IV

Abstract

The world intended in art is never and nowhere merely the given world of everyday reality, but neither is it a world of mere fantasy, illusion, and so on. It contains nothing that does not also exist in the given reality, the actions, thoughts, feelings, and dreams of men and women, their potentialities and those of nature. Nevertheless the world of a work of art is “unreal” in the ordinary sense of this word: it is a fictitious reality. But it is “unreal” not because it is less, but because it is more as well as qualitatively “other” than the established reality. As fictitious world, as illusion (Schein), it contains more truth than does everyday reality. For the latter is mystified in its institutions and relationships, which make necessity into choice, and alienation into self-realization. Only in the “illusory world” do things appear as what they are and what they can be. By virtue of this truth (which art alone can express in sensuous representation) the world is inverted—it is the given reality, the ordinary world which now appears as untrue, as false, as deceptive reality.