In a world delineated and ramified by purposes there is some relief offered by aesthetic perception. The object, formerly there for the sake of something else, is able to be viewed in its pure thusness, or under eternity - as long as that eternity is of the grain of sand variety. Whether these two modes of vision are seen as complementary or as competing, their relationship is taken to be horizontal, in the sense that they are on the same plain of reality; neither abolishes the other, their alternation is a matter of attention and oblivion, their conflicts quintessentially political. Where the purposive world is ruled by the polarity of gratification and frustration, the aesthetic world has only gradations of delight, say from satisfaction to rapture or from rapture to satisfaction. For this reason a preference for the aesthetic may develop, although this is more a matter of loosening its powerful connections to the purposeful, replacing the purposeful grasp of the aesthetic with the aesthetic contemplation of the purposeful. If this can be extended far enough it leads to a form of spirituality, one that is entirely immanent. It is worth wondering however whether the insistence on immanence, which was one of the unspoken shibboleths of his time, the moral obligation to be horizontal, is not an arrest. What is the engine of delight in the beholding of things suspended weightlessly in themselves? Does not this lightness long to fulfill itself in the vision of beauty? And is not the abode of beauty both within us and above the world?