In his earlier works, Plato approximates far more closely to Schopenhauer's theory. He speaks there of the poet as "a light and winged and holy thing. There is no invention in him until he has been inspired.... Beautiful poems are not human or the work of man, but divine and the work of God. The poets are only the interpreters of the gods, by whom they are severally possessed."
The value of art for Schopenhauer lies mainly in its power to deliver us from the slavery of the will. In the quiet contemplation of beauty revealed in art, we are { 60} delivered from the misery of life. Willing, he maintains, arises from want, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it, but every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one, and both are illusions. No attained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification. It is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive today, that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow.
Without peace no true well-being is possible. But when some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, and knowledge is delivered from the slavery of the will, we have a vision of things free from this relation of the will. We can observe them without personal interest, without subjectivity. Then, all at once, the peace which we are always seeking, but which always fled from us on the path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us. This is the painless state, which Epicurus prized as the highest good, and as the state of the gods. We are then set free from the miserable striving of the will. It is this deliverance that art effects for us, and which is accomplished only by the inner power of the artistic nature. Art frees us from all subjectivity, from the bondage of the will. This freeing of knowledge lifts us out of all the misery of endless desire, as wholly and entirely as do sleep and dreams. Happiness and unhappiness have disappeared. We are no longer individuals. We are only that one eye of the world, which looks out from all knowing creatures, but which can become perfectly free from the service of the will in man alone. Art provides us with a sphere, in which we can escape from all our misery, and can attain to a state of temporary peace and painlessness.