Does beauty save?
On the axis: Beauty in life · existence as a whole
Is beauty a mere ornament, or what redeems an otherwise absurd or suffering existence and makes it bearable?
Justification
It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified: the thesis of subordinates the meaning of life to the aesthetic rather than the moral register. Art, not morality, is the truly metaphysical activity of man.
It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.The Birth of Tragedy, §5
The Birth of Tragedy, §5 and §24 · The Birth of Tragedy, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism", §5
Justification
The death of God strips existence of any pre-given end and opens the danger of nihilism, which a share of the reflects. But Nietzsche's answer is the transvaluation of values and the creation of meaning through the : meaning constructed, not discovered. No cosmic teleology is admitted.
The Gay Science, §125 and §301 · Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On the Thousand and One Goals"
Justification
Art is a 'quietive' of the will, a Sabbath in which the forced labour of desire ceases for a moment, and as such the aesthetic experience is the highest of the goods accessible within the world. But it does not last, the genius is not the saint, and the final hierarchy places ethical holiness, the denial of the will, above the mere contemplation of beauty.
The World as Will and Representation, Books III and IV
Justification
The world offers no end to realize: the is aimless and history accomplishes nothing. The only way out is soteriological: that the will, recognizing itself in the universal spectacle of suffering, turn against itself and deny itself, through the voluntary whose model the saints and mystics of every tradition provide. This final 'nothing' is not despair but deliverance, which Schopenhauer likens, in a personal and now contested reading of the Indian traditions, to the Buddhist .
To all who are still filled with the will, what remains after its complete abolition is assuredly nothing. But conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, it is this very real world of ours, with all its suns and galaxies, that is nothing.The World as Will and Representation, §71
The World as Will and Representation, §71
Anchors: Nietzsche · Dostoevsky · Schopenhauer
leads to: The meaning of life