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“wheel of Ixion,” “the hard labour of the will,” “the vile pressure of the will.” But granted that Schopenhauer was a hundred times right for himself personally, how does that help our insight into the nature of the beautiful? Schopenhauer has described one effect of the beautiful⁠—the calming of the will⁠—but is this effect really normal? As has been mentioned, Stendhal, an equally sensual but more happily constituted nature than Schopenhauer, gives prominence to another effect of the “beautiful.” “The beautiful promises happiness.” To him it is just the excitement of the “will” (the “interest”) by the beauty that seems the essential fact. And does not Schopenhauer ultimately lay himself open to the objection, that he is quite wrong in regarding himself as a Kantian on this point, that he has absolutely failed to understand in a Kantian sense the Kantian definition of the beautiful⁠—that the beautiful pleased him as well by means of an interest, by means, in fact, of the strongest and most personal interest of all, that of the victim of torture who escapes from his torture?⁠—And to come back again to our first question, “What is the meaning of a philosopher paying homage to ascetic ideals?” We get now, at any rate, a first hint; he wishes to escape from a torture .