Beauty

Beauty names the ideal fusion of existence and essence, and of temporal life into a whole—a synthesis the world indicates but cannot actually complete. In aesthetic intuition, that unattainable ideal appears through imagination, making beauty both a way the world is apprehended and a sign of the lack that keeps it from becoming whole.

Definition: Essence and Existence

Beauty is presented as a transcendent and ideal indication that an existing thing and its essence might become one. In this imagined fusion, concrete, “flesh and blood” existence would itself be the essence, while essence would be produced as a complete concretion. Form would be its own matter, and matter would become absolute form: neither would remain a separate ground for the other.

This ideal does not describe a quality that things already possess or a possibility waiting to unfold within them. It is a unity indicated by the world but never realized in it. Beauty therefore differs from a property that could simply be found in an object; its force lies in the gap between the concrete thing and the complete identity it suggests.

Temporal Totality and Value

The fusion beauty indicates reaches beyond any single moment. It is neither a condition of the present nor merely a future state: it suggests a synthesis of past, present, and future, a temporal totality still to be effected. Beauty is thus value as transcendence, an ideal of the world correlated with an ideal realization of the self.

In that imagined realization, the essence and existence of things would be revealed as identical to a being merged with itself in the absolute unity of the in-itself. Yet this completion would require more than the disclosure of a beautiful world: it could occur only through a totalization of the self as well. The desired unity of things and the desired unity of the self are bound together, but neither is achieved as an existing state.

Aesthetic Apprehension and Absence

The unattainability of beauty shapes how it is experienced. The world is apprehended as lacking beauty insofar as the self apprehends itself as a lack; the ideal appears across the world’s imperfection rather than as a finished feature within it. Beauty haunts things as an absence, often implicitly rather than as an explicitly stated value beyond the world.

Aesthetic intuition makes this absence available in the imaginary mode. In it, a person apprehends an imaginary object through an imaginary realization of the self as a totality that is at once in-itself and for-itself. Imagination does not turn the ideal fusion into an actual condition of things; it provides the mode in which the unattainable synthesis can be apprehended. Beauty’s significance rests on this tension: it is a world-shaping ideal, but its appearance depends on the incompleteness it cannot abolish.