without reality; but the latter, the aesthetic
determinableness, has no limits, because it unites all reality.
The mind is determined, inasmuch as it is only limited; but it is also
determined because it limits itself of its own absolute capacity. It is
situated in the former position when it feels, in the second when it
thinks. Accordingly the aesthetic constitution is in relation to
determinableness what thought is in relation to determination. The
latter is a negative from internal and infinite completeness, the former
a limitation from internal infinite power. Feeling and thought come into
contact in one single point, the mind is determined in both conditions,
the man becomes something and exists--either as individual or person--by
exclusion; in other cases these two faculties stand infinitely apart.
Just in the same manner the aesthetic determinableness comes in contact
with the mere want of determination in a single point, by both excluding
every distinct determined existence, by thus being in all other points
nothing and all, and hence by being infinitely different. Therefore if
the latter, in the absence of determination from deficiency, is
represented as an empty infiniteness, the aesthetic freedom of
determination, which forms the proper counterpart to the former, can be
considered as a completed infiniteness; a representation which exactly
agrees with the teachings of the previous investigations.
Man is therefore nothing in the aesthetic state, if attention is given to
the single result, and not to the whole faculty, and if we regard only
the absence or want of every special determination. We must therefore do
justice to those who pronounce the beautiful, and the disposition in
which it places the mind, as entirely indifferent and unprofitable, in
relation to knowledge and feeling. They are perfectly right; for it is
certain that beauty gives no separate, single result, either for the
understanding or for the will; it does not carry out a single
intellectual or moral object; it discovers no truth, does not help us to
fulfil a single duty, and, in one word, is equally unfit to found the
character or to clear the head. Accordingly, the personal worth of a
man, or his dignity, as far as this can only depend on himself, remains
entirely undetermined by aesthetic culture, and nothing further is
attained than that, on the part of nature, it is made profitable for him
to make of himself what he will; that the fre
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