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Origin of the beautiful and ugly.—Biological value of the beautiful and the ugly.— That which is instinctively repugnant to us, aesthetically, is proved by mankind’s longest experience to be harmful, dangerous, worthy of suspicion: the suddenly vocal aesthetic instinct (e.g., in disgust) contains a judgment. To this extent the beautiful stands within the general category of the biological values of what is useful, beneficent, life-enhacing—but in such a way that a host of stimuli that are only distantly associated with, and remind us only faintly of, useful things and states give us the feeling of the beautiful, i.e., of the increase of the feeling of power (—not merely things, therefore, but also the sensations that accompany such things, or symbols of them).
Thus the beautiful and the ugly are recognized as relative to our most fundamental values of preservation. It is senseless to want to posit anything as beautiful or ugly apart from this. The beautiful exists just as little as does the good, or the true. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd man will experience the value feeling of the beautiful in the presence of different things than will the exceptional or over-man.
It is the perspective of the foreground, which concerns itself only with immediate consequences, from which the value of the beautiful (also of the good, also of the true) arises.
All instinctive judgments are shortsighted in regard to the chain of consequences: they advise what is to be done immediately. The understanding is essentially a brake upon immediate reactions on the basis of instinctive judgments: it retards, it considers, it looks further along the chain of consequences.
Judgments concerning beauty and ugliness are shortsighted (—they are always opposed by the understanding—) but persuasive in the highest degree; they appeal to our instincts where they decide most quickly and pronounce their Yes and No before the understanding can speak.
The most habitual affirmations of beauty excite and stimulate each other; once the aesthetic drive is at work, a whole host of other perfections, originating elsewhere, crystallize around “the particular instance of beauty.” It is not possible to remain objective, or to suspend the interpretive, additive, interpolating, poetizing power (—the latter is the forging of the chain of affirmations of beauty). The sight of a “beautiful woman”—
Thus 1. the judgment of beauty is shortsighted, it sees only the immediate consequences;
2. it lavishes upon the object that inspires it a magic conditioned by the association of various beauty judgments—that are quite alien to the nature of that object. To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly—(which, incidentally, is why marriage for love is, from the point of view of society, the most unreasonable kind of marriage).
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If my readers are sufficiently initiated into the idea that “the good man” represents, in the total drama of life, a form of exhaustion, they will respect the consistency of Christianity in conceiving the good man as ugly. Christianity was right in this.
For a philosopher to say, “the good and the beautiful are one,” is infamy; if he goes on to add, “also the true,” one ought to thrash him. Truth is ugly.
We possess art lest we perish of the truth.