The aesthetic sensibility does not require the detachment of its object from its reference to reality, but the detaching of reality from its reference. The finer the distinctions that can be perceived the less one seeks to modify or simplify the object, instead rising to see it within the whole of which it is a part, so that in the end one seeks to appreciate reality itself as detached from reality. Appreciation is no small thing, it is a considerable cultural and psychological achievement and carries with it a form of self-transcendence which explains why it can come forward as a substitute for religion. In this way it can seem that there is a large overlap between spiritual reflection and aesthetics, and certainly the world of art is quick to seize a hieratic role, all the more so since, if in its very essence nothing human is foreign to it, it appears to occupy the very ground of the universally and transcendentally human. Why this fails is not entirely clear. Is it that art is inseparable from a certain detachment, no matter how engaged it becomes, and hence that it remains amoral, or is it that its only morality is in its willing thraldom to appearance?