super-historical validity of moral values. Up to now, one solution has been found that goes only so far as to claim that a fluctuation in the feeling of values does not need to imply a fluctuation in the values themselves; all the more if it manifests these alterations only in the direction of the negative side. For the feeling of values never assets contradictions; it never disowns values that were once recognized by it, even in other epochs; and it never stamps a value as a disvalue – in that respect, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the “transvaluation of all values” rested on a misunderstanding – but rather the feeling of values can “err,” can turn itself off or become a dull instrument in certain cases or, as the phrase has it, it becomes blind to value. That explains abundantly the historical relativity. For apparently different times and nations are blind to certain areas of the realm of values, and are only “clear-sighted” when judging just a few of them.

The affirmative aspect of the problem, i.e., the ontological status of the ethical values themselves and their “validity,” which is conditioned in more ways than temporally – insofar as validity must mean something other than merely being acknowledged – has not been made clear in this way. Here the metaphysical problem of value is left entirely without a solution.

Chapter 28: The Place of Beauty in the Realm of Values

a) An attempt to trace the problem

The essence of aesthetic values is, in many respects, easier to determine than the ethical ones. Most importantly, the pressure of the metaphysical element ceases for it. Not that its essence is without background elements and full of puzzles that contain many metaphysical (irresolvable) problems, but these are not pressing here, because the aesthetical (343) values do not make demands and they give no orders, and no controversies are created by its claim to autonomy.

Aesthetic value has the reverse relationship to man: it gives him a gift, it flies to him, and shows itself thereby to be a “good,” no doubt such a peculiar one that we cannot simply subsume it under the heading of goods. However, even though it makes demands of the artist, once he beholds it, which are wide-ranging and can even take on the dimension of destiny, these demands are still not moral ones, and the artist is entirely free to choose other tasks for himself.

One-sided aesthetical theories – usually such that have been shaped by the poetic arts and their history – have attempted to trace as a matter of principle aesthetic values back to ethical ones. They rely ever and again on the idea that we are representing the human, and, indeed, the moral element in humankind (broadly understood) for the most part, and only that work is satisfying, in which the element of ethical value is handled properly. This must not be understood narrowly: in the drama and the novel, the good need not “win out” in the end, but its destruction must be represented in such manner that our sympathies are on the side of the good. Otherwise, the poet will fail also to create the effect of the “beautiful,” and instead cause repugnance.

In our times, this conception has returned repeatedly, although it is usually hidden beneath an outward rejection of it. It holds on tenaciously because the argument just given for it is quite valid (sympathies must be on the side of the “good”). One does not notice, however, that the thesis has not been demonstrated. It may no doubt be very true that there is here a necessary condition for the occurrence of aesthetic value in literature, yet without this one condition being sufficient for its occurrence. To speak concretely: without sympathy for the morally right side, there would be no beauty in the literary work, but also none with that sympathy alone. Quite other qualities are needed in the literary bestowal of form for the achievement of that end, for which the correct moral feeling of values is only a presupposition.

Of course it is possible to argue more rigorously against such confounding of values and their “tracing” to other values. It is intended to be applied only to the very cases that most speak for such a reduction to ethical values. Further reflections lead us beyond, especially toward the reflection that there are, after all, other arts than literature and other beauties than in the arts. There are beauties that do not attach themselves to man, and just for that reason cannot be traced to moral values. For aesthetic values can attach themselves to all things that exist, but ethical values can attach themselves only to man. Or, when we look upon a beautiful oak tree, an old elk, the bank along a woodland creek, or a starry sky, must we behold a “hidden humanity” in them in order to see their beauty?

Here we quickly reach absurdity. And with that, the thesis is done with –without yet having to call upon the heavy armor of the non-representational arts. But we must observe that the relation of at least some aesthetical (344) values to the moral values is not thereby disposed of. But this relation is of a quite different kind.

In this context, we must again be warned about the Hegelian system of aesthetics. Although it correctly assesses the “appearing [Scheinen] of the idea,” provided that it is a question of appearance, in its development the emphasis nonetheless falls back upon the idea, specifically upon the content of the idea. And if one looks more closely, one will find that this content is almost entirely of a moral kind. This leads us to the thesis that the aesthetical-literary values must be traced back to the ethical ones.

The thesis of Cohen’s106 aesthetics is better in many ways: “Nature and morals are degraded so as to become material for the arts.”¹⁰⁷ In this idea is contained the conditions presupposed in both sides, without granting to the values on either side a superior position. Perhaps it was only because of the obstinate rejection of the concept of value by neo-Kantianism that the proper understanding of the fundamental situation, which had almost been attained, was delayed for so long.

The main thing in all of this is and remains: aesthetic value is not an act-value, but an object-value, while moral value is essentially that of an act. If within an aesthetic object certain acts also belong to the bearers of the aesthetic value, as with all levels of the drama, still the act is only a part of a whole, and its moral value or disvalue is not its aesthetic value or disvalue.

To conclude: not what is inner and psychic in man is as such beautiful, but purely its sensible appearances as something visible, or as visible to the mind (the latter is especially true for poetry). The same is true for a living face: its “beauty” lies in a certain play of lines or the rhythm of its movement, not because moral values of an inward kind peer out, or because an excellence of soul expresses itself in them, but simply because a concealed inward life that has been given form appears within them, upon which both moral value and disvalue depend.

A common conception concerns the reduction of aesthetic values to expediency for some end. This idea does not derive from Kant. Kant drew it only into the transcendental realm, where he considered expediency “for” some subject, whereas traditionally the ontic purposefulness of a thing was thought to be in the thing itself. Tradition understood the latter as the perfection of nature – behind which, according to the generally dominant opinion, genuine, real purposive activity had to function. Naturally, they were thinking primarily of living creatures, and, among these, again of man. This inner teleology of creatures lay at the root of the Monadology, and with that, the idea was taken over by Kant from Leibniz (through M. Knutzen108 and others).

At this point, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, belatedly but effectively, tried to put things in order. Only in that way can the connection between “aesthetical” and “teleological” judgment be understood: we cannot assume, just from the miraculous craftsmanship of animal (345) organisms, any purposes that constitute them, and even less can we assume purposiveness for the objects that we call “beautiful,” which have, but only for us, the wonderful property of being able to force from us an enjoyment that requires of us no practical interest!

This idea has been subject to such rigorous critical analysis that one cannot add any objection against it. Whether Kant’s further explanation by means of the “play of the imagination and the understanding” is correct, is another question. But it changes nothing regarding the principal thought.

It should not be concealed that this fundamental thought about the nature of beauty tells us very little. In fact, the role of purposefulness in the beholding and the enjoyment of the subject is self-evident. For it means that if no real determining aim lies behind it, then nothing else than what the phenomenon tells of itself is there: the object is so constituted that it captures the act of beholding it and calls forth that peculiar pleasure that is free from all other interests.

This peculiar condition of the aesthetical problem of value now becomes clear: even today we must, after careful analysis, agree with Kant’s basic thesis, but we cannot conceal that hardly anything is achieved by it for the real problem of beauty. It does not help us to know that no superhuman understanding pursues its purposes along with us, all the more as in the arts the creative man quite surely acts to achieve purposes.

What will take the place of what was once believed to be the providential powers of nature, what kind of power governs nature’s multiplicity and creates the clear unities in natural beauty? We shall not learn that by means of this merely critical philosophy.

b) Uselessness of beauty and luxury in life

Among Kant’s doctrines, one that is of use in the analysis of the value of beauty, is that of the disinterestedness of enjoyment. The only indications we have of the specific nature of some value are the kinds of acts in which we respond to it evaluatively, and we must gather the former from the latter. This is the way things stand. With the idea of disinterest, Kant identified a peculiar character of the act: peculiar character of the value must correspond to it. What is this character?

If we reflect that “interest” refers here to every kid of usefulness or usability for both practical and theoretical ends, then it becomes clear that to such disinterested enjoyment all goods values and all instrumental values for some ends, that is, all expediency, are denied entry.

The value of beauty is accordingly definable as that of something “purposeless” i.e., literally something “not there for the sake of an end” – and as the value of something “useless,” or, to name it more precisely, of something “useless in itself.” This last phrase is taken from Nietzsche, who used it for his “radiant” virtue [Cf. Ethik, Chap. 56].109 His definition of this virtue applies precisely here. He compares it in a simile (346) to gold: it is “uncommon,” it is “luminous,” it has a mild luster, and “always bestows itself.”¹¹⁰

All of that is characteristic of genuine aesthetic value, especially the “bestowing itself.” Aesthetic value is without use for practical life; it stands there as something “beyond need,” that is, necessary for nothing. If it causes joy and gives a certain luster to life, then that is something important, and perhaps it bestows meaning upon all of life, but still it is something “useless.” The last term is understood literally: something useful for nothing else. For it lies in the nature of absolute intrinsic value that it serves nothing else at all. Otherwise it would not be intrinsically valuable. For that reason, other things can very much serve it, and perhaps everything else.

When seen in this way, disinterestedness refers to nothing but the absolute intrinsic value of beauty, traceable or reducible to nothing further. That is simply a validation of what one silently assumes when one turns to aesthetics. Nothing new is thereby said. For that reason also, no genuine positive characterization of the fundamental aesthetic value is contained in it. Even from the encounter with Kant we emerge with empty hands. His analysis is formal and critical and it thereby points out a way; but it leads to no tangible goal.

Moreover, this negative characterization of aesthetic value is not without danger. People have understood it to mean that beauty, and with that, all of the arts, are a luxury in human life. From there, it is easy to interpret the situation such that all artistic life, along with its creations, is simply superfluous, that is, no longer in keeping with the suffering or the seriousness or the struggle of life. Then too, the aspect of “play” in the arts has this aftertaste of the superfluous and the frivolous.

In the face of this, we must stand guard: “uselessness” is not superfluity; precisely the highest things are useless because they are the highest. Anything that imparts meaning is in this sense “useless,” even the intrinsic moral values, the highest more than all others. Thus the world is built up from the bottom. Life is not useful for lifeless nature, mind is not useful for organic life; but both, when they first come into existence, bring sense and significance into the world.

So beauty too stands before us in its peculiar value-character. It is useful neither to the life of the organism nor of the mind, though the latter finds in it a mountain-peak that radiates across its entire horizon. And, again, just for that reason the greatest achievements in the world of the mind can derive from beauty. For such things is the word “useful” much too puny. For it is a question of the giving of meaning. It is also insufficient to bring in the ideal of a certain “cultural function” (for example, in education) of beauty, as when one wishes to resist this idea of uselessness. There is something much greater going on here.

These analyses define the external aspect of aesthetic value. The uselessness – the “luxury of life” – corresponds exactly to the extraction and liberation of the entity that carries the value from all the conditions of life, to its isolation from them, its extraction from life, and to the phenomenon of the frame. (347) However, the meaning given in the self-value, which again benefits real life, corresponds to the deeper ties to life found in the creativity of the artist and in the acts of beholding and enjoying; it corresponds also to the fact that precisely the highest of its effects, those that have been most entirely liberated from the real world, are those that derive from the most potent and stormy elements of the life of the mind.

From the standpoint of our investigations in Part One, these are things that seem to be only its consequences. Nonetheless, one can ask: what do these consequences consist in? They lie in the following considerations: the beautiful object showed itself in Part One as a thing constructed in strata, where only the first stratum, the foreground, is real; all other strata are mere appearance. The quality of being beautiful depends neither on the foreground alone, nor on the background strata alone, thus neither on the real or the unreal alone, but in the peculiar interrelation of both, that is, on the appearance-relation as such. These theses are recapitulated here; they constitute the major thesis of the doctrine of the aesthetic object.

What conclusions may be drawn concerning the nature of the value of beauty and of the position of aesthetic value in the entire realm of values? The following: aesthetic value is not the value of something absolutely real or an existing thing in itself, as is the case for goods values, vital values, and moral values, but rather the value of something that lies only in appearance, thus a value that exists merely for us – one could also say: the value of something that exists merely as an object as such. Now that is again the simple consequence of what had been said earlier. But the formulation is so terse, and so central in its importance, that we must analyze its nature in detail. For what it asserts is something unique in the realm of value.

For all other classes of values, the realization of values is itself valuable, but for the aesthetic values that is not so; aesthetic values are not realized at all. For the object to which they are attached as their bearers are not real objects, but rather possess a mixed ontology. Only the foreground is real, but that is the least thing about it; all else – the entire series of strata reaching inward – is and remains unreal. But the value does not depend on this background at all, but only on appearance itself.

Thus the most extreme contrast lies in the nature of this value, compared to the value of something useful, or something good, of life and life-functions, of human actions and dispositions: everywhere the reality of the bearer of value is the main thing, and everywhere the value gives rise to propensities and acts that aim at its realization. This holds even for the value of truth. It is otherwise only for aesthetic value: It is and remains the value of an appearance.

The situation is no different even where the limits of the appearance-relation proper are found, i.e., in the external strata of the non-representational arts and in ornament. These limits do not suggest that (348) appearance entirely stops at them, but only that here there is no longer an appearance of a different kind of content. The expression “pure play with form” alone testifies to that.

The “play” is in contrast to earnestness (of practical life); it is not a genuine concern for reality, but for the unfolding of sovereign form in a material that holds this form fast. Reality is of secondary importance, and it extends only so far as the material does. Play is entirely a “luxury in life,” even if it is also lovely and able to bestow meaning; it is a thing that is “useless” in itself. This is true particularly for pure aesthetical play with forms – that is, where it is not like vital forces that want to exercise, stretch, and unfold themselves. This “play” is therefore originally related ontologically to the appearance-relation.

c) The founding of aesthetic values upon moral values

What one is unable to determine directly in itself can be determined out of its connection to better-known phenomena that lie upon its borders. This is true for the aesthetic values, to a great extent, and particularly for its basic value, beauty. With it, as also for the moral values, there is, in addition to such roundabout methods, the appeal to value feeling. Thus we will study the relation of aesthetic value to moral and to vital value; and, in certain domains of the beautiful, to the values of goods and of pleasure.

Here we come upon a phenomenon that we would not have expected a priori: the foundation-relation again appears. We made an acquaintance with this relation in our study of the moral values. There it existed generally between them and the value-goods, and also among the situational values; its presence was rooted in the fact that in moral agency the value of the intention is never identical to the intended value, but rather “appears upon the back of the intention” (Cf. Chaps. 27c and d).

Obviously, this relation cannot appear here in the same form. There is no question in this case of a comparable intentional agency. The founding must therefore be of a quite different kind. Let us say just this much in advance: if it is true that nature and morality become material for the arts, then it must also be true that the values contained in the natural and in the human moral world become “material” there also. That is directly related to the problem of the independence of aesthetic value, which was our point of departure.

Let us recall that the error that suggests itself here consists in the false substitution of moral values for aesthetical ones. That happens everywhere that an art form takes as its material humankind along with its entire moral life. When in an epic poem the hero is represented in the radiance of his high-minded nobility, the reader almost necessarily falls victim to the illusion that this moral value of the hero is the artistic value of the poem. That is in drama everywhere the case, especially in (349) tragedy, where sympathy for the heroic man is intensified considerably by his downfall.

Here it is clearly a matter of a fundamental relation between aesthetical and ethical values. The illusion to which we have referred comes down to the identification of those classes of values. Yet that cannot be the case, for the same literary art forms also represent just as much the low, shadowy sides of moral life –otherwise they would not be true-to-life – especially the novel; and yet their artistic value does not suffer as a result.

What, then, is the genuine fundamental relation of the two classes of values? Let us stay with the drama. The aesthetic values of primary concern here are those of the dramatization itself, the liveliness of the production, the sculptural quality of the conflict and tension. Beyond those lie the intensification and resolution of the plot, the portrayal of human kindness, of heroism and tragedy, etc. Now if we ask ourselves: what do the moral values and disvalues that are proper to the material and that have been worked into it in the process of bestowing form upon it, contribute to the appearances of those aesthetic values?

Our answer must be: they are its presuppositions. The dramatic tension proper can be felt, if at all, only by the man who, with his sense of moral values, “stands on the side of rightness,” who feels sympathetically “with” the excellent, brave, and high-minded characters, and also “against” the envious and malicious ones. If an audience member is in any way insensitive, immature, or blind to these moral values and disvalues, he will fail to see perhaps not only the moral of the story, but the dramatic situation itself, the tension, the tying together of the plot and, in consequence, the peripety or Aristotelian turning-point, in short, everything out of which the peculiar aesthetic value of the dramatization is made. He does not understand what is going on upon the stage; he cannot appreciate the artistic achievement of the actors, he lacks the key to everything. That is the simple meaning of the conditionality of an aesthetic value upon the moral values.

This conditionality is obviously related to the foundation-relation. As in a human ethos, moral value can “raise itself” [sich erheben] only “over” a goods-value as its basis, so too in this case can aesthetic value “rise” only “over” certain moral values – specifically, where these are felt and responded to in the correct way.

Now this relation is without doubt a much more general one.

First, it extends to all literature, and by no means simply to the drama. In the epic, in the novel, in lyric poetry the situation is the same, for everywhere aspects of moral value are at least worked into the material and are present there.

Second, it extends to the fine arts, at least in so far as some of them represent men and human conditions – for example, in sculpture the dying gladiator, in painting the character study. (350)

Third, it extends even to the non-representational arts, provided that psychic life appears in its inner strata: this occurs of course in an indeterminate manner that depends upon the entire tonality of the work.

Fourth, one can find the same relation again in human beauty, just where we meet it in life: for here too the moral assets and liabilities, which appear in the external features, must be at the very least be correctly felt and responded to by some observer in order that he correctly assess the beautiful and the ugly in its total appearance.

In this sense, therefore, moral values are a condition of aesthetical ones. But is that in fact a foundation-relation? To that question belongs, as we saw above, the independence of the founded values, their axiological autonomy – just as the moral values retain that quality over against the goods values. The dependence can in fact lie only in the presence of the founding values: thus, in this case, in the correct moral feelings of the observing subject.

Is that really so? This question can be affirmed unconditionally. And we can demonstrate, by analogy with the foundation-relation of the ethical values to the aesthetical, the three characteristic forms of independence.

1. Moral values do not reappear in the aesthetic value that has risen over it, neither as a nuance of valuation within it nor as a component of its value. That it constitutes the value-foundation for the aesthetic value refers to something else. The dramatic value of a scene is not composed of the moral values of the individual characters taken together; rather they are only its presupposition. Dramatic value is also achieved where the characters are markedly lacking in moral value (Macbeth’s scenes, Mephisto and the schoolboy [in Faust I]).
2. The height of the aesthetic value is independent of the height of the founding moral value; the same is true for the importance of the moral disvalues. This is proved by the fact that from a group of insignificant and vulgar characters presented by a writer very interesting and highly significant dramatic situations can emerge. The older dramatists did not entirely grasp that; they required characters from elevated social milieux, kings and lords. Only the modern drama has descended to the bourgeois classes. In [Ibsen’s] The Wild Duck, there is not a single important person.
3. The occurrence – we cannot use the term “realization” here – of aesthetic value is also entirely dependent upon the achievement of the founding moral value. This is well known: otherwise, there could be neither a tragedy nor a genuine comedy. For in the first the hero, and with him the righteousness for which we whole-heartedly side with him, is defeated, and the wicked triumph; but in comedy the character with high moral aims descends to pettiness and futility, and some annoying subordinate succeeds. In both cases the (351) aesthetic value, i.e., the dramatic, theatrical, tragic, and comical value, rises above the moral ones – floating over them, as it were –. That aesthetic value does not depend upon the “victory of goodness” – that is, upon its “realization” in the content of the play’s plot, but upon quite different conditions: upon the artistic bestowal of plastic form upon the characters and scenes, upon the structure of the whole and upon the concreteness of what appears from stratum to stratum.

What then is left over as the element of dependence in the way aesthetic values are founded in moral ones? Only this, that the ethical values and disvalues are present in the form bestowed upon the material; they come to their proper title, and are responded to by a correct feeling of value. This latter also has an analogy in the foundation-relation of the ethical values; for there, too, it is significant that goods are really felt along with their goods values, e.g., someone else’s goods as things that are desirable.

It remains to be shown that the situation in literature is just the same in painting and in sculpture (as with the portrait or the gladiator); further, that the same could be shown for music and architecture, insofar as psychic life and an ethos speaks from within them. We may pass them by at this point, because the method of demonstration for them is everywhere the same as in literature. However, that demonstration turns out to be all the scantier and more formal, the more indefinite and general is the expression of humanity in those arts. As a practical matter, the demonstration of the situation in literature – where it is most tangible – is completely sufficient for its validity in the other arts.

d) The broadening of the foundation to include vital values

Up to now, the foundation-relation of the aesthetic values has been understood only as their foundation upon moral values. The question is whether that is sufficient, and whether other classes of values could be drawn into this relation. Before all else, we must inquire whether the vital values do not also play a founding role here; for “nature,” too, and even more, living nature, are areas from which the representational arts draw their material. The values of goods and of pleasure may also be in play here, because, after all, they are touched upon through the “material.” It is thus still a question of how far the foundation-relation reaches, and whether it remains the same throughout.

The founding role of the vital values is the easiest to see in the fine arts, as far as they represent the physical bodies of men or of animals, but the human body is of closest concern to us. There is a superabundance of elementary vital feelings, which speak out in an observer when he is placed before sculpted, drawn, or painted representations of the human body. A certain “empathy” actually dominates here – in the sense that one feels with inward immediacy the movement, the effort, the elasticity, the physical achievement, but also the state of rest, of release, of relaxation, and of the sense of well-being. Those are elements of the feeling of life that are tinged with values, with, specifically, those that are vital in nature. (352) This is true also for feeling sympathy with elements of disvalue, such as suffering, defeat, and failure.

The feelings tinged with sexuality belong here also; they accompany the sight of the human body. These need not be the same as sexual arousal, but that may on occasion happen. In innumerable cases the very most powerful and original vision of an artist was from the first accompanied by sexually charged emotions; only later did these achieve the purity of the aesthetical feeling for beauty. And just because in this case the two realms of value are so tightly woven together, such that the vital values first arouse aesthetical sensibility but then the artistic value decisively influences vital and sexual sensibility, it is appropriate to clarify the relation among the values that lie at their basis.

At this basis lies precisely a foundation-relation. Here aesthetic value is founded upon vital values, that is, the former is dependent upon the possession of the relevant vital qualities by the body represented by the artist and by the observer’s ability to feel these qualities as they are by means of his own properly oriented sensitivity to values. If the observer has no sense of the strength and elasticity of the human extremities, then their beauty and plasticity will be a closed book to him, for they presuppose such acts of feeling. And if he also lacks a healthy sexuality, then the physical beauty of youthful bodies will be lost on him, for here, too, vital stimuli are the presupposition of its appreciation.

There exist theories boarding on the philistine that deny and in a certain sense scorn all intimations of sexuality, even everything erotic, in artistic vision. That is an exaggeration of a tendency that is justified in itself: naturally there cannot be an enjoyment of an artistic kind where sexual feeling dominates aggressively; for it is itself a vital feeling, and its elementary power displaces the finer and higher feelings of values. But if the observer is entirely without this natural vital feeling, aesthetic value is also closed off to him. He lacks the power of sensual arousal that leads us towards them, and he lacks an intuitive understanding for the deeper capacities and secrets of the body. We should emphasize that we are not at all speaking just of direct sexual desire for the opposite sex alone, rather for an emotional sensitivity to every sexual power, also to that of one’s own sex.

For a more precise demonstration that this really is a foundation-relation, we must present those of the three forms of independencies that are in accord with those of dependency. These forms of independence are very easy to present, as soon as one has grasped correctly the kind of dependency that is involved here.

Clearly, the dependency is only one of being present: the vital value must be there, it must be given, just precisely in the sense that it is grasped and appreciated; without the correct feeling for it, formal beauty cannot be understood. The conditionality, however, is limited to this one point: in all others, the value of beauty is independent. (353)

1. It is independent with respect to content. The vital value does not return in the aesthetic value. In every respect this is the main point. The value of the vitality of the body does not return in its value as beautiful; the thought of its capacity for movement and control is entirely a simple presupposition of its beauty. Similarly for the value of the body’s sexuality: it is excluded from the aesthetical feeling of beauty; it is, so to speak, allowed to return, but it is then clearly responded to as a different value that no longer extends to the aesthetical.
2. The independence of the height of a value is almost completely obvious. The artistic value depends on the representation and not on the material represented. The art of painting, especially, governs its material with entire freedom. Painterly values are effective much more in the play of light and color than in the material of the painting; they elevate even what is of little value to the luster of bright color and the enjoyment of seeing. But a trained eye for what is alive is, as always, its presupposition.
3. The value of beauty is also independent of the “realization” of the vital value. To show that, we need only point to the many scenes of crucifixions and martyrdom in painting. For with respect to their “material,” we see in these genres the destruction of states of high vital value. In painting there is also an analogy to the tragic.

We see that this foundation-relation, here as elsewhere, is entirely complete; its characteristic elements all recur in aesthetics, as was first demonstrated in our study of the ethical values. For the theory of value this signifies the exhibition of a more universal law of value, about which the only question remaining to investigate is how far the law extends and how it is integrated into the still more universal stratification of values.

For aesthetics the consequences are not as large. Nevertheless their significance is considerable, when one realizes that up to now almost no doctrines have existed concerning the relation of aesthetic value to the lower classes of values. One must attempt here before all else to measure their consequences correctly. What we have said about those consequences is not exhaustive.

For by no means are the fine arts the only ones to be affected: vital values come always in play where the human and all-too-human are represented, especially in poetry. Everywhere that material contains a struggle with poverty, hunger, disease or other suffering. Where deep passions, instinctual envy, or a tender and shy awakening of love are brought onstage, the correct feeling of the affected vital values is the foundation of all other value feeling of a higher sort. Here the corresponding three kinds of independence can be demonstrated easily; for the relation is the same as in the fine arts.

We might go a step further and draw music into our discussion also. For we have no reason to assume that the dynamics of the human, which is articulated by the inner strata of music, concern only the purely psychic part of life; it could also touch at times (354) bodily states – from the external rhythm of the beat to the indefinable vital feeling of contentment, of urgency, of relaxation, etc.

e) Relation to the lower classes of values

If one has passed far downward to the realm of vital values, one cannot help but examine how the relation in question stands with respect to the still lower classes of value, those of goods and of the pleasant. For it could be that a foundation-relation is present there too – just for the reason alone that foundation depends always upon the “material,” the material, however, only as far as it is taken from the sphere of human life, and is permeated entirely by those values. After all, the general field of perception in our everyday experience is already “pre-selected” by means of pleasure and pain.

It follows immediately from the fact that they found ethical values that goods values must also be foundational for aesthetic value; for since ethical values themselves have been shown to be foundational for some aesthetic values, the values of goods must also be indirectly foundational for them.

The drama and the novel depict situations in life within which characters act. Now action involves managing goods that have significance for persons. Thus only the man who grasps the goods values present in the scene with a correct feeling for their value will understand also a course of action correctly or correctly assess dramatically some human situation.

The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for the values of pleasure: to the understanding of a situation belongs the sensibility required to understand what is painful or sweet to the characters engaged in it, what they find attractive and what repulsive. All effort of will in life depends upon these elements of pleasure and pain; for that reason they must be correctly felt imitatively in their unique character as values and disvalues. Otherwise the situations will not be correctly understood, and also not the ways of acting, the characters, even their destinies. Out of the consistency of their “appearance” the beauty of literature is constituted. How can we appreciate a Dutch painting of a feast, if we have no sense of culinary values? Thus in the case of both the goods values and the pleasure values, we are dealing with a genuine founding of aesthetic values. So, at least, as far as we are concerned with the main positive point: the state of conditioning. It is important to see this conditioning by the values of pleasure clearly and within its limits, because aesthetic value also announces itself in the form of pleasure. We must distinguish the two.

It is not otherwise with the negative point, with the three forms of independence of the founded values. Since the difference in relative height of values is already quite considerable here, the presence of those forms is more apparent than in the case of the ethical values. (355)

1. It is immediately evident that neither the goods values nor the pleasure values recur as an element in the aesthetic values. That also follows directly from the fact that the situations are not real, but only apparent; but reality is essential for goods and for pleasure and pain; as merely imagined they may serve for the understanding of another’s sensibility, but surely do not produce one’s own.
2. One sees from the fact that the drama in human conflicts can easily be caused by insignificant events as well as by matters of life and death, and that the height of the value of some good or some state of pleasantness does not determine the “relative height” of an aesthetic value. The real mainspring of the conflict lies in the characters, in the passions of those involved in the situation, etc.
3. The realization of the goods values or of the values of pleasure has absolutely nothing to do with the “realization” of the aesthetic value. This is true if only because aesthetic values are not in fact realized at all, but are attached to appearance. Moreover, the destruction and loss of valuable goods and pleasures belong precisely to the meaning and aesthetic value of many elements in the plot and of various human fates. How the characters respond to the loss of them is essential to that meaning and value.

If we look back from this point, we will observe how the foundation-relation dominates the entire borderline separating the aesthetical from the other classes of values. Only the value of truth is omitted here, because in its case there exists a different and more complicated set of conditions, which we came to know earlier as “true-to-life” and “essential truth.” These conditions, as far they extend, remind us of the foundation-relation too, because they play a role in conditioning aesthetic value.

The foundation-relation of the aesthetic values is distinguished essentially from that of the ethical values only in one point. The latter are continuously and necessarily founded upon goods values, and do not occur without such a foundation; in contrast, the aesthetic values are neither continuously nor necessarily founded upon vital values, goods values, or the values of pleasure, yes, not even necessarily upon any one of these classes of values.

These aesthetic values are founded upon those four classes only under specific conditions, namely when they are values of works of representational art. The law of foundation is thus valid only for literature, painting, and sculpture, but indirectly no doubt also for music (in its inner strata). It is difficult to find the law that functions in architecture, and it does not apply to ornamental art.

However, there is a point here at which beauty in art once more approaches beauty in places external to art. For apparently the foundation-relation plays a broad role in natural and in human beauty as it does in the representational arts.

This is easy to see. When at any point living nature takes on aesthetic value for us, the sense of the vital value is its natural precondition: the sense of power, suppleness, health, facility in movement, etc. This sense of vitality even passes almost (356) unnoticeably into the aesthetical sphere, but without the two becoming assimilated to each other. That is true also for our feeling of sexual values.

And this is as much true for the ethical values as for the goods values and the value of pleasure felt upon looking at a living human being: the sense of the drama of life, the comical, the tragic, etc., can accompany the events we experience only when our sense of human joys and sorrows has already been sufficiently developed and drawn out from the experience of life. To that belongs, however, a completely developed sense of the values of pleasure and the goods values to which the human heart is attuned; even more for ethical values, which are already elevated above the former.

The test of this by example is of a negative kind: the sharpness of vision for the corresponding disvalues – for displeasure, suffering, renunciation, unhappiness and moral weakness – allow the comical and tragic elements in real human life to flash out before us, indeed they first open us to the inadvertent dramas of life.

Chapter 29: Survey of the Value-Elements in Beauty

a) Values of the mere being of objects

When a person well versed in the arts turns to aesthetics with high expectations, he is disappointed when he learns that what we have said in the previous few chapters is almost everything that can be said about the nature of aesthetic values. Those chapters confirmed what was said at the outset: that aesthetics is a prosaic science, and in many respects a backward one – in great contrast to its rich and variegated subject matter, which it is unable to define exhaustively, given its current state. And here in this chapter also we will attempt only to draw a few conclusions from this fact.

All analysis of value is just feeling one’s way into the proximity of the aesthetic values. We cannot grasp directly those values themselves in any other way than with value feeling, that is, in aesthetical beholding, enjoyment, and rapt contemplation. We “know” very well on the basis of this beholding that they are each unique, but we cannot express what their uniqueness consists in, at least not what constitutes their essence proper. For what we can describe are always mere individual traces in them, those of a relatively general character that are found in other instances: in a word, what is merely typical. But what is essential is in every case something unique and singular, that is, the genuine aesthetic value is individual; it is the value of one single object.

This is also true for the basic aesthetic value, the beautiful. Taken strictly, “the beautiful” does not exist in such generality. Rather, in the concept of the beautiful (which, naturally, one can and must shape as a generality) there exists only “something that is truly beautiful,” that is, it characterizes what recurs, what can be held in common. It does not touch beauty itself. If one wanted to characterize (357) what beauty itself is, one would have to say it (1) with reference to the individual case – which would be too complicated, and one would have to say it (2) as the artist says it – not conceptually but as directed to our capacity for beholding and feeling – but then no concept would emerge. That is the basis and meaning of the irrationality of the beautiful and of aesthetic values in general.

One must not, therefore, demand the impossible of aesthetics. Just as we must renounce any attempt to produce an imposing metaphysics of beauty, so too we must renounce a description of its character as a value. All that we can do is limited to certain of its fundamental characteristics, which are in part derived from the analysis of the object and in part must be interpreted from their relation to other regions of value. One should not attempt to collect some of these particulars without a concern for the extent to which they may have appeared in the earlier chapters.

The first difficulty is related to the ontology of the bearers of these characteristics, for it is complex. The specific bearer of these values is neither the subject nor the act: that is, an emotional state, a state of the subject (beholding, desire, rapture), nor a being in itself external to the subject, for it is in itself what it is. Rather it is a third thing, one difficult to grasp and even more difficult to relate to the question of value. To speak concretely: it is neither enjoyment that is beautiful nor creativity (the “ability to make” art), but solely the object. Yet once again the object is not the thing, the man, the building as it is, but only as what it is for us. The result is as follows. Aesthetic values are not, as one might otherwise expect from its relation to pleasure, the values of an act, neither of beholding nor of creating. They are values only of the objects of these acts. For that reason, they are not the values of some thing that exists in itself, for a thing in itself does not need to be an object at all, it is above all being as object. The aesthetic object is not above all being as object, it does not exist in itself, but only as object of those definite acts of beholding and enjoying. Whatever is there apart from such acts is merely the real foreground, thing-like as other things are; nothing appears in it. Only to a beholding of a specific kind can the background appear; this belongs within the aesthetic object.

Consequently: an aesthetic value is the value of an object only as the object of these specific acts. The value is not tied to the naked being of the art object – as even the moral values are tied to the qualitative existence [Sosein] of man and his actions – but to these objects’ “being-for-us” in contrast to their being in itself. That means: it depends on being an object for us. The object of knowledge is only per accidens an “object”; by nature, it is an entity, and becomes an object only by means of a knowing subject. The aesthetic object, in contrast, is essentially only an object; therefore, its values are the values of being an object as such, values of a mere “object-being” (the old sense of the esse objectivum). (358)

If one now recalls what the nature of this “essential object-being” is, we find it founded in the appearance-relation. If something appears in the foreground and then something else again from stratum to stratum, and what appears in its series of strata essentially constitutes the aesthetic object, then the value of the object must be a value of this appearing. It clearly does not suffice to call it “the value of the appearing thing” or even the value “of the appearing thing as an appearing thing.” For it could still seem as though this were a question of the value of the “background” alone, without the foreground, which would contradict flatly the analysis of the object: only the background appears, stratum after stratum, but it could not appear without the foreground. Thus, the foreground belongs to the whole. And we must express the matter so: the aesthetic value is the value of appearing itself. With respect to content, it includes always foreground and background, and can be detached neither from the one nor the other. These are no longer new ideas; they were already the result of the analysis of the object. But only here, from the standpoint of the problem of value, can they be fully assessed.

b) The value of de-actualization

One easily recognizes once again in these matters the ontology of “de-actualization,” of which we have often spoken. Clearly, the value of such things as aesthetic objects can only be a value of this process of making unreal. But we must understand it correctly; it may not be taken in the sense of the old doctrine of the “idea” or the “ideal.” Let us recall in this context the Hegelian teaching.

Hegel meant by the ideal not an artistic (artificial) beautifying of natural objects, but “reality itself,” understood, he thought, in a way that is more true and more profound than is possible under the conditions of quotidian life; “reality in its entire abundance of power and freedom.” Accordingly, a character, for example, appears in life only as a “fragment,” one bounded, limited, dependent upon a thousand trivialities; for that reason the heroes of heroic poetry had to be kings and lords, for only they are “entirely free.” Opposite to their lives stands “common life,” with its everyday miseries – that is, life “unpoetic and boring.” Art must, he believed, lift everything into the ether of a distress-free existence.

This kind of de-actualization is not proposed here. It is not true in any case that this doctrine touches upon the genuinely “real” – that can be true only for Hegel’s metaphysical concept of reality, which refers to the “realization of the idea” exclusively, and which in this context would be entirely tautological. Moreover, the elevation of all things “into the ether” means, in the end, an artificial beautification of them, if, perhaps, not a trivial one. In fact everything is lifted beyond the visible into a “shadow land of beauty,” and there it is robbed of its power, simplified, made distinct, perhaps drawn with classical lines, but poor, lacking bright colors, weak and limp, in a word: lifeless. (359)

There is no question that much of the older poetry produced works like those. But are they worthy models, classics? Or did such poetry display the weakness of all initial tries? Was it the incapacity to reach into the real, full life of man? Certainly not always. We contemporaries have descended from this high pedestal into everyday life, into the lowlands, into the sphere of weakness and misery. And behold: life here is still richer, larger, and deeper.

The mystery of the situation is that one must “be able to see” this sphere of life, one must have an enlightened eye for it, must be able to penetrate it, to draw from it what is significant, what is always there.… “And grip it where you will, it’s gripping too.”111 We do not need to distance ourselves from what is real in the sense of an “ideal” when we look as an artist does, but only to distance ourselves in a different way. The question is only, In what way?

One grasps quickly the correct sense of de-actualization when one fixes one’s eyes on the relation of power and impotence with respect to values, and compares them to the ethical values. To do this, one must recall some well-known features of ethics.

A clear sense of the Ought is tied to the moral values, but these values do not have of themselves the capacity to realize their own Ought-to-be. The real world does not measure itself according to them, for it has its own lawfulness, which it obeys, i.e., the lawful order of nature. The Ought demands something else, but it cannot realize what it demands by itself. Such is the impotence of the moral values. They are realized nonetheless, not by their own power, but by the power of man. For man is a real being, and only where a real being puts himself to work for them can these – purely ideal – demands be fulfilled, that is, become realized.

Ethical values thus have much less causal capacity than do natural laws. But insofar as they determine the will of a man – and they do that, when they become evident to him – their power to cause things to happen transcends the laws of nature; and, provided that happens, they are the stronger principles.

What does this point have to do with the aesthetic values? Aesthetic values are not made real at all, neither by their own power nor by the power of others. For the work of the artist is not for their realization, but only their appearance upon an appearance-relation. One may therefore say: aesthetic values are, in the real world, more impotent than the moral values.

That no longer seems amazing, once one has grasped that they are not the values of something real (being-in-itself), but only values of an object as object, or of an appearance as appearance. They cannot be realized at all; rather they remain the values of a “being-for-us.” They exist, similar to the background of the beautiful object, only for a certain kind of looking -through. Aesthetic values are, to be sure, “banished into a real object,” that is, they are fixed upon it. But that is not the same as realizing it. (360)

Nevertheless, there is a greater power, also, that corresponds to the greater impotence. For this impotence relates only to the real world; there, aesthetic values have not only nothing to “create” as do the ethical values, but also nothing to aim at. One may also not seek the domain of their power or influence in the real world. In their own sphere, in contrast, these values are anything but powerless. In that sphere, there is another standard of freedom. There are no obstacles here, no laws of nature opposed to them, and the creative person can shape things according to his own measure – and, where he “represents,” he is bound only to care for the true-to-life, not, however, to the specific unique real conditions of possibility. Otherwise, he is free; what emerges from his efforts is a matter of his composition.

Moral values must set the dead weight of the real world in motion; their realization comes up everywhere against the resistance of the real. Aesthetic values come up against no resistance – unless against the “matter” in the real foreground of the objects – for they have no tendency to transform things that real. They merely allow something different to “appear” in them.

For these reasons, aesthetic values stand open before very different possibilities than those that may present themselves in the realm of the real: possibilities that are not tied to real conditions. Representation and appearance pass over without restraint the limits of what is possible in reality. Aesthetic values have, therefore, no resistance to overcome in their own sphere. Of course, there are laws in their sphere, but only their own, those of aesthetic values. There, they have no regulations limiting them, which they would have to overcome. Aesthetic values are thus not only autonomous within their sphere, but an autarchy, that is, they are all by themselves, are absolute, and have no gods seated next to them.

In this sense, they are values of what has been made unreal, de-realized, i.e., values of a kind of being that is far distant from real reality and with no pretensions to it. This “making unreal” rests upon a peculiar kind of freedom, in which the balance of possibility and necessity, as found in reality, has been suspended – but not to the benefit of necessity, as with the Ought, but to the benefit of possibility. Here we have a being-possible without a being-necessary, for it does not rest upon a closed chain of real conditions.112

For there, in the ethos, is the positive freedom of necessity (i.e., the detached necessity¹¹³), but here, in art, there is the freedom of the detached possibility, which is fundamentally without boundaries. Upon that freedom rests the power of art to let appear what is not. This is where the true role of “ideals” belongs. Naturally there are “ideas” which the genius first beholds inwardly, but he then gives them to humanity to guide its way. But he bestows them upon us not in a conceptual form, but intuitively, as a shape, living and pictorial. In that way, he convinces. (361)

c) Relativity and absoluteness

Let us touch upon the question of the extent to which aesthetic values are to count as “relative” and the extent to which they count as absolute. We refer not to the inner relativity, which is self-evident, where it is contained e.g., in the foundation-relation, but the external, historical relativity, as lies at the root of all talk about relativity. But we must begin with a comparison to the moral values.

So much has been clarified about the nature of the existence of moral values during the long disputations about it that the historical change in moral beliefs and in the consciousness of values need not to refer to the relativity of these values to the given conditions of some period; this change may also have a different real basis. This different basis is the narrowness of the consciousness of values and its evolution within the multiplicity of values, such that in each epoch contemporaries grasp only a segment of the realm of values. The epoch must then be blind to the remaining value.

The evolution of the human eye for value will in the meantime be determined by the very different actualizations of the individual value-domains. Every moral value appertains to a type of situation (to a ). It can be real only if situations of this kind are frequent in common life, or if they become intrusive: so bravery only when men live in danger. But then it is not the values that are historically relative, but only their becoming actual, and, dependent upon that, the openness of the feeling of value for them.

That is a clear outcome, which recognizes fully the phenomena of relativity, but gives it a deeper meaning than relativism has heretofore given them. The question now is whether this outcome extends to the aesthetic values as well. This seems at first not believable, for nothing varies as much as artistic taste. One thinks of fashion, of the quick appearance and disappearance of fashions in art, of the great periods of art history in painting, poetry, music, and architecture, where in each the general direction of tastes evinced peculiar preferences.

These facts make the problem very complicated. Kant saw it in its more simple form, that is, unhistorically. His “antinomy of taste” in aesthetical judgment was designed to account for it. The antinomy concerned only the judgments of taste in individuals; moreover, it was limited to the question of whether the judgment is “founded upon a concept” or not. We would most likely say today: upon a general principle. But there could be a universal validity – intersubjective universality – for aesthetical judgment even without objectively universal principles. That universal validity might stem from the merely intersubjective communality of the entire human constitution, that is, from the conditions governing the senses up to the most ideal demands of rationality.

In a deeper and historically grounded form of the question the antinomy would be expressed as follows: in all the variations of taste, is there a firm basis for deeming a thing beautiful? Or can such a thing not be, because (362) taste in itself demands variety (as in fashion!), and always rejects what is already done and has become routine. It might also be that taste must change along with transformations in the conditions of life. If so, the situation would be strictly analogous to that of ethical values.

If one looks upon the matter in that way, then the scales seem to tip markedly in favor of relativity. How can one seriously put in question the variegated diversity of the sense of beauty in history, which in the human ideal of beauty in painting, in architecture, in music, in comedy, is so obvious? It is clear that this vacillation and this diversity in taste cannot be denied. The question is simply whether this is really a relativity of values, or whether it is in the end only a relativity of judgments of value and of the feeling of value – due to the fact that the heart does not open itself at all times to all values.

There is a phenomenon that must be recognized in this context that weighs decisively against value-relativism, namely the possibility that exists for recovering the meaning of once authoritative aesthetic values. One can – if one is sufficiently experienced, learned, and practiced – open one’s own feelings of value to the specific values of works of the past by consistently taking part sympathetically in these works. This is possible only when these “specific values” are not tightly tied to their historical epoch and relative to them, but rather are valid and convincing to a much later and differently oriented mind, one that takes an appropriate stance towards them. But that means: it is possible only if they are absolute in a fundamental way, and the relativity in question – as with the moral values – is merely one of the temporary direction of preferences of the feeling of value itself.

And just think what an enormous role is played just in our times by the wonderful capacity of our feeling for art to orient itself! The sense for the tastes of past eras has in fact risen in our times. We are the living witnesses of a feeling for values that allows itself to be awakened even to the strange tastes of alien epochs. Only when that happened did the great surge in the systematic study of the history of art and the growth of our awareness of it become possible. So relativism cannot be the final word. The most convincing witnesses to that are found in the further fact that for us today the art of many past epochs has become as familiar to us as is our own.

To conclude, let us recall one question: what does the “claim to universal validity” really mean? This claim can be raised by something that is objectively individual and absolutely singular, as Kant correctly saw and insisted upon in his concept of “subjective universality.” Every genuine work of art raises this claim, and yet it is never fulfilled in fact, but is met by the divergence of a thousand individuals.

The answer is simple. For it is the same as with the theoretically universal and the concept of the a priori. People usually do not reflect upon this: the universality of a mathematical theorem does not mean that any uneducated person can understand it. It means rather only that anyone who does understand it (363) must assent to it, because it is inwardly compelling precisely for the faculty of understanding. It can mean nothing more than that.

It is the same with the universal validity of the judgment of taste and of the aesthetic values in general. Not everyone who is unschooled in art or otherwise inadequately oriented towards it can assent to the value judgments of those who understand and are open to art, but only those who are themselves open and adequately oriented. Intersubjective universality means nothing more that the agreement of those who are adequately oriented.

Therewith collapses the antinomy that has confused his issue; similarly all presumed “relativity” of the validity of aesthetic values. Also historical relativity: for as often as an adequately oriented consciousness reappears in history, the same value is also again given recognition.