The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

’There is also a negative species of the charming or exciting which is even more reprehensible than the positive form which has been discussed ; this is the disgusting or the loathsome. It arouses t^ will of the beholder. just as what is properly speaking charming, and therefore, disturbs pure aesthetic contemplation. But it is ^ active aversion and opposition which is excited by it : it arouses the will by presenting to it objects which it abhpra. Therefore it hiis always keen recognised that it is

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altogether inadmissible in art, where even what is ugly, when it IS noF dis^sting, is allowable in its proper place, as we shall see later.

I 41. The course of the discussion has made it necessary to insert at this point the treatment of the sublime, though we have only half done with the beautiful, as we have considered its subjective side only. For it was merely a special modification of this subjective side that distinguished the beautiful from the sublime.

This difference was found to depend upon whether the state of pure will-less knowing, which is presupposed and demanded by all aesthetic contemplation, was reached without opposition, by the mere disappearance of the will from consciousness, because the object invited and drew us towards it; or whether it was only attained through the free, conscious transcending of the wiU, to which the object contemplated had an unfavourable and even hostile relation, which would destroy contemplation altogether, if we were to give ourselves up to it.

This is the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. In the object they are not essentially different, for in every case the object of sesthetical contemplation is not the individual thing, but the Idea in it which is striving to reveal itself ; that is to say, adequate objectivity of will at a particular grade.

Its necessary correlative, independent, like itself of the principle of sufficient reason, is the pure subject of knowing ; just as the correlative of the particular thing is the knowing individual, both of which lie within the province of the principle of sufficient reason.

When we say that a thing is beautiful, we thereby assert that it is an object of our aesthetic contemplation, and this has a double meaning; on the one hand it means that the sight of the thing makes us directive, that is to say, that in contemplating it we are no longer conscious of ourselves as individuals, but as pure will-less subjects of knowledge ; and on the other hand it means that we recognise in the object, not the particular thing,

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