The attempt to transcend the world of material reality constituted an intellectual effort to elevate oneself from the particular to the general and from the concrete to the abstract. there is only pure intuition, a free vision of the ideal, a momentary participation in Plato’s idea, in Kant’s numen, once one has attained this forgetfulness of one’s transitory life, of the role one plays in it and of the everyday torment thus momentarily suspended. This being so, of what importance are the conditions and forms of his transitory individuality?. The object no longer exists, it is the idea that exists, the eternal form and the subject likewise has been raised to a higher plane, has liberated himself: he is free from time, free from Will, free from striving, free from desire, free from pain: he participates in the absolute, in the eternity of the idea, he is dead to himself, he no longer exists other than in the ideal. Ernst Caro, whose writings on Schopenhauer were instrumental in making accessible his philosophy to the Symbolists, expressed succinctly this component of Schopenhauer’s thinking and indicated, furthermore, the aspect of transcendentalism implicit in this position: Schopenhauer’s aesthetic expresses an idea basic to all idealist theories of beauty that: ‘When we say a thing is beautiful… we mean that we recognise in the object, not the particular thing, but the Idea’. More specifically it is the realisation of the element of beauty in that object which, through the Platonic Idea it embodies, facilitates the transcendence of material reality. The contemplation of a work of art affords an escape from the intolerable aspects of the material world. The image of the feminine in these works, usually bathed in an etheric atmosphere of nostalgia, solitude and silence, evoke the theme, as will be suggested in this article, of the feminine as soul, the embodiment of spiritual knowledge. The image of the feminine is at the centre of many artworks which are constructed in dream-like ‘Ideal’ interiors or in Ideal landscapes or forests at twilight. An important implication of this is that the feminine was regarded as a guide between the two realms conveying the artist or spectator from the physical to the metaphysical, from the natural to the spiritual and from earthly beauty to transcendental Beauty. The beauty of the feminine was understood to be a reflection of the Ideal and was thus understood to be the medium between the material order and the Ideal order of reality. According to Idealist epistemology, one can gain insight and knowledge of the Ideal through the contemplation of beauty as it is incarnate in the physical and is portrayed for example in paintings. The term ‘Ideal feminine’ is adopted here to refer to the construction of the mythic feminine as a personification of the philosophical notion of the ‘Ideal’. Further anthropomorphic thought yielded the notion of the male deity as a lover of the great Goddess. These included a virile male God, who was, however, at least temporarily still subordinate to the Goddess. The Goddess was still supreme but no longer alone, for people’s imagination and religious feeling had made room for other personifications of the sacred reality. Her splendor was celebrated in many myths, and her favor was sought and her wrath appeased through numerous rituals. Each Goddess, while having her own name and distinct attributes, was hailed as the source of life, the life-granting power behind vegetation and fertility. Thus, the Goddess became multiple, while retaining the universality that had been associated with her for countless generations. We do not know her earliest names, but later, after writing had been invented, she was celebrated as Inanna in Sumer, Ishtar in Babylon, Anath in Canaan, Astarte in Phoenicia, Isis in Egypt, Nu Kua in China, Freya in Scandinavia, and Kunapipi in aboriginal Australia. The Great Mother, or magna mater, appeared under different names in the villages of the Near East and Europe. She was endowed with special characteristics, a personal if legendary history, and a name. For, as human experience and conceptual capacities leaped forward, the Great Mother became increasingly personified. However, it underwent a significant transformation during the neolithic age. The belief in the universal Female was deeply ingrained and vital. Undoubtedly, they also used more perishable materials to depict the Great Mother, though these did not survive the ravages of time. They delighted in immortalizing her image on cave walls and in the form of statuettes carved out of stone, bone, ivory, or coal. Our paleolithic forebears, thirty or more millennia ago, conceived of Nature or the Divine as a cosmic female. At the dawn of history, God was a she-or so it appears.
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