>>3743908Let me point to one single instance.
Schopenhauer speaks of beauty with melancholy ardour,—why in truth does he do this? Because in "beauty" he sees a bridge on which one can travel further, or which stimulates one’s desire to travel further. According to him, beauty constitutes a momentary emancipation from the “will”—it lures to eternal salvation. He values it more particularly as a deliverance from the “burning core of the will” which is sexuality,—in beauty Schopenhauer recognizes the negation of the procreative instinct. Singular Saint! Some one contradicts thee; I fear it is Nature. Why is there beauty of tone, colour, aroma, and of rhythmic movement in Nature at all? What is it forces beauty to the foreground?
Fortunately, too, a certain philosopher contradicts him. No less an authority than the divine Plato himself (thus does Schopenhauer call him), upholds another proposition: that all beauty lures to procreation,—that this precisely is the chief characteristic of its effect, from the lowest sensuality to the highest spirituality.
Plato goes further. With an innocence for which a man must be Greek and not “Christian,” he says that there would be no such thing as Platonic philosophy if there were not such beautiful boys in Athens: it was the sight of them alone that set the soul of the philosopher reeling with erotic passion, and allowed it no rest until it had planted the seeds of all lofty things in a soil so beautiful.
